First-class entertainment out of the box
‘Watchmen’ expresses both reverence for its source and some anxiety of influence
Many a superhero origin story involves exposure to a volatile substance — something dangerous, radioactive, caustic — that can be powerful if mastered, ruinous if uncontrolled.
In HBO’s Watchmen, that fissile storytelling material is history: specifically, America’s legacy of white supremacy. The first episode begins with the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which white mobs rampaged in the prosperous Black Wall Street, massacring African-Americans in the street and strafing them from above with airplanes. A small boy’s parents pack him onto a car that’s fleeing the mayhem, like Kal-El being sent from Krypton. But there is no Superman flying to the rescue. With that opening, Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers) reframes the universe that the writer Alan Moore and the artist Dave Gibbons created in the 1980s comics series. Where Moore wrote an alternative history of Cold War America — a pre-apocalyptic dystopia in which masked vigilantes have been outlawed — Lindelof reaches back and forward in time to root his caped-crusaders story in a brutal American tragedy.
The choice invests this breathtaking spectacle with urgency. Watchmen isa first-class entertainment out of the box, immediately creating a sad and wondrous retro-futuristic world. It takes longer, though, to get a handle on the complicated and all-too-real material it uses as its nuclear fuel.
In 2019, Robert Redford (yes, that one) has been president nearly three decades, succeeding Richard Nixon, who’s now on Mt Rushmore. Redford’s liberal administration has instituted reparations, or ‘Redfordations,’ as disgruntled racists call them.
HBO’s Watchmen isn’t a remake; Moore has disavowed it, as he did the 2009 film. The series expresses both reverence for its source and some anxiety of influence; it presents the back story of the original superheroes through a farcical, Ryan Murphy-esque show-within-a-show, American Hero Story. But Watchmen takes place in a world where all the graphic novel’s events happened. The omnipotent Dr Manhattan — the sole superpowered being in this world — won the war in Vietnam, which is now the 51st state; the Cold War ended after the messianic villain Adrian Veidt detonated a giant psychic squid in Manhattan, killing millions but uniting the world against a fictitious alien threat.
Watchmen explains much of that history eventually, but at first Lindelof dumps newbies into this strange ocean like so many squidlings. It may not matter, though, because it moves with such brio, carried by Regina King’s confident star performance as Angela Abar, a Tulsa policewoman who moonlights as Sister Night, in a supercool ninja-nun long coat and cowl.
Watchmen is a big, audacious swing. It asks: Which is more outlandish and dystopian: an America in which the Tulsa atrocity is being paid for and fought over nearly a century later? Or the one we live in, where it is barely remembered and taught? If the series can sustain and deepen its commitment to this idea, it can be not just a great entertainment but also one invested with great power. But as someone from another comic-book universe once said, with great power comes great responsibility.