Tied Up In Knots

Alan Moore's "Watchmen"; "Knots," by R. D. Laing

I wrote three essays this month about Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Two of these essays focused on the big ideas that are contained within this book: the illusory nature of time, the illusory concept of ‘saving the world.’ I use the word ‘big’ to describe these ideas because they are, quite literally, massive in scale. There are no real answers to these questions, yet subjective, formless answers seem to pop up everywhere, as long as you are looking for them.

Of course, despite the grand scale of these questions, a person can go their entire life without ever thinking about them. They are the kind of questions reserved for philosophers and overthinkers—real questions, yes, but foreign, abstract ones. It’s precisely because it’s hard to pin them down that they feel so magnificent to us. The flip-side to this is that they are almost too intellectual. They are so abstract that they fail to elicit a real, human reaction.

Watchmen is an immensely powerful book. Its characters enamor us, and the problems it poses keep us turning the pages. This is not the type of reaction that ‘philosophy’ can generate. Therefore, while it’s fun to think about the book’s large, ‘heady’ ideas (and the author certainly wanted us to—the book is jam-packed with them), they are not the themes which lend Watchmen its lasting power. The true ‘meat’ of this book is more subtle. It is packed in to every page, it underlies every line of dialogue, and it is so natural, so commonplace that an unsuspecting reader may not realize it is there at all.

I’m talking about the characters and their relationships—a topic which is dealt with elegantly in the book. Moore only explicitly mentions the ‘philosophy’ of interpersonal relationships once, in Watchmen’s penultimate chapter, and even then, this philosophy is hidden in a reference to a different book—a book titled Knots, written by a Scottish psychologist named R.D. Laing.