As I reflect on HBO’s Watchmen series that I recently finished, I never thought the original story could continue drawing on the themes it espoused upon release in 1985. The original graphic novel, from which the series gathered source material, weaved a story of many themes relevant to American life in the 1980s, focusing on deeply flawed former superheroes amidst the backdrop of rising Cold War tensions, along with fantastical musings on the Vietnam War and Nixon’s presidency. While foreign paranoia and the threat of war still linger in the American psyche as we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11, our focus resides mostly on domestic issues. I suspect the creator of the Watchmen series, Damon Lindelof, fascinated by the perspective of time presented through Doctor Manhattan, especially with his mostly great exploration of it during Lost, found a fountain of adaptability, now even more prescient as our country vigorously re-examines our relationship with the past.
In the original work, Alan Moore sought to examine our collective fear and stained emotional psych from years of paranoia and enmity towards the amorphous idea of the Soviet Union. Lindelof turns the barrel of those feelings back toward us as Americans through an immensely imaginative recharacterization of historical events, tying in the progression of characters in the Watchmen universe. The series’ origin story begins with an event, often forgotten by history, the Tulsa massacre of 1921 where the growing shame of white people in the city towards the success of “Black Wall Street” spurred open warfare against the black residents, including machine guns and, incredibly, airplane attacks. It’s arguably one of the most insane and unimaginable events in American history that almost no one knows about. I myself was only slightly familiar with it before watching the show. The show uses this event to set the stage for the inherited trauma of the black characters in Tulsa in 2019, the story’s main stage. We come to learn that the child the viewer followed throughout the massacre is related to the main character, Angela Abar, who in 2019 is a cop in Tulsa. I can’t say that I’ve seen a historical event presented on screen that so emotionally engages the viewer to empathize with Angela’s historical trauma, passed down through generations of black life in America. The effectiveness of this event becomes all the more horrific when you realize this event actually happened. I am white and not Jewish, so I can’t relate to the deep scar an event like this left in the real world on generations of black people in real life. As all people do though, I have scars from events in my own family, of much smaller scale, that imprinted on me from my ancestors despite occurring before my birth. I’ve always been fascinated with the implications of ancestral trauma passing down to people who don’t even know, sharing familial grief with their ancestors. This series most effectively forces the viewer to confront that trauma of racism in the past, along with its presence today.
Being a police officer is treacherous in Tulsa for Angela and all cops in the story. She wears a mask and superhero disguise as public knowledge of her crime fighting will put her and her family in danger from a white supremicist group, the Seventh Kavalry who have no qualms about killing police officers. The first episode culminates with the hanging death of the Chief of Police, played by Don Johnson, seemingly at the hands of an elderly black man in a wheelchair. The story evolves and we learn that the old man, who Angela takes in, is her grandfather. In one of the best episodes of television of this decade, maybe all time, Angela relives her grandfather’s memories through overdosing a dangerous memory inducing drug, discovering his trauma and true identity. As Angela comes to learn, her grandfather was the little boy we followed during the Tulsa massacre who grew up to be a cop and became the real Hooded Justice (aka Will Reeves), his alter ego born out of a staged lynching attempt by his fellow, white NYPD officers. The series turns the original Hooded Justice character, who had a limited backstory in the book, into an incredible narrative to tie in all aspects of the series. We learn that Hooded Justice literally painted the area around his eyes white, the only visible part of his skin so society would believe him to be a white man. In actuality, he fought against an early white supremicist group, Cyclops, who’s insidious plot used a film with psychological effects to induce black people viewing the film to riot. The shared agony between Angela and Will becomes actualized as his memories are interspersed with visuals of her as him during these events as she wrestles with the memory drugs. She also learns exactly how he managed to kill her friend, the chief of police, learning that he was closeted white supremicist, giving her the answers about her chief’s dark alter ego. Without knowing it, Angela’s own personal trauma along with the scars of her family passed down to her father, the son of Will Reeves, seems to have caused self-fulfillment in her career as a masked officer of the law. Doubly, her constant paranoia and feelings of insecurity being a black woman working in a largely white police force against a highly sophisticated paramilitary group echo the same challenges that faced her grandfather.
What’s so poignant about the story putting together these two people and their experiences is the concept of destiny that many of us feel. While we tend to focus on the suffering passed down to us, there’s also the shared triumphs and lessons we learn from our parents’ mistakes. Angela, having grown up in the US state of Vietnam, almost couldn’t help become a cop in the same city of Tulsa where her grandfather experienced the massacre that shaped his future self. Angela’s duty in her self discovery of her family’s past invigorates her to fight the same fight her grandfather did; a noble and just cause against the hate thriving in the city. Too often, we lean on the crutch of our trauma and use it as an excuse for the failings of our own lives, but real people and characters like Angela take ownership of their strife to fight against the existential threats they face. Another character, Lady Trieu, a successful tech tycoon, embraces her own abilities inherited from a father she never knew, Adrian Veidt, the smartest man in the world, to build herself in his likeness and attempt to fulfill a destiny of her own, drawn from his success. She’s a contrast in some ways to Angela because her birthright privilege gave her every tool in her DNA to be successful. Both Angela and Trieu give viewers hope as well as anguish in the struggles we have of escaping the legacy of our parentage, so often a sentence of sorrow for some, but a membership of an exclusive club for others.
The concept of privilege and specifically white privilege is dominating our collective consciousness this year and as many of pointed out, this show, which came out before the collective shitstorm that has been 2020, typifies many of the experiences black America feels, sharing in the trauma of the real Tulsa Massacre and Jim Crow and Orangeburg and Emmett Till and the personal experiences only they know of. While a paramilitary group isn’t trying to capture Doctor Manhattan, many feel the hate of the Seventh Kavalry has a real place and at times a pedestal in America, a fear and feeling I really can’t relate to as a white man, devoid of experience being racially discriminated against in my life. Watchmen, a show with a blue demi-god, examines the very real notion that the feelings of shared ancestral trauma didn’t just go away because America had a black president. Despite 2020 America being still in the best place it’s been when it comes to race, the trauma of history doesn’t recede that easily, because we know what happened and despite our attempts to heal and recover, black America is constantly reminded of the worst things that happened to their ancestors and to them first hand. Watchmen’s commentary on privilege gives us a view of the historical context of the black experience. The economic struggles of black America, among other things come from a place of discrimination, lack of generational wealth and economic instability, the opposites of which are known to so many other Americans. Even now in 2020, we’re examining ourselves as a country because despite considerable efforts, these structural obstacles still exist, with ancestral benefits not available to many black people in America. The struggle of this show, shown most starkly with Will Reeves’ experience as an NYPD officer, portrays many of the foundational elements in this country as deeply skewed towards the exultation of white people and the denigration of black people. I find in my own life that my ancestral struggles are poor financial planning and fiscal incompetence, things at times I feel destined to likewise fail at because of my elders’ failures with money. At the same time, I know that my current position in a strong middle class life didn’t happen solely because of my hard work to escape those familial trappings. Being a fact based person who relies on logic to make most life decisions, I can’t help that my anxiety over familial economic strife doesn’t emotionally affect my life, so how can we expect black people in America, who throughout our history, experienced infinitely more trouble than me or my ancestors did, to just move on and get over those experiences? If I still struggle as many people do with their own personal trauma, despite the advantages I have, why then in more dire circumstances can we not recognize, sympathize and empathize with the anger and resentment of the black experience in America?
From a story perspective, the show provides a strong narrative with sufficient drama that’s earned it the awards it’s received. Angela realizes the vast conspiracy that seeks to harness the power of Doctor Manhattan, her husband and the various competing parties for that power. With an assist from Adrian Veidt, she’s able to defeat said parties and join her grandfather in that triumph, despite losing her husband. It’s a wonderful story, filled with the quality expected of any HBO show, but I left the show with more thoughts on the second narrative of racism in American than the story itself. While the premise of the show was fantastical with superheroes and demi-gods, that second narrative made the biggest mark on me and many other viewers. It’s sometimes sad to think that stories like this only become meaningful in the backdrop of a story with superheroes, with television making many aware for the first time about the Tulsa massacre. Nonetheless, the message of this show is profound and so prescient especially given its timing with America on the precipice of confronting ourselves more than we have in a long time. Angela eventually overcomes or at least becomes more aware of how her ancestral trauma affected her life, ultimately realizing her destiny to protect others and herself as an officer of the law. It’s buttoned up nicely for the show, but in real life America in 2020 we’re still grappling to find answers to the challenges of our past.
Bo's Gamut 