After watching the Director's Cut...
I loved the Director's Cut, don't get me wrong, but one thing that is bothering me about the movie...they keep referring to Rorschach as either a sociopath or a psychopath. Zack Snyder even says he's psychopathic on one of the video journals. Rorschach isn't either one of those things.
Sociopaths have antisocial behavior and lack a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience and are also only interested in their own needs over others, and don't care how their actions affect other people. Usually, they are very manipulative as well. Psychopaths have antisocial behavior that shows itself in aggressive, amoral, criminal or perverted ways, and have no empathy or remorse towards others.
Yes, Rorschach is antisocial, that much is true in the way he distances himself from others purposefully, but he's not so antisocial that he can't interact with them. If he truly were, he wouldn't even have Dan in his life as a partner, or anything else you might want/hope they would have had. Going for days without eating or sleeping is not generally sociopathic behavior. And he's not manipulative at all...just violent, but not on a psychopathic level, since he cares enough about what goes on in the city to want to do something about it.
And he definitely does not lack a sense of moral responsibility, or else he would not be in a mask fighting criminals. His moral compass is so far to the right that it might as well be glued down. He's always saying you shouldn't compromise, that he never will, "even in the face of Armageddon" and that basically by the end, he is so broken by what Adrian has done that I think he wants Manhattan to kill him because he can't wrap his mind around the fact that what Adrian has done was really the only thing that could have been done to prevent nuclear annihilation. He would have to be making a sacrifice if he accepted it, and it would so go against everything that he believed in that he wouldn't have been able to live with himself. The only other way it would have ended for him would be that he got sloppy in a fight, whether on accident or on purpose, and been killed that way. I don't think he would kill himself, since that sort of behavior seems beneath him.
And I know many people have touched on this, but it deserves to be reiterated: the fact that the blots on his mask never blend in with the mask itself is very much how he sees the world. There is no shade of grey for Rorschach. No, "Oh, well this might actually be right if I stop to think about what NOT having done it might have accomplished or set in motion." He sees the world in black and white. Good. Evil. That's all there is. "There is good and there is evil, and evil must be punished."
Someone mentioned this to me, and I feel his mother had a great deal to do with how he turned out. Because of her profession, he had to deal with constant ridicule, it looked like, from other people, and because of her neglect, and probable abuse, he had to learn to defend himself and more than likely came to the conclusion that because he couldn't depend on his mother, that he would have to be self sufficient and learn to defend himself. He saw firsthand how ugly the world was at a young age. Once the Kitty Genovese incident occurred, he made the decision to take matters into his own hands, as we saw.
x-posted
Sociopaths have antisocial behavior and lack a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience and are also only interested in their own needs over others, and don't care how their actions affect other people. Usually, they are very manipulative as well. Psychopaths have antisocial behavior that shows itself in aggressive, amoral, criminal or perverted ways, and have no empathy or remorse towards others.
Yes, Rorschach is antisocial, that much is true in the way he distances himself from others purposefully, but he's not so antisocial that he can't interact with them. If he truly were, he wouldn't even have Dan in his life as a partner, or anything else you might want/hope they would have had. Going for days without eating or sleeping is not generally sociopathic behavior. And he's not manipulative at all...just violent, but not on a psychopathic level, since he cares enough about what goes on in the city to want to do something about it.
And he definitely does not lack a sense of moral responsibility, or else he would not be in a mask fighting criminals. His moral compass is so far to the right that it might as well be glued down. He's always saying you shouldn't compromise, that he never will, "even in the face of Armageddon" and that basically by the end, he is so broken by what Adrian has done that I think he wants Manhattan to kill him because he can't wrap his mind around the fact that what Adrian has done was really the only thing that could have been done to prevent nuclear annihilation. He would have to be making a sacrifice if he accepted it, and it would so go against everything that he believed in that he wouldn't have been able to live with himself. The only other way it would have ended for him would be that he got sloppy in a fight, whether on accident or on purpose, and been killed that way. I don't think he would kill himself, since that sort of behavior seems beneath him.
And I know many people have touched on this, but it deserves to be reiterated: the fact that the blots on his mask never blend in with the mask itself is very much how he sees the world. There is no shade of grey for Rorschach. No, "Oh, well this might actually be right if I stop to think about what NOT having done it might have accomplished or set in motion." He sees the world in black and white. Good. Evil. That's all there is. "There is good and there is evil, and evil must be punished."
Someone mentioned this to me, and I feel his mother had a great deal to do with how he turned out. Because of her profession, he had to deal with constant ridicule, it looked like, from other people, and because of her neglect, and probable abuse, he had to learn to defend himself and more than likely came to the conclusion that because he couldn't depend on his mother, that he would have to be self sufficient and learn to defend himself. He saw firsthand how ugly the world was at a young age. Once the Kitty Genovese incident occurred, he made the decision to take matters into his own hands, as we saw.
x-posted