Category: superheroes

I am writing this piece in reference to my original review of Damon Lindelof’s adaptation of Watchmen for HBO, namely in light of recent episodes and a recent discussion I had about where the last few episodes seem to be going.

Specifically, there was a lot of discussion of episode 6, “This Extraordinary Being”, where it was revealed that Will Reeves, who killed Angela’s mentor Judd Crawford, was not only her grandfather but none other than Hooded Justice, the first costumed hero in the world, a revelation that addressed the whole premise of how black people could get justice in the United States. Even in the short time that the episode has been out, it has gotten a lot of praise for its storyline.

Yeah, but unfortunately this is one of those areas where the right-wingers bashing the “woke” agenda of this series almost have a point.

Mind you, I can understand WHY the producers took this route, since if Alan Moore’s original story had one blind spot, it was that it had no black principals in a story that was all about American politics and culture. In some respect that is the result of an Englishman doing a deconstruction of a white-dominated medium. In other respects, it’s kind of the point. The original series was about a community of costumed heroes in New York whose common element was Captain Metropolis, a charter member of the World War II Minutemen who tried to get the new generation of heroes together in the 1960s in a meeting that ended disastrously. In the background material, Hollis Mason (the original Nite Owl) said that Hooded Justice had made certain pro-Nazi statements in the World War II period, and Captain Metropolis hadn’t really disagreed with them. In the 1960s meeting, Metropolis has a series of cards on the map addressing issues for superheroes to address such as “Promiscuity” and “Black Unrest.”

Under the Hood, the in-story autobiography of Mason also implied that Metropolis (Nelson Gardner) was having an affair with Hooded Justice (and that Silk Spectre I was Justice’s ‘beard’). The total impression being that the two men were a couple and were also united in their racism, even if Metropolis was less overt with it. In retrospect, this might explain the lack of black vigilantes in the original story; they simply weren’t let into the “community” by Metropolis.

“This Extraordinary Being” can be reconciled with Moore’s story, but only to some extent. Given that he is seen in closeup as a Caucasian, it was an interesting point to have Will’s wife suggest he wear makeup under the hood; it conveys the point of a black hero having to wear a mask under the mask. (It also parallels Angela’s use of face paint in addition to a hood to conceal her features as Sister Night.) And Hollis never actually did see Hooded Justice without the mask, so we cannot establish that HJ is NOT Will Reeves. Except: in the comic (drawn by Dave Gibbons) Hooded Justice is depicted as a LOT larger and more muscular than the average man. In the TV show, Jovan Adepo (who plays Reeves in the ’40s) is above average physique, but not that large. For another thing the character has a secret identity as a policeman, and while he would have stood out in that day for being black, he would have stood out even more for his height. This is why, in Under the Hood, Hollis deduced that Justice was actually Rolf Muller, a German-born Bundist and circus strongman who is pictured side-by-side in contrast to a picture of Hooded Justice. Hollis also ascribes racist motives to Hooded Justice that obviously aren’t depicted in the Will Reeves character.

This gets to one more problem in the identification of Hooded Justice with Reeves. Episode 6 does include the idea of Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis having an affair, but it doesn’t include the one scene in the comics where Hooded Justice actually appears. In this scene, the Comedian (then a young punk) attempts to rape Silk Spectre I, her “boyfriend” Hooded Justice accidentally comes across them and proceeds to thrash Comedian, at which point Comedian deduces his real secret: that he is a sadomasochist who gets off on beating men up. Shocked, Hooded Justice just tells Comedian to get out. The Nelson-Will relationship has some rough-sex elements, but it doesn’t seem as dark as the relationship implied in the comic, nor does the TV Nelson seem racist except in the sense of Nelson telling Will that racial oppression is Will’s problem and not his.

And then the fact that the Comedian is not a factor kills one of the implications of Moore’s Watchmen: That everything happens in cycles. It is implied that once Hooded Justice refused to unmask for the House Un-American Activities Committee he was disgraced and eventually tracked down and assassinated by the Comedian as revenge for his prior humiliation. In the main storyline, Comedian is beaten and killed by Ozymandias, not only because he beat up Ozymandias in their first encounter but because Comedian destroyed his illusions by sabotaging Captain Metropolis’ hero meeting in the ’60s.

And this gets to an overall problem with the series. A recurring motif is the use of Jeremy Irons as a now-elderly Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias) who for reasons unexplained has been exiled to somewhere else in the solar system after his plot against New York was exposed. I think that if the Zack Snyder version of Watchmen fell down anywhere, it was in its effete depiction of Ozymandias, whose motives are central to the story. (And for another thing, if they were going to make Ozymandias openly gay, then why didn’t they let him wear lavender with gold trim?) You have a similar issue with the Irons character, who is an unqualified bad guy. Now, from the racial angle, the ethnically-German Veidt is an Aryan superman, but if you are a right-winger (like Rorschach) you could interpret him as the ultimate example of leftist altruism gone wrong, someone who was willing to kill millions for the sake of the “greater good.”

Thing is, because Moore is a leftist, and specifically opposed “black and white” morality as represented by Rorschach, he didn’t make things as simple as making Veidt an unqualified bad guy, however terrible his actions are. Indeed, Moore set events in such a way that Veidt’s choice seems like the only one to make.

For one thing, the mere presence of Jon Osterman (Doctor Manhattan) as an agent of the US government tipped the superpower balance such that the US could win the Vietnam War, among other things. This parallels the leftist critique that the USSR balanced the USA as well as vice versa, and that since the fall of the Soviet Union, the unipolar world order under America has been neoliberal dystopia at best. (Watchmen was actually written before the fall of the Soviet Union.)

Veidt also deduced that with the humiliation and containment of Russia under this unipolar order, this would actually increase tensions (in a way that they did not in our world) and that the only thing stopping nuclear war was Dr. Manhattan. He further deduced that as Jon (who is like God, only with less people skills) became more alienated from humanity, he would eventually leave it altogether. And after Comedian destroyed Captain Metropolis’ meeting by burning his map to show how nuclear war was inevitable, Ozymandias decided to “save the world” and to top Comedian, decided to do so by what he described as a practical joke: convincing the two superpowers there was a greater threat. And while Veidt deduced that Jon was going to leave Earth anyway, he arranged events to make that outcome more likely, so that he could proceed with the rest of his plan. So while Lindelof’s Watchmen has been both provocative and subtle in addressing the racial politics of America, it has not been nearly as good at depicting the global struggle that Moore addressed in his comic and that informed Ozymandias. Most of what we see proceeds logically from what has been established: Rorschach and Comedian are dead. Nite Owl II is in jail and Laurie, the last Silk Spectre, is working within the government in hopes of getting him out. But what we see of Veidt is a rather hollow depiction of the original character, and if he is not believable, then the premise of Moore’s story collapses, and if there isn’t a payoff in regard to the main plot, then there is little reason for Lindelof’s series to depict him.

Which leads to the last character from the original series. The show had been leaving little hints that if Manhattan was on Earth he was in fact Angela’s husband Cal. For one thing, Laurie is attracted to him. (Though as a strictly hetero male, I will concede that Yahya Abdul-Mateen is hot.)

The last episode established not only that Cal is Jon, but that Angela has been aware of this the whole time and Cal has not. It was also established that Senator Keene’s Seventh Kavalry plot was in fact an elaborate attempt to find Dr. Manhattan and steal his power. As Lady Trieu put it, “can you imagine that kind of power in the hands of white supremacists?” So Angela raced home and actually killed Cal, in order to pull a device out of his skull that was suppressing his true self.

So a few days ago, my Facebook friend Robert asked me, “so where do you think this Watchmen plot is going?”

And I said, “did you ever see a Doctor Who storyline called The Family of Blood?”

In this story, a race of asshole aliens, who cannot survive very long outside of their hosts, decided to steal The Doctor’s Time Lord essence in order to live forever. They were about ready to destroy the TARDIS, so the Doctor and his companion Martha decided to lay low in 1913 England. And because the aliens were able to track his essence, the Doctor used the “Chameleon Arch” of the TARDIS to contain that essence in a pocket watch, actually transforming his biology to human and creating a whole new identity and history that he believed was real. Thus, he couldn’t reveal himself to his pursuers. What the Doctor didn’t anticipate was that he would settle down and fall in love. So when the aliens came to the town and started terrorizing the people, Martha told “John Smith” the truth and he was forced to choose between becoming the Doctor and his happy normal life. Eventually the Doctor used the pocket watch as bait to get into the aliens’ spaceship and destroy it, and once he did he punished his enemies by locking them in individual moments of space -time. “We wanted to live forever. So the Doctor made sure that we did.”

The Family of Blood storyline encapsulated a theme that the producers of Doctor Who had been running with ever since the 21^st Century reboot and especially during the David Tennant era. That theme being: The Doctor is not an eccentric but kindly Englishman who just happens to have been born on another planet. He is an Elder God who just happens to be on the side of the Good Guys, and if you get him sufficiently pissed off, you will literally regret it for all eternity.

I predict that we are going to get a similar resolution in Watchmen, but again with a deliberately racial angle, given that you have a racist conspiracy going against Doctor Manhattan, who is now a black man. The difference being that Manhattan’s superpowers make the change in identity a more plausible retcon than with Will Reeves.

Again, it’s a great story. It’s just increasingly removed from the one Moore actually wrote.

The reason I don’t cry more is because of a certain irony that I don’t think Alan Moore himself wants to admit. He’s been bitching for years that DC took his characters and used them for commercial purposes that he didn’t intend, but the whole point of Watchmen was to be a politicized retcon of someone else’s work – specifically, the Charlton Comics line up of heroes that DC Comics had just obtained. And Dick Giordano, a former Charlton staffer who helped obtain the characters, asked Moore to produce a story with these new intellectual properties, and had to reject the first proposal where Peacemaker was killed right off the bat, The Question was a whackjob (as in, BY Objectivist standards) and Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt was the mastermind of a plot that killed half of New York.

Watchmen, written by Alan Moore, is quite likely the greatest story ever written for comicbook format. It started when DC Comics obtained the rights to use old characters from the Charlton Comics company (including Steve Ditko’s The Question) and then hired Moore to write for those characters. When Moore proposed a murder mystery where at least one of DC’s new characters got killed, his editor proposed that he make slightly altered versions of those characters in a new setting- which had no continuity with the universe of Superman and Batman. The result was both very adult and very philosophical, in which Steve Ditko’s Objectivism was transmuted into Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism: in an apparently random universe, the only thing that gives life meaning is the responsibility of making a moral choice. Even if that means putting on a mask to fight crime.

The thing is, Moore and artist Dave Gibbons also wrote Watchmen on the condition that the rights would revert back to them once the comic series was no longer in publication – which given its success, means never. So Moore was so pissed he now refuses to let his name be associated with any of the work he did for DC- even though the Watchmen characters he made were themselves based on someone else’s material. In any event DC continues to exploit its intellectual property for all it’s worth, such as Zach Snyder’s semi-successful adaptation of the Watchmen story, a recent comic book crossover where Moore’s universe was in fact merged with the DC Universe, and now this TV series by Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers).

Given that the comic was a complex limited series with 12 issues, with sex, profanity and a FUCKTON of violence, a lot of us thought that a Watchmen adaptation should have been a limited series on HBO in the first place. But since the story was already done by Snyder, DC actually decided not to reboot something they’d done only a few years before (like Batman) and instead went in a totally new direction.

Whereas the original story was set in the 1980s, the Watchmen series goes into 2019, meaning that Lindelof’s story is set in the same universe, over 30 years after the events of the comic. What makes this piece interesting and valid is that it takes the background universe and uses it to present a setting that actually has some relevance to the current situation. For instance: Latter-day critics of Moore’s Watchmen point out that despite the series being set in 1980s New York, there were no black characters among the principals. (In that respect, it was sort of like Friends, if Friends was a R-rated drama about murderous vigilantes.) This series is set in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a multiracial police force and a cast of characters centered around Regina King, who plays a police operative called “Sister Night.” Now, why cops have to have secret identities and costumes is a background element that isn’t immediately explained in the pilot, nor is the connection between King’s character and the bloody massacre of Tulsa’s black community by racists in 1921. Presumably this is the sort of thing that gets drawn out and explained over the course of the series, in the same way that the comicbook drew the reader in by gradually explaining details, like how Nixon became president-for-life partially because another superhero won the war in Vietnam.

So given that the story starts in progress (as it did during the comic) it really isn’t necessary to have read Moore’s Watchmen to see this series, although the tie-ins are important for anyone who has. In the comic, the vigilante Rorschach left his journal with a right-wing publisher, hoping to expose the main plot of the story after he was killed. Well, in the ensuing period, his journal apparently became the inspiration for a masked racist goon squad called The Seventh Kavalry who seem to be the main bad guys of this series. (Historically, the 7^th Cavalry was the unit under General Custer that got trashed at Little Big Horn.) And this was one of the things I didn’t like about the TV pilot. Rorschach in the comic might have been a right-winger with a LOT of issues (namely misogyny) but he never seemed actively racist. Now again, that might be because the main characters weren’t interacting with black people much at all. But given how many heroes in this setting (especially from the World War II generation) had racist opinions, Rorschach didn’t seem like that type. Given his other positions though, he didn’t seem like he was directly opposed to racism, which may be the point. This wouldn’t be the first time that racist goons took the writings of some dead person and interpreted them to support their position whether it fit or not.

In this respect, the other thing that distinguishes Lindelof’s project from the comic is that this world seems to be the mirror image of liberal fears of conservative dominance and the ultimate expression of the conservative paranoia that drives them to seek dominance. Since Nixon died, Robert Redford has been president for over 30 years, racial reparation is called “Redfordations” and gun control is so strict that cops have to go through bureaucratic procedure just to access their pistols in the field.

The one bit of this production that rings false is the median scenes featuring Jeremy Irons as “Lord of a Country Estate.” Because if he is supposed to be Adrian Veidt, the script does him even more of a disservice than it does Rorschach. It’s always fun to watch Jeremy Irons chew the scenery, but his character actually is a Republic Serial villain. In the comic, Veidt would freely kill people as a means to an end, but not as gleefully as Irons does. Plus, Veidt was supposed to be an American of German background. Producers have so far cast him as a decadent Eurotrash played by Matthew Goode and now Irons. Whereas the original dialogue and artwork conveyed more a plain-spoken American type. If anything, the elderly Veidt should have been played by Robert Redford himself, or maybe Brad Pitt.

But if nothing else, you can say that Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen is timely (so to speak). So far, I’d say this is like a couple of other bastard progeny of Alan Moore’s DC Comics work: The Sean Connery version of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (LXG) and the Constantine movie starring Keanu Reeves. If you went into them assuming they had anything to do with the source material other than the starting premise, it would only make your head hurt. But if you looked at them as their own things, they were surprisingly entertaining. I think of Watchmen the same way, and who knows, it might actually have something to say at the end of it.

“Dying is easy. Comedy – THAT’s hard.”

This Saturday, one of my friends wanted to see Joker with me, my roommate and another friend. And after we saw it, I said, “remember Gary, this was YOUR idea.”

Professional critics have pointed out that director Todd Phillips (The Hangover) has taken some pretty obvious inspiration from two of the classics Robert DeNiro made with director Martin Scorsese: Taxi Driver, in which a complete loser succumbs to his dark side and achieves a kind of ascension, and The King of Comedy, in which an even bigger loser becomes a supervillain because he completely fails at standup comedy. These elements are actually linked in the character played by Robert DeNiro in this movie, a local late-night talk show host in Gotham City who is an inspiration to the main character, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) who struggles with mental illness and poverty even as he writes standup comedy and works as a hired clown, because he sees his life’s mission as “spreading joy and laughter to everyone.” So already you know this isn’t going to work out.

The reputation of this film has far preceded it, with said professional critics bagging on Joker not so much for its quality as a movie as for the message they think it’s sending. Gotham is clearly a stand-in for the failed administration of New York in the 1970s, prior to Rudy Guiliani (MY, how times have changed). In this age of disturbed “incel” gunmen, an unpopular and mentally disturbed person who turns to violence to make an impact seems to be too close to home. And as Bill Maher said months before, in regard to the remake of It, “if you’re trying to make a movie about a badly-painted clown who terrorizes the neighborhood – you’re a bit late.”

Reviews frequently use phrases like “numbing” and “empty.” Kevin Fallon at The Daily Beast called Joker “meaningless.” One review went into political analysis, describing the pivotal event that turns Arthur into a murderer (like that’s spoiling anything), getting on the subway in costume after getting fired from his clown job and being harassed and beaten by three drunks. He shoots them all in a scene that the critic describes as evoking the 1984 subway shooting by Bernhard Goetz of non-white teenagers. At the same time, critic Richard Brody admits that the drunks in Joker are white, but doesn’t point out that the men turn out to be connected to a certain millionaire’s company. He presents Joker as “an intensely racialized movie” in which the overt aspects of racism are “whitewashed” (as in the subway scene), but if anyone seems “racialized,” it’s Brody himself, who sees Joker as being a parody not of a Scorsese film, but of none other than Black Panther.

A lot of the backlash seems to be less the film as it actually is than the perception that critics brought to it in advance. So why is Joker such a threat to the culture? Why is this Todd Phillips/Joaquin Phoenix Joker somehow more offensive or dangerous than the Christopher Nolan/Heath Ledger Joker?
Well, for one thing, Joaquin Phoenix makes the Heath Ledger Joker look like Mr. Spock.

For another thing, the Heath Ledger Joker was never intended to be a character study. The whole point was that he was a character without a past. (Or as the Alan Moore Joker put it, ‘I prefer (my past) to be multiple choice.’) He is somehow easier to accept as a character who came into being ex nihilo as an Agent of Chaos.

Arthur Fleck, on the other hand, is presented as a product (if not a victim) of circumstances: child abuse, class struggle, an unfeeling or hard-pressed government that cuts social services, the works. The fact that there are violent losers in the real world who could claim such circumstances (and do use them to justify anti-social acts) makes the stakes seem that much more real to some people. Indeed, this movie goes so far into “realism” that it makes Christopher Nolan’s unrelentingly grim take on the Batman mythos look as wacky and family-friendly as Batman ’66.

Moreover, The Dark Knight is a movie where Good wins. Batman (and Lucius Fox) bet that the people of Gotham will not do the evil thing to save themselves under pressure, and because they do not, the Joker’s scheme is foiled. Joker is not nearly so optimistic. Arthur/Joker is simultaneously leader and follower of a stochastic wave of violence, in which an aristocratic class that thinks it knows better than the common rabble are pitted against a “kill the rich” mob determined to prove them right.

The Dark Knight was in 2008, only 11 years ago. I wonder what changed since then?

Joker is a good movie, in the sense that it is a unique personal vision that is perfectly executed. It’s just not a very uplifting one. Joker does NOT put the “fun” in “funeral.” As my friend Don said, “It was deeply disturbing, and then it was deeply disturbing over and over again.” We also agreed that it was more disturbing than the before-the-movie trailer for Doctor Sleep, which is the sequel to The Shining.

Still, Joker isn’t as disturbing as the trailer to Cats.

Nothing is more disturbing than that.