The hero character "Night Owl" in the movie "Watchmen" was once my most hated character in the show.
The hero's name "Night Owl", the original text is Nite Owl, should be pinched from Owl of Athena, Athena's Owl, or Minerva's Owl. "Minerva's owl takes off only after nightfall", and people can only know its meaning after it has happened. The ethics of the night owl is very similar to that of Aristotle, that is, good and evil are transcendent and cannot achieve certainty, just like the owl in the night wants to see the sun. The other characters in the play—Dr. Manhattan, Pharaoh, Rorschach, and even Silk Soul... have all reached certain degrees of certainty about a certain truth, but Ye Xiao always lingered in painful anxiety and hesitation. , stay in the abyss between certainty and truth.
In the play, Ye Xiao's positioning is intriguing, even if the character is deleted, it will not have a fundamental impact on the ending of the story; however, as a hindsight thinker and a powerless actor, he is also the ultimate reflection. The author has witnessed the final destination of those active actors; in this way, he is the most important character in the whole play, the only character in his story that the audience can cut into, the only one who can escape being caught by a certain idea The possessed character is the real protagonist, and without him the story degenerates into a clichéd play between superhumans. The story of "Watchmen" is really not the story of the fate of the earth, not the story of millions of victims, not the story of superheroes, but the story that happened around Ye Xiao. Although he didn't realize it himself, he was a battleground for various forces in the story. Others fought for him, deceived him, bound him, or begged him, and no one could bypass him.
In this story, everything around Ye Xiao is invisibly urging him to make up his mind: from the disturbing arms race broadcast on TV to the conspiracy that old friends are involved in. Among them, the most direct and representative example is the homeless man disguised by Rorschach holding a sign of "THE END IS NIGH", as if to say "It's dusk! It's now! It's time to take off! It's time to take off!" Throughout the story, Night Owl seems to turn a blind eye to these hints, but in reality it isn't. Like hypnotism, these cues have always accumulated in the depths of his unconscious, determining his every move in the play. He seemed to transfer these emotions to his love for Silk Soul, and when he finally won Silk Soul's heart and thought he was freed, he failed and had a dream: he and Silk Soul became heroes , with the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb in the background. This was his moment of determination, and it turned out that the owl's determination stemmed from the departure of the sun, and he finally noticed the revelation contained in what he had been using only as a background board. As night fell, the owl fluttered and took off, and it was too late.
The tragedy of the other heroes is that they do each prove their belief in their ideals, but always in a twisted way, in a way that they themselves do not want to see. The tragedy of Ye Xiaoze is that at first he was satisfied with sound reason, observational reason, and learned ignorance, restraining his understanding and staying in his thoughts, making himself an outsider completely. Despite his whole body and mind asking him to do something, his mind persisted in its restraint, ignoring calls from the unconscious, ignoring background radiation from the abyss. And when it became apparent that his passion finally triumphed over his thoughts and forced him to act; but because it was too late, his act could only be an anachronistic, misplaced act. In this way, the other heroes are modern tragic heroes, and the night owl is the postmodern tragic hero.
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