The world within the graphic novel Watchmen is a much different place in part because Watergate did not destroy Richard Nixon’s presidency thereby engendering a sense of trust in democracy and the American way through the victory helped along considerably by a free and open press that brought on feelings of victory stimulated by the reality that even the President of the United States could not get away with whatever he wanted. Nor does that world within Watchmen also represent quite the same place we know in which that sense of victory distilled an overarching sense of disillusionment that it was inevitably going to happen to again.
Watchmen is perhaps the most intentionally noirish graphic novel of the 21st century precisely due to its cinematic effects which draw distinctly upon iconic elements ranging from the heavy shadows to the fedoras to the starkly pessimistic viewpoint of the film’s philosophy. Watchmen is hardly alone in how the comic book adaptation of the 21st century can be accurately be read as a transformative effect of film noir in reaction to the disillusionment cause by yet another President overreaching his limited power.
An incredibly palpable link of the themes of film noir as a reaction to occurrences in the real world can be read through the history of that ties the post-World War II era, the politics of 1968-1972 and the attacks of September 11, 2001 together. These periods of American history were all preceded by periods of conformity and collective ennui stimulated by economic prosperity. The period following the victory of World War II and post-Watergate era were both instrumental in the adoption and confirmation of film noir as a vital genre for asking the tough questions about morality that other genres would not or could not seriously address.
The original examples of film noir and the resurrection of neo-noir in the 1970s present nothing less than a sociological examination of the nature of moral consciousness. All films that fall under his genre respond to the inescapable awareness of the darkest of the dark spots that work within the human strain. The response of the first two eras forced a confrontation with the ugly fact that morality is an ambiguous aspect of the human soul at best. By going back in time to rearrange events that portray a contemporary United States historical timeline much more at home in film noir than in a traditional black/white duality expressed in the comic books geared toward kids, Watchmen manages to stand slightly to the left of its modern-noir brethren in celluloid. The slippery morality in Watchman definitely feels more at home in the incoherent world Bogey and Bacall than in the clearly delineated contrasts between the supervillains and the superheroes.
By contrast, the makers of contemporary film noir—the movies based on upon those starkly delineated lines separating the easily identified villains from the heroes of the comic books upon which comic book movies are made—have responded to the disillusionment of the response to the threat posed by the terrorists behind the 9/11 attack in a much different way than the writers of the 1940s responded to the disillusionment of learning that not all evil could be accurately said to inhabit only the hearts of Nazis.
By compelling readers to closely scrutinize the equivocal nature of good and evil by making all characters blend together in a foggy world of ambiguous ethics, Watchmen seeks to actually blur the dividing line between good and evil even more and thereby intensity awareness of the lack of differentiation that exists between what is viewed as good and what is viewed as evil in the world. The noir of Watchmen is a response to the disillusionment of 9/11 and the revelation of even greater corruption by the American leaders charged with responding to those attacks by creating superheroes who exists on a plane beyond good and evil.
