 Okay, everyone, welcome to your final lecture for Arts One this year. Although that's not quite true, we have planned a review session, sort of a plenary review session kind of like a lecture for next Tuesday, because Monday is a holiday, next Tuesday and again in that evening slot from five till seven, and we have to book another room, so it is in the room that Rob Crawford had his tempest lecture in, which is Chem D 200, Chem D 200, five till seven on Tuesday, April the second, I believe, and that'll be kind of, as I said, a plenary review session. If you want to come to that session prepared with a question about the course, you can ask any of the lecturers any question you want, we'll all be there, so we'll be structuring it a bit, I think, we'll see how it goes, but a bit like a panel session, so you have access to all of us and not just your seminar leaders at that point. Alright, there are all kinds of diverse media and different kinds of texts that we have dealt with in Arts One, and we try to point you outward, I think, to different sorts of diversity, but one of the anchor points, I think, of the course, and in a way, I hope this will make this lecture today a bit of a summative experience, a bit of a summing up, is that all of the teaching we do is tied to the book in one way or another. The book is a figure, the book as an object that you have in your hand, perhaps, and the book is something that you read. So I'm Watchman because of its structure, because of its style, because of its genre, puts at issue what it is books do, what constitutes a book, and what it is to read. We've been telling you about different kinds of reading, different approaches to reading, and what it is that reading might be for culturally, for you in this course. For me, Watchman puts all of those kinds of questions in a very focused and, I think, compelling way. So seeing as believing is my theme here, and we're going to talk a little bit about the nature of ideology, ideology, that's believing in some ways, a system of beliefs or, well, there are other definitions as well that will come to things that you see in a way. Appearances can be referred to as ideology, and the word will come up on the PowerPoint slide so you don't have to necessarily worry too much about it, ide-o-l-o-g-o-y, ideology. And in a way what I'm going to talk about is the ideology of the book, I suppose. And there are for this course, for this class, rather, what amount to, and this just kind of appear in the background, but copyright issues around me using images in the PowerPoint from this text, and rather than complain about this, this is published by DC Comics, so it has a kind of, there's a kind of, a vast economic kind of investment in the dissemination of this text. They want you to buy it, so giving it away for free on the internet or putting it into electronic format can cause us some problems. As I said, rather than complain about that, I want to kind of make a virtue out of this and ask you please to, I hope, to please take out your books. I want to, and there's going to be lots of information up there on the screen, but I think none of it is going to be copyrighted. And instead, what I want you to think about is the experience of having a book to hand. I'm going to get you to read the book, to look for pages in the book during the lecture today, and I'm going to kind of do it along with you. But it's not just sort of incidental to the matter of the lecture that you have to open up your book. I mean, you do this with any lecture anyway if you bring a textbook along with you. Rather, opening up a book and using it, watching it, watching it, I might seem a strange thing to say, although it makes sense with the title here. Looking at it, reading it is actually what this text from one perspective is all about. It's about the material character of interacting with text, with books, with pages, with the kind of weight of this object. So you're going to need your books. And that need as well is something that's a bit pressingly articulated in watchmen, right? It's not just that this text argues or asserts that books are neat or comics are cool or something like that, but it expresses a need. They have to be there in one form or another for Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, the collaborative authors of this text. We'll think a little bit about what authorship might mean as well in this context. But you're going to need your books is something to remember here. All right, Alan Moore, you may know, have you ever heard of him before? I think some of you have in my seminar at least have said your fans and things like that. So sometimes if you're sort of go to comic book stores or you're connected to comic book culture, you would know that he has a particular profile, a fairly big profile in the world of graphica and the comic. We'll talk about that term graphica in a little while. So Moore is a kind of canonical author in that space. And if you did follow any of the kind of commentary and sort of media buzz that emerged around Watchmen, it's published in the mid to late 1980s, so 1986, 1987 originally. And then it's adapted into a film that appeared about five years ago. It's actually filmed in Vancouver and there are Vancouver actors in Watchmen, the movie as well. So that's always interesting to find something local in something so global. In any case, if you do know anything about the turning of this text, this fairly bookish, I would say comic bookish, comic bookish, that's not even a word, comic bookish text into a film. You know there was some controversy around it, particularly having to do with Alan Moore's reaction. It was hard to make this into a film I think of a number of directors took it on and then Moore opposed it throughout. And you can see what he says here. So this is in an interview that was published in, I guess it's a kind of a blog offshoot of the Los Angeles Times. He says, I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying. He doesn't like movies. There are screens and things in here, right? And in fact, there's a movie going on in the background. I don't know if any of you noticed something about this one. You have to watch the background quite a bit. Does anybody know what the film is in and around Times Square? Where that new stand is in here? Yeah? It's the Day the Earth Stood Still, a sci-fi classic remade with Keanu. That's not the classic version. But before that, the Day the Earth Stood Still. So and it has something, the plot of that film in fact has something to do with the plot of Watchmen. So they're all kinds of intersections. Film exists in this world, right? And it informs how you think about, in fact, we'll see the cinematic nature of this particular text. In some ways, a comic book unfolds like a set of film storyboards, right, from beginning to end, one image after another. There are some cinematographical tactics involved in producing a comic book form. And we'll come to that a little later. But Moore opposes this. He doesn't like it. And he doesn't like it, he says, because it spoon feeds us, which has the effect of watering down, and here I've highlighted this, our collective cultural imagination. This is if we're freshly hatched birds. He really doesn't like this. He in fact is more pointed in other interviews. He's holding back a bit. Freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open, waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. That's what he thinks film is. The Watchmen film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms. So not happy at all with the conversion from this text, from this medium, into something else. Now aside from being a bit cranky and a little bit of a kind of sort of deliberately marginalized figure, he pulls himself out of the mainstream in various ways. Alan Moore's a little bit reclusive, I think. It nonetheless points up something about how he, as one of the authors, as the author of the text of the story, views this particular output. And that is as essentially tied to the book and the comic book for what it is that it's supposed to do. If you take it out of this medium, if you try and adapt it into film, it becomes something else that happens with any text anyway. But for Moore, that adaptation actually betrays something crucial about what it is that this book does. So it's a book as a book. This is really important to notice for him. Second, I've highlighted there this idea of our collective cultural imagination. What's the idea of watching Hollywood films? That's what we do, right? With film, we watch it. Who watches The Watchmen we hear over and over again in here? We're watchers in many ways. We'll talk about what that phrase means very shortly. But what is it to watch a film for Moore? Seems to me it's a bit mind-numbing, isn't it? It suggests that as viewers we're inherently passive. Maybe a little bit, I'm sort of asking you questions here and you notice how you don't respond. All right, you're expecting from this architecture, which is like a film auditorium in many ways or a sort of dramatic theater in some ways. You're expecting to receive information that seems to come out of my brain and out of my mouth and into your ears and onto your pages or laptops or whatever it is you're using. And that idea of that kind of one-way flow puts you in an extremely passive role. Your passive recipients of whatever I'm telling you right now, the screens are designed to kind of shout at you visually in a way and make you sit there and maybe copy it down. Now that's useful, of course. That feels like there's some kind of substantive knowledge that you're getting here. But notice how Moore doesn't really like that idea for readers and for viewers. He does not want a passive readership, a passive viewership. He doesn't want you to sit there like baby birds and get some nasty stuff shoved down your cognitive throats, right, into your mind somehow. And he calls this our collective cultural imagination there. The idea is that imagination, whatever else it might be, is somehow proactive or reactive, maybe both, right? That you don't sit there passively, maybe when you're reading this, and hopefully even when you're watching a film, that you're not a passive recipient, but somehow you are an active co-participant in that creative activity. That your imagination is at stake here as much as the imaginative work of an author, of a graphic artist, of colorist, of whoever produced this thing. So you're a participant, you're invested in this material for Moore, and he doesn't like it when that investment is made problematic somehow. This is a question of what we call mass culture, the mass culture argument in cultural studies. Most of you will have heard, I don't know, internet, television, radio, all these kinds of things called mass media. And the implication behind that term is of a kind of passive perception that people are an undifferentiated mass in general who receive from a fairly small body of those in power, in control of images, of money, of all kinds of things, power. All the raw materials that they use to understand themselves in their everyday life. Everything comes to you, you are a receiver, but you're not a maker in this mass culture model. We are part of an undifferentiated mass. We often blur this together, the idea of mass culture with popular culture, you need to tease those ideas out a little bit. I would say that, say a comic book is a pop culture form and maybe a mass culture form, you have to think about this. But you'll notice how more in here wants to differentiate between passive and active recipients around a mass cultural medium, a popular medium. So in him saying somehow that he wants an active readership or implying it, he doesn't want somebody eating regurgitated worms of whatever culture trash it is, he wants you to somehow talk back, write back, think back especially. That suggests that he's working against this mass culture idea, but he's doing it in a mass culture form. So there's an interesting contradiction here that he's trying to negotiate. I hope everybody's finished the text because I'm about to spoil it, right? Ready, everybody's ready? Okay, so you all know who the bad guy is, right? If there's a bad guy in here, it's a little iffy to just kind of decide sometimes. But of course it's Ozymandias. Right, it's Adrian, right? What is it that Adrian is doing? He's trying to avoid nuclear war, right? So this is a text and said in the 1980s or in a kind of fictional version of the 1980s where there's a lot of what we call nuclear anxiety, right? And somehow he has to avert an apocalyptic disaster. The world is about to end. Nixon is about, Nixon who somehow managed to hang on to the presidency for five terms is about to start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, right? And so what's the plot? Might as well spill the beans here since we're spoiling it. Those of you watching at home, if this does ever make it onto the internet as a film, plug your ears, close your eyes. What happens? How does he do it? We just get our big plot out of the way here, yeah. Well, the center of New York really, yeah. By imitating an alien invasion. And the idea is that when this creature that has been creatively concocted, notice that it's an artistic and scientific collaboration it's been put together. When that is somehow, was it attacking on beam he's got or something, they make something up. It's re-beamed with this kind of blue light into the, or white light into the center of New York City over the, it's over the, what is it, the Center for Extraterrestrial Research is where they've chosen to make it manifest. I guess there's a bit of irony there. And this alien appears and then everybody will, in the world, will unify. Now think about this in terms of the idea of mass culture. This mass culture idea, right? Who's manipulating whom here, right? Do people know what really happened? For example, well I suppose when it happened, maybe at the moment that it happened, so are they gonna know or shortly thereafter? Cause there's actually a problem with Rorschach as you may have gathered. But for the most part the idea is that they won't, right? That people will not see through this that they will be fooled by a massive fiction, a trick. This means that people are passive enough to be fooled, that they are not going to investigate who's are in the opening pages, for example, we meet, well you meet Rorschach as you know, and even before that who are up in the comedians' apartment, what are they? Their jobs, the detectives, right? So there's a mystery here that's being solved, right? And we're sort of pursuing a particular kind of knowledge. If those detectives actually see the course, if it's possible for them to see through the screens, the veils, the false images that are created around this alien invasion at the end of 11 book 11, comic book 11, this came out originally as a series of 12 comic books over the course of a year. So each of the chapters is actually a discrete comic book and it's been bound up here in this large edition. If those detectives somehow allow us to see through that all those false images, we will realize that this creature is not there and what'll happen has not come from outer space and it's not invading us. And the implication is that war, right? Nuclear war will start all over again, human beings will start fighting. You remember just before the creature manifests itself or the false creature at the end of chapter 11, one of the new stand operator says, why is everybody fighting? There's a lot of brawling going on in the streets. So that's the idea, that's maybe human nature. Maybe it's a little bit like Hobbes and the idea of the state of nature that Hobbes offers us that somehow human beings are sort of nasty, violent, angry creatures who will by their very nature squabble with each other to the point of killing themselves, the point of doing themselves in as a civil, ourselves in as a civilization. So the only way to avoid this, Adrian Wight seems to suggest, even more than suggest seems to enact, is to trick people, is to delude them. So he is saving us on behalf of ourselves, saving us from ourselves. So all that is connected to this mass culture argument, right? But what does that imply about people? What does that imply about people? What is Adrian? What's his superhero name, his vigilante name? Ozymandias, did you notice anything about that name that might even connect to this course? Yeah. It's a poem. It's a sonnet by, close but wrong. Percy Bish Shelley, Mary Shelley's husband. So you've all read Frankenstein. There's like a connection like this right there. And Ozymandias, it connects us to a certain idea of the romantic imagination, right? Now think about in Shelley's novel, about this idea of a sort of the human imagination. Is Frankenstein suggesting, I mean maybe that creature that's made, that never quite living alien that's fabricated and zapped across the continents to reappear in New York, is that like a creature? Is that a Frankensteinian monster in some ways? It certainly looks like a monster in our terms and this might on the one hand be the monster of our text. We've been looking for this. Although in Frankenstein of course, the argument is that maybe it's Victor who might be more monstrous than his own monster. And so that would make Adrian probably responsible here, right? But that romantic imagination and we invoked it a little bit. In Shelley's novel is both, there's an argument made for it, it's limitation, right? That it's a scary thing and also for its encouragement, its inspiration, right? Think of Victor listening to those lectures or his interest in alchemy, right? Somehow it lifts you up and it's a very individuated idea, right? Of the solitary poet, the solitary figure, the single imaginative being the artist. And there are lots of artists in here, comic book artists and writers and graphic artists and all kinds will appear in here. Solitary artists exploding or cutting through in a visionary way all those kinds of false appearances. In Rorschach even in a kind of degraded sense because he's our writer, he's the writer with whom we, I would say, begin and end this tale. It's his voice over, his journal. What's gonna happen when somebody reads that journal when the New Frontiersman publishes it? Why does Dr. Manhattan spoiler again but you all know this? A consigned Rorschach to oblivion. Bill's Rorschach. What's the problem? Gonna spill the beans, a can of which he eats earlier on too, right? It's cute, they're full of jokes like this in here. So yeah, that's right, he was gonna tell us, and does he spill the beans? Think about this, this is a tricky one. No, because he's been obliterated. Exactly, send it off to this obscure right wing-ish New Frontiersman, this paper that who knows who reads it? It's the sort of wacky paper, right? With all the crazy stories that people pick up, but it's going to publish Rorschach's journal. Away out of this maybe, and it's a bit of a conundrum, is to ask yourself, what are you reading? How would this exist, this text, without Rorschach's journal? You are reading it, in fact. Somebody picked it up, somebody read it. The text loops back on itself. Watchman loops around in a set of circles. Really there are all kinds of circuits in here. And it's up to us to decide maybe if those are closed or open. But that whole idea of the circle, of repetition, right? Relates both to mass culture, to mass media, which is full of repetitions, simulations, reproductions, false images. And to that circuit relates to this idea of the romantic imagination, or to the disruptive imagination, to the singular vision, to the one person who's going to expose it all, who's going to open things up, or in the case of Vite, to the one person who's going to try and control it all, try and shape it all, right? In all of these cases, I point out that Shelly and William Blake and Bob Dylan even are invoked in here repeatedly. Watch your section titles, look at, there are quotations of song lyrics, there are all things playing through this text. So this idea of a romantic artist figure, of a romantic creative solitary individual is really significant in this book. It may be it's the superhero as well, or the vigilante. Maybe it's that figure of the great blue Dr. Manhattan. In all cases, this kind of imagination, the singular imagination, we've been hearing about this repeatedly, I think, in arts one, for better or for worse, depending on your perspective, the idea of the romantic imagination really attaches itself to the book as an artifact. Books will change your life is the idea, right? Books will somehow alter the way you see, the way you read, the way you think. All right, so that's what Moore is attaching himself to really is that idea. This is a short section, a segment from an essay by, you can see it, there's Sven Bruckerts from 1996. The title is not his, exactly, it's in quotation marks, The Fate of the Book. And he's asked repeatedly, Bruckerts writes a lot about poetry, a little bit about media and mass media in many ways. And in 1996, so this is 10 years after Watchman, about 10 years ago now, more than that, 15. There was a lot of talk about what's gonna happen with the internet, what's gonna happen with electronic media, the world is changing, books are going to disappear, right? And sort of battle lines were drawn within the academy and things like this, and there were those of us, I shouldn't say us, I don't know what side I would be on, those of us who were focused on sort of embracing the new media with its unraveling of clear texts, with its uncertainties, and those who were seemed to be clinging to what starts to feel like an archaic or dated idea of the book. So this is what he's talking about in this essay, he says, if I'm right about these tendencies, so there's a tendency he's observing now. Think about that idea that John re-invoked that I mentioned of zeitgeist, zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. Now again, that's a very deterministic notion, that's a very deterministic idea that we all act according to certain principles because of when and where we're living. I'm not very comfortable with that, but that's sort of what's being invoked here, right? The shift. If I'm right about these tendencies, about the shift from page-centered to screen-centered communication, and half of you've got your laptops open now, maybe more than half, others are writing things in pen on a book, we've got this division actually enacted right in front of us here in your note-taking practices, right? Then we will be driven either to acquiesce in, give in, that's what Adrienne wants passively maybe, or to resist, this sounds like Alan Moore, what amounts to a significant modification of our patterns of living? Are you being taken in by your purchase in Facebook, by your, I don't know, love of Apple products and iTunes and all that kind of stuff? Are you just buying into a kind of mass corporate machine here that lets you type away and send your messages round and round, and they've got your money anyway, so wonderful, they say? Is this a form of mind control? Or is there creative agency in this kind of medium? Or is creative agency actually the purview of those of you who have pens out right now and are bothering to write things down in an embodied, rather than a rather virtual and somewhat disembodied way? See what I'm getting at here? There's an investment in presence, in body, in viscerality and all kinds of things, like fleshliness that also ties itself to this idea of the romantic imagination. And just to gesture a little bit, what's that? You all got your covers, everybody open your book, you don't have to open it, close your book, look at the front cover. What's this thing? We can make a sound effect if you want. What is it? Could be, could be ketchup. Human bean juice. Could be human bean juice, as we say, we're back to our bean metaphor here, right? It's blood, right? And notice how, what's it playing across? We've got sort of two kind of ovoid shapes here and yellow, nice bright fluorescent kind of artificial color, primary, right? Red and yellow too, very primary, yep. Yeah, it's a happy face, right, in this case at least, although this image does, recurs in different kind of configurations throughout the book, you'll see in fact. But notice how this is sort of asymmetrical and messy versus something that's very neat and clean, right? It's as if something of the human body, whether it's something you're eating or whether it's blood or whatever it is, has disrupted the even, smooth, clean textures of the artificial of a happy face pin or something like that. So these two tendencies are playing off against each other. That Berkertz is calling screen and book that I'm saying might be representation or image and flesh, material, embodiment. They're crossed and at cross purposes in here. There are lots of images of human bodies that we'll come to in a second in here, but think ahead to what happens to Dr. Manhattan, for example, how does he become Dr. Manhattan? This is a good way to start to think about this, I think. How does he become Dr. Manhattan? Yeah, yeah exactly, it's tacky on beams again or whatever it is, and it pulls him apart. His body is torn to its atomic or even subatomic level and then he reassembles himself and we get body parts manifesting, a nervous system, a skeleton at different points in this imaginative universe, right, this imaginary space. But again, think about this though, how embodied that is versus how tied to the idea of light, of seeing, of mere representation, that is as well. Those two tendencies, screen and book again, generally calling them, actually play out in that image of Dr. Manhattan being torn to pieces and reformed. Of course again, at Adrian's Antarctic hideaway, this happens to him as well, right? He's torn apart by another set of beams or whatever it is that Adrian nefariously plots to have him done, have done to him. All right, with all that in mind then, one of the ways to think about this tension between body and text, maybe, or this assemblage, the way the two of them are put together, right? So it's both, that Burkert's quotation made it sound like it's antithetical, right, that these are opposites. I'm not sure that this text thinks that, exactly. And it rather reassembles them, it tears these ideas apart and puts them back together in various configurations. It thinks about this relationship in different ways. So I wanna call the name of that kind of thinking, Graphica, the graphic. The graphic, the graphic novel, I don't know if that's what this is, right? This is some kind of graphic form. It's a comic book, really, all right? Whatever it is, the graphic is the right name for it, in as much as it involves this sort of ragged, hybrid mixed zone between the merely textual perhaps or the merely typographical words on the page, book stuff, all right? And the lived experience, we would say the phenomenological experience in your mind and your consciousness of its reception, the embodied experience of receiving it, the graphic kind of moves back and forth. It uses images, for example, often, right? It uses textures. You have to, again, with more, at least, this is graphic, this is graphic. It's in your hands, it's about that far from your eyes, right? You hold it up and you experience it this way with physiological, physical page terms, right? The page itself is set up in a particular fashion. It's not just a string of words, but it actually matters where things are positioned here. So it's a highly spatialized form. Halfway between, I wanna suggest, or I don't know, it's halfway, somewhere between a kind of lived experiential notion of what's represented here and a textualized written account of what that is. It has something to do, too, with putting your hand on the page or perhaps using a spray paint can or whatever it is gets used in here. Rorschach uses mustard on a menu at one point and goes, right? He's making graphic art. There are all kinds of ways in which this idea of the graphic as an in-between or hybrid or mixed form gets invoked. Grapha literally means writing, so we're referring to some kind of act of the pen on the page, perhaps some kind of writing. You can see it there in Greek, right? Okay, graphic. This word, the reason I'm giving you this is not only because it's called a graphic novel, but also because there are kinds of resonances, bits and pieces that play with this notion of the graphic that we'll come to. One I wanna point to you, first off, is this thing, praxinoscope, a praxinoscope. Have any of you ever heard of this before? There are others, essentially it's a lamp with mirrors on the inside and sets of images on the outside that you can use to sort of, it's a bit of a toy in some ways. But what it is is a precursor of the movie camera. Now remember, Alan Moore does not like the idea of this being made into films. We have to keep that in mind. And yet it is a visual form that has cinema to graphic aspects to it. So the word cinema comes from the Greek word, kinesis, kinesis? Kinetic, like you take human kinetics, what are you taking? Studying human kinetics. Human kinetics. Yeah, gym class, but it's actually human motion is the idea. Kinesis is motion, right? So the human body in motion. Cinematography is, literally that word means writing out motion. How do you write motion? How do you catch it on a graphic surface? You can't in a sort of still image, but a praxinoscope, when you crank it, actually makes little pages seem to move in sequence. You can make your own, or you might compare the idea of a flip book. Do you know what a flip book is? Go, if you ever, like Captain Underpants? Do you ever read Captain Underpants? Yeah, you know there's Fliporama? Have you ever tried Fliporama, Captain Underpants? Very cool books, right? They're kind of rude, but they're made for, I don't know, what, like 10 year old boy, something like that, that's your target audience there. So what you do is you take the page and you go, like this. What it makes Captain Underpants go pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, over and over again, flipping back and forth between two images. The idea is in the flipping motion, it's kinetic, right? You sort of fill in the blanks. This is how films work as well, right? Not so much digital photography, which doesn't exactly have the same idea of the frame, but films with, with, political film, right, with the real tangible film, I guess some film study scholars are gonna be after me for that, but with tangible film works in this as a sequence of fast moving still images and that's kind of the basis for how, where a praxiscope comes from, right? So an action viewer is what it means, literally. Did you notice there's a flip book in here? I don't know that you can, but you can make it flip, but it relates to the cover image and to others. So sometimes we just miss these things in passing. This is what's called Propospeak Paratex, so the text we tend to think of as this main, the main body of the story. Did you skip this stuff when you're reading? Just look at the 26 to 28 pages that are part of the comic book and skip the sort of bits from encyclopedias and essays and things like that. You skip the title pages? Or did you try to read these things? Yeah, there's lots of information in here, but this is paratext or context. It's just outside of the text. If you look at this page, this comes at the end of each of the comic book issues. There's something like this. A clock face, what's it set to? Minute wise, can you read analog time? What's it set to? It is 12 minutes to midnight. Actually, it could be noon, but it's midnight in this case, 12 minutes to 12. How many issues are there in Watchmen? 12, turn to the back of chapter two. You can see what's coming here. What time is it? It's 11 minutes to and what's starting to appear up here? Turn to the back of book three, chapter three, comic book three. What's happening? What time is it? Yeah, you can now do this all the way through. Are you glad now you brought your texts and you're flipping through them? At the end of each, I think we can say with the exception of our, well, even here, there's our last page. What happens to the clock hand? The blood goes drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. If you could tear them out and then flip them, I don't say tear up your book, but notice how you can't actually make this a flip book. It's like a flip book that resists being one. You get this kinetic, you get a cinematography happening here. As movement happens, blood drips down and covers the clock face. Maybe it's a watch too. We'll see there's a, time pieces are really significant in here and the hand will move. It's still on the page, but it's made to move in the progression of pages. This is a non-linear way of reading though. You cannot do this by reading front to back even. You've got to skip through and isolate things and then actively, unless you cut it apart and somehow make it flip, or I did this on a PowerPoint once, took a picture of each page and then made it go ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. It's kind of cool, it works. But you can't do that literally when if the book stays like this, you have to imaginatively reconstruct, right? The flip book. This is an instance of Moore and Gibbons trying to encourage you actively and imaginatively to participate in the restructuring of that book in your head as you read it. So it's a non-linear restructuring of linear times. Makes sense, right? And it does it in this kind of praxinoscope-like way. This is without the kind of light fixture you've got a praxinoscope operating in this book. Also on individual pages, I mean this is how comic pages work. This is a set of photographs from a Victorian photographer who was sort of made stop motion photography happen. So Edward Mybridge is very famous for this. There's a book by Rob Winger, in fact, a poet Rob Winger that I really recommend checking out called Mybridge's Forces, where he sort of deals with this idea of the relationship of the still image to time, right? Watchmen arguably is about time in very many different ways. Think about history. Think about the instantaneous rewriting history for that matter. But temporalities, the way in which time happens. What is Dr. Manhattan, John? What is John's career, I guess, that he's trained in before he becomes a physicist? He's a watchmaker, right? And in fact, what does his fortress of solitude desk thing look like on Mars? Yeah, it's like the gears or the sort of inner workings of a watch in particular or a clock. There are actual images of watches in here. There's an image of a watch from Hiroshima on the cover of Time magazine in here that plays past. So there are all kinds of ways in which this image works itself out. And it's built around this idea of a kind of stop motion photography. So it looks here, if your eye translates, this is like a prexinoscope set that's been laid out in front of you. In this case, I'm done with the camera. And you can see how images are either layered onto each other to give the illusion of motion. You can see how the body moves there. Notice to it, very importantly for my bridge, this is a body in motion. Often he did studies of nude human men and women moving. You might have noticed Dr. Manhattan increasingly has a proclivity for shedding all his clothing and really likes to be naked, in fact, by the end of things. So here you have an echo of my bridge's practice of seeing the body in motion. He wanted to understand human kinesthetics here. He wanted to understand how it is that body's moved. And he thought this kind of photography could do that. One of the questions that my bridge asked, in fact, this is just trivia, but he was asked to do all four of the horses hooves come off the ground when it's galloping. You couldn't tell if you're just watching. So he had to slow it down and it turns out the answer is yes. And you can see that photographic series there. In fact, proves it. So that's kind of the projects that he was setting about doing. And in the course of this kind of research, visual research, he kind of invented movies. There's one argument here that argument invented cinematography. He invented the way to produce films, right? By working with this kind of stop motion photography in the Victorian period. All right, please open your books. So we should have a look here to the first page. I said the first page. Which one is the first page? I'll tell you what I mean, of course. Is that the first page? Notice here, again, if we're thinking about circles in here, about enclosings, U-A-D-C-M-E-N. That's the last. So those are the inner inside of your book. Notice that the word is written across there. What happens on the various walled garage doors? And we'll come to this more directly in a few minutes, but just to just your head, what happens on all the walls, garage doors, and I don't know, surfaces available to the not-tops graffiti, right? I'm gonna talk a bit about graffiti and as I said in a second. But there are a couple of graffiti forms in here that are important, but there's one in particular that you can imagine I'm fishing for here. You can do this and you can see it now. You gotta do it, but who watches the Watchmen? What's important about that, too, is it ever, do you ever actually get to read that? Who watches the Watchmen in there? It's kind of at the end, but it's cut off. Either Rorschach has punched out the guy who's doing graffiti, or there's a body in the way, or the frame only catches part of it. You never actually see the whole thing. Look here, the opening, you never actually see the whole thing. That's not actually what I mean by the first page, though. I don't actually mean the title page where Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and your colorist who's not really so much acknowledged but should be John Higgins are listed as authors here. So not that, we have a thank you. The page, I mean, is in fact not even this, which is the cover of the comic book reproduced inside the book here. I mean this one, I mean this one. So open your books to the first page, all right? So we're thinking about this idea of opening and closing. Start off visually, perspective-ly. Remember Nietzsche talks about multiple perspectives, perspectivalism, and we had some argument over whether it is in fact a perspectivalist or not. We talked about this a bit. Where does this page start? I should start here, is that right? No, actually we should start here, right? Because this is where we first meet, what is that little black thing there? Yeah, this is where your I starts. You start I to I with one of the most basic graphic representations of a face that you can have. What does Worshack say when they take his mask? Give me back my face! Something in there about the idea of the face, about masking and about full disclosure. So here you are, face to face with a face. In fact, it's too close to recognize it as a face right here, though it's got some kind of a blood smear across it, so you think that's a bit weird. That though is an I. In particular in the faces in here, it's the I, which is a key organ. Because what do you do with your eyes? You see, you look, you watch. That's one of the senses of watching in the title. So here we are on this front page, and we start to, if you can imagine, against Alan Moore's wishes that we are a camera somehow. What's happening here? You're in, if we think perspectively here, what happens is we go from cover to cover to page one. Numbered one there, so you can tell that's actually page one. If you're a camera, how are you doing this? It's pulling back, right? It's like it zooms back, or the camera actually draws back to where. It's gonna do it all the way down here. We're drawing up a building, aren't we? We get to look at this guy's fault spot. Who's this guy? That's our detective, right? He's trying to see what's going on, and he's looking over this precipice, and he says, that's quite a draw. Makes a remark about perspective, all right? Why do they begin this way, do you think? Why do they begin this way? Is that really what you begin with though? Is that all we've got is perspective here? Just kind of pull back? Is it a way of orienting yourself? Is it what they call in film an establishing shot? Do you know what an establishing shot is? Again, Moore doesn't like all this filmic stuff. He says, nope, but I'm gonna do it anyway. Dave Gibbons seems to be okay with it. We're gonna have to debate here. Yeah, what's an establishing shot? Yeah, it's unclear, right? In fact, you don't know what's going on, or even where you are. It's quite disorienting. An establishing shot in film is the big picture. It starts off, you've often seen this in movies. It says something like, New York, boom! You get a picture of the whole city, and then we somehow zoom in. We come from some perspective to be in the company of whoever the main characters are or wherever we're gonna start. This is the reverse of an establishing shot. We start off disoriented, and I take your point, and I take it quite seriously, that this does in fact put perspective at issue. We're disoriented, we're not sure where we are, and you have to actively, even though it's doing it for you, you also have to actively start to sort out where you're at. You're all alongside, in a way, that detective. If he had super zoom vision, maybe Superman vision, he could do this and be looking from up there and zoom right down to the level of this button. He can't. But we do pull back. Is there anything in here that indicates motion as well? Is it a still shot that we're pulling back in? There's something going on here, say, with this figure. Yeah. We don't know it's Kovacs yet, but yes, we see Kovacs walking, and you see his footprints go through the blood. It's a typical, who's Kovacs, spoiler again? That's Worshack. In fact, we start with Worshack, right? But we start too close to it to know who he, and we don't, in fact, know who he is as well. What's Worshack's sign say? Yeah, what part of the book are we at? Hmm. Yeah, well, don't you or do you? You can sort of see it, right? It's right there in the third frame here. You can sort of read it. You have to kind of do this, though. This won't work really well, right? You can't actually reorient your perspective. The image is fixed. But in a way, if you try hard, you can read it. It says Worshack's journal. Do we know at this point who Worshack is? No, so again, disorientation. It starts without telling you details. But how do you know these details? You answered my question. So how do we know these details? We've read it already, right? The end is nigh, because if you go to the end as well, might as well do what the book said, go to the end. The end is nigh, and where are we? Image wise? Yeah, we're back at splorched happy face, and he's about to pick up and read Worshack's journal. So I think Seymour is our stand in for the reader here. We're with Seymour at this point, and he's reading Worshack's journal as we get the visuals played out for us. We just go around in a big circle. What shape is a happy face button? It's a circle, right? This is a circuited structure, all right, in which we are playing. What about the arrangement of the page itself? This is significant. I'll just put a few things down here. What about, I'm giving you a little answer there, but what about the shape of the page itself? How does it use the page shape here? No answer? Have you noticed anything? Let's use it as a flip book again. Everybody take your book in hand. You're not gonna hurt it, no tearing up pages. Bend it just slightly, but you don't want to hurt it, and let go. What do you notice about every page that goes by? Every single one. They're all exactly the same size, and in fact, although sometimes they're compacted and pulled together, the same nine-part rectilinear grid is present on every page. It is invariant, it never changes, all right? Sometimes characters will move from frame to frame. Sometimes frames will be collapsed into each other to get a bigger picture. Sometimes we have the whole page as a picture, as a single kind of large image. That's quite rare, but here's one where we've got three, and then a large image built out of six. But that grid stays unmoved, unmoved. This is an effect of, now, what can we call this if we're thinking in terms of what we've been talking about, that is of course a graph, isn't it? This is a rudimentary graph form, a graphic form. I'll talk a little bit more about this. I've been gesturing ahead again. We're coming to these things in terms of what that shape is and what it signifies, right? But think at least at this point of how, despite it's a square-ish kind of shape, it's a rectilinear shape, it's actually also a circle. It's circuited. It keeps repeating itself in a kind of rotational and also linear symmetry, symmetry. So it's symmetrical. What does this book think about symmetry? Is this a symmetrical figure, for example? No, it's a splotch. That's asymmetrical, right? What happens to symmetry in this book? What do they call it? William Blake says, it's fearful. What immortal hand or eye could frame that dye fearful symmetry? He says that fearful symmetry. Why should you be afraid of symmetry? Think about mass culture maybe. Why would you be afraid of symmetry, of repetition? Why is it fearful? One thing after the other, same old, same old, same old, same old, isn't that an insertion of replication, cultural form, photocopying, in a way, into this particular text. What does Rorschach do across our frame? Or do the images that you've got here line up with its rectilinear form, for example? They don't do they. They're kind of at odds with it. And Rorschach walks across it, leaving footprints in blood, alright? So you have this kind of very square, invariant structure, maybe it's like, you can see it here, the front of a building, a skyscraper, something like that. It's also, think of Adrian sitting in his Antarctic fortress again. It's complex there. Where's he sitting as he's waiting for news of his plot? He's sitting in front of something. I'm fishing here. This has an answer to this question. Adrian Veit is sitting, Azubandias, sitting in front of a bank of television screens, right? One after the other. It replicates this kind of mass media form. So that's kind of what's gestured at there. But again, notice how it's cut across. It's incomplete sometimes. It never quite works. Also within these images, there are other kinds of embedded images. There are layers of text, alright? Rorschach's journal here. Speech bubbles, signs. He's carrying a sign, alright? Images like the happy face. Other kinds of fields are laid one on top of the other in here. It gets more complicated in fact as we go along. This kind of layering of fields. So notice we have a kind of juxtaposition of a very simple symmetrical form with a very complex asymmetrical layering. We would say an over determination too much. An over determination of text and image. And those two things again play off each other in various ways. And it's all about ways that I think that we can either keep this set of images open or closed. Is that circuit? Is that circle a closed circle? Or does it open out in any way? I think this is actually, it seems like a trivial question, a small formal question. It's actually a crucial one for me. Because it's speaking to what it is that this text wants to do. Does it open or does it close? That tension between the open and the closed. I mean I'm gonna push for the open a little more here I think. Between the open and the closed, that in the context of what Moore and Gibbons are doing is another name for graphé, for the graphic. Working between these two ideas. So keep those in mind. Keep thinking about those things. All right. So, we can turn to another page maybe here. Let's see. The source for this particular, I'm trying to find our best one. It recurs, how about, I've got two, you can see I've got like a thousand bookmarks here. So they actually become useless once you, so do this. Page numbering is peculiar in here too. So, book or chapter six. Chapter six, page 15. I hope this will work for us. I may have to move us around. This is one of the hazards of getting you to open your books in a lecture. So this is the Rorschach. Yeah, this is what I wanted. The Rorschach chapter where he's been captured and he's talking with his assigned psychiatrist. The bottom frame here. So it's a two panel frame. You see it there? That's the right, or a two frame image rather. This is a panel. So, what does it say in the background? Here's an example of, anybody got one? The bottom there. Rorschach's walking away on page, okay. This is book six, chapter six, page 15. I'll try and make this as quick as I can so that we can all flip there, but flipping does slow you down. In fact, this book wants to slow you down. Did you find this an easy read? People sometimes presume that comics are fast. I think this is actually slower than just having a book there that with text that you can scan and skim through and read through. There are more layers to get through here. It's a slower experience. It's not as easy to read this stuff. It slows you down in particular ways. Again, that are tied to its bookishness in a way, to its page. Okay, so the bottom of that, page 15 there. Do you see the image I'm after? What does it say in the background? So we got layers going on here. I put it up for you. Yeah, it says, who watches the, whoo! It's a bit like Monty Python, you know? The castle of uh, I mean, or in the Lord of the Rings. I think I told you about this when that dwarf is sort of transcribing when they're getting killed and he somehow has scripted those wonky. Still writing while he's being stabbed. We cannot get it. And then again, so he gets the whole sentence out. It's like, okay, we can excuse that. Here they go, wah! Why does he, I mean Monty Python finds this silly. But why the splotch there after wah? What happened, action-wise? There goes Rorschach. Rorschach's leaving. Yeah, so that's either blood or some kind of paint. But he went, who watches the wah! And he did that, right? So this is a bit like that splotch he got on the cover. Notice how textuality gets turned into something chaotic here. It's illegible or unreadable at this point. It's also fractured. This is important. Where in the frame is that piece of writing? Is it center? For example, just think about this. It's up in a corner and there's something on top of it. What's on top of it? Yeah, a text box, right? And so it's actually obscured by text. It's one piece of writing is on top of another. Do you know what that's called? This isn't quite this, but it's called a palimpsest. It's not quite a palimpsest. Palimpsests in medieval manuscripts, I've talked to about this once before. It's when they wanted to save vellum, they would scrape off old text and write over it. It's like so you didn't have an eraser. There weren't books then, it was very expensive, very costly to get vellum to write on. So you'd scrape it off, you had a particular scraper. But the old text still shows through, so it's like you've got two texts, one written on top of the other, and you can kind of read both at the same time. That's called a palimpsest, palimpsest. Here you have something like a visual palimpsest here, where a text box is kind of put over another text. You can still read what's underneath. Notice also that there are all kinds of layers here, foreground and background. So this is just one surface, one writing surface among many. And it only gives you part of it. You only get a chunk. This is true throughout. We only see bits and pieces of who watches the Watchmen. If you wanna flip back to chapter one, this is my microphone here, page nine. Again, I hope I've got this right. Yeah, that's it. This is, I think, you can correct me if I'm wrong the first time this appears in the text. So in the center bottom frame, center bottom frame, do you see it there? This is, I think, the garage under Hollis Mason's. And you can see it says H-O-T-C-H-E-S-E Tremend. So the thing is completely, I think we got a question mark too, nicely. Rorschach, it turns out, is based, I think. Maybe they'll correct me as well if they ever care. But on a figure called The Question from DC Comics. So these are repurposed comic book heroes, a lot of these characters in this text. So who watches the Watchmen? We know it's there, but you can't really read it. It's kind of half legible, do you see that? And it's spray painted. And we'll talk a bit about graffiti in a second. Here's the phrase comes from Juvenile, Satire Six. So this has a classical source. This is a very arts one moment we have here. I'm gonna just take one or two more minutes to talk about this and then we'll take a break. Who watches the Watchmen? He says, actually, there's the Latin. I'll give you my fake Latin. Said, que es custodia, ipsos, custodies, right? That's translated as who watches the Watchmen or that's actually not a correct translation exactly, right? You can see the word custodian in there. It means who guards the guardians. It's kind of, we were talking a bit about mass culture and manipulation. Those who are in positions of power, who puts checks and balances on them. Who takes care of the jailers is the idea. To guard, to watch over, to arrest someone is what it means. So who observes those who stand outside of the law? What law applies to them? It's translated here, though, it's who watches the Watchmen. Now watching over is exactly a sense of this. It's not a great translation, but it's good enough, right? It's right. They like the sense, given, in particular, more of watching because it's polysemic. It has multiple resonances and meanings here. So that's why they've chosen that translation, particularly as well, because it refers to surveillance. What happens with graffiti? When do you do graffiti? Maybe we can leave that. I'm not gonna encourage you to do it necessarily. But where is it that graffiti happens? Notice a graphica we're talking about? Graffiti's an Italian word. Graffiti, graph, grafica, graph. Means little writing, right? Graffiti is a little bit of writing. Where do you do graffiti? Is it legal? No, don't do it. If you do do it, though, you gotta do it when you're not observed invisibly somehow, right? In the corner of things. Somehow if you're gonna tag a building, you gotta get around behind them and no one's looking, shh, where you go. All right, and do your stuff because you'll get arrested otherwise. What do people think of graffiti? Who own those buildings? Badly, they think poorly of it. It's defacing that particular surface, right? So writing as defacement. That's what, why does Rorschach punch everybody? Whether if you can get them, or actually Dan and Lori go and beat up some guys who are doing graffiti as well at one point. Why do they stop these people from doing graffiti? It's the knot tops who are doing this, principally that sort of punk gang with the hair tied up here. Why do they do that? Why stop them? Was it breaking the law? Somehow Rorschach in particular has, I think it's a rather perverse relationship, but a relationship nonetheless to enforcing moral standards. He's a fundamentalist beyond anything else, I think. And that's why he's carrying, by the way, that sign at the beginning. A sign that you see him carrying at various points. There's another page, hopefully I'll get it right. Try 512, 512. So that's chapter five, page 12. If I can find it here. Yeah, that's the one I want. So we look in the background of, let's see, right here in this final frame. So in brown there, kind of in the shadows. Can you see it? Look really closely, this is a detail. Although a lot of these, think about that perspectival idea at the beginning. As they say, the devil is in the details. What's going on there? Rorschach's eating out of a garbage can. And he's put his sign down. So these guys sort of are floating around in the background in these abject spaces with these signs. They're turned upside down sometimes. They occur in random places. If you look all through this page, in fact, we have Bernard, our comic book kid, or he's sold enough to smoke, so I don't know how old he is. He's reading Tales of the Black Frater. That's kind of played through here. We have our new stand guy. There are signs all over the place. All kinds of layers of text played out here. And then you have this guy digging around in the garbage in the background. So somehow there's something said here for watching and watching carefully, looking carefully. Who watches over this guy? Did you think that guy digging in the garbage can with that sign is actually one of the watchmen? Although that's not his name, that's not the name of their organization, is it? Did you notice this? What are they called? What are they called? Crimebusters, sort of. They don't really like that name, but they're the Crimebusters. They're a bit like the Justice League in DC Comics, right? This is the idea? Yeah, so crime, but before that they were Minutemen or then there was sort of the second part of Minutemen and then there are Crimebusters. They don't have a name. It sounds like though the title is Who They Are, right? They're a watchman, but they are, and in the marketing you'll see this, right? This happens, but in fact they are unnamed. All this kind of stuff plays around inside this notion of, I'm about to take a break, so we'll leave it here, satire. Juvenalian satire, and I'll just leave you with this very famous quotation. We'll take a 10 minute break. Satire says Swift, very famously in a preface to a book called The Battle of the Books. It's a sort of glass, a mirror, sort of glass. Notice the visual stuff in here, where beholders do generally discover everybody's face, lots of faces in this text, but their own, which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets within the world so that so very few are offended with it, he says, this is a kind of a snarky definition of satire. When in text or in image, right? When something attacks, satire is text that attacks in many ways. Who watches the watchman? Is it part of a satire by Juvenal, right, in Latin? So how does satire work says Swift, right? Around the time of Daniel Defoe, in fact. This is about the time he's writing here. It's like a mirror you look in and you see everybody else how awful they are, except yourself. What about that, again, I said I was gonna leave and I'm about to leave, but there's so much to say here. What about that bottle of perfume, nostalgia, into which we look on Mars and in Sally Jupiter's room? Did you notice, you'll have to find the page, but do you remember this? What's in reflected in that image? She picks up the bottle of perfume, we look. Ha ha ha ha ha, have a look. I'll tell you, it's her eyes. It looks back at you, it looks back at you. What does Nietzsche say? Those who look long into the abyss, right? You find that the abyss also looks back into you. That's what Swift is talking about here. We look in a mirror and we see everybody but ourselves. More suggesting, try to see yourself in here. All right, we'll take a break, right, and we'll come to a few more specific details and think a little bit more about graffiti and other things, Hiroshima Shadows when we come back. So 10 minutes, so back here at about a quarter past, 20 past one. Okay, I think I'd better start talking again so I can get us through this. Hopefully you've had a moment or two to have a break. So welcome back to part two. This is, I put this graffiti, this up before, it's actually disappeared years ago, but it did happen on the side of a convenience store over in the University Village. Somebody scrawled this. You can see the kind of smurches on the stone there as well, but I like this image because it seems to be an anti-media image and in a way it fits with Alan Moore, but it also points to the collision, I mean, a collision of different kinds of looking here. That you're actually staring at a wall in this case. It's public writing. It's illegal public writing. It's written in the margins on the outside, surreptitiously, a little bit like the way the vigilantes operate in this text. They come from the margins. They live unobtrusively to an extent out of public view and yet they are on side with a kind of public morality. This is telling you that it's better for you to read than to watch TV. I think that's the idea here. Well, you got those nice bunny ears from 1960s TV there. It's not really cable we're talking about here, but some kind of leave it to be for television. In any case, it does point up the difference between, so we've got reading there written inside a frame, read was written inside a frame, which is apparently also a representation of a screen, the electronic sort of locust, the place, the space where representation takes place. This is playing off in all kinds of different ways on the idea of graffiti. But one of the things to remember at least on this is that graffiti is what jumps in and disrupts it. That's cute. But that too is happening. Here's some PowerPoint graffiti in other words. We tend to think that what you see on that screen up there has a certain kind of stability, has a certain kind of authority. Those are the kind of authoritative claims, visual claims that more in Gibbons are in fact aiming to disrupt, to make a bit asymmetrical to play against. So I've been telling you to open your two page, let's do that. I'm gonna point to a few more pages. But before we do that, in order to give us a little bit more of a vocabulary, one of the things that I mentioned this word already, so this is where it's a little better defined, one of the images to explain what ideology is, ideology is, that's offered by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in a book called The German Ideology. It's a collaborative book, a little bit like, not exactly, a little bit like more in Gibbons and Higgins here, so Marx and Engels, collaborative book, but that's a bad analogy. But they're defining this idea of ideology and what they say ideology is in a nutshell is false consciousness, false consciousness. They don't mean it's a belief system, although they are talking about bad belief systems, but it's how you are deluded. It's the mistaking of something constructed for something natural. Ideology offers itself as the way things are. If anybody ever says to you, boys will be boys, for example, that's a topology, a circular statement, who watches the watchman almost sometimes seems tautological in that sense, a bit of a circle there. But if they say some kind of statement like that, that's at a moment when ideology is in its fullest force, right? This is just natural, the claim, this is just the way things are. No, say critics of culture, those are the points when we're trying to pretend that something's natural that isn't. That serves somebody's interests, somebody in power. So this is where Marx and Engels step in in this case. They say ideology works like, and their image is, so we've seen a praxinoscope, a camera obscura. So here's another old image of a camera obscura. That is to say, it's like a pinhole camera. And if you've ever done a pinhole camera, you know that the outside world is projected, your eyes work this way, literally, to quote Rob Lowe from Parks and Recreation. That's a misuse of that term, your eyes actually. Don't you watch Parks and Rec? Good show. They literally work this way. So what you see out there is actually on your retina inverted and your brain flips it back around. Camera obscura presents an inverted image on its screen. Things are upside down. So that's how Marx and Engels, this is their image for what ideology is. It's the world upside down. Things are backwards and you're not able to see them that way. What Marx and Engels want is justice. What Moore and Gibbons arguably want is for you to see through those inversions. That's what Rorschach's gonna do with his journal, right? You're gonna see through the machinations. You're gonna see through the false fronts and find out, maybe, what actually happened. Again, with this circular form that the text follows as well, or this kind of symmetrical form, you can see how inversion is practiced. I won't point you to this too much, but look at the color scheme, for example, on any page, particularly one with all nine images. You'll see that it makes an X often. It's a chiasmic. Chai, the Greek letter chai, is like X or CH, X. Chiasmic means a crossing. The color patterns cross on most pages. That's what the colorists did this. There are color schemes that make these kind of... It's in reminding you about reversals and about shifts. We move back and forth among color schemes, in fact. Watch for this. There are also points when the beginning and ending, for instance, of each chapter or each comic book, you get the same image echoed, the beginning and ending of the book. Everything moves and crosses, maybe, and circles. We come back to the beginning. This is camera obscured stuff. It's reversing itself. This is a reversible book, we could say. It starts at the end, after all, doesn't it? It says, the end is nigh. There it is. Okay, so camera obscura is maybe what's being invoked here as an idea of ideology. And what you wanna do in ideology critique, and maybe this is where Moore is getting... Now, here's a page I would do want you to go to, maybe. This is our news vendor at the bottom of 517. So we're doing that thing where we read the comic as well, along with Bernard and all that kind of stuff, but he says at the bottom of the page, I mean, all we see is what's on the surface. Isn't this how we think we read comics? Not just surfacey shallow reading. All we see, Marx and Engels would say, is ideology here, false consciousness. All we see is what's on the surface. I bet there's all kind of stuff we never noticed. Of course, that's the one in the background where Rorschach, again, this isn't the same image, but look in the back. There he is again. He really likes that particular trash can. I don't know if you see him. All kinds of stuff going on that you don't see behind in other planes of vision, in other visual fields. And we're reminded by the text to look and look carefully and look again. Go around the circle more than once, read it in more than one way, watch carefully. In this case, reading is seeing and perceiving clearly. One of the other forms of graffiti that recurs throughout this text, could you please turn to a little bit back from where you're at? So, chapter five, comic book five, page 11. This, as I mentioned, this with Rorschach already. He's sitting there blotting his mustard. Is it ketchup? I think it's mustard, isn't it? I forget. Ketchup or mustard? It's ketchup with Seymour here at the end. So, he's gonna make a Rorschach blot. Notice it's an upside down question mark as well. But the not tops are producing a particular kind of graffiti. And our psychiatrist, Rorschach's assigned psychiatrist says at one point, it's in fact in this section, but he notices that these remind him, he says of Hiroshima shadows, Hiroshima shadows. So these are atomic shadows. These photographs I've put up for you here. These are photographs of actual atomic shadows in Hiroshima. They are made by the intense heat and the blast of radiation being met by, in this case, human bodies. These are the shadows of bodies that were either badly burned, or at least badly burned, or probably disintegrated. And the traces of those bodies are sort of burned into the walls behind them. It's another form of graffiti here. Another form of graffiti. And it's called Hiroshima shadows in here. They mention it directly. I mentioned that this, if you think about the whole text, it's a text about nuclear anxiety, arguably. Sort of late cold war anxiety. The world is going to end. That's what Rorschach says, the end is not. It's another way to read that claim that the destruction of the world is about to happen. It's an apocalyptic claim. Hiroshima shadows are early evidence, symptomatic writing. I don't know if you want to call this writing. It's an atrocious writing. It's a horrifying writing, but it's writing nonetheless in the graphic sense of the imprint of a human body on the wall, or on a stairs there, as you can see, on a staircase. Bodies that are to take language from elsewhere in the text being taken to pieces by radiation. So this is, again, a horrifying kind of thing, but the Hiroshima shadows that they're drawing, if you have a look there, it's a pair of what? What figure is this? Avoid the slide for just a second. I skipped ahead just momentarily here. On this page, 511, what do they represent? This image recurs throughout, again, in the background, just as who watches the whoop or whatever recurs throughout the text. So, too, does this one. Watch for it. You'll see that it's there. Look carefully, says our news vendor. There's stuff going on that we don't notice. You bet there it is. All kinds of stuff going on in here. What's it an image of? So it's a Hiroshima shadow, they say, but of lovers, right? Do you see this image echoed anywhere else in the text itself? There are at least two places. You want to remember this, perhaps? But yeah. Yes, in Daniel's dream, so Night Owl 2, his dream, and it's he and Laurie. And you remember, of course, they pull off their uniforms and it's sort of an erotic dream. And then they pull off their skin. They pull their bodies off. And what's inside? Their costumes again, which is the mask and which is the reel, which is the disguise and which is the true identity. That becomes problematic. If you know Kill Bill part two, there's a David Carradine, Bill has a long speech on whether Superman is in costume or not at various points. Superman, he says, his costume, that's his reel appearance and Clark Kent is his disguise. Whereas Peter Parker, for example, as he's not DC or Batman, let's say, Bruce Wayne is his real life and Batman is his disguise. So it's backwards for Superman, right? So here you have that played out in that scene. And you can see the echo of the two of them as they're kind of exploded in a nuclear, on a horrific nuclear blast, right? In his dream, they're taken to pieces as well. You get their skeletons and it produces a version of that Hiroshima shadow. So that's one, nuclear anxiety. There's another key image, yeah. Yes, with his mother and good. So that, yes, I agree with you, yeah. So when his mother has a client, his mother's prostitute, Rorschach's mother he remembers. But those, that's not quite a Hiroshima shadow because it's also, he sees it in a block, the interpreting of a Rorschach. That's why he's called Rorschach. Those are Rorschach blocks. It's a psychiatric tool. You want to, it does, the mask moves. This is another idea of the kinetic, right? That the fabric that he makes his mask, he works in a dress factory, doesn't he, at one point? And it's this strange fabric that never, no one took up so he takes it and it changes the shapes. But they're always symmetrical on his face, random and symmetrical, blotty like this, but also ordered, right? So it does, it's ghosted there. They're Rorschach blocks and they connect to this. Maybe the whole idea of the Rorschach block connects to this coupled shadow. I'm thinking of one more though. What about the news vendor and Bernie and Bernard? It's a bit of a spoiler, but what happens to them? They don't make it, right? So this is 1128, 1128. Now there's two things there. One is that they, he's just asked him, in fact, a few pages before, what's your name, right? And they talk to each other. He's been there all along. We've been reading Tales of the Black Frater along with him, right, this younger guy. And then he gets asked his name and what do they do in the face of, this is the manifestation of that creature, right? What do they do? They come together. This is not exactly eros in the sense of the erotic, but in the Freudian sense of eros, right? Of community bonding, right? At the level of the body. They hug each other, right? There's a gesture of closeness, right? Sensitive closeness that's represented for us here. And you get, you see in fact the Hiroshima shadow and their bodies tend to fuse into one. And then what's the last image? It's not quite a Hiroshima shadow anymore, is it? Does it have any symmetry with any other image that you've seen? Flipbook. Did you notice? They become the splot shape. It's identical to that splotch, which seemed asymmetrical, but now is produced in a circular way, right? So what looks like a random phenomena is actually recurrent here visually. Those Hiroshima shadows are speaking to the visual structure of this text. It's suggesting what? On the one hand, the horror of the extinction of human life. And on the other hand, what happens at that moment of extinction? What happens? In this case. At this individual level, at this unremarkable level, they come together, don't they? All right? Some kind of love, some kind of eros, some kind of positive human relationship happens still in the face of horrific destruction. There is a trace of humanity gets played out on this page. If we're thinking too about page forms, this last frame, this isn't the last frame, of course, where that splotch gets echoed. There's one more where it's gone. What does that, I often say when I've had the lecture on this book, this is the easiest frame to draw in the whole book. I could draw this. You could draw this. Could you? Because why? As my kids used to say when they were younger, because why? There's nothing there, right? Nothing there. That's empty, white desolation, isn't it? It's all white light. This is the blast, the atomic, I guess, tachyon, transporter, whatever it is, blast of that creature manifesting itself. And if you go to the next page, of course it creates not whiteness, but a plenitude, a mess of color and disturbance. So this is clean, this is not. Except what's going on in all that whiteness? What's going on in all that whiteness? I said this is the easiest to draw. It might also be the hardest page to draw. The hardest frame to draw. Isn't this full of everything? White light, in this case, is full of all the colors. It's full of all the people. So what looks like emptiness, I would suggest to you is actually plenitude here. What looks like the easiest thing to do, not draw at all, is in fact a wash with traces at the minute in minuscule a way, as you could imagine, of the human. Our photographs here I've put in, so maybe to reinforce this, of leftovers from Hiroshima. This is by a photographer named Hirome Tsuchida, and you can, this is some pictures of museum exhibits. This is a lens that was taken from the eye of someone who was killed, is taken from the eye socket, so the glass blew the glasses into her eye. If you look on Watchman page, so book seven, these are dire images. Page 15, bottom corner. There's that image. You might think that was random. They're echoing other images, except if you have a look at book four, chapter four, page six. Again, I'm making you flip around. I know it goes slow, but if you have a look there, there's a watch. It's broken. What time is it broken at? It's frozen at, can you see it? The watch stops. It's a broken watch here. It's John's watch. Smashed at eight, 15. Do you know what time that was? It's the time of the exploding of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. It's where this watch is stopped. There is a system of other kinds of echoes going on in Watchman. It doesn't just echo itself and its own histories. It echoes, I guess, the history of the Cold War, in many ways, the history of the post-atomic age. It echoes the history, a history that's pervaded with this kind of atomic anxiety, and it echoes it through visual echoes, because of glasses, for example, horrifying echoes, but, I mean, maybe you didn't notice that as you were going, pay attention, says our news vendor, and echoes of timepieces like this, timepieces that are frozen as they're blasted against someone's body by the atomic blast. This is what, actually, the Associate Curator of the National Gallery of Canada says about these photographs, the strong sense of presence of what has disappeared is what is at the heart of these photographs of artifacts that survived Hiroshima. His work points to the limits of bearing witness to absence and attest to photography's capacity to conjure what is, in fact, unrepresentable total annihilation. That's what's being avoided here, and that is what that white page is, isn't it? Total annihilation, wiping clean. That's exactly what Adrienne wants to avoid, right? At the same time, that's how visually it's brought about here, so you have a complex interaction with the kind of horrors that, we say the procrustian, procrustes, it's a Greek myth. Maybe I'll leave it to you to look this up, but essentially, he's a bad host. If you come to his house, he has a bed. You lie down, if you're too long, he chops your feet off. If you're too short, stretches you, so he's a bad host. He had to fit his bed exactly. There's a proper size for the human body. There's a procrustian element to the Cartesian nine-part grid. Everything has to be made to fit on the page. If it doesn't fit, it's cut off, isn't it? There's an annihilating quality to the visuals here. Kind of a scary one that ends up with that white page. At the same time, what do you do with the white page? Now maybe, so this sounded bad. Now, what do you do with that white page? I've been suggesting something about being a proactive reader, a proactive viewer of watching the Watchmen. We're told in here, look at the details, watch, pay careful attention. So what do you do when you face with a blank page? What does your brain do? What are you imagining is happening when you look at, if you just think about imagination now and more, what do you imagine is happening when you see that white space? What's in your head? There's nothing there, but you imagine it's a blast, don't you? You imagine it's full of sound, it's terrifying image, and yet it's an image of nothing. Your imagination is actually actively filling that in. They've drawn nothing there. In a way, you are now invited to be the artist. You're invited to be the writer in your head. You have to fill it in in order for it to be meaningful. That's the flip side of this kind of dire sense of what's being represented, of the unrepresentable, that you're actually being invited to participate in these economies of representation. You have to take part now. You can't sit there and not do that for him. So the question is, what in a destitute time are comic books for? That's a quote from Rilke, except he says poets. What are poets for? In a destitute time, says Reiner Maria Rilke. I'm gonna ask you what are comic books for in that same time? They're representing this kind of anxiety in the Cold War that we see in these Hiroshima shadows. So destitution, and it produces an alternate history. It produces a creatively shifted history of the world. Something has changed in here, and it's changed imaginatively by the comic book form. What we're trying to avert is there are doomsday clocks that clock that you see represented in here in various points on those watches. It's a real thing at the University of Chicago, and it has to do with sort of nuclear anxiety again over how close we are to annihilating ourselves in some kind of set of atomic explosions that we directed each other, how close we are to destroying the world. In 2012, it was at five minutes to midnight, so I guess we're on chapter seven of this book. I don't know, I mean, you think about this, because that's both what Vipe, in a rather cynical way, is trying to avoid, right? Suggesting we're all sheep who have to be led around who can't work this out for ourselves. And what more, in a much more critically minded, creative way, is also trying to invite the critique of that kind of falsehood. So recognize where the doomsday clock is. John. Tell close, how close you are. So I guess they use a way, they have their gauges of deciding how politically, socially, scientifically, how close we are to doing rid of ourselves, getting rid of ourselves, doing ourselves in. So I can't give you a specific answer as to why, but what we should note maybe is that for this group of people, people who manage that clock, it's pretty close. It's pretty close, and we tend to forget sometimes how close this is, and we might want to be a little more mindful of that. In 1986, this anxiety was even more heightened, right? We've sort of gone through different periods of different kinds of governments and things like that since then. But in Morse time, this is something that is quite dire. All right, here's a happy face then. You want to think about this sort of graphically. I can do this, so it's not to violate copyright. If we've looked a little bit at that smirch, you can see how it recurs in various ways. Can you build something symmetrical out of something asymmetrical? So here's our happy face. This is a mass media image. Nobody owns it. It's public domain, all right? And then we take and smear that across. In some ways, this is mass culture being adulterated. There's a graffiti happening here as well. We're writing in human stuff across this very clean symmetrical form. Someone reminded me at the break that this happy face actually occurs throughout Alan Moore's own conception of writing for Swamp Thing, you said, so have a look at that because there are more resonance here than I'm indicating to you today. But for now, I want to at least suggest that somehow there's a disruption taking place here, continually, a kind of visual disruption. And it has to do with this idea of graffiti. It has to do with this idea of shadow. It has to do with this idea of starting to think critically and re-participate, engage again in what look like clean, cartesian, rational, fixed representations of who we might be or of what we're supposed to be, of what's right and what's wrong. This book places that grid front and center and also massively distrusts it. Cosmically too. This is another thing that, we looked at those Hiroshima images, those artifacts is another image you might want to be aware of. This is a real image of Mars in Watchman. This is the Gallic crater on Mars in chapter nine, page 27. I think I've got this right if you want to have a look. There we're back on Mars and we pull back just as we pulled back at the beginning. Yeah, and there is where the, where the again this, I don't know watchmaker fortress of solitude is smashed. You also have a kind of smerch across under the eye. It's like the block at the center. There's a happy face on Mars. There really is a happy face on Mars. All right, you didn't believe me, but it's true. So there's a photograph of the happy face crater, the Gallic crater. Now is God having a joke, right? Is this, if there's some kind of creator out there who built Mars, is this not, why would there be a happy face? It seems impossible. It's a bit like the man on the moon idea, right? And this is a particularly goofy mass culture image. So why would they put a happy face, whoever they are in charge of the universe? Why put a happy face on Mars? And there you have it echoed here of course in visually in the page here to remind you a bit about this button that was the comedians button, right? To remind you a bit about the kinds of symmetries that are being worked out here and also the ways in which they're disrupted. More than that, this idea of some kind of divine interference interestingly is called the watchmaker idea. It comes from William Paley and they know this in here. So that happy face is an instance of argument for the watchmaker. That is to say that of an argument toward a kind of natural design, that is there is a kind of intention here that thinking and looking and observing and doing scientific work will eventually lead you to principles of design. Many scientific undertakings look for these basic principles. Often they're symmetrical principles, right? This is the idea. So it comes from William Paley here. And his example is a watch. What if you're coming out in nature and you come across in the field a watch? He says, there must have been, it's so complicated, it's so interesting. There must be a maker. There must be intention there. There must be design or as they ask it in here, there must be a God, right? John, Dr. Manhattan kind of positions himself as a second tier God, doesn't he? He aspires to that kind of power and he becomes quite indifferent in fact because of that. It's something that, notice how Paley here because he's more interested in the theological, he said it actually exceeds human computation. We're not that sophisticated. We can't get to it. In another instance, and this is quoted in the book, there's a reference if you wanna find it. But we mentioned this already. This is an instance of what immortal hand or eye, says Blake, could frame the tiger. This beast could frame thy fearful symmetry. It's a terrifying symmetry to frame it. We talked about the idea of framing in the context of this poem with regard to Frankenstein in fact. How that frame narrative works both to contain, that's what framing can mean. What God could contain, what I, as it's visual, could contain hand manuscript written. What hand or eye could contain that fearful symmetry, that terror, or could create it. That word frame can also mean it's opposite. It can mean a kind of expressive creation. Blake leaves the sense ambiguous here as do they in this text. Notice that that nine-part grid frames and contains but it also gets torn apart, pulled apart, worked across all kinds of interesting things. I wanna come to, I guess, to conclude things to come. I'm gonna leave it open so I'm gonna invite you to start filling in those blanks. But I wanna give you a little bit more of a toolkit to start to think about how it is that symmetry is operating here. And one of the things that it has to do with is book design, book design. Yeah, it seems dry. But a book designer named Jan Tichold talks about the idea of balance inside a page. And what you do is work with what's called PHY, a golden ratio. It's a proportional structure from the Renaissance. Now this isn't exactly, you can see how page, I don't know if you ever noticed that books have a particular rectangular shape. They tend, you know, you can have coffee table books in different rectangles, but they tend toward a particular shape. Then when you open it up, they'll have gutters. There's white space in the margins and then text is arranged in a particular space there. It's usually arranged if the book design has been done well in a golden section. It's a golden ratio, it's called. And this comes from painting. It's the ratio in the Mona Lisa's face, if you look at it. I'll leave you to look up the math because I couldn't explain it very well, even if I tried. But it is essentially an idea of rectangular balance. It's the rectangle at the front of the Parthenon in Athens. You turn it on its side, that's a golden ratio. So it's a very specific kind of rectangular ratio and it involves squaring the circle to a certain degree, a certain kind of arcing across a rectangle produces this ratio of sides. But your eye reads this as symmetry and balance is the idea. This is a perfect shape for thinkers in the Renaissance, for humanist thinkers. I want to sort of wind things up to my favorite page. We all have our favorite pages. So mine is in book five near the end. Chapter five, maybe page 27 should be my favorite page. It is, it's my favorite page. All right, so I'm going to, because I'm pushing time a little bit, I'm just gonna, so keep in mind this idea of the golden section, I'm gonna push through just a couple slides. Here's an image that would relate to Dr. Manhattan and in fact, this image is reproduced with Dr. Manhattan in it. And this is Leonardo's picture of Homo mensura and notice the human form and notice how it squares the circle when you got your arms out. Notice how it's male and he's naked just like Dr. Manhattan. This is the perfect human form, a kind of symmetry in the human body is this idea. So it's Leonardo da Vinci, but that's not where I want to go. Yeah, this is where I want to go. Are you ready for it? So I can't, as I said, reproduce things from the comic book, but I can do this. That wasn't exciting for you as that was for me. Roar, this is Rorschach. Roar, I love that one, right? Why do I love this? Well, we can just look closely at these two frames here at the bottom. Think about this idea of a golden section. Do you see the window there? And then there's a blind fold in front of it. I think, I haven't measured it carefully enough, but I'm quite sure that blind is a golden section. What color is it? It's gold. Oh, tricky, these guys know what they're doing. And it produces a kind of symmetrical rectilinear balance. That's one of those surfaces, right? Like the inset frames, that seems to contain things in an orderly grid-like structure. It's a window, all right? It's absolutely still here, although we get a little bit of voice over here. It's a dead end, they say. He can't get out. He's stuck in the apartment. This is when he's gonna be captured, right? He's gonna be contained. Rorschach, do you think you can contain that guy? No, because he says, Roar, and he smashes through what? The window, he smashes through the symmetry. He smashes through the frame, all right? If I can leave you, I have an outright sort of said what that monster might be. Is Rorschach a monster? He's certainly monstrous. You'll see how dirty he is, how violent, how disruptive he is. But if I can leave you with that image, maybe if you can remember this for your exam. Roar, that might be a word, inarticulate, wordless as it is, for what this text is trying to do for you, with you, alongside you, maybe to you, I don't know. It's trying to encourage you to burst out of the frame. In a way, this is Rorschach. This is the image here, trying to get off the page and into your face, right? He's jumping out towards you. Now you know you're safe, he can't get out of that page. He's just a picture. But it's trying somehow, viscerally, disruptively, to register that impact on you. So although this seems like nothing, just a superhero or non-superhero going rah-rah at you, speaking inarticulately, this is a moment when that body, that embodied graphic experience starts to try and tear those pages apart. Just as that neat, balanced body gets torn apart and reconstructed throughout. The monstrous, in this case, so maybe we can end a whole set of lectures here with a comment on the monstrous, I want to make sure that you understand that the monstrous, for me, and maybe for some of us, is connected to this idea of demonstration, to signs, and to, in particular, an active relationship of the reader, the watcher, the viewer, between inside and outside. That sign trying to get from containment out of its form into something palpable and to get into your face. We're going to leave it there, so think about that. And enjoy your seminars. Thank you.