Watchmen Meets The Aristocrats

This essay reveals key plot details of the graphic novel Watchmen and the film based upon it.

On March 6, 2009, Warner Brothers released a motion picture based on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel, Watchmen, directed by Zack Snyder and written for the screen by David Hayter and Alex Tse. The history of this project is long and contentious. Moore has insisted the work can never be filmed successfully. According to legend, when the director Terry Gilliam planned an earlier attempt, Moore offered one word of advice: don’t.¹ Several months before the release of the Snyder version, Moore declared, “I am spitting venom all over it,” and added a “magical curse” against the enterprise (Boucher).
 
Perhaps Moore’s curse lacked sufficient throw-weight to reach California; or it could be that even the cleverest wizard cannot thwart the Sauronic power of Warner Brothers, at least not without a posse. The film at this writing seems on track for profitability, primarily through strong response from the comic’s dedicated fan community (Thrill). So another effects-heavy, green-screened, $200 million epic goes into the ledgers, vindicating (or flouting) bullish (or bearish) views about the box office in hard times. Why should we care, old fan-boys who have always been watching the Watchmen?
 
On first inspection, Snyder’s film seems mainly a technical achievement, remarkable for its frame-to-panel fidelity, but perhaps not deeply engaged with the best virtues of the original, such as its notoriously non-linear narrative and its relentless interrogation of all media, including its own. Is the Watchmen movie just another Inevitable Comics Conversion, part of a cinematic tulip craze that must inevitably bring us Superbaby, or Submariner vs. Pirates of the Caribbean? On the other hand, could there be something more substantial at stake in what is, after all, a careful attempt to translate a notably difficult work into a powerful, rapidly evolving medium?
 
In fact, Snyder’s film does not belong among the hothouse flowers, and ought to be considered as much for its significant departures from Moore and Gibbons as for its uncanny ability to translate their conception to the IMAX Experience. We should take the film seriously, if only because, in the mortal words of the Comedian, “It’s all a joke.” In fact, a particular joke comes to mind.
 

(1) Check out this act!

 
The joke to which the Comedian refers (though not yet the one of which I speak) is the central crime in Moore and Gibbons’ graphic novel: a massively destructive prank involving teleportation, a giant artificial organism, and psychic fallout designed to induce post-traumatic nightmares. (As will be apparent, the jokes under discussion here are not strictly speaking funny.) This horrible trick provides a gravitational center for the constellation of doublings, pratfalls, taunts, and twisted recognitions that illuminate the panels of Watchmen. In most if not all these instances, the operative trope is savage irony, as in the bloodstained smiley button with which the comic opens, resonating against the psychotic anti-hero Rorschach’s claim to know the “true face” of the city. Echoes and variations ripple through succeeding pages in passing references to faces, smiles, and bloodstains. At its most ambitious, this trope gives us the memorable moment in the Martian crater Galle, where the disintegration of Dr. Manhattan’s clockwork flying machine produces a planet-scale model of the stained icon, laid out as the point-of-view zooms steadily up from the planet, though unperceived by the figures who occupy the scene (Moore and Gibbons, chapter IX, pages 26-28).²
 
These juxtapositions and cross-cuttings, and the deep logic of double meaning to which they answer, evolve naturally from Moore’s basic approach to comics art, which he has described as a particular design idiom, or “under-language”:
 

What it comes down to in comics is that you have complete control of both the verbal track and the image track, which you don’t have in any other medium, including film. So a lot of effects are possible which simply cannot be achieved anywhere else. You control the words and the pictures -and more importantly -you control the interplay between those two elements in a way which not even film can achieve. There’s a sort of “under-language” at work there, that is neither the “visuals” nor the “verbals,” but a unique effect caused by a combination of the two.
 

(Wiater and Bissette 162-3)

According to Moore, comics afford unmatched opportunities both for “interplay” and other sorts of play, especially puns, doublings, echoes, and other strategies for overloading the signifier. The fifth chapter of Watchmen, for instance, represents a graphic palindrome, in which the number and placement of panels on the first page represents a mirror reversal of those on the last, the second reversing the penultimate, and so forth. The centerfold spread in this remarkable design, the two innermost pages, presents an X or chiasmus (or perhaps two mirrored Vs), a figure that simultaneously incites and frustrates interpretation.³ As Moore says, this type of design language seems unique to comics. Just try anything like it at 24 frames per second.

 
Yet that is, more or less, what Zack Snyder and company have attempted, and their remarkable feat of cinematic chutzpah sets up the dark joke to which we are coming. Despite the reputation Snyder has earned for textual fidelity from his previous film, 300, Moore remained hostile to the Watchmen project. Asked for comment a few months before its release, he offered this view of the relationship between comics and the movie business:
 

There are three or four companies now that exist for the sole purpose of creating not comics, but storyboards for films. It may be true that the only reason the comic book industry now exists is for this purpose, to create characters for movies, board games and other types of merchandise. Comics are just a sort of pumpkin patch growing franchises that might be profitable for the ailing movie industry.
 

(Boucher)

Those who have tuned their receivers to the resonance frequency of irony may need to drop the gain a bit, because Moore’s observation pins the needle in the red. It is hard to imagine a twist of fate quite so pure, intense, and nasty. If Moore is right (and the point seems at least plausible), the relationship between film studios and comics publishers has become more than usually corrupt. Leading publishers no longer care about comics in and of themselves, that is, as explorations of the under-language, but only as storyboards, the genetic material of films and other franchise commodities. Yet here, among the stack of stock-keeping units, we have a movie called Watchmen, a likely commercial success, and creditable on a technical level as well. Its general design and visual texture are remarkably faithful to the graphic novel. Time and again, key panels from the comic are reproduced with apparently obsessive precision. Overall, the outcome could have been much worse (see League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or better yet, don’t).

 
It would seem to follow, then, that Watchmen is one of the most successful storyboards in cinematic history. The man who curses Hollywood has, entirely against his will, produced something of great value to his adversaries. This is, to one way of looking, simply our old friend the political economy of the sign: same as it ever was, infinitely capable of subsuming any impulse to critical distance, or difference. Or, if we retain some capacity for resentment, we might describe the situation as an irony worthy of Alan Moore. To find a more egregious case, we would have to turn to truly historic instances: the face of Che Guevara on a billion sweatshop T-shirts, or the relics of the saints.
 
Ironies on this scale demand an approach both cosmic and comic. On the one hand, they call to mind the phenomenon called a singularity, an infinitely dense point that swallows everything within its gravitational grasp. Welcome to late- (or end-?) stage capitalism, where as Thomas Friedman says, the world is truly flat: spun down into an accretion disk circling the central, all-devouring maw, a scenario ruled by that other great law of cultural physics: Never give a saga an even break. As noted, there seems to be a deep correspondence between cosmology and comedy. So the singularity has its correlative in the world of stand-up comedians. It is the dirtiest joke in the world, popularly known as “The Aristocrats.”
 
Here is the general form of the joke, which is traditionally told serially by a group of comedians, each trying to extend or embellish the previous effort: A family act auditions for a talent agent. The agent is unimpressed with the standard performance. When he asks what else the performers can do, family members present a series of bizarre sex acts, a sort of Homeric catalog of organs, orifices, parts, products, and possibilities, which grows more extensive with each iteration of the joke. The punchline is both obligatory and largely meaningless. When the last perversion has been performed, the agent asks what the act is called. The answer is, The Aristocrats!
 
Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza’s documentary about this joke (2005) makes two things very clear. First, the joke is not especially funny. Second, it says something profound about the entertainment industry and the culture in which it operates. The Aristocrats joke is the black hole rendered into language, a limitless accretor of charged expression. It is the very emblem of the process that spirals in from the funny papers, to the comics houses, to the movie studios, ultimately reaching the central anomaly, an infinite concentration of transnational capital. As we have said, Watchmen has now passed the event horizon of this economic catastrophe. Thus Moore’s tour de force of cosmic irony has been fed into its own trope, ironically fueling the industry its author abominates. Watchmen thus collapses into that general version of The Aristocrats, joke without end, that we call contemporary entertainment. We could say, with every measure of regret, that the joke is now on Alan Moore; but to leave matters here would minimize a complex situation that deserves further treatment. The cosmic joke is not simply on Moore, but perhaps on all of us.
 

(2) A stronger loving world

 
Several times in the graphic novel, Moore and Gibbons use the print equivalent of a match cut, where a shot of a character in one context dissolves to a new scene or point in time, the character’s position and posture unchanged. This effect, like most of Watchmen‘s semiotic signatures, answers to a general principle of similarity-in-difference which is the logical underpinning of irony. The greatest divergence between comic and film lies with the machinations of Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias), the story’s world-conquering supervillain. Both film and graphic novel include passing references to an episode of the 1960s television series, The Outer Limits, entitled “The Architects of Fear” (first aired October 30, 1963, a year after the Cuban missile crisis). In the TV episode, a scientific cabal contrives a phony alien invasion to convince the superpowers to end nuclear conflict in the interest of planetary defense. This is, of course, very like Veidt’s plot in the graphic novel.⁴ Veidt teleports a gigantic, telepathic lifeform to an address on 7th Avenue in New York. The creature dies in agony, unleashing a psychic pulse that kills every person in the vicinity, leaving millions subject to recurrent nightmares about invaders from another dimension. The apparently alien corpus delicti, and the piles of dead bodies choking the streets (as Veidt has promised in an earlier advertising slogan: “I WILL GIVE YOU BODIES BEYOND YOUR WILDEST IMAGINING”), give tangible evidence of a cosmic threat, securing the new peace.
 
If Moore’s architecture of fear is Rococco (or perhaps Deconstructionist), Hayter, Tse, and Snyder offer something more along Bauhaus lines. They eliminate the giant, cloned psychic brain, oneiric fallout, and any suggestion of interdimensional travel. Instead, the attack on New York (in the film, one of several world capitals struck simultaneously) involves a more conventional weapon of mass destruction. In the film, Veidt teleports to each of his targets a device that apparently applies the same intrinsic-field nullification that transforms physicist Jon Osterman into the superbeing called Dr. Manhattan. Veidt evidently builds his cosmic bombs from a prototype power reactor given him by the blue superman. The devices are said to leave an “energy signature” tying them indisputably to Dr. Manhattan.
 
No doubt this change in the narrative was dictated primarily by the need to keep the film’s running time under three hours; but even so, the revisions change the story in very important ways. For starters, Dr. Manhattan becomes central to the film’s plot, while in the graphic novel he remains essentially incidental, in spite of his superhuman abilities. In the comic, once Veidt has deceived him into withdrawing to Mars, Dr. Manhattan has no immediate significance for humanity. Though he makes several important appearances on the comic’s stage (silently blessing the union of Laurie Juspeczyk and Dan Dreiberg; blasting Rorschach out of existence), he plays no direct role in Veidt’s Alexandrian master-stroke, beyond failing to stop it (indeed, there is always Moore irony).
 
The situation in the film is radically different. Here, Veidt does not simply distract Dr. Manhattan in order to pull off a bizarre prank; rather, Veidt makes Dr. Manhattan the focus of the fraud, the butt of his massively murderous joke. Veidt produces Dr. Manhattan as the alien threat, appropriating the destructive component of his superpower to devastate the world’s great cities. Like his print predecessor, Veidt encourages the superman to remove himself from the new society; but the film’s Veidt goes a crucial step further, converting Dr. Manhattan’s absent presence into a source of world-dominating power, both political and thermodynamic. In the film, Dr. Manhattan is not merely tricked into exile; he is stripped of his charisma as the condition for a new world order.
 
The realignment of the plot in the film makes a considerable difference for the overall shape of the narrative. This impact is most clearly visible in the concluding scene, which is nearly identical in both versions. The last moments take place in the editorial offices of The New Frontiersman, defined in the comic as a radical right-wing tabloid. Incensed at the US-Soviet detente that has followed Veidt’s coup, and desperate for material to print, the editor assigns his assistant, Seymour, to fill a hole in the upcoming issue with an item from a “crank pile” of unsolicited manuscripts. The top item in this pile (which evidently works on a Last In, First Out basis) is the journal compiled by Rorschach and committed to the mails before his final confrontation with Veidt. The journal contains a complete account of Rorschach’s investigations, including a direct indictment of Veidt, backed up by business and financial details.
 
In the final panel as well as in the final frame, Seymour reaches for Rorschach’s book, teasing us with the possibility that the world is about to See More, though there is (in either case) no more Moore to see. Yet for all its visual fidelity, this moment reads very differently on the screen than it does on the page.
 
In the graphic novel, publication of the journal may destabilize Veidt’s balance of terror, by starting an investigation that could unravel the threads of his fraud. Once the phony alien in New York is debunked, there will be no threat from beyond the stars to constrain nuclear brinksmanship. Rorschach’s journal thus represents a terrible presence: quite possibly a truly ultimate weapon, or Doomsday Book.
 
In the film, however, prospects seem both happier and more deeply perverse. Even if we assume exposure and prosecution of Veidt (an enterprise that would likely demand cooperation of both adversarial powers), the foundation of his bloody peace would almost certainly survive. The Veidt of the film does not invent aliens from space, but rather demonstrates the murderous potential of a real superbeing, using aspects of his own power. In both comic and film, Dr. Manhattan remains at large, whereabouts unknown; but in the film, this absence constitutes an impending threat. No matter what befalls Adrian Veidt, any future geopolitics must account for his possible return. After Veidt’s horrible Halloween prank, the world will always live in fear of Dr.Manhattan’s judgment-in every sense of the word.
 
Read on this level, Snyder and company’s ending seems to improve on Moore’s fatalistic vision. The joke we have just heard may be The Aristocrats, yet we may smile all the same, at least on first presentation. Perhaps, in this regard, the Watchmen film simply reflects the enormous cultural difference between the late 1980s (Thatcher, Reagan, and the climax of the Cold War) and the post-Millennium years (the decade of 9/11). Since a visually faithful adaptation of Watchmen must include the Twin Towers in its cityscape, as well as images of mass murder in New York, some avoidance or tropism seems in order. So the film’s moment of mass murder features bodies gracefully rising from the ground, not falling from the skies, before they disintegrate without trace. After the attack, we see a giant, hemispherical crater (an image unique to the film), but none of those no-longer-unimaginable bodies that might affront audience sensibilities. The extension of Veidt’s holocaust to sites beyond New York also seems consonant with this process.
 
Yet for all its careful evasions of real, historical horror, the Watchmen film nonetheless proceeds from, and reproduces, a distinctly post-9/11 ideology. Moore insists on the implausibility of any utopia, while Snyder and company seem attuned to a different Realpolitik. By re-engineering Moore’s implausible plot, the architects of the film imagine a more durable and impenetrable balance of terror. Their world will live in constant fear of further attack even if it learns the first incidents were spurious. The implications seem clear enough. The film gives us terror absolute, terror metastatic, terror as inevitable condition of everyday life. The revelation-proof utopia of the Watchmen film thus offers a rather clear portrait of the current world order-a recognition that might wipe away our initial smile.
 

(3) Picture book strange loop

 
If these connections to 9/11 and the Homeland Security State seem too far-fetched for a discussion of popular entertainment, we might instead consider the divergence of comic and film as a matter of media and technology. Here again, the altered status of Dr. Manhattan seems crucial. In both versions, he withdraws from the world before the final scenes; but as we have seen, this fact reads differently in each. In the comic, the world becomes obsessed with invaders from beyond the stars, shifting the balance of anxiety away from Dr. Manhattan. By the end of the book, he is gone and largely forgotten. In the film there is no such displacement: Dr. Manhattan becomes World Enemy Number One, so his absence exerts a paradoxical presence. Though gone, he is unforgettable (as an ad in the comic for one of Veidt’s perfumes declares, Oh how the ghost of you lingers!). Moore subjects the superhero to something like deconstruction, laying bare the limits of his relationship to humanity, and ultimately abstracting him from our experience. By contrast, Snyder and company weave the absent superbeing into the heart of their new world order, producing something more like apotheosis.
 
Anyone who has been monitoring the development of cinefantastique over the last thirty years may detect a parable here. Dr. Manhattan is in every sense a virtual superman; and as far as the industry of spectacle is concerned, we can say actual as well. The great blue nude of Snyder’s film is an elegant amalgam of old-fashioned, carbon-based acting (Billy Crudup’s remarkable characterization) and computer-generated imagery (CGI). Close-ups featuring the character’s disconcerting, actively scintillating eyes take us deep into the so-called Uncanny Valley, where CGI efforts historically come to grief; yet Snyder’s reintegrated superman seems monstrously unstoppable, both in the world of his story, and perhaps in ours. Those eyes are deeply disturbing, but hard to erase from memory.
 
Dr. Manhattan belongs to a proliferating line of comic-book and fantasy figures (Jar-Jar Binks, Gollum, Ray Winstone’s Beowulf, most of the Marvel superheroes) who populate the leading edge of Posthuman Hollywood. Precisely where this front is headed remains a matter of speculation. The recent finale of Battlestar Galactica, with its montage of Japanese robotica insinuating that even now Cylons walk among us, may prove as prophetic as it is corny. Gibson’s Idoru comes to mind, leading one to wonder whether a state that elects character actors and other players (Reagan, Schwarzenegger) might someday be led by a Non-Player Character. So perhaps it is fitting that Snyder, Hayter, and Tse refocus the plot of Watchmen to center on their indestructible, ineluctable superman. Whether or not the Watchmen film says anything about the contemporary politics of terror, it certainly reflects a cinematic watershed. To update Super Powers and the Superpowers: the superman exists, and he’s digital.
 
Perhaps the two versions of Watchmen belong to different aesthetic contexts, divided not so much by the transition from Cold War to War on Terror, as by another Millennial passage. Consider a second offering from the discontented winter of 2009, this one by the blogger Clay Shirky:
 

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves-the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public-has stopped being a problem.
 

(Shirky)

As Rorschach might say, an industry died in New York last night-or in Denver, or in Seattle, and if Shirky is right, all round the networked world. This obituary for the publishing business casts stark light on many matters covered here: on the one hand, on Moore’s lament about the decline of comics into a “pumpkin patch,” and on the other, on the epiphany of the CGI superman that shines through the film’s plot changes. Above all, though, this apocalyptic note rings out over the final visual signature of both comic and film, that moment when Seymour reaches for a fatal or futile book.

 
While the book in the comic seems dire, in the film it is more of a grace note. We might extend this diegetic or literal reading to higher levels as well, turning from the message to its mediation. The final image in the comic represents a last, emphatic assertion of Moore’s ironic master-trope: the convergence of opposites, or as it is often called in Watchmen, Fearful Symmetry. Here is a picture of a book that has not been opened, completing the last page of a book that is about to close. Like most other points of convergence in the comic, this moment is haunted by Rorschach, whose “face” is marked by mirror shapes. By the end of the story, Rorschach has been revealed as the man who knew too much, so when he symbolically reappears, we should prepare for dire enlightenment. Yet the subject of this final revelation may be not so much the world, as the work itself. Though Rorschach’s journal is very different from the graphic novel in which it is imagined, it seems fair to say the final image of the book refers at least obliquely or artifactually to the comic-which is, after all, the book we are holding in our hand, as we study an image of a hand and a book. Read in this way, Moore’s Watchmen goes out with a glowering reminder of the power of reading, writing, and perhaps the “under-language” of comics.
 
By definition, the film cannot produce this immediate self-reference, since it abducts Watchmen into a very different medium. The film’s final recourse to the image of a book risks a certain nostalgia. Nostalgia (the pain of memory) implies loss or devaluation. Moore complains of cinematic “spoon feeding” (Boucher) and the writer and comics artist Adam Cadre notes that for all the visual genius of the film, its messages are thrown serially across a giant screen, not deployed in an elegant, convoluted sign-system that demands artful discovery (Cadre). Since these points seem undeniable, it is easy to feel a certain cynicism about the film’s reproduction of Seymour and the book. Perhaps the final tableau, viewed on the IMAX screen, comes down to nothing more than this: Hey kids, hope you enjoyed the movie-remember to read a book now and then: preferably a comic from the DC division of Warner Brothers!
 
Having sunk this far, those of my generation (especially academics) may slip readily into the next stage of descent, which has been named the Gutenberg Elegy (Birkerts). How sad, goes the whinging chorus, that we have fallen away from the good, old world of books-even comic books. If one were persuaded by cultural conservatives in the last, or indeed in the present administration, that reading is imperiled by new technologies, or by the collapse of commercial publishing, one might beg space for Alan Moore aboard Professor Bloom’s Ark-not that any berth would be found, even far below the waterline, or that Moore would accept such passage.
 
Not to put too fine a point on it: whinging never helps. If any past master deserves remembrance here, it is not Gutenberg the goldsmith, but William Blake the prophet, grand master of fantasy comics avant la lettre. Further, there seems no particular reason to mourn, since unlike the Blake of Watchmen (the Comedian who dies in New York), the Blake of our visionary tradition seems very much alive, at least in certain hearts and minds. Not for nothing is Alan Moore’s current work in progress a massive project called Jerusalem (Boucher).
 
One clear indication of Blake’s spiritual survival may be Alan Moore’s notoriously renegade stance toward the popular culture industry, illustrated by his staunch refusal to view any film made from his work. Who watches the Watchmen? Not Alan Moore. Moore’s refusal to participate in the industry of spectacle strikes a bright line between page and screen, in spite of all attempts to confuse them. His feud with the film business asks those of us who care about his writings to keep them out of the pumpkin patch, remembering that they are formally challenging, highly original efforts, not simply frozen embryos of movies.
 
Yet, as we have seen, for all its revolutionary consciousness, Moore’s ending is at least potentially less hopeful than Snyder and company’s. His numinous book may open to ultimate revelation or Apocalypse, evoking, as Moore quotes John Cale, “a stronger loving world to die in.” On the other hand, the film’s book seems more likely the image of a new world order, a stable dominion, albeit one of architectural terror.
 
Such is, in effect, the way we live now, and perhaps there is something to be said for making the best of it. If we swap elegy for paean, it might be possible to elicit a more hopeful reading from the final image of the Watchmen film. Where the comic offers Fearful Symmetry, perhaps, if we can avoid the pitfall of cynicism, the film might supply a less ominous pattern. Specifically, the film’s repetitious return to the book might constitute what Douglas Hofstadter calls a Strange Loop:
 

an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive “upward” shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop.
 

(Hofstadter, 101-102)

Applying Hofstadter’s terms, the “upwards movement in a hierarchy” would be the transition from the old medium of ink and paper to the brave new world of polygons and bits. The paradox or strangeness would manifest on two levels, literal and symbolic, the first supplied by the image of the book, the second by the mechanism of absent presence, which Snyder and company have made even more prominent in their version than in the original. In the most immediate sense, this absent presence is Rorschach, author of the Doomsday book, whose identity is always linked to his mirror opposite, Dr. Manhattan, the present absence of Watchmen‘s world order. Behind both these figures, however, lies the ultimate uninvited guest: Alan Moore, whose credit you will not find in the marathon roll that follows the final shot.

 
The “strangeness and charm” of this procedure (to borrow Moore’s borrowed language) lies in the paradoxical reassertion of primary genius against overcoming or obsolescence. No matter how plausible or faithful its appropriation, the film does not fully displace the comic book, or indeed, its author. Things might perhaps have been different had Moore signed on with the American dream machine, but to his lasting credit, he refused. So when we come back to the book, in the radically different context of Zack Snyder’s posthuman epic, we are, in Hofstadter’s sense, closing the uncanny circuit. We may not be “exactly where we started out,” but we must acknowledge certain lingering presences.
 
If we manage to see the film’s bibliophanic moment as a “level-crossing feedback loop” then perhaps there is some hope for narrative, after all, even in the Valley of the Uncanny, among all those strange faces with deeply spooky eyes. Dr. Manhattan, the latest poster-boy of CGI, is not the only spectre haunting our technological sublime. Alan Moore is out there, too, channeling William Blake, casting spells and curses, continuing to cover the page. If we have to bury Gutenberg, or newspapers and publishing houses-and perhaps someday, in these increasingly hard times, even the mighty Warner Brothers-the idea of magical, subversive texts will remain.
 
Irony survives the death of irony, if by no other process then through the perdurably perverse logic of the World’s Dirtiest Joke, whereby, the poet advises from Hell, “the most sublime act is to set another before you” (Blake 151). If absence can be presence in the Rorschach space of modern media, then obsolescence can just as well signify vitality. Snyder and company may offer what is, logically considered, an impotent parody of Moore’s book of revelation; but their inversion reminds us that other works, other worlds, and other revelations remain to be produced. No invention is final, no weapon ultimate, no act so sublime (or obscene) that it cannot be topped by the next guy. So we may imagine, in the mental frames that always roll off after the end of any film, books of the future, both wonderful and terrible.
 
Perhaps these are books of new strangeness and charm, the kind that never appear in print. In any case, we read on.
 
Who watches these watchmen?
 
We’re the Aristocrats!