26 The New York Review
has returned and, for somewhat inscru-
table reasons, falls in love with Angela
and inhabits the body of a mortal so
he can marry her (she chooses a dead
black man for him to reanimate; Yahya
Abdul-Mateen II imbues the famously
neutral character with a cool, slow
charisma). They decide he should live
under an amnesiac spell—one partner
seeing the future turns out to be a bum-
mer for relationships; during a fight, he
tells her, infuriatingly, that he’s standing
on the surface of their swimming pool
because “it’s important for later.” While
it’s depicted as a solid and vibrant mar-
riage, it also exposes Angela and their
children to the threat of the Seventh
Kavalry, which is trying to steal Dr.
Manhattan’s powers. She proves her
love for him by trying to kill them.
Angela’s newfound understanding
of trauma simply joins the host of mo-
tivations the show provides her with to
kill, to torture, to be party to the grue-
some destruction of both the white su-
premacist bad guys and Lady Trieu, to
accept and enact violence. The show’s
investment in trauma suggests that it
wants to be politically good, but it can’t
relinquish the fun of a gun-slinging,
finger-cracking hero. In the final epi-
sode, Angela and her grandfather end
up in the theater from the first epi-
sode. As a black spiritual hums on the
soundtrack, Hooded Justice perorates
about the legacy of being the victim—
not the complicit or recruited perpetra-
tor—of violence:
My mama played the piano right
over there. It burnt, too. Last thing
I saw before my world ended was
Bass Reeves, the black marshalof Oklahoma. Fifteen feet tall in
flickering black and white. “Trust
in the law,” he said. And I did....
That’s why I became a cop. Then,
I realized, there was a reason Bass
Reeves hid his face. So, I hid mine,
too. Hooded Justice. Mm. The
hood. When I put it on, you felt
what I felt? Anger. Yeah, that’s what
I thought, too. But it wasn’t. It was
fear and hurt. You can’t heal under
a mask, Angela. Wounds need air.It seems the problem with vigilantism
isn’t the violence; it’s the anonymity.
All that trauma-sharing gives way to a
pat and slightly disingenuous revelation
about healing. Mask or no, Angela’s
still a cop, still the wielder of state-
sanctioned violence, and now with a
personal legacy to motivate it.The king is dead, long live the king!
With this proclamation, first made in
1422, when Charles VII succeeded
Charles VI, the passing of an old order
is made simultaneous with the advent
of a new one. Or nearly simultane-
ous. There’s that comma. That blip,
that pause, that tiny vacuum called an
“interregnum” by the Romans, who
treated it as a suspension of the polis
and the law. It’s a weird and ghastly
thing, the comma that sits between
death and life, splices the void and the
surge of power, makes of the king a dop-
pelgänger. Slavoj Žižek’s 2010 transla-
tion of a line from Antonio Gramsci’s
1930 prison notebooks captures it well:
“The old world is dying, and the new
world struggles to be born: now is the
time of monsters.”This is where we are now when it
comes to cultural production, in the
gap between TV and prestige TV, comic
books and comic book culture, diver-
sifying art and decolonizing it, fun art
and good art. We are in the interregnum
between an old order and a new, and
it’s bursting with monsters. “Monster”
etymologically derives from the Latin
word monstrum, which itself derives
from monere, “to warn.” The original
Watchmen cast itself as a warning. Any
artwork that insists on issuing warn-
ings must depict—must immerse itself
in—that which it is warning us against.
How do we fight the monsters that we
ourselves conjured in the first place?
On the surface, both Watchmen
projects have the same arc: a murder
prompts an investigation of the hero’s
past that reveals that there’s no form of
heroism—not even a knightly fantasy
of law and order—that isn’t drenched
in blood. As a young girl, Angela iden-
tifies the terrorist who bombed her par-
ents, then asks to listen when he gets
shot by the cops. She’s rewarded with a
badge and a future job offer. As a cop
in Vietnam, she falls in love with Dr.
Manhattan, knowing he committed
the genocide that motivated that man’s
act of terrorism. As Sister Night, she
beats suspects during interrogation.
As a mother, she reminds her adopted
son that they live in a black-and-white
moral universe. The show seems to jus-
tify Angela’s violence with her identity
and her history as a black American
wo m a n. Wh at i f it h a d b e e n b ol d enou g h
to say outright: she too is a monster?
What if we’d been asked to see her—as
we are asked to see every superhero in
the comic—as an antihero?
Instead, the show blesses her heroism
with a supernatural gift—an egg that
Dr. Manhattan leaves for her, in which
he has stored enough of his matter, he
says, that anyone who consumes it will
have his physical and psychic powers.
In the last moment of the show, stand-
ing at the edge of that swimming pool
where they had their lovers’ quarrel,
Angela cracks and swallows the egg,
then hovers her foot over the water.
The screen goes black. When she steps
down, will she plunge or will she bal-
ance? Will she turn a radiant blue?
And what will that glow, so close to the
blue of police car lights, mean about her
bodily matter? Watchmen doesn’t show
that moment, and not just because it
needs to end on a note of irresolution—
that ambiguity to which it commits as
a good aesthetic and a fun cliffhanger.
Watchmen can’t show that moment be-
cause the implications of this juxtaposi-
tion made manifest would be both silly
and a little grotesque: black life matter
might become blue life matter, and if
she absorbs Dr. Manhattan’s powers,
perhaps all life matter as well.
We are desperate for black heroes.
We have been starved for over a cen-
tury. Putting a black woman—black
pride, black love, black speech (King
knows her way around the piquant
varietals of “motherfucker”)—at the
center of a superhero show is a long-
awaited reversal of the usual story.
We’d hate to see that unabashed black-ness blemished with quibbling about
the relative righteousness of violence.
But what if Watchmen had refused the
trend of casting black actors as cops,
a double distortion that flaunts sta-
tistical reality and uses “diversity” to
humanize the brutal practices of the
state? Or what if, premise conceded,
the show had been brave enough to
give us a glimpse of Angela as a mon-
ster, a vigilante glowing with the un-
checked power of police blues? What if
it had taken seriously the fact that all of
us—even black women with a history
of trauma—can be recruited into per-verse and unjust state violence through
the illusion of heroism?
Hegel argued that tragedy emerged
not from a conflict between good and
evil, but from a conflict between two
goods. In Antigone, one of these goods
is the heroine’s love for her brother; the
other is the law, which bans her from
burying him. She buries him anyway
and is killed:That is the position of heroes in
world history generally; through
them a new world dawns. This new
principle is in contradiction with
the previous one, appears as dis-
solving; the heroes appear, there-
fore, as violent, destructive of laws.
Individually, they are vanquished;
but this principle persists, if in a
different form.Angela, too, is split between love and
law, but when she violently destroys
laws (when she tortures witnesses, for
instance) she in fact doubles down on
the murderous logic of the law. The ul-
timate testament of her love is shoot-
ing a bunch of racists who are trying
to kidnap her genocidal husband. The
show does emphasize the futility of
her choices: black cops still get killed
by white supremacists, Dr. Manhattan
dies anyway. But I think it makes a mis-
take, that it in fact condescends, when
it pulls its punches and its punchlines,
when it lets an avenging Angela tri-
umph—unvanquished, violent, heroic,
full of justifications about justice, and
perhaps soon to be all-powerful—with-
out asking: What is her principle? And
in what form will it persist? QNew York Review Books
(including NYRB Classics and Poets, The New York Review Children’s Collection, and NYR Comics)
Editor: Edwin Frank Managing Editor: Sara Kramer
Senior Editors: Susan Barba, Michael Shae, Gabriel Winslow-Yost, Lucas Adams
Linda Hollick, Publisher; Nicholas During, Publicity; Abigail Dunn, Marketing Manager; Alex Ransom,
Marketing Assistant; Evan Johnston and Daniel Drake, Production; Patrick Hederman and Alaina Taylor, Rights;
Yongsun Bark, Distribution.Regina King as Angela Abar in Watch menMark^Hill/HBO“The experience of reading Green, or so I find,
is far more animating than the ordinary reading
experience and extends far beyond the usual
confines: It can be almost physical, as if the
thought or sensation expressed on the page
were being generated by one’s own, not the
author’s mind.... One is mesmerized, thrilled,
transported, often by the very recklessness
entailed by an underlying and urgent purity
of vision.” —Deborah Eisenberg
Surviving presents a miscellany of Henry Green’s
writing, and is as reflective of his extraordinary
and unclassifiable genius for the word as any of
his great novels from Living to Loving to Nothing.
Readers will find remarkable stories from the
1920s and 1930s; Green’s telling of his time in
the London Fire Brigade during the Blitz; a short,
unpublished play, Journey out of Spain; journal-
ism; and the hilarious interview with Green that
Terry Southern conducted for The Paris Review.
Edited by the novelist Matthew Yorke, Green’s
grandson, Surviving also includes a memoir by
Green’s son, Sebastian Yorke, that is a brilliant
portrait of this maverick master.
ALSO IN THE NYRB CLASSICS SERIESLOVING • CAUGHT • BACK • BLINDNESS
LIVING • PARTY GOING • DOTING • NOTHINGAvailable in bookstores, call (646) 215-2500,
or visit http://www.nyrb.comSURVIVING
Stories, Essays, Interviews
Henry Green
Introduction by John Updike
Edited by Matthew Yorke
With a memoir by Sebastian Yorke
Paperback • $18.95
Also available as an e-book
On sale April 21st“With Green, we’re presented with
a singular kind of artist who, like the
poets of ancient India and Greece,
has nothing to offer us but delight.”
—Amit Chaudhuri