Failed Writer's Journey: An Ambiguous Post About Ambiguous Works Not Being Ambiguous

This one wanders a bit, so grab a snack and a compass and come stagger around aimlessly with me as I try and figure out why I am so ambiguous about ambiguous works. You can pretend we are too drunk to walk straight if it helps.

Cole Haddon, whose work I really, really enjoy, reposted a thought piece on Watchmen and the ambiguity of the message. And I know this is going to mark me as a philistine, but I find myself less and less impressed with ambiguous works. Mostly, I think, because they are hardly as ever ambiguous as they think they are. As a warning, I am going to spoil some classic pieces, but they are all more than twenty years old, so I feel okay about that.

Go read Cole’s piece, in part to help understand what I am talking about, but mostly because it is good. I’ll wait. See, told you it was good. But it is also wrong. Watchmen, like most supposed ambiguous stories, is not really ambiguous.

There are two general ways that supposedly ambiguous works fail to be actually be ambiguous. First, the works in question are actually pretty clear in their meaning. The canonical example is probably the Sopranos. People debated forever about whether Tony was dead at the end of the last episode despite the fact that the text of the show made it very clear that he had been killed. Tony was as dead as a dead thing that was very dead and also dead. No ambiguity — merely a misunderstanding.

The second way these pieces fail is that the message is not as ambiguous as the work likes to think. A great example of this is the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode In the Pale Moonlight. The episode is often held up as a morally ambiguous tale of a man making hard decisions and sacrificing his own morals for the greater good. It is no such thing. The text of the show very, very, very clearly comes down on the side of what the character in question did being correct. It is a testament to the skill of the actor that he was able to sell any moral grey-ness, because the script practically jumps up and down screaming at us how right the character was to be bad. Watchmen is just as clear.

For those who have not read it, Watchmen is a deconstruction of superhero comics. Today, that is table stakes, but at the time it was rare. Watchmen was well done, better than almost any other normal comic, much less one attempting to take the piss out of the genre. As with the Star Trek episode, though, it really doesn’t earn its reputation for moral ambiguity. Cole points out that the “good guy” in the story is a mass murderer. His mass murder works — it does bring peace to the world, averting a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union. The only character who unambiguously says that his actions were wrong is the most sociopathicly evil of the main characters. We are supposed to question whether the means do justify the ends, and what place morality amongst the greater need. Except the text really doesn’t demand those questions, largely because the plan is so fscking stupid.

The hero who saves the world does so by faking an alien attack on New York City, giving humanity a common enemy. Yeah, maybe, for about a week. See, no other alien attack is coming. The hero had a one off monster built and used in the attack. He cannot duplicate the attack since he killed all the people involved in order to keep the secret. When no attacks come, it is clear that the two sides will start right back on the path to nuclear destruction. Maybe even faster, because the remains of the “alien” are all over New York City, and sooner or later it is very possible that some clever bugger working for the government will notice that nothing about the alien is, well, alien. In the paranoia soaked world of the comic, I am pretty sure we are supposed to understand that the plan is a failure.

The point, then, has no ambiguity. The book is clearly saying that sacrificing human lives for the greater good is bad. Look, the books says, even the worst person in this world understands that the hero did evil. And for what? A plan so stupid that it would be laughed out of the Evil Overlord Open Call for Ideas to Control the World Symposium and Brunch.

I think, sometimes, that we want moral ambiguity in our works and see it when it doesn’t really exist. Being truly grey, having truly no right answer, is hard to pull off in media since stories generally have a point of view and a main character. Humans have a tendency to identify with the main characters of stories, and this includes the writers. And that tendency both undermines the ability of consumers to see that the main character could be wrong and creates a bias for writers to put their thumb on the scale, at least a little bit. More importantly, people have points of view, and those points of view tend to bleed through into their art. The creators of the Watchmen clearly thought that treating people as disposable things was bad, and that came through their work, whether they intended to or not. And, frankly, that makes is more interesting.

Ambiguity is overrated. It is not naive or childish or simplistic to have a point of view and for that point of view to influence your art. Art that says something beyond “oh look at how morally grey I am” is the most interesting kind of art, in my opinion. There is a difference between “it is hard to do the right thing” and “oh, who can say what the right thing is?”. If the latter is all you have to say, why are you bothering to talk?

Weekly Word Count

Not a lot. About 15 pages on the clone/school-shooting play and a bit of work on a graphic novel script. I thought I would try something different and learn how to write a comic script (I will not be drawing it. It is illegal for me to draw in twelve states. it is a capital offense in three.). I took the Encyclopedia Brick concept (if you know, you know. And are likely me) and am working through how to make it work as sequential art. We will see how it goes, but its good, I think, to stretch your creative muscles.

I hope you all have an unambiguously great weekend.