April 9, 2020 25
cultural production. This is nowhere
more evident than in how the show
deals with blackness.
Watchmen’s take on race illustrates
the continued difficulties of using fun
(clever, nice, interesting) comic book
techniques to address intractable, com-
plex questions about the good. The
comic book’s political critique was
aimed squarely at America’s question-
able involvement in international con-
flicts: the Vietnam War, the cold war,
the Iran-contra affair. The show takes
up a more homegrown fascism: Ameri-
can white supremacy. Lindelof, who is
Jewish, spoke in an interview about the
need to change the structure of the pro-
duction, rather than simply sprinkling
the casting with superficial diversity:
I could no longer deny that our
country is completely and totally
divided by race. This seemed to be
the new Cold War and there is a
reckoning that should be happen-
ing. As a white man and a benefi-
ciary of this system, do I approach
this with guilt and shame or can I
approach it from a vantage point
of service?... I brought together
a writer’s room, where the white
dudes—there were only four of us
out of 12 people—had to sit back. I
had to hear some hard truths.One of those truths came out in an-
other interview: the other writers con-
vinced Lindelof that the show needed
to buck political correctness, to show
police officers using the word “nigger”:
“We didn’t want to pull any punches.
We didn’t want to be flippant with the
material.”
The show begins with a series of race
reversals. First, an invocation of The
Birth of a Nation, the film that was both
the birth of mass cinema and the rebirth
of the KKK. A sepia silent film plays in
the opening moments of the first epi-
sode: a hooded hero on a steed chases
a villain, who turns out to be the white
sheriff of the town. He lassoes the man
to the ground, then removes his hood
to reveal that he is black. A white boy
points and exclaims excitedly, “That’s
Bass Reeves!”—a genuine historical
figure, the first black deputy US mar-
shal in the west, long thought to be the
basis for the Lone Ranger.
The camera roams out of the film to
its screening, where a lone black boy sits
in the audience, while a black woman,
his mother, plays the soundtrack on
a piano near the stage. The scene of
happy movie-watching is swallowed up
in a harrowing sequence of violence and
escape. This is Tulsa, Oklahoma, the
summer of 1921, when white suprem-
acists bombed the city’s flourishing
Black Wall Street. The boy is loaded
on the back of a cart inside a wooden
box, soon riddled with near-miss bullet
holes, through which he watches a car
dragging the bodies of lynched black
men. An explosion. The boy wakes
up alone in a field, and finds an aban-
doned baby girl, whom he wraps up in
an American flag. The flames light up
the horizon behind him, the scene col-
ored in a patriotic red, white, and blue.
Then we shift to an American chase
scene of a more recent ilk: the traffic
stop. Except this time, the man driving
along, listening to hip-hop, is white; the
cop who pulls him over is black, evi-
dent even under his mandated yellow
mask—part of Lindelof’s expansion of
Watchmen’s alternative universe. The
cop goes back to his car to request per-
mission from the dispatcher to unlock
his gun—another alternative feature—
but despite receiving the all-clear, has
trouble removing it. He looks up as the
white driver shoots him through the
windshield. And we’re back to reality: a
black man with an authorized firearm,
shot dead, riddled with bullets, covered
with blood, inside his own vehicle.
As the show goes on, the political
implications of its race reversals pile up
a little messily. We meet Angela Abar,
played with extraordinary emotional
precision by Regina King. Angela isa black cop with three adopted white
children. She grew up in the fifty-first
state, and now runs a Vietnamese
bakery in Tulsa as a front—she’s un-
dercover. She dresses up as a nun, code-
name Sister Night, when she’s on duty,
busting heads and torturing suspects.
She’s best friends with the white chief
of police, who is played with disarm-
ing charm by Don Johnson. He teases
her for not showing up to watch Black
Oklahoma, a faithful rendition of the
musical starring an all-black cast. All
these reversals feel like good fun. The
soundtrack and edits whenever An-
gela gets outfitted as Sister Night have
a pumping, action-movie energy. When
the chief of police finds her in his office,
she’s sitting in his chair, feet up on his
desk, a badass, our hero.
Angela believes in a black-and-white
moral universe, as she tells her son. We
learn that the boy’s biological father
was her police partner, who was killed
along with his wife in what is known
as the White Night, during which men
wearing Rorschach- inspired masks
slaughtered cops in their homes. This
trauma is the reason cops now wear
masks to protect their identity. It is also
why Angela is so close to the chief ofpolice: they were two of the few po-
lice officers who refused to quit after
the White Night. The instigating in-
cident for the plot of the show comes
when Angela is called to witness his
dead body, hanging from a tree, at the
base of which sits a 105-year-old black
man in a wheelchair. “I’m the one who
strung up your chief of police,” he tells
her. It turns out that he is Angela’s
grandfather (played with wry gravitas
by Louis Gossett Jr.), and that he was
one of the original Minutemen, with a
decades-old axe to grind.A black woman is our central hub,
around which everything revolves. This
very fact is enough to reverse a long
white male history of comic books and
franchises. But every reversal, like a
spinning wheel, picks up residue. The
twenty-first-century imperative to (fi-
nally!) give us sympathetic black he-
roes comes up against the critical bent
of Moore and Gibbons’s older comic.
That is to say, the masked heroes in the
original Watchmen were clearly anti-
heroes. Their respective motivations
for putting on masks to fight crime were
all cast in doubt. The comic relentlessly
asked, Were they a righteous militia
(the “New Minutemen”) or were they
perverse, violent vigilantes? We can
see the show’s tonal shift in how one of
the original heroes, Laurie Blake, diag-
noses Angela: “People who wear masks
are driven by trauma; they’re obsessed
with justice because of some injustice
they suffered, usually when they were
kids. Ergo the mask. Hides the pain.”
Blake herself doesn’t believe trauma
excuses superhero violence; as she later
quips, “You know how you can tell the
difference between a masked cop and a
vigilante? Me neither.”
But the show dwells on Angela’s
trauma in a way that seems to justify
rather than diagnose her vigilantism.
The plot meticulously unmasks Angela’s
pain, and her grandfather’s, and—this is
crucial—goes on to juxtapose them. This
hinges on a science-fictional invention:
“Nostalgia” pills that store memories
and allow you to reexperience the past.
Angela swallows a whole bottle of her
grandfather’s Nostalgia pills at once,
sending her into a kind of waking coma
in which she experiences his life from
within. A remarkable feat of cinema-
tography, this episode-long sequence
takes juxtaposition to its logical ex-
treme: conflation. Angela doesn’t just
witness or hear about her grandfather’s
traumas, which take place in a black-
and-white past, she feels them: the epi-
sode switches between her grandfather
as a young man and Angela acting in
his place. As if combining a match cut
and a splice cut, the camera pans away
from him and returns to her, as they re-
member being that little boy orphaned
by the Tulsa bombing, as they become
a black officer in a racist white police
force, as they become a superhero, one
of the first: Hooded Justice.
The episode cleverly picks up cer-
tain details from the comic, in which
Hooded Justice is presumed to be
white—his refusal to remove his mask,
the unexplained noose around his
neck—to give him a new origin story.
When he tries to arrest a man for set-
ting a Jewish deli on fire, his fellow of-
ficers release the arsonist. It turns out
that they, like many cops in real life,
belong to a white supremacist organi-
zation—this fictional one is called theCyclops, and is using a form of hypno-
sis to get black people to murder each
other. The climax of the episode comes
when Angela undergoes her grandfa-
ther’s horrific experience: white cops
assault him, cover his head with a hood,
wrap a noose around his neck, string
him up to a tree, let him hang for excru-
ciating seconds—then cut him down.
Even after she comes out of her em-
pathic fugue state, the show continues
to intercut shots of Angela’s own origi-
nary trauma—watching her parents get
blown up by a terrorist’s bomb when
she was a child in Vietnam—with shots
of Hooded Justice’s experiences. The
continuities between the two characters
work as a matter of plot: the Cyclops
group from her grandfather’s youth has
recently reemerged in the form of the
white supremacist Seventh Kavalry.
Angela is part of a lineage of trauma-
tized, righteous black police officers
forced to don masks and maintain a
secret identity. At the Greenwood Cen-
ter for Cultural Heritage in the show’s
alternate Tulsa, a video of Treasury
Secretary Henry Louis Gates Jr. offers
“condolences for trauma you or your
descendants may have suffered.” At a
meeting of those who suffer from “ex-
tradimensional anxiety,” a black man
explains how his mother’s experience
the night the squid attack caused three
million people to suffer “a horrific,
traumatizing, and inexplicable death”
may have resulted in “genetic trauma”
now locked into his DNA. Lady Trieu—
a brilliant, ludicrously wealthy Viet-
namese scientist who is on a hubristic
mission to save mankind—clones
her mother, then raises that baby as a
daughter, feeding her with Nostalgia
pills so she can “remember” the trauma
of the Vietnam War.The Tulsa race massacre, the Ho-
locaust, the Vietnam War, the ever-
prophesied American race war to
come. Does the juxtaposition of these
conflicts reflect history’s eternal re-
turn? Does it imply a “both-sides”
victimhood competition? Or does it
suggest a basis for solidarity between,
say, the Vietnamese and the African-
American victims of American geno-
cide? Watchmen occasionally posits
that we can forge connections with oth-
ers on the basis of purportedly shared
or analogous traumas. This is its form
of political match cutting—histories of
violence are juxtaposed; we are tasked
with bridging them in a meaningful
way. Hooded Justice wants Angela
to take his Nostalgia pills rather than
hear his story because “she’s not gonna
listen, she’s gotta experience things by
herself.” While Angela recovers from
that experiment, Lady Trieu’s daughter
runs another one on her for a disserta-
tion about “the adaptive function of
empathy and the role of rage suppres-
sion in social cohesion.”
Yet comparing her trauma to her
grandfather’s—finding “the similarity
in the dissimilar”—leads Angela toward
neither rage suppression nor social co-
hesion. She is a righteous warrior! The
show simply surrounds her with other
righteous warriors. It turns out that not
only was her grandfather a cop and a
vigilante, and her father a soldier, but
her husband is secretly Dr. Manhattan,
the superhuman superhero who won
Vietnam for America by committing
genocide there. Having left earth to its
own devices for years, the superheroDr. Manhattan fighting in the Vietnam War;
panel from Watchmen by Alan Moore
and Dave Gibbons, 1986 –1987DC^Comics