I’ve been reading about Watchmen, the book and the movie. In the comic, I always thought the Gordian Knot Company was a bit of a stretch as names go. Yes, the Gordian knot was impossible to untie, but you don’t really think of untying locks, just opening them; to my mind, rope and metal are too different for one to easily suggest the other. Additionally, the legend of the Gordian knot is known but not widely known, at least not in the U.S. Not a likely name for a small-time consumer service company.
I figured Moore wedged the name in there simply to further his Veidt-Alexander parallels. But no. He said in 1988 that he just thought the name would be funny and that it was only as the book went on that he realized how it dovetailed with Veidt’s monumental self-esteem.
Next, the movie gives us Dr. Manhattan always surrounded by an eye-repelling blue-white glow. I thought the glow was one further effect of the film’s deadly CGI blight. Again no. Peter Aperlo’s Watchmen: The Movie Companion tells us the glow comes from the little bulbs on Billy Crudup’s motion-capture suit. It was, what do you call, actual-source light or something. Only the big blue muscles were CGI.