Watchmen Chapter VI: The Abyss Gazes Also

VI.3 Rorschach's primal scene (and gaze -- see title): source of his obsession with "symmetry," which of course has moral dimensions (crime and retribution) as well as psychosexual ones (VI.3.1).

VI.4.8 Silhouette of Walter Kovacs and his mother; mother is brutalizing Son. See another, different silhouette below.

VI.10.2-6 Origin of Rorschach's mask: Kitty Genovese murder.

VI.16.6 "On 7th Avenue, someone had sprayed silhouette figures onto the wall. It reminded me of the people disintegrated at Hiroshima, leaving only their indelible shadows."

Note where else Hiroshima shows up in this chapter. And where the logic of silhouette lovers leads.

VI.7.4,6 Dog's head.

VI.18.4 The Roche kidnap case. Kidnap site is a "disused dress maker's." This was the very business in which Rorschach himself found work, and the source of his trademark mask. Point: Rorschach is to be identified, to some extent, with the murderer of the Roche child -- i.e., with a child molester and mutilator. Though Rorschach is neither of those things, he is still every bit a monster.

VI.21.6 The moment of transformation. It is always traumatic. Rorschach murders the killer's attack dogs, who have apparently eaten the victim's corpse. "The shock of impact ran along my arm. Jet of warmth spattered on chest, like hot faucet. It was Kovacs who said 'Mother' then, muffled under latex, it was Kovacs who closed his eyes. (Panel 7) "It was Rorschach who opened them again."

Why does Rorschach say "Mother?" (Why does Norman Bates say it in Psycho?) Child abuse. The child murder in the Roche case might stand for the abortion with which Rorschach's mother taunts and threatens her son. The retribution Rorschach seeks is to some extent directed toward his mother, the primal betrayer.

Connect Rorschach with Laurie Juspeczyk's father problems, already foreshadowed but developed more fully in Chapter IX.

VI.26.2 "Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone..."

What is the "fearful symmetry" between Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan?

VI.26.3-5 "Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose." Rorschach speaks of being "reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world. Was Rorschach."

VI.27.3-4 Match cut from Hiroshima lovers to Mal and Gloria Long, but this time symmetry is reversed (the couple facing away from each other, not lovers but people on the brink of separation). Symmetries and broken symmetries.

VI.28.3 Mal Long: "Why do we argue? Life's so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing."

The irony here is especially biting: Rorschach is no longer alone or without meaning. He has become his doctor's personal obsession, and nightmare.

VI.28.9 Nietzsche -- "Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

VI.Doc.1 Rorschach's bottle of Veidt's "Nostalgia" (mentioned in police report).

VI.Doc.3 A childhood essay at the Charlton Home, age 11: "I think it was a good thing to drop the bomb on Japan. That is all I have to say about my parents."

Note that Charlton was the name of a comics publisher active in the fifties and sixties. Supposedly Watchmen was originally intended as a set of new stories involving characters from the Charlton comics line, to which DC had acquired rights.

VI.Doc.4: Walter Kovacs' dream (age 13). Compare Dan Dreiberg's (age 39 or so).

VI.Doc.4 Drawing of "My Dream," Age 13: Rorschach's primal scene, lovers fused front-to-front. The Abyss Gazes indeed.