Who Owns The Watchmen?

This post will go in a bit of a different direction, although a later missive will take up the issue of lack and desire in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The impetus for this post is a comment made by Moore in a recent interview conducted by Wired Magazine where he had the following to say regarding the ownership of his intellectual property: "When I returned to work for - well, I didn't return. I was kind of press-ganged. I had DC buying the company I had just signed contracts with, which is very flattering in one way and very creepy in another. It's like being stalked by a very rich demented girlfriend who can just buy your entire street in order to be close to you." While this quote is vintage Moore - overtly metaphoric and layered with sarcasm and resentment for the publishing industry - what interests me about it is the way that his own work often utilizes works found in the public domain as a pivot for his critiques. In his comments on League, Moore has often said that he mainly dealt with characters drawn from the literature of the era "because characters from literature were all that were around until roughly the end of the 19th century" (Wired). This is certainly a plausible enough justification for the methodology he employs in League, but I am more pointedly interested in squaring it with his desire - seemingly closely aligned with a Cultural Studies perspective - to effect a "unified field theory of culture that actually links up all these various works, whether they're high culture or low culture, or no culture" (Wired). Moore's choice of words here could not be more apt; in using the descriptor "links" he encapsulates the hypertextual nature of his literary output in a single phrase.

I think Moore's desire to "flatten out" culture is part and parcel of his desire to resist the loaded epithet of creative genius that is often directed at him. Moore's resistance to DC's "overtures", I think, has little to do with an apparent tension in his utilization of public domain materials (and here I mean not just in League but in Watchmen and V as well) coupled with his aversion to losing control over his own characters. I think Moore is acutely aware of how the creative figure in the digital era has become what Mark Poster has called "a rallying point for ideological jockying". But what kind of jockying? Precisely the sort that commodifies the creative genius as the unnassaible locus of intellectual property rights. Much like how the late 18th century bore witness to copyright wars launched in the name of author's rights, the unsettling and destabilization of the cultural field initiated by digitization has sparked a similar response from vested commercial interests. Call it the Metallica Syndrome.

If we grant the possibility that Moore is indeed actively and energetically resisting the label of artistic genius in order to thwart the commercialization, not of his works, but of him; how might his adoption of the role of shaman be a strategic choice rather than a personal one? In several interviews, including the extended ones conducted for the film The Mindscape of Alan Moore, the author relishes his position as shaman. It seems a convenient category for him to adopt for a number of reasons. In Mindscape Moore says the following about the role of the artist (which he has previously harmonized with his definition of the shaman): "It is not the job of the artist to give audiences what they want. It is the job of the artist to give audiences what they need...[art should] overwhelm the sensibilities of the audience [and attempt to] direct their consciousness." Here we have Moore arguing for precisely the same role as an artistic genius, although he has divested himself of the troubling label and its associated connotations with publishing. By borrowing the cloak of a shaman Moore is able to problematize the relationship between authorial genius and intellectual propertyright cases waged in their name. The rhetorical ellusiveness of his gesture is also quintessentially Moore, achieving as it does a tenous hold on a liminal space free from stringent control, creative limitation, and predetermined authorial expectations.

One of Moore's signature moves is undoubtedly his effective deployment of cultural "nodes of intelligibility"; that is, the utilization of widely recognizable culture products in a manner that recodes their associations and allows them to function as part of a loosely coherent critique of modernity. I am thinking here of how Moore takes a character like Alan Quartermain and renders him an ineffectual opiate addict, at the same time that Captain Nemo - formerly the "scourge of the empire" - becomes a far more palatable character. While League is the most obvious example of Moore's heteroglossia, I am curious to hear what other types of resonance you think he achieves in the usage of public domain material in V and Watchmen? What do you think, is it possible that Moore is not as contradictory as he appears due to his aversion to the label of genius? Is this part of the Lacanian distancing that Jason perceives in the character of Rorshach? More to come...