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 21st 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.