Scorsese says superhero movies lack courage. ‘Watchmen’ might be the answer
The America of HBO’s television series “Watchmen” is eerily like ours yet distorted, like an upside-down reflection in a fun-house mirror.
Policemen wear masks to protect their identity.
They own guns but must phone into headquarters and explain the eminent threat to unlock them for use.
A terrorist group, modeled after the KKK, is on the rise, and when the police interrogate suspects, they ask questions similar to those you’d hear at an implicit-bias training session by your humanresources department — what an investigator later in the series calls a “racism test.”
Without offering full explanation, the show’s pilot presents image after image that prods at today’s static ideas of racial dynamics, suggesting that the problem with race narratives in pop culture
might not be wrongheaded politics but lack of imagination. In other words, this show conjures images that neither hide behind subtlety nor conform to any stereotype. There is a newness to them that makes them powerful.
The show’s protagonist is Angela Abar (Regina King), an African American woman who, in the first scene, wears an áo dài, the traditional dress of Vietnam, where she was born (supposedly because the U.S. won the Vietnam War and Vietnam is now an American state). She owns a Vietnamese bake shop. Her husband is black, her children are white, and at night she spraypaints her eyes black and dons a nun’s garment to become the vigilante Sister Night. A black police officer pulls over a white pickup driver, a rare image in popular culture that both distorts and reinforces what people think about race and law enforcement today. The final image of the blood-pounding pilot is perhaps the most twisted and incendiary — a white police officer lynched from a tree, with a black man, perhaps a suspect, sitting at his feet.
This, safe to say, is not your typical adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ classic 1987 comic-book series. But what exactly is a typical superhero franchise these days? The dominance of these brands is so inescapable, so infectious, that it’s hard to have a conversation about cinema and TV without a comparison to, or against, Marvel’s “Avengers” series. Take Martin Scorsese. Last month, the director — doing press for “The Irishman,” a movie that seems as unrelated to the shenanigans of Captain America and Iron Man as they come — was asked about the omnipresence of Marvel properties in Hollywood. He tells the interviewer Marvel movies aren’t cinema. The internet exploded. After a weeklong saga of Twitter and Instagram outrage, the celebrated director ended up both clarifying and doubling down on his position in a Nov. 4 New York Times editorial.
“The most ominous change has happened stealthily and under cover of night: the gradual but steady elimination of risk,” he wrote. “Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption. Many of them are well made by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all.”
Scorsese’s definition of cinema is, of course, an opinion, one that can be agreed with or disposed of. The pro-Marvel camp declares that popcorn movies have existed for as long as Hollywood has, and that crowd-pleasing, formula-driven narratives have ruled the box office since the days of monster flicks and Westerns. But Scorsese’s defense of the auteur — a term often used to describe such directors as Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson — rightly points out a fundamental divide in popular cinema that has grown starker in the past decade.
“Watchmen” creator Damon Lindelof was well aware of this divide. The Scorsese-Marvel debate, after all, is more than a fun topic for a Friday night. It’s an all-too-real artistic challenge for anyone attempting to adapt an existing property. Stray from the canon and an artist risks being fired — which is what happened to the zany directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who were to helm “Solo: A Star Wars Story” before getting the boot because of “creative differences.” Today, the director of a superhero adaptation movie is like the director of a Beethoven symphony — more of a craftsman and servant than an original creator.
Which is why, more than a year ago, Lindelof prefaced his vision of “Watchmen” with a lengthy post on Instagram, in which he said, “We have no desire to ‘adapt’ the twelve issues Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons created thirty years ago. Those issues are sacred ground and they will not be retread nor recreated nor reproduced nor rebooted.” By clarifying to fans that he would not touch the canonical, he gave himself room to be artistic.
Except the new HBO “Watchmen” series, by pushing against canon, honors the spirit of the original 12-part graphic novel more than Zack Snyder’s faithful 2009 film adaptation. The vision of the original “Watchmen” was never about faithfulness. It was created to protest canonization. Its superheroes were nasty people with human urges — who lifted their masks to eat greasy food, who raped and murdered and lied and took offers from the U.S. government. The graphic novels were a superhero story that tried to persuade you to stop believing in superhero stories, a deconstruction rather than upholding of superhero mythology. And the story directly tackled political issues of the time, including the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon and the threat of nuclear warfare.
Which makes HBO’s “Watchmen” both an appropriate spiritual successor to Gibbons and Moore’s vision and an answer to Scorsese’s grievances. The new series begins with a depiction of the 1921 Tulsa race riot, also known as the Black Wall Street Massacre, in which hundreds of black residents of a prosperous neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., were killed at the hands of white attackers. Though it’s not yet clear in the pilot how this event is connected to the present-day plotline, the show suggests descendants of the attack are compensated by the American government via reparations.
Lindelof ’s decision to excavate this moment of real history and bring it into the modern day is not unlike Gibbons and Moore’s surrealist take on both the Vietnam War and the Cold War — both the HBO show and the original graphic novel use the language of superhero narratives as a tool to dissect the paranoias of their current society.
This places Lindelof in the same realm as “Us” and “Get Out” director Jordan Peele and “Parasite” director Bong Joon-ho — creators of so-called “popcorn” movies that nevertheless contain challenging ideas about inequity, race and class. When it comes to making a statement about the world, these artists don’t treat today’s dominance of genre as a liability, but as a superpower. They enter a well-trod tradition — for Peele, it’s horror — and reinvent the language by bending, rather than ignoring, the rules of the given genre.
The resulting product for Lindelof is a series of images that are both startlingly literal in their reflection of the era of “Black Lives Matter” and the Charlottesville, Va., attacks, yet still contains an air of mystery and symbolism. A dead white cop lynched at the supposed hands of a black man is certainly a provocative image, but what it is supposed to mean? The answer isn’t there. And thus, by creating such a bold image, Lindelof also turns into a master entertainer, a purveyor of “popcorn” entertainment — he compels us to click onto the next episode.