Death of a Nation
Watchmen offers a restless vision of a society in moral collapse.
ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS you’ll notice about Damon Lindelof ’s Watchmen is that the characters who wear masks seem to have trouble keeping them off. The HBO series is a follow-up rather than an adaptation of its source, set in an alternate present more than three decades after the events of Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins’s industry-realigning 1986 comic—er, graphic novel. Watchmen was ground zero, along with contemporaneous works like Frank Miller’s Ronin and The Dark Knight Returns and Moore’s The Killing Joke, for the “grim and gritty” craze that continues to this day. True to the spirit of those inquisitive, psychology-driven revisionist ’80s works, Lindelof ’s series never loses sight of the core question of why people would don masks, even in situations where it’s not important to hide who they are.
Watchmen’s restless dystopia is riven by racism and class anxiety, even more so than the present-day United States, and the country seems to have made peace with a mutated version of authoritarian rule—although the fact that the strongman running the country is liberal environmentalist, gun-control advocate, and former actor Robert Redford, still chugging along after 26 years as president, complicates the analogies to Trump’s America. (Redford himself is not in the series, but his name is spoken often.) There’s a racially motivated hot war between the guardians of the state and racist elements in the populace, represented by a melting-pot police force whose members wear masks to prevent enemies from identifying and murdering them. The main antagonists are the Seventh Kavalry, a Ku Klux Klan–influenced militia that stockpiles weapons and attacks officials and institutions while wearing masks inspired by Rorschach, a character from the original comic who was the only vigilante who refused to be employed by the U.S. government.
It makes sense that Kavalry members would wear masks when carrying out terrorist actions and committing crimes, and that the police would wear their own, often more personalized masks while
on duty, and while carrying out off-thebooks vigilante missions—as when detective Angela Abar (Regina King) decides to capture a suspect in a police shooting without authorization and puts on the costume of her own alter ego, Sister Night: a flowing hooded cloak and black face paint. But there are many other moments where characters wear them even though they have no apparent reason to. One of Angela’s fellow officers, Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson), wears a silvery ski mask with no eyeholes (how does he see?) even when he’s at home watching American Hero Story and eating an old-fashioned TV dinner. Does wearing a mask liberate or hide these characters? A bit of both, probably, because people are complicated.
Moore and Gibbons’s series was released midway through Ronald Reagan’s second term, and many of its elements seemed to warn of latent fascistic tendencies within the United States’ cultural identity, including an obsession with superheroes and supervillains who settled ideological and personal differences through city-leveling mayhem and often claimed to be acting on behalf of higher principles even when projecting their personal issues onto the world.
The show’s story lines concentrate on American racism right from the beginning. Watchmen’s opening sequence is a re-creation of the 1921 Tulsa riot, in which a white mob destroyed an affluent African-American section of town known as Black Wall Street. This theme threads through each successive hour, investing even moments that are theoretically about the characters’ personal lives with a dread of impending racial violence. There’s plenty of literal violence, including police raids on a Kavalry staging area and a crackdown on a fenced-in trailer park called Nixonville. But Lindelof & Co. give these and other seemingly straightforward scenes touches that complicate an easy reading (or just muddle things up). The images of poor whites fenced in by armed police plays into Trump fantasies of the dominant demographic in the U.S. as an embattled minority beset by deep-state forces and muzzled by political correctness. And for avatars of righteousness, the cops are quite comfortable with torture, which the series portrays as a not merely defensible but effective means of extracting useful information.
While early episodes keep a tight focus on a new race war happening on the ground in Tulsa, Watchmen slowly widens its view to incorporate other characters, some of whom are drawn from the original series. Adrian Veidt (Jeremy Irons), a.k.a. Ozymandias, long missing and officially declared dead, is secretly living in a remote château, where he rides horses, works in the nude, and is attended to by young servants who double as actors in his plays. The great Jean Smart, fresh off FX’s psychedelic comic-book adaptation Legion, plays an older, more hard-bitten version of Silk Spectre, a crime fighter from the original. Among the new characters, the standout is Angela’s boss, Chief Judd Crawford (Don Johnson), who wears a white hat and professes to have enjoyed an “all-black” local production of Oklahoma! (This is the most charming that Johnson has been since Miami Vice—although his casting in this part, as well as the character’s Oklahoma!-derived name, guarantees that the character’s no saint.)
Beyond the embellishments and reimaginings of the source material, the biggest hurdle this Watchmen will face is the way it tells its story. Although each chapter has the feel of a stand-alone, it’s ultimately a highly serialized tale—one that takes its sweet time easing you into its world and making you work to understand who’s who and what’s actually going on. It’s easy to imagine viewers who aren’t already invested in the very idea of a Watchmen sequel growing impatient with the show’s gradual doling out of exposition; this might turn out to be a case where it’s better to watch the entire thing later, in a single sitting, to eliminate the feeling that not enough is happening. Still, the sheer nerve of Watchmen is admirable, as is Lindelof ’s determination to make a newish comicbook series that’s bound to be as divisive as the work that sparked his imagination as a teenager.