Watchmen raises the bar on storytelling
2019 was a rocky year for superheroes until this series showed us how it’s done
The year 2019 has been a complicated year for superhero stories, but Damon Lindelof’s outstanding adaptation of Watchmen for HBO is proving what can be done in the genre, and laying down a marker for all who dare to follow.
Judging by the second-buzziest bit of comic-book pop culture released this year, the comparison isn’t likely to be flattering. The Todd Phillips feature Joker, with its portrait of the DC Comics supervillain as a troubled social outcast, may have grossed $1 billion worldwide and been praised for its “grittiness,” a term often used to signal moral and sociological seriousness in art, but viewed side by side, Watchmen and Joker illustrate the difference between art that actually challenges its audience and art that simply plays at provocation while reciting well-worn ideas.
The bar for an interesting Watchmen adaptation is stratospheric: The source material by Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore is one of the most venerated comic books of all time, renowned for its portrait of dysfunctional, morally compromised heroes. And while some superhero stories share the Watchmen comics’ grim tone, few dare to dismantle heroic fantasies in the same way. In a 2016 interview, Moore condemned most superhero stories — now quite literally the most popular genre on Earth — as “still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race.”
Lindelof has proved himself up to the challenge. The première of Watchmen opened with a re-creation of the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Okla.,’s prosperous black community. And in the show’s most recent episode, the series revealed that the first superhero, Hooded Justice, who was long assumed to be white, is actually a black man who survived that slaughter.
The hour follows Will Reeves (played as a young man by Jovan Adepo and in old age by Louis Gossett Jr.) as he joins a big-city police force only to discover that it has been infiltrated by a Klanlike organization using mind control techniques to incite riots in black communities. His fellow police officers subject Will to a mock lynching in an effort to dissuade his investigations. The noose they leave around his neck ends up becoming part of his superhero costume. After Will starts making headlines, he inspires a team of white superheroes, whose leader, Captain Metropolis (Chris Whitley) recruits Will with a promise to fight the racists — only to break that pledge and belittle Will.
In a spasm of despair, Will murders the racist conspiracists and takes their wicked technology. Hooded Justice’s story is a shattering reminder that we don’t always rise above bigotry to become better people, and that giving a black man the same impunity as a white man can turn him into the same kind of monster.
What does Joker have to say that’s remotely as daring? It’s hardly news that men who believe themselves to be rejected by women and unrecognized at work sometimes use these failures to justify horrific acts of violence. The perpetrator of the Isla Vista, Calif., murders of 2014 left a lengthy manifesto to that effect, and at least two other killers have cited him as inspiration.
Joker is a dank and sullen movie, and its main character, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), resents both the social workers who have little to offer him and the talkshow host who turns him into a punchline.
But aside from a throwaway line about stretched budgets, Joker doesn’t have much insight into the holes in the social safety net. Its villain is a cardboard rich guy. And while Arthur rants about the comedic gatekeepers who get to decide what’s funny, laments about political correctness are hardly under-represented today. Joker is distinguished from its slick competition in the Marvel Cinematic Universe by its unremitting ugliness, not because it has more to say.
This is the real dividing line in pop culture today: not whether the characters wear spandex, or have been manipulated by CGI, or whether the actors playing them are getting their checks from Walt Disney and Warner Bros. It’s between art like Watchmen that actually has something to say and the guts to say it, and a project like Joker that just wants credit for showing its audience the illusion of courage.