(dramatic music)
- Hey Wisecrack, quarantine Jared here. It’s
been a while since HBO’s Watchmen concluded,
and many of you have noticed that we’ve
been uncharacteristically quiet. That’s
because this show is dense. Sure, it pretty
overtly deals with race in America. But there’s
just so much going on - it’s rife with god
complexes, allusions to the graphic novel,
and characters reading very specific books
like Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom The
Bell Tolls.” It seems like nothing in this
show is a coincidence, and we really wanted
to get it right.
So what is Watchmen trying to say between
the convoluted conspiracies? Well, we’ve
got an idea. To quote our favorite blue man:
“Nothing ever ends.”
What never ends? Well let’s find out.
Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on The Philosophy of HBO's Watchmen.
And of course, spoilers ahead.
First, a quick recap. Watchmen takes place
over 30 years after the events of Alan Moore
and Dave Gibbon’s graphic novel. So let’s
start there: In the 1980s, the United States
and the USSR are on the verge of annihilating
the world in a nuclear apocalypse, so the
world’s smartest man Adrian Veidt concocts
a plan to avert the war through fear and sends
a giant psionic squid to attack New York City,
killing millions. The squid, the world believes,
is an invader from another dimension. So everybody
unites as one, nuclear apocalypse averted.
The history of Watchmen’s world is very
different from our own, before and after the
graphic novel. The United States won the Vietnam
war, Richard Nixon was never impeached, Robert
Redford becomes president, and term limits
have been abolished.
- ”Good, god. Robert Redford is still president.”
- Also Doctor Manhattan used his god-like
intelligence to invent a bunch of electronics,
but people thought he was giving them cancer,
and so now the world exists mostly devoid
of things like cell phones and lithium batteries.
Watchmen, the TV show, picks up in modern
day in Tulsa Oklahoma. Rorshach, who in the
graphic novel sent his journal detailing Veidt’s
plot to a right-wing newspaper, has been mostly
dismissed as a crank. But his visage has been
taken up by a group of white supremacists,
known as the 7th Kalvary. They’ve been terrorizing
the police who have also taken up masks to
shield their identity. Within this literal
race war is Detective Angela Abar, a black
woman who must learn about her family’s
past by OD’ing on her grandpa’s memory
pills. Also she, it is heavily implied, becomes
God.
Before we can grasp what the show means by
“nothing ever ends,” we have to understand
one of Watchmen’s recurring motifs: judgment.
Moore and Gibbon’s Watchmen invoked the
Latin phrase “who watches the watchmen”
to warn of the dangers of masked vigilantes
taking justice into their own hands. That
is - what do people do with unfettered power?
If you’re the comedian, you gleefully murder
with a smiley badge because it’s kinda funny.
In the show too, the cruelty, and tyranny,
of individuals exerting their judgment outside
the law is everywhere. Veidt callously disregards
the life that exists to serve him, creating
the creepiest “I’m sorry” a father has
ever conveyed to his daughter. When he’s
put on trial for his crimes, the judge is
keen to note that a jury of one’s peers
is the cornerstone of a fair trial, before
noting:
- ”You are not his peers, as such I have
taken the liberty of assembling an alternative
jury, much more suited to the task.”
- The point being, one is entitled to be judged
by one’s peers. And while Veidt might consider
himself a quasi-God above these creatures,
the judge considers him to be below humanity.
The whole problem with vigilante justice,
especially of the masked variety, is that
they rob people the opportunity to be judged
by the legal system or their peers.
But the show is not just interested in individual
vigilantism but in the vigilantism of mobs.
In the show’s first scenes, a young Will
Reeves watches a film about a black sheriff
who captures a white cattle thief and rebuts
calls for mob justice, with a plea to instead
trust the law.
- ”No mob justice today, trust in the law!”
- This scene is interrupted and we’re shown
another kind of mob justice, as white Tulsans
massacre their black neighbors after a black
man was accused of assaulting a white woman.
One way to answer the question of vigilante
violence is with the work of Sociologist Max
Weber, who defines a state as an entity that
claims “the monopoly of the legitimate use
of physical force” within a community.”
In other words, I can’t just go and rally
my friends to beat up the guy who sold me
a bootleg copy of Pokemon Gold, nor can I
physically coerce him to give me a refund.
Instead, I have to call the police - who,
as agents of the state, are allowed to use
force in carrying out the law. This is the
basic conflict between the US government and
our masked adventurers: as the Keene Act criminalized
vigilantism. But trusting the law and the
state’s monopoly of violence isn’t, as
Reeves learns, a magical cure to the ills
of the world.
One way to understand this is through Michel
Foucault’s proposition that “politics
is the continuation of war by other means.”
Foucault was inverting the famous aphorism
that “War is merely the continuation of
politics by other means.” If for instance,
the US military’s goal was to defeat the
threat of Nazism during World War II, we can
look at the politics of post-war Germany as
a continuation of the Allied Victory as the
country rapidly de-nazified. Of course, the
show explores a similar idea with Vietnam’s
statehood, as the police do the role otherwise
done by the US military. But, the wars don’t
always have to be fought with tanks and generals.
If we’re to consider the historical armed
suppression of America’s black community
through lynchings, firebombings, etc, as a
kind of war, then we can see how that war
was institutionalized into politics. In Watchmen,
the Tulsa Race Massacre is the war, and much
of what comes after is the politics. Seeking
justice through the law by becoming a police
officer, Will Reeves soon learns many of his
colleagues are secret white supremacists shielding
their allies from arrest. Years later, this
relationship is made even more clear by Senator
Joe Keene, who more or less admits that he
started a race war to help his presidential
aspirations, where he could use the full power
of the law to keep America’s minorities
in their place.
- ”You’re wrong about Cyclops, we’re
not racist. We are about restoring balance
in those times in which the country forgets
the principles upon which it’s founded.
Because the scales have tipped way too far.
And it is extremely difficult to be a white
man in America right now.”
- But well before that, he describes the tension
between the police and the 7th Kavalry as
a “managed peace,” to achieve his ends,
- “I came down here and assumed leadership
of these idiots to prevent that s**t from
happening again, and my buddy Judd did the
same as chief of police, each of us managing
our respective teams so we could maintain
the peace"
- As Foucault writes, “the role of political
power is perpetually to use a sort of silent
war to reinscribe that relationship of force,
and to reinscribe it in institutions, economic
inequalities, language, and even the bodies
of individuals.”
Even the members of Cyclops implicitly share
this view of politics, but with themselves
as victims. With Redford as president, the
members of Cyclops feel like they’ve lost
their war, that policies like Redfordations
are just a way of, as Keene describes, putting
the white man down.
- ”First, he took our guns. And then, he
made us say sorry. Over and over again. Sorry.
Sorry for the alleged sins of those who died
decades before we were born - sorry for the
color of our skin.”
- In other words Watchmen is not just about
the dangers of vigilante justice, whether
from lynch mobs or war-crime committing comedians,
but about how war and violence can become
embedded in the law. And when violence gets
embedded in the law, it can often evade judgment
as a result. After all, “justice is blind.”
Speaking of judgment, if you weren’t sure
if this was at the top of Damon Lindelof’s
mind - there’s one song that keeps coming
up you may have noticed during Veidt’s trial.
That’s the “lacrimosa,” from Mozart’s
“Requiem.” Let’s translate those lyrics
“Full of tears will be that day
When from the ashes shall arise
The guilty man to be judged; Therefore spare
him, O God,”
You know, just a song about being judged at
the end of the world.
- ”The end is nigh.”
It plays when Lady Trieu tells Angela Dr.
Manhattan is in Tulsa, when Wade discovers
the Cyclops hideouts, but most notably plays
when Blake arrests Veidt, and he says:
- ”Who do you think you are to hold judgement
over me, huh.”
- The point being, whether God-like, actual
Gods, or just people dressing up like Batman
- many of our characters feel like their fellow
humans are inadequate to judge them. Keene
and Trieau want to become God for just that
reason. Trieu because she thinks she can unilaterally
solve the world’s problems, and Keene ostensibly
to reestablish the glory days of white supremacy.
Veidt’s unilateral decision to save the
world from nuclear apocalypse is unknown to
the world, and thus not capable of being judged.
So too are the actions of Captain Metropolis,
Hooded Justice, Rorschach, or Lube Guy. A
Mask - in the world of Watchmen, shields its
wearer from the judgment of others. Which
makes Judd’s recitation of the Latin phrase
“Who watches the watchmen” to his masked
police force so incredibly ironic, especially
as they reply:
- “Who will guard the guards themselves?”
- “We watch!”
- Cyclops conspiracy aside, Watchmen isn’t
shy about how such a culture quickly leads
to an out-of-control police state where torture
and rightlessness are the norm.
- ”I want my lawyer”
- ”Yeah, we really don’t have to do that
with terrorists.”
- When certain kinds of violence become embedded
in the law, the state can effectively shield
themselves from judgment, whether you’re
throwing someone in the trunk of your car:
- ”There’s a guy in my trunk.”
- or exploding people’s heads on behalf
of the federal government.
But if hiding one’s identities protects
one from the judgment of their peers - so
can hiding one’s history. One of Veidt’s
sources of power is his ability to hide his
past crimes from the public - he doesn’t
need a mask to avoid judgment. But this idea
isn’t simply limited to Veidt. We learn
through Peteypedia, the supplementary HBO
material as collected by Agent Petey, that
Fogdancing, a book Veidt reads in prison,
is about American soldiers who would dispose
of evidence of American war crimes. He claims
he reads it because it’s about loneliness,
but maybe he relates to themes of covering
up one’s crimes:
- ”You wouldn’t understand. It’s about
loneliness.”
- If Veidt is hiding his history to avoid
judgment, who, or what else is?
To fully grasp that, we have to look at Watchmen’s
one true God: Doctor Manhattan.
Part 2: Nothing Ever Ends
While Doctor Manhattan isn’t even seen until
the penultimate episode, his worldview is
critical to understand the show. In Episode
8, he explains his unique relationship to
time. It’s not a flow of events from past
to present, but something he experiences simultaneously.
- “How long’s it been?”
- ”For you, 24 years, 41 days, and 13 hours.
For me it's happening…”
- “Right now. Yes yes, I remember.”
- With this premise, the show cuts back and
forth between the doctor’s childhood fleeing
the Nazis, his meeting of Angela, and their
future together. The show wants us to think
about history, like Doctor Manhattan, without
the idea of “before.”
- ”I don’t experience the concept of before.”
- In other words, a view of history in which
nothing ever ends.
History is not dead, but alive in our current
moment, and the show constantly explores how
the past continues into the present. We see
the fictional events of the graphic novel
trickle into every detail of life. In a nod
to the final pages of the graphic novel, Angela
and her grandmother eat at a chain called
“Burgers ‘N Borscht” - a cultural melding
made possible by the threat of extra-dimensional
annihilation. At a dinner party, kids make
a game of reciting the US presidents, moving
to where Watchmen history diverges and Nixon
never resigns, and is succeeded by Gerald
Ford and Robert Redford.
It relishes in the tiniest of details, imagining
that Steven Spielberg made Schindler’s List
not about the Holocaust but about the giant
squid attack,
- ”The movie’s black and white so the
red really pops, you know? And the girl’s,
stumblin’ around Harold’s Square, walking
under the tentacles, through all the dead
bodies, and she’s scared.”
or suggesting to the viewer that John Grisham
has become a Supreme Court justice.
Of course, if the alternate history gives
way to the alternate present, so too does
real history give way to the real present.
Aside from small easter eggs, it cannot be
understated the insane level of detail Watchmen
puts into thinking about history. Blake’s
sidekick Petey has a PhD in history:
- ”Petey’s kind of an expert on me and
all of the yahoos I used to run around with.”
Will’s wife June is a reporter at The New
York Amsterdam News
-”Why are you writing your story about me?”
-”Because the Amsterdam says a Negro cadet
making the force is big news.”
- becoming one of New York’s “most influential
and oldest...African American newspapers”
that was especially active in covering the
civil rights movement and chronicled the rise
of Malcolm X .
Lady Trieu is named after the Vietnamese historical
figure who fought to resist the Chinese state
of Eastern Wu as it occupied Vietnam, and
is quoted by her mother when she steals Veidt’s
seed.
- ”I want to ride the strong winds, crush
the angry waves…”
“Slay the killer whales in the Eastern sea…”
“Chase away the Wu army, reclaim the land…”
“Remove the yoke of slavery…”
“I will not bend my back to be a slave.”
- Key events happen in a literal museum, and
the US Treasury Secretary is real-life historian
Henry Louise Gate Jr.
And here we get back to Doctor Manhattan.
Because just as Manhattan’s experience of
time seamlessly jumps from one moment in time
to another, so too does the show. Like Manhattan
laughing at a sixth-month-old joke,
- ”Six months ago she’s telling me I have
a fantastic imagination.”
- the show interjects moments of history to
show their connectedness. The show often juxtaposes
similar objects from different times. This
is most explicitly done while Angela is overdosing
on Nostalgia. As Angela remembers being given
a badge by a Vietnamese police officer, the
show quickly cuts to the badge of Bass Reeves
in the 1920s, to Will Reeves’ receiving
his badge over a decade later, to the blood-spattered
badge of Chief Crawford over half a century
later. When a police officer puts a sack over
a suspect’s head, Angela flashes back to
the memory of Will putting on the sack from
his almost-lynching.
Or, as Will Reeves sees a police car drive
by, two corpses from the Tulsa Race Massacre
drag behind. Through these techniques, the
show asks viewers to consider past and present
acts of racism as one continual legacy. Other
examples in the show are stretched out between
episodes. In Tulsa, we see a molotov cocktail
thrown through a shop window, an event that
repeats itself years later at a Jewish deli.
Angela’s makeup closely resembles Hooded
Justice’s, but it blackens her skin instead
of whitens it. And a racist bank ad we see
unveiled by captain Metropolis is later hung
up in the 7th Kavalry hideout.
Much like the graphic novel, the show uses
the clock motif to ask the viewer to consider
the idea of time - and how, not unlike a constructed
watch, is, a series of meticulous cogs that
create an illusory march from past to present.
This counterintuitive approach to time seems
critical to one of Watchmen’s biggest themes:
historiography - that is, the writing of history.
Put simply, debates around historiography
can let us ask questions like “what is or
was considered historically important enough
to discuss in the first place?” A lot of
history involves finding facts about individual
events and discerning a narrative in them.
And that’s where things can get especially
tricky. So was the Holocaust some anomaly
of European history, or was the extermination
of Jews, Gypsies and others deeply influenced
by practices and ideologies birthed by Europeans
as they colonized Africa, as philosopher Hannah
Arendt or other historians argue? Same event.
Different story.
Watchmen’s own show within a show American
Hero Story, like the comic’s novel within
a novel Under the Hood, serves as a reminder
of what happens to history when sensationalism
meets an utter disregard for the truth. Petey’s
complaints about its accuracy aside:
- ”That show is garbage.It’s, the, the,
mm - it’s full of historical inaccuracies.”
- it manages to tell the story of Hooded Justice
while glibly ignoring the lack of information
about the person behind the mask. In this
case, what the show portrays as a fun romp
of a robbery-busting was actually a black
man fighting the Klan. To drive the point
home, the scene more or less plays in reverse,
hinting how the show got it, in historical
terms, “ass backwards.” Whereas fictional
Hooded Justice breaks into the store from
the window to save the day from some nameless
thugs, the real Hooded Justice jumped out
of the window when fleeing from a prominent
white supremacist.
Much of the history of Watchmen, like its
fictional critique of American Hero Story,
focuses on exactly what’s been forgotten,
or deliberately ignored in the mainstream
writing of real American history.
Throughout the show, we’re presented with
events and newspaper clippings that one might
easily dismiss as part of the show’s intricate
mythology. But time after time - they’re
not. They actually happened. Hooded Justice
has pinned up articles declaring “Nazis
March Through Streets of Long Island,” and
“22,000 Nazis Hold Rally in Madison Square
Garden,” the latter being a reference to
the German American Bund rally in New York.
The insinuation is that support for Nazism
in America is intricately linked to the fictional
Cyclops - with its white supremacist mission.
Of course, many people have discussed the
show’s opening, which portrays the events
of the Tulsa Race Massacre - where America’s
wealthiest black neighborhood was destroyed
by a mob of white Tulsans. As NBC reported,
many people were surprised to learn that this
was, in fact, real, as it is often not discussed
in most history textbooks. Even the small
details - the presence of black GI’s who
had served in World War I in Tulsa and the
bombing by airplanes are all historically
accurate. Later we see German propaganda during
WWI that asks black GIs why they would fight
for a country in which they were second-class
citizens.
- ”Do you enjoy the same rights as the white
people do in America? Or are you rather treated
as second class citizens?”
The leaflet, given to a young William by his
father, reflects real German propaganda from
the time.
What’s more, a newspaper on the ground bears
the real headline from the Tulsa Tribune in
the leadup to the massacre. This article even
makes its way to modern day, as is seen in
the Greenwood Museum. That museum is helmed
by not only by a prominent historian, but
a man who sparked a national outrage about
racial profiling after being arrested for
breaking into his own home.
There’s a pretty fitting moment, when Will
Reeves confronts Judd about the Klan robe
in his closet. Again - the history is no accident.
The Klan often collaborated with police departments,
especially during the civil rights era.
- ”The Klan had helped elect a white racist
named Eugene Bull Connor as Birmingham’s
police chief.”
In Florida, for instance, “The FBI knew,
too, that.. in the 1940s and ’50s, county
sheriffs openly joined the Klan,” writes
Gilbert King in his book Devil in the Grove.
During the Tulsa Massacre itself, some police
offers straight up deputized members of the
lynch mob. Of course, the regular involvement
of police departments with lynch mobs and
the Klan are simultaneously either ignored,
or in Judd’s case “part of his heritage.”
-”I have a right to keep it. It’s my legacy.”
To which William replies:
-”If you're so proud of your legacy, why'd
you hide it".
Like Veidt, America’s history has been shielded
from judgment.
Alan Moore, though he’s had sharp words
against the HBO show, has made similar statements
about the history of masked “heroes,”
saying “ a good argument can be made for
D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the
first American superhero movie, and the point
of origin for all those capes and masks.”
Griffith’s film, which glorified the Klan,
is credited with helping the rebirth of the
KKK in America.
Then of course, there’s the more subtle,
or maybe just coincidental historical parallels.
The Cyclops mesmerism encourages African Americans
to harm and hate each other:
-”Do not bring harm to any white man or
woman or child, only each other.”
- which seems like a loose fictionalization
the idea, as argued by thinker Bell Hooks,
that “The entire world of advertising and
mass media in general, which sends both the
covert and overt message that blackness is
negative, is part of the propaganda machinery
of shaming.
The 7th Kavalry members live in a place called
Nixonville, obviously after the president,
but Nixon might be of specific importance
to the show’s fascination with history.
Whereas pandering to white racists was a favorite
pastime of Democrats like George Wallace,
Nixon and his political allies were able to
wrest votes from the traditionally Democrat-voting
South to the Republican party by stirring
up racist fears in white voters. To quote
Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips in 1970, “The
more Negroes who register as Democrats in
the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites
will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.
That’s where the votes are.”
The idea that the 7th Kavalry are not some
modern anomaly but the product of specific
history is further driven home by smaller
details. Their name derives from the US army
regiment famously commanded by General Custer
during the Great Sioux War of 1876 - a war
brought on by America’s desire for gold
in Native American territory. At one point,
Judd even sends a pager message reading “Little
Bighorn,” in reference to Custer’s famous
last stand. The idea that they’re driven
by the historical legacy of manifest destiny
and white supremacy in America is furthered
with small details like the painting “Martial
Feats of Comanche Horsemanship” - a George
Catlin painting that, in Peteypedia, we learn
was given by Senator Keene to remind Judd
how “formidable our savage enemies can be.”
The philosophy of Watchmen might just be coyly
written right there in the episode four title
“if you don’t like my story, write your
own” - borrowing from a quote from author
Chinua Achebe. It’s worth mentioning Achebe’s
famous novel “Things Fall Apart” is about
the arrival of European colonizers in Nigeria.
Achebe, as scholar John Thieme notes, was
interested in recuperating the image of Africa
in contrast to European writers like Joseph
Conrad who portrayed it as a place of savagery
and barbarism.
Through the character of Angela, we see Watchmen’s
approach to history as she learns the truth
of her past and how it has deeply affected
her. Her whole journey is, as Will describes
it, to learn where she came from:
- “I wanted to meet you and show you where
you came from.”
- She not only has to grapple with the trauma
that defines her, but how that trauma seems
rooted in her genealogy.
In a different episode, Lady Trieu tells two
farmers that:
- ”Legacy isn’t in land, it’s in blood,
passed to us from our ancestors and by us
to our children,”
- Angela learns that the legacy she inherited
was that of the granddaughter of a Tulsa massacre
survivor.
Elsewhere, we are told about “genetic trauma”
in a support group.
- ”I read an article, there’s this thing,
genetic trauma.”
- While psychic-squid mass murder is fictional,
the concept of genetic trauma is the real
and ongoing hypothesis that stressful or traumatic
experiences might alter the genetic expression
of their children.
Small studies of the children of Holocaust
survivors, for instance, suggest biological
changes in their children.
But if squid-survivors can beget their trauma
to their kin in Watchmen’s eyes, so too
can the victims of racist violence.
When Angela fully learns her history by taking
nostalgia, it almost breaks her mind. But
by the end, Angela learns not to suppress
her personal trauma, as Will explains:
- “The hood when I put it on, you felt what
I felt,”
- “Anger.”
- “Yeah, that’s what I thought, but it
wasn’t. It was fear, and hurt. You can’t
heal under a mask. Wounds need air.”
- And what about Angela’s heavily implied
apotheosis? For a show fixated on the monstrous
deeds of characters trying to become God,
it seemed strange to have the protagonist
become one.
But if we think back to “time,” one of
the show’s primary motifs, and how Doctor
Manhattan experiences it - maybe Angela’s
arc is to experience the past, present and
future as one. To understand, as the show
reminds us, that nothing ever ends.
What do you think Wisecrack? Let us know in
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and we’ll catch y’all next time. Peace.
