Great Characters: Rorschach (“Watchmen”)
To me Rorschach is the most interesting character in Watchmen.
For those who don’t know the background of this character, here is a brief bio per Wikipedia:
Rorschach, born Walter Joseph Kovacs, is the son of Sylvia Kovacs, a prostitute, and “Charlie” (surname unknown). His mother was frequently abusive and condescending toward her son. In July 1951, at the age of 10, Kovacs became involved in a violent fight with two older bullies, in which he partly blinded one with a cigarette and took a large bite out of the other’s cheek in a blind rage. Once his living conditions were finally looked into he was removed from his mother’s care and put in “The Lillian Charleton Home for Problem Children” in New Jersey until 1956, where he rapidly seemed to improve, excelling at scholastics as well as gymnastics and amateur boxing.
After leaving the Home for Problem Children when he was 16, Kovacs took a job as a garment worker in a dress shop, which he found “bearable but unpleasant” partly because he had to handle women’s clothing; it was here that he acquired the fabric that he would later fashion into the mask he wears as Rorschach. The fabric, created by Dr. Manhattan, contained two heat and pressure-sensitive viscous fluids between layers of latex, creating a shifting black-on-white color effect without mixing to form gray. Kovacs scavenged the material from a rejected dress that had been special-ordered by a young woman with an Italian name. Though Kovacs learned how to cut and fashion the material successfully with heated implements, he soon grew bored with it, as it served him no real purpose at the time. Two years later when buying a newspaper on his way to work in March 1964, Walter read about the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese (he later told his prison psychologist “Woman who ordered dress. Kitty Genovese. I’m sure that was the woman’s name.”). Ashamed by what he read about the unresponsiveness of her neighbors, Kovacs became disillusioned with the underlying apathy that he saw as inherent in most people. Inspired by Genovese’s fate, Kovacs returned home, made “a face [he] could bear to look at in the mirror” from the dress’s fabric, and began fighting crime as the vigilante Rorschach. Initially, Kovacs left criminals alive, but bloodied, for the police to arrest. In the mid 1960s, he teamed up with the second Nite Owl, a partnership which proved highly successful at battling organized crime.
In 1975, he investigated the kidnapping of a young girl named Blair Roche after promising her parents that he would return her alive and well. He was given the name of an abandoned dressmaker shop, where he found a little girl’s underwear in the stove and two dogs gnawing on a human bone. Convinced that its occupant, a man named Gerald Grice, had killed Roche and fed her remains to his dogs as scraps, Kovacs killed the dogs with Grice’s meat cleaver and waited for his arrival. When Grice returned, Kovacs surprised Grice by throwing his dead dog’s bodies at him and handcuffed him to a stove. As Grice insisted he had not been involved in the kidnapping, Rorschach poured kerosene around him and gave him a hacksaw, hinting that Grice would have to cut off his own hand in order to escape. Rorschach then set the building on fire and left, noting afterward that no one emerged.
When the Keene Act was passed in 1977 to outlaw vigilantes, Kovacs responded by killing a wanted multiple rapist and leaving his body outside a police station with a note bearing one word: “NEVER!”
By 1985 and the events of Watchmen, Kovacs is the last active non-government sanctioned vigilante. The first character to appear in the series is a red-haired man carrying a sign reading “THE END IS NIGH.” A police report describes him as a “prophet-of-doom sandwich-board man seen locally over the last several years.” This character appears several times through the early chapters, although it is not until Rorschach’s arrest and unmasking that he is revealed as Kovacs.
Here is Rorschach in action:
Some Rorschach quotes:
Never compromise. Not even in the face of Armageddon. That’s always been the difference between us, Daniel.
I heard a joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Says life is harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world. Doctor says, “Treatment is simple. The great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go see him. That should pick you up.” Man bursts into tears. Says, “But doctor… I am Pagliacci.” Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.
You see, Doctor, God didn’t kill that little girl. Fate didn’t butcher her and destiny didn’t feed her to those dogs. If God saw what any of us did that night he didn’t seem to mind. From then on I knew… God doesn’t make the world this way. We do.
Certainly a ‘dark’ figure, but also committed to his world view. What is it about him that makes him so compelling, such a great character?
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