With Its First Episode, ‘Watchmen’ Proves It’s Not Just Another Superhero Show
Lynchings, police murder, and the KKK -- 'Watchmen' wants to push every one of your buttons.
At first glance, the pilot episode of Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen seems to be set slap bang in the middle of a dyed-in-the-wool conservative’s worst nightmare.
Spoilers for the first episode of Watchmen follow
Hamstrung cops are so micromanaged that they can’t use their guns until higher-ups remotely approve them. A Liberal president — baby-faced actor Robert Redford — has been in power for three decades, time he’s spent handing out ‘Redfordations’ to disenfranchised communities, much to the chagrin of sour right-wing children (literally) nationwide. And white, blue collar Americans are being threatened by African-American cops at truck stops.
But quickly that veneer of neo-Fascism is revealed to be a ruse.
The blue collar American in question is no innocent farmer — hidden in the back of his truck is a Rorschach mask and a machine gun. And before we are even introduced to Redford’s milquetoast brand of misguided left politics — a thousand ‘Yass kween’ clapbacks to a Hillary Clinton Tweet given sentience and left to run the country — we open with a real life massacre of African-American citizens, led by the KKK.
So no, this isn’t a Make America Masked Again-style superhero show. But nor is it the narrow-minded takedown of Trumpism that that one might expect, given this is a miniseries inspired by one of the most famous dissections of the fascist mentality in modern comics.
Instead, Watchmen seems as committed to courting hot takes as it is to actively and systematically befuddling every single one of them.
In The Shadow Of A Squid
Lindelof’s “remix” was always going to live in the shadow of Alan Moore’s original. But rather than fight that second fiddle status, the writer and creator has actively embraced it, and his Watchmen is set in a world haunted by the actions of Moore’s original gang of do-badders.
Dr. Manhattan, the walking atom bomb, has — as promised — left behind human society entirely, choosing instead to make cities on Mars. The legacy of Rorschach has inspired a violent rebel faction known as the Seventh Kavalry, a mix of vigilantes and white supremacists. And every now and then, tiny squid rain from the sky, leftovers from the plot of Adrian Veidt, who has faked his death and is living in a castle surrounded by old fashioned servants who rub his thighs and are probably cyborgs.
It’s a neat trick, providing an opportunity to tip a hat to the largely hostile and suspicious Moore die-hards who need the show to acknowledge the legendary source work without ever imitating the beats of the original. After all, Zack Snyder’s uber-faithful film adaptation proved that we don’t want more Moore, and Lindelof is happy to take things firmly in his own direction.
Well, I sure enjoyed that Watchmen pilot.
It’s excellent exactly because it wasn’t precious about the original.
Being too respectful of Alan Moore is what ruins adaptations of Alan Moore.#WatchmenHBO
— Victor LaValle (@victorlavalle) October 21, 2019
The pilot’s best flourishes, in fact, come from pure invention: in a neat bit of technological retro-futurism, Lindelof’s heroes have pagers, not mobile phones. Maybe on paper that sounds tacky and ham-fisted — this is a show riddled with imagery of police brutality and murder, and our mobiles are the first port of call when it comes to holding law enforcement accountable. But it doesn’t. Instead, it feels like a twist of pure literary defamiliarisation, presenting us with a world close to ours, while meaningfully separate from it.
Then there’s American Hero Story, a series within the series that takes the place of Tales From The Black Freighter, Moore’s comic within a comic. At once a reference to Watchmen lore, a gesture towards the over-saturation of superhero content, and a way of contrasting the reality of vigilante crimefighters with the glossy, Marvel-style presentation of it, it’s a stroke of some considerable genius, relegated to the background.
Which is a genuine surprise. At his worst, Lindelof has always tried too hard to draw attention to his own intelligence. Not only does he hold back from ever doing that during the Watchmen pilot, he saves his best ideas for the background.
Neither Black Nor White
Sister Night (Regina King) and Judd Crawford (Don Johnson) are nominally the protagonists of the first episode. But to call them heroes would be wrong. In fact, despite taking to the pointy end of the plot, the cops resist easy categorisation.
The assembled law enforcement officers we meet wear masks, snort coke at quiet family gatherings, beat up prisoners and work closely with vigilantes. Lindelof couldn’t try harder to blur the boundaries between the two sides of the law if he tried — particularly when he ends the episode with the lynching of Crawford, whose blood falls onto his police badge in a direct reference to the first frame of Moore’s comic.
holy fuck…Watchmen
— Elijah Wood (@elijahwood) October 21, 2019
In Moore’s work, it’s The Comedian’s blood that hits a badge, and there’s no more complicated character than he — a rapist and monster whose actions end up inspiring Dr. Manhattan to re-entangle himself with the affairs of men.
In fact, the death of Crawford is one of the moments where Lindelof most boldly shows his hand. Sure, killing off a character who seemed poised to be your hero is an old trick — the world gasped when Ned Stark met a sticky end; it won’t gasp like that again.
But it’s not just that Crawford dies. It’s how we dies — killed in a manner that calls to mind years of racial vilification. It’s who we are led to think kills him — an African-American man in a wheelchair, himself a survivor of the racist violence depicted at the show’s opening.
And it’s when he dies — right at the show’s end, Lindelof going silent just as we want him to talk. Crawford might have gotten to sing Oklahoma at a dinner table, but that doesn’t mean we’re meant to endorse him. He’s composed solely of conflicting facts, and when he dies, Lindelof has cleverly endorsed absolutely none of them.
Watchmen is awful and very pro-cop. I suspect there might be a “the cops are bad too” twist mid-season, which will get people saying “see???” but the main character of the show is still a “good cop” which really misses the point of the comic Watchmen
— jack allison (@jackallisonLOL) October 21, 2019
My bet: Crawford was somehow involved with the Seventh Kavalry, who are themselves somehow being funded by Adrian Veidt in order to further dismantle the world order. But at the very least, the wise might expect that Crawford’s death will kick off more questions than it answers, just as the Comedian’s did. The wiser still might expect that the rest of the show will tarnish Crawford’s reputation, just as Moore transformed a murdered superhero into an abhorrent criminal.
Our culture is no longer trained for that ambivalence. In the hours since the episode has premiered, the show has been accused of being both pro and anti-cop; a testimony to Moore’s work and a terrible mutilation of it.
In actuality, taken on its own merits, the first episode sits in neither binary. It’s not so much table-setting as it is table-disrupting, an hour of constant thematic and plot feints. Terms like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ seem rather reductive; it’s not even clear what thesis Lindelof is setting us up for yet, let alone whether he’s doing it well.
Clearly, this is a show that has something on its mind. But at this stage, it appears to be saying both nothing and everything at all.
Almost like a Rorschach test.
Watchmen is currently streaming on Foxtel Now.
Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @Joe_O_Earp.