If he did not die at the end of the story, the day could have very well occurred when Rorschach decided that all women and homosexuals deserved to be punished and that he was the only one capable of doing so. All of these attributes add up to Moore’s entire premise of the book, that no one person-especially not Rorschach-has the right to decide the enactment of justice. His menacing concern over Moloch’s unlicensed handgun is also an amusingly obsessive aspect of Rorschach’s character-something I think Doherty would agree with me on, considering the fact that he authored a book titled Gun Control on Trial. America’s farce of a drug war, for example, is something liberals revel in as much as conservatives, despite Rorschach’s continuous snide comments about left-wingers. Homosexuality is something else that Rorschach finds unsettling, as he obsesses over Adrian Veidt’s sexuality and deems it worthy to thoroughly investigate.Īll of the discriminatory beliefs listed above not only demonstrate that Rorschach is not a hero working from an objective set of values, but that he’s also silly in just how apolitical he really is. For example, Rorschach is an obvious misogynist who refers to the Comedian’s attempted rape of Sally Jupiter as a “moral lapse.” When informed that his own mother (a child-beating prostitute) was killed by her pimp, Rorschach only answered with one word: “Good.” He also harasses the villain Moloch (who’s dying of cancer) over non-prescribed painkillers he’s popping as well as an unlicensed handgun he owns. But where does Rorschach’s brutal brand of justice end? This is where Doherty’s argument in favor of the character’s objective values weakens, as Rorschach is filled with a lot of silly and weird quirks and prejudices that are all subjective aspects of his own personality.
Most would turn an eye to someone like Rorschach taking such hardened criminals down. It’s apparent that Rorschach hunts down the worst of society’s ills, criminals that few would defend: rapists, pimps, murderers, gang leaders, and thieves. While Doherty praised Rorschach as a character worthy of Randian values, he missed the entire point of Moore’s story: “Who watches the watchmen?” Moore used Rorschach as the most extreme example of pavement-pounding vigilantism to demonstrate to his readers that no one in their right mind would want someone like that wandering around exacting his or her own uncompromising (and brutally violent) sense of justice. He’s not in the comic book to exhibit an irony that the one person labeled as “crazy” is actually the sole figure operating logically and rationally in the world around him. The most important element of the entire Watchmen story is that all of the superheroes within its pages are caricatures designed to demonstrate how silly, ridiculous, and sad superheroes would actually be if they existed.
#Rorschach symbol from watchme code#
On more than one occasion, Doherty pointed out that Rorschach operates on a pure code of objective right and wrong, a code that he will not compromise for anyone, making him a romantic individualist hero of which “ Rand would have been proud.” But Rorschach is not a heroic purist because he delivers his judgments on an individual basis instead of operating within a collectivist structure-he is, at his core, a pained psychopath looking for an end.
Doherty, a published author and senior editor at Reason magazine, presented several examples of the bone-breaking and murder-friendly vigilante that framed him as someone to be admired instead of feared and pitied.ĭoherty reflected on Rorschach as a misunderstood but morally outstanding figure, smeared and misconstrued by whiny and weak liberals. A confused mixture of sighs and laughter ensued as I read Brian Doherty’s column on Reason Online titled “ Rorschach Doesn’t Shrug: The Watchmen’s hero as Objectivist saint.” The entire premise of Doherty’s essay was an effort to paint Rorschach as the “moral center” of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen.
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