24 The New York Review
In the Time of Monsters
Namwali Serpell
Watchmen
a television series created
by Damon Lindelof
Eyes stare from the screen; we zoom
out from stained-glass windows shaped
like eyes. A superhero tilts her head to
one side; we see a bronze bust tilted at
the same angle, a purple mask over its
eyes. The trunk of a car shuts; the trunk
of a car opens. We zoom in on a detail
of a white horse from an old painting of
the genocide of Native Americans; a
gentleman rides a white horse through
a green countryside to his manor.
These are some of the strik-
ing visual moments in Damon
Lindelof’s 2019 HBO series,
Watchmen. The show is based
on—really a sequel to—the
1986–1987 comic book series
by Alan Moore and Dave Gib-
bons, a gritty, virtuosic meta-
fictional critique of superhero
culture—including the comic
form itself. These abrupt
shifts from shot to shot are in
fact one effort to capture the
aesthetic of the original. In
an interview about the show,
the director of photography,
Gregory Middleton, said:
One of the transitional de-
vices we wanted to use to
echo the graphic novel is
the match cut. In the comic
you’ve got one panel with a
character in the foreground
and someone in the back-
ground. The next panel is
the same character in the
foreground, but they are
somewhere else—or some-
where else in a different outfit...
and you’re basically just jumping
time because you’re really with the
character and where their state of
mind is, so the intervening time
between how they went from here
to there is irrelevant.... It’s a nice,
clever way to keep you on point....
[We] worked hard on all the tran-
sitions in that episode to try and
achieve that effect and make it
interesting.A match cut “jumps” rather than
flows from shot to shot. Unlike a splice
cut, which moves smoothly from one
angle or moment to another in a single
setting, giving us a feeling of continuity,
a match cut lasts long enough for us to
notice that two shots in different settings
have similar shapes or movements—
we make the leap to connect them, to
relate two things separated by space,
time, perspective. You could think of a
match cut as a visual analogy or meta-
phor: a purposive claim that one thing is
like another thing, a “perception of the
similarity in the dissimilar,” as Aristo-
tle put it. Or you could think of a match
cut as a visual pun: a trifling way to
play with the fact that two things echo
each other. Either way, as a technique
for juxtaposition, match cuts raise two
questions: What’s the relationship be-
tween the things juxtaposed? And how
is the juxtaposition itself justified?
You can justify juxtaposition aes-
thetically, the way Middleton does:
as nice, clever, interesting. The match
cut between the eyes and the stained
glass is indeed very pretty, between the
opening and closing of the trunk deft.
But what about the match cut between
a painting of the genocide of Native
Americans and a shot of a gentleman
riding his horse to his manor? It seems
to be making a point about the relation-
ship between empire and mass murder.
As the show progresses, we learn that
the gentleman is essentially a colonial
master over a race of amenable clones
on a moon of a distant planet, and that
decades earlier, when he was still onearth, he killed three million people,
ostensibly to prevent the imminent nu-
clear holocaust of World War III.
But what are we to make of this
comparison between a fictional geno-
cide justified by utilitarianism and a
real genocide justified by Manifest
Destiny? What are we to make of the
juxtaposition of large-scale acts of vi-
olence as such, a kind of match cut of
historical traumas? Here’s where the
technique of juxtaposition gets tricky.
Watchmen puts disparate things next
to each other and admirably eschews
didacticism by asking us to decide the
relationship between them. But is that
bridge a metaphor or a pun? Is it good
art or just good fun?What’s the difference between good
and fun when it comes to art? Good is
an egg—a slippery, laden, fragile word.
Good works of art aren’t necessarily
about good people—in fact, they’re
usually not—nor are they necessar-
ily created by them. Fun is a gun—a
shiny, blunt, punchy little word—easy
to pull, hard to look away from. Fun
seems universally appealing, but it can
quickly turn cruel. Good and fun are
both relative—to the viewer, to history,
to culture—yet they’re common, famil-
iar feelings, recognizable terms we still
like to use because they gesture at our
evergreen debates about the relation-
ship between art and ethics. You can
map good vs. fun onto: aura of authen-ticity vs. mechanical reproduction; high
art vs. mass culture; midcult vs. mass
cult; avant-garde vs. kitsch. Every bi-
nary implies a hierarchy one way or the
other. Critics have generally (though
not always) favored the good over the
fun, while mass audiences have made
a case—with their numbers if nothing
else—for fun.
The original Watchmen comic book
is all about the collision of the good and
the fun in that classic American arena,
violence. It opens like this: “Dog car-
cass in alley this morning, tire tread on
burst stomach.... The streets are ex-tended gutters and the gutters are full
of blood and when the drains finally
scab over, all the vermin will drown.”
These lines come from the journal of a
superhero named Rorschach, who is a
violent racist and misogynist. They in-
troduce the metacomic self-awareness
characteristic of Watchmen: “gutters”
is industry jargon for the thin gaps be-
tween the frames of a comic book page.
Readers hop across them, filling them
in with missing scenes and implica-
tions, which in genre comics are more
often than not literally full of blood.
This is the most basic form of juxtapo-
sition in a comic book; Watchmen im-
mediately calls attention to it.
Rorschach has just discovered that
a superhero named the Comedian has
been murdered. As he investigates, he
visits other superheroes, whose back-
stories then unfold over the course of
the comic. Watchmen takes place in an
alternative universe where two genera-
tions of masked heroes—the Minute-
men and the Crimebusters—emerged
to fight crime, only to be banned in
1977 as dangerous vigilantes. The
crimefighters we learn about include
fascists hungry to harm; abuse victims
seeking revenge; kinksters looking for
masked love; outcasts with delusions
of grandeur; the smartest man in the
world, Adrian Veidt; and only one gen-
uine superhuman, Dr. Manhattan, who
was accidentally disintegrated in a nu-
clear reactor and reconstituted himself
into a omnipotent, omniscient glow-ing blue giant. With his supernatural
help, the US wins the war in Vietnam
and incorporates it as the fifty-first
state. On the cusp of World War III—a
looming nuclear exchange with the So-
viet Union—Veidt drops a gargantuan
squid on New York City and claims it’s
from another dimension, killing mil-
lions and scaring the world’s nations
into joining together for protection.
Watchmen is a sophisticated inquiry
into the ethical implications of its own
form—the flash and bang, the pruri-
ence and violence of comic books.
The superheroes save the world, but
at what cost? Or as graffiti
on the walls of its alternate
New York City puts it, WHO
WATCHES THE WATCH-
MEN? The line quotes the ep-
igraph to an appendix of the
1987 Tower Report that Ron-
ald Reagan commissioned to
investigate the Iran-Contra
scandal, which in turn quotes
and translates Juvenal’s Sat-
ires from the second century
AD: “Quis custodiet ipsos cus-
todes.” This allusion within an
allusion captures the problem
of moral contamination with
which the comic is most con-
cerned: Can violence redress
or prevent violence?
The Watchmen comic ends
in 1985, just as “RR” is run-
ning for President of the
United States—not Ronald
Reagan but Robert Redford.
An arbitrary historical coinci-
dence yields a pun that works
as cutting political satire: it
could just as well have been
the other cowboy movie star.
The Watchmen show is set in 2019—
and Robert Redford is still president.
The show uses the occasion of his name
to conjure a controversial reparations
program called “Redford ations.” This
pun is a stroke of genius: a President
Redford’s name would indeed get at-
tached to a progressive program (as
with “Obamacare”), which would in-
deed cause frustration among white su-
premacists. The pun soars even higher
when you realize how flat “Reagana-
tions” would fall, and because Redford
never makes a cameo, the satire on race
relations can float and sting rather than
getting bogged down in real politics.
The show best captures the satirical
spirit of the comic when it offers what
Thomas Pynchon calls the “high magic
to low puns.”
The show is a great example of the
promise and paradox of “prestige tele-
vision”: a high-quality HBO series ad-
aptation of a work in what was once
considered the lowest, pulpiest, mass-
iest of forms. It is good and it’s fun. But
the Great Media Shift of the twenty-
first century—toward the hegemony
of Hollywood action movies and the
Third Golden Age of Television—has
only intensified the questions about the
representation of violence that the old
Watchmen comic obsessed over in the
Eighties. The new Watchmen show is
thus also an example of the clusterfuck
of fun aesthetics and good politics, the
clash of the slick and the woke that
we’re seeing in so much contemporaryRegina King as Angela Abar in her Sister Night costume in Watch menMark Hill/HBO