Watchmen Chapter IX: The Darkness of Mere Being

IX.3.1 Falling "Nostalgia" bottle: "N" into "Z."

IX.5.4 "I'm just a puppet who can see the strings." The reference is to string theory, an advanced explanation for the state of the physical universe. Among other things, string theory emphasizes the connectedness of phenomena. See next note.

IX.6.6 "Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet."

It would be putting it mildly to say that this is one of the more important statements in Watchmen.

IX.6.7: Laurie's earliest memory: the snow-globe. Note that the image here is also of a stylized human face (Laurie's, looking into the globe), rather like yet another "smiley."

IX.7.6 A good instance of the complexity and denseness of reference in Watchmen. The verbal text is (Sally Juspeczyk speaking to Shexnayder in the next room): "My child, that's what all this is about, remember? Anyway, don't you worry about her future. That's taken care of." Image is 5-year-old Laurie, lifting (or touching) the skirt of her mother's vigilante costume.

Some of the resonances here: (1) "my child:" Laurie is not Shexnayder's but Sally's, the father unnamed; (2) the lifted skirt gestures at the issue of sexuality: her mother's rape and the affair of which Sally was the issue; (3) "her future:" the Comedian has presumably made financial arrangements for Sally and Laurie -- and the costume (with its lifted skirt) is Laurie's future.

IX.7.9 The snow-globe contains "slow time." The time of movie flashbacks, or possibly the time (not just slow but actually reversible) that Dr. Manhattan inhabits?

IX.8.2-3 (Panel 2) "Larry, don't you dare take it out on her! She's only a kid! She's vulnerable..." (Panel 3) "...fragile..." Image is of the falling snow globe (Panel 2) and the falling Nostalgia bottle (Panel 3).

IX.8.4 Laurie guesses that Hooded Justice was her father. Wrong.

IX.9.1 "My red world means more to me than your blue one."

IX.9.4: "The gravity of the situation." Dr. Manhattan's crystal palace lifts off: Now we see that it is symmetrical both above and below the ground: reciprocating design, and the theme of unseen structures.

IX.14.1 "Chaotic terrain." What Mars "chose" instead of life.

IX.15.4-9 The Comedian and Laurie.

IX.17.2 Dr. Manhattan's prophecy: "I return to Earth at some point in my future. There are streets full of corpses. The details are vague." What a set-up.

IX.17.3 "There's some sort of static obscuring the future, preventing any clear impression. The electromagnetic pulse of a mass warhead detonation might conceivably cause that."

IX.18-19 Comparing great things and small. Olympus Mons, Valles Marineris: a landscape on a scale several times greater than that of Earth -- these things juxtaposed with the Oedipal secret of Laurie's identity.

IX.20.4 Woodward and Bernstein dead in the parking garage. No Watergate in this world, just as there was no defeat in Vietnam.

IX.21.9 "Thermodynamic miracles:" extremely unlikely events, occurring in spite of the fact that physical law seems heavily set against them. Life itself is an instance of this.

IX.23.3 "If you'd only relax enough to see the whole continuum, life's pattern or lack of one, then you'd understand my perspective. You're deliberately shutting out understanding, as if you're afraid; as if you're too delicate." This criticism triggers Laurie's flashbacks and her recognition of the Comedian as her father. This knowledge of her origins is what she has been shutting out.

IX.24.3-4 Father/Daughter confrontation, with Jon as stand-in for Laurie's actual father. f.3: "You're not my fuh, my fuh, fuh..." Panel 4: Laurie hurls the "Nostalgia" bottle, shattering the entire creation (Jon's Watchmaker-World).

IX.25 The fall of a crystal palace.

IX.25.4 Laurie under Dr. Manhattan's force field, with fragments falling all around her -- this recapitulates the image of the snow globe ("slow time").

IX.26-27 The grand thermodynamic miracle of Chapter IX, revealed by the super-cinematic trick of astronomical perspective (a 500-million-mile dolly shot). And what is revealed? A "Face on Mars" -- take that, National Enquirer. But it is also a smiley face, and a recapitulation of the bloody button (the smashed palace makes a pink dot below one of the "eyes").

A film scholar could probably do more here, but I'm struck by the similarity between this sequence and the end of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, where the camera pulls back from what seems to be a simple domestic scene and shows it to be something very different, once it is seen from orbit.

If you have the Shockwave plug-in, you may view an animated version of this sequence (about 250k). For those without Shockwave, a separate page contains all twelve panels of the sequence.

IX.27.1: The "Face on Mars."

IX.27.3 This great tour de force demonstrates the privilege of perspective, of being above the action, out of the system; and yet through it all, Dr. M. is affirming this love for the human race, putting himself back into the system.

IX.28.3 Final panel of the astronomic "dolly shot" -- interstellar space. The "Darkness of Mere Being." Wow.

IX.Doc.2 Nelson Gardner, "Captain" Metropolis, "promotes" himself from Lieutenant in the Marines; in the same way, Sally promotes (sells) herself.

IX.Doc.3 Hooded Justice's closeted gay life. He and "Nelly" (Nelson Gardner) were lovers.