The new HBO series Watchmen is based on the seminal graphic novel masterpiece by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. It is not an adaptation, and even the term "sequel" seems not quite appropriate. Instead, it's what I'd call an extrapolation.
Watchmen, the comic, imagines a version of the 1980s in which costumed vigilantes exist, but only one of them, Doctor Manhattan, actually has any superpowers. The former John Osterman utterly changes the balance of power, single-handedly winning the Vietnam War, while some of these so-called superheroes (The Comedian) prevent the Watergate scandal from sinking Nixon (it's implied he killed Woodward and Bernstein) and thus we get this odd alternate reality where Nixon is still President, getting past the two-term limit. The alternate-history elements to the story give it a disorienting feeling.
The new show takes this to the extreme.
Set primarily in Tulsa, OK, the series begins with a depiction of the 1921 destruction of "Black Wall Street," the neighborhood of Greenwood, where a race riot saw a massacre of black people in a neighborhood that had previously been a beacon of black prosperity.
This event really happened. If you hadn't known about it, you might think it was a part of Watchmen's alternate history, but it's true that white supremacists were literally dropping bombs from airplanes on an American city. I've read some reactions to the show that generally suggest a lot of the white audience is shocked to discover that really happened while black audiences tend to know about this. I'll admit that while I had heard about it, before watching this it was not at the forefront of my mind when thinking about race issues in American history, though it should probably occupy a pretty prominent position.
When we flash forward to the present day, we're presented with a scene that feels like it was written specifically to make us question our preconceptions about one of the prominent race issues we're talking about today, which is police violence.
On the same road that a young boy finds himself stranded after the car he was meant to escape Tulsa in crashes back in 1921, a white man is pulled over in his pickup truck. A police car drives up behind and the officer seems quite menacing. Then, we see that the police officer is a black man - and that he's wearing a big yellow mask over his nose, mouth, and ears.
There's a bit of subtle microaggressions that happen here, but given the role-reversal it's hard to clock which feel more menacing. We don't yet have the context to see that the cloth mask the driver has in his glovebox is, essentially, the new version of a Klan hood - based on the costume of the comic's antihero, Rorschach.
However, when the officer goes back to his car to run the guy's license and registration, he seems concerned. He requests access to his firearm - the first sign of a vastly different political reality that we'll be seeing more of - and is forced to answer a series of questions clearly designed to prevent excessive use of force. Just as he gets his gun out, however, bullets shower the windshield as the white driver has just emerged with a submachine gun.
This incident kicks things off an introduces us to the world.
Broadly, the world is far from the Nixonian right-wing landscape of the 80s comic. Instead, Nixon was followed by President Robert Redford - we got an actor president, but not the one that this realty got in the 80s. Redford, like Nixon, has been president for far longer than two terms. And it appears that he has remade much of America into a liberal dream. The cars are all electric, there are content warnings before violent television shows, and the government has finally, finally gotten around to paying reparations to the descendants of slaves and victims of racial violence.
These reparations are derided by right-wingers as "Redfordations," a term that has clearly become so charged politically that it can start fights in an elementary school. And it has clearly gone beyond that.
While the line between reparations and the birth of the "Seventh Kavalry," a white supremacist terrorist group, is not explicitly drawn, it seems likely. After all, just as the bombing of Black Wall Street demonstrated in the shared history between reality and Watchmen, prosperity for minorities - particularly black people - has always drawn a reaction of racial violence.
The Seventh Kavalry (named for Custer's unit, which was known for committing massacres against Native Americans) is most infamous for an incident called "White Night," when, at midnight on Christmas, members broke into the homes of Tulsa's police officers and murdered many in their sleep.
The show's protagonist, Angela Abar, was attacked that night, shot in the stomach after killing one of her assailants with a kitchen knife. Unlike the vast majority of surviving officers, Angela opted to stick with the police. But in the wake of this incident, the police were permitted - and even required - to hide their identities, wearing masks to conceal their identities and concocting fake careers to explain to others.
While the rank-and-file officers simply wear uniforms with masks, the detectives have their own personas. Angela becomes Sister Night, with a long coat, hood, mask, and airbrushed black paint over her eyes.
The use of the Greenwood massacre at the beginning is, I think, a key to the way the show begins to explore this alternate version of history. The bombing of Black Wall Street was essentially tolerated by law enforcement or even supported.
Yet, in the version of 2019 depicted in the show, the police force in Tulsa is apparently a very diverse one, but while officers are forced to deal with strict regulations that, in the first modern scene, nearly get an officer killed, we see that Angela, at least, is perfectly happy to set aside due process if it lets her beat some answers out of a Kavalry member. Meanwhile, trailer parks with white, right-wing residences are referred to as Nixonvilles. One such place (though perhaps more) have actual statues of Nixon standing above them. It remains to be seen what, exactly, the transition between Nixon and Redford looked like, but I suspect that it was contentious.
Indeed, one thing the show has played pretty close to the vest is the direct connections to the events of the comic. Given that those events happened about 35 years ago, it is perhaps not shocking that people aren't constantly talking about the giant squid that wiped out most of New York (though we get a quick picture of it when Tim Blake Nelson's "Looking Glass" is interrogating a suspect (the one that Angela then beats up.) Then again, at this point we don't cite 9/11 for every political point like we did in the decade or so that followed it, and that's much more recent.
For example, it's heavily, heavily hinted that Jeremy Irons, living in a manor house that we see both being temporarily constructed by Doctor Manhattan on Mars and also by Angela's adopted son Topher in some sort of floating lego-like metal bricks, is in fact Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias, aka the villain of the comic series.
Ozymandias custom-built a horrifying catastrophe in an effort to shock the Cold War into ending. And it's implied that he was basically successful. One of the detectives in Tulsa is a Russian guy who goes by "Red Knight," and when one of the Nixonville folks calls him a fascist, he angrily corrects them, identifying as a communist. One presumes, then, that the Soviet Union did not fall in this reality, though one wonders: has it reformed in ways that the current Russian Federation has not?
The point, I think, of all this world building, is that the modern era of Watchmen is just as complicated and thorny as ours is, but just in different ways. Critics seem to be enjoying it (as I am) and I think that if it takes off, it's likely to generate quite a lot of political analyses from all sides.
At the moment, the show feels very much like a puzzle-box, which can be a bit of a red flag for those who were very disappointed by the way Lost ended. Damon Lindelof is the creator on this one, though I think he earned a lot of credibility from Leftovers (which I saw the first few episodes of, but haven't finished.) There are tons of mysteries introduced in Watchmen's first two episodes, and that speaks more to plot than worldbuilding.
In a way that may or may not have been intentional, the comic was a bit of a Rorschach test. I've heard a lot of people who think of Rorschach as the clear hero of the story, and indeed it can be hard to condemn him if it means effectively endorsing what Ozymandias did. Even Doctor Manhattan, for all his omnipotence, is left in a position where the right thing to do isn't clear, and he kills Rorschach because he knows that there is no way he will be able to talk him out of following his principles - indeed, Rorschach's last words, telling Manhattan to kill him, suggest that even he knows that the lie that keeps the peace is worth preserving. But Rorschach's worldview is so profoundly toxic that you can't really call him "the good guy."
The uncomfortable and ambiguous morality of the story is one of the key things that makes Watchmen the default "best graphic novel of all time" to a lot of people. Right now, the show seems to build that into its world, but it remains to be seen how effectively it will do so with its plot - and even if that's its intention.
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