When I first read the Watchmen many years ago, some of the more frustrating aspects of the story involved Eddie Blake, the Comedian. Blake was an attempted rapist, the murderer of a woman bearing his child, Kennedy’s assassin and a ruthless plumber for Richard Nixon. Yet, throughout the entire story, all but two of the characters express some degree of admiration for him. Nobody calls him on it. The woman he tried to rape goes on to bear his child and becomes something of an apologist for him. Any reasonable reading of the character would paint him not as a hero but as a villain.

I don’t disagree with that, but as I’ve gotten older and repeatedly re-read and now watched the story unfold on screen, I’ve gained a greater appreciation for the character and an understanding of why he is viewed as he is.

The hardest aspect of the story to fully grasp is his exoneration at the hands of Sally Jupiter, the original Silk Spectre. The notion of a victim forgiving her would-be rapist is, on its face, abhorrant. How she could go on to bear his child and remember him fondly at his death is maddening. And, as I originally read it, seemingly unrealistic. But to understand their complex relationship means, in part, boiling it down to the relative simplicity of their characters.

Blake is the embodiment of unchecked masculinity. The prototypical “alpha male”, as powerful and forceful as anyone in the story whose skin isn’t blue. As morality and social propriety are primarily feminine contributions to society, he is naturally devoid of them. To his detriment, in the end.

Blake, in the end, loved Sally Jupiter. She is the only character throughout the entire work that he said even one positive thing about. The only person he allowed to emotionally injure him. As repulsive as the notion sounds and as much as it will sound like an apology that it is most definitely not meant to be, the attempted rape boiled down to a misunderstanding. He was sixteen (in the comic, 24 in the movie), intelligent but relatively uneducated and poorly socialized. In his way of thinking, if they both wanted sex (and he believed that they both did), the rest (such feminine things as morality and decency) were beside the point. When his initial move was rebutted, he flew into a rage and compounded the error.

This doesn’t make Blake an okay guy nor does it excuse what he did. More than nothing else, it exemplifies how dangerous he really is. A walking id with a mask and a gun. But with good looks and pure testosterone, a baser sort of woman could ask for little more.

Sally Jupiter, then, is exactly that baser woman. Whereas Blake embodies the dark sides of masculinity, she exemplifies that shallowness of femininity. Her beauty is her primary asset. Other than the ability to fight, her only asset. She becomes a hero not out of a desire to do good or instill justice, but out of self-interest and vanity. Whatever her physical strength, she displays almost no emotional strength whatsoever. Her sense of morality is based on little more than arbitrary rules built primarily to make herself look better and others (including her daughter) look worse. When she interceded on Eddie Blake’s attempts to introduce himself to their daughter, her primary motivation isn’t so much to protect her as it is to bury that which makes her look bad.

But just as Blake’s personality allows him to make a woman feel like a woman with his forcefulness, her (pre-bitterness) boisterousness and raw sexuality would almost certainly make a man feel like a man around her. He prized his masculinity; she prized her femininity. They brought it out in one another. The attempted rape is one of the darker scenes in a dark piece. But because it prevented these two people from being able to make the most of their shallow weaknesses, it was in its own way a tragic one.

If the love (and sexual tension) between Eddie and Sally was a case of two well-stacked people that should have been in love failing to partner up due to circumstances and their individual foibles, the romance between Dan Drieberg and Sally Jupiter’s daughter, Laurie Jespeczyk, was a case of two people only marginally compatible that partnered up mostly because circumstances allowed for it and neither was sufficiently flawed to blow it.

Neither the comic book nor the movie made a particularly convincing case for why Dan and Laurie were well matched. In fact, there is sort of the feeling you get when watching an action movie where the hero has a love interest mostly because he is supposed to and they run through the motions mostly because the genre requires it.

But I would argue that it was more significant than that. The complete lack of electricity in their relationship was indicative, in a way, of the situation that they were in.

It parallels the situation with Laurie’s mother a little bit. As far as the Minutemen were concerned, Eddie and Sally were the only two verified straight characters there were. Captain Metropolis, Hooded Justice, and the Silhouette were verified homosexuals. There were hints that Dollar Bill and Mothman were close enough that Bill’s death precipitated Mothman’s descent into madness. Hollis Mason was established as straight in a companion to the movie, but in the comic book he is a life-long bachelor with no mentioned romantic asperations. So there you had them, the man’s man and the woman’s woman in a room full of homosexuals and/or people without sexual conviction or success.

As far as the Watchmen/Crimebusters are concerned, you have gay Captain Metropolis (in the comic but not the movie), seemingly asexual Rorschach and Ozymandias, and four heterosexual characters (Eddie Blake, Dr Manhattan, Laurie, and Dan). Removing Blake from consideration because he is the only female character’s father, you have two straight males and a straight female. And in the course of the comic book (and the movie), you have the female (Laurie) leaving one male (Manhattan) for the other (Dan).

Whether or not there are heroes outside of the east coast is never fully established, but if there were they were never mentioned as being in contract with the main characters of the story. So there you are with three characters that spent much of their lives doing things that only a handful of people in the entire country ever do and as far as Laurie and Dan are concerned, those people are not potential romantic partners (except Dr Manhattan, whom Laurie is dissatisfied with at the start and whose sexuality is dissipating with his humanity at any rate).

So that Laurie and Dan would end up together by process of elimination is relatively significant. The only thing they have in common is their costumes, but when neither of them have that central part of their existence in common with anyone else, it’s enough to give one another a second and third look and however many looks it takes to fall in love.

It takes fewer looks for Dan because he is at the outset the classic beta male who, even if he were willing to put away his childish things, would probably have some trouble with women anyway. Even at the height of his career, during the Crimebusters meeting, Laurie comments that nobody but Dr Manhattan interested her. Dan was a relatively uncompelling fellow even before being washed up and overweight.

But that he was sidelined by the Keene Act was devestating to him. He was deprived of the one thing that gave him purpose. He only lit up when he was able to reach back into his glory days. While Hollis Mason and Veidt had careers to go to and Eddie Blake found an alternate outlet for his activities, Dan lacked the drive and motivation to do much with himself.

And socially speaking, he had the same sorts of problems that a lot of nerds do. His rich history of excitement and intrigue was somewhat off-limits due to his secret identity. His amazing inventions are geek toys. Everything that he does have to offer, intelligence and physical prowess, had been spent in service of something that was stripped from him and that he cannot talk about. He is probably the nicest guy in the whole story, but his only two friends are his predecessor and Laurie, who lives mostly in isolation with her big blue boyfriend.

In the comic (though not the movie), Laurie finds a signed picture of a vice queen that Dan busted wherein the queen expressed romantic interest. So remote was he prior to Laurie’s split with Manhattan that I had to wonder why precisely it was that he didn’t pursue that. She may have been a villain, but she was there and she probably understood his life better than most. It was a good thing he didn’t, of course, because he found Laurie, which given the givens is probably the best he could ever expect to do.

But what about Laurie? After having slept with the Most Powerful Man in the History of the World, why would she end up with an introverted gizmonerd? The romantic explanation would be that she left the powerful man that didn’t really care for her (in a way she could appreciate) for the sincere beta. As you’ve probably figured, I associate it mostly with his availability and her relative isolation.

Apart from her attractiveness, of course, she didn’t have much to offer. She’s somewhat like the unattractive girl in the Anime Club, where it doesn’t take much to get some sort of interest from somebody. Laurie is beautiful, of course, but she’s also obnoxious. In a sense, though, she is also a creature of the path of least resistance like Dan is. The main differences are that she was raised by her wildly extroverted mother and she has the striking looks that he lacks. If you’re going to be listless and pretty, it works out a lot better if you’re female.

It’s a sort of by-the-numbers thinking that lead her to completely overlook Dan at the Crimebusters/Watchmen meeting. She also had the perspective of a sixteen year old. But Manhattan was the biggest, most powerful thing around. It’s not surprising at all that she would gravitate towards that, blue skin or no. In the world in which she was raised, he was the biggest thing there was. It was only after years of emotional exhaustion that she gave up on that and figured that Dan would do.

In the action movies I mentioned where the romantic storylines are by-the-numbers and present only because of genreic requirements, when there is a sequel it’s often the case that the leading woman from that movie is conspicuously absent from the next so that they can start from scratch with another (usually uncompelling) romantic plot. Despite, or maybe because of, the somewhat electricity-free nature that Laurie transitioned from the powerful Manhattan to the meek Owl, I would suspect that ten years down the line that they would actually still be together.