Written by Ben Berman Ghan
A young black boy sits alone in a theatre, staring up at a projection of black and white. His mother plays piano for effect during a horseback chase as a man in black lassos a man in white. The man in black dismounts before the gathered townsfolk and unmasks. He is U.S. Deputy Bass Reeves: the black Marshal of Oklahoma. The crowd seems ready to lynch the man in white, a second corrupt sheriff. The little boy’s voice fills the silence of the title cards, reading words he must know by heart. “There will be no mob justice today! Trust in the law!”
Outside the theatre, the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 begins, and a nostalgic childhood memory becomes a nightmare. Over three hundred African American peoples are murdered in the streets by the white residents in KKK hoods, and the neighbourhood known as “Black Wall Street” burns to the ground. So begins HBO and Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen, the nine-hour sequel to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s seminal 1985 graphic novel.
In this world police conceal their identity masks evoking the Crimebusters/Minutemen of old, electric cars are abundant, the internet never came to be, Robert Redford has remained president for thirty years on a platform of reparations (Redfordations) for crimes past, and Vietnam is the 51st state. Over everything hangs the blue, glowing shadow of the superhuman Doctor Manhattan, and the Lovecraftian horror of the alien giant psychic squid that once slaughtered New York. Watchmen is not our world, but it could be. Much has been said about the politics of Watchmen, and the stellar cast, with Regina King, Tim Blake Nelson, Jeremy Irons, Jean Smart, Yahya Abdul Mateen II, and Jovan Adepo all turning in career-defining performances. Still, there is one remarkable aspect of Watchmen that can never be addressed enough: nostalgia
The series joins other works such as Jurassic World, Disney’s Star Wars, Blade Runner 2049, Creed, and Mad Max: Fury Road in a weird family of sequels released decades later. These resurrected properties are fuelled by nostalgia for the original, repackaged and often catered to new audiences who aren’t old enough to have even experienced the original releases.
Watchmen is full of love and nostalgia for the original work. A drop of blood falls on a police badge as it once did on a smiley face, lines of dialogue are repurposed and refitted to their new environment, and Tim Blake Nelson’s “Looking Glass” pulls up his shiny reflect mask halfway up his face to munch on some nuts in an image so reminiscent of Moore and Gibbon’s Rorschach that it gives chills. But merely capturing iconography doesn’t mean an adaptation understands its source material.
Watchmen has more in mind than merely evoking the “Hey, remember this?” feeling some of its cinematic peers strive for. Though not without its flaws – the subplot with Jeremy Irons takes too long to connect to the main narrative, and Hong Chau’s “Lady Trieu” never feels quite as real as the other characters, no matter how superb a job both actors are doing – Watchmen is always striving for something more. As obsessed with joke structures as the original novel, if the first four episodes of the mini-series are set- up, introducing new settings, remixing iconography, reintroducing characters from the original, then everything comes crashing down in the first scene of the 5th episode: “A Little Fear of Lightning.” We return to 1985 at the closing moments of the novel, standing in New Jersey with New York twinkling in the distance. People crying out Nixon’s name, fear of a nuclear holocaust that we the audience know will never come. Here is our nostalgia.
Then the world explodes, like so much glass in a hall of mirrors. A young man from Oklahoma stumbles through wreckage, screaming for help. The camera pans outwards, hundreds of corpses litter the street. We keep pulling back, and back, until we see the monstrous squid crushing New York City, a sightless eye staring up at us as everything dies. Thirty years later, we return to the present, and Looking Glass continues to sleep in a bunker, his head wrapped in material meant to protect from psychic blasts. “I’m not out of the tunnel,” he says. From here, everything snaps into place, and the two sides of the narrative become one.
In 1985, nostalgia was a perfume to choke on. In 2019, nostalgia becomes a drug threatening overdose, containing memories of previous lives. “Taking someone else’s nostalgia can kill you,” Jean Smart’s Laurie Blake warns, as the pills slide down Angela Abar/Sister Night’s (Regina King) throat. One person’s nostalgia is another person’s trauma, and both can be passed on through the generations. “It’s like I inherited my mother’s trauma,” one character says of the squid attack from before he was born (referred to in-show as 11/2). Inherited trauma runs deep through the blood of Watchmen, carrying with it the demented twin of inherited nostalgia.
The white supremacist 7th Calvary is nostalgic for a time before America was desegregated, a time none of them ever lived through. Angela/Sister Night carries the trauma of the Tulsa massacre even if she doesn’t understand it, passed down through generations of her family. Generations of Vietnamese remember the blue behemoth of Doctor Manhattan as the ultimate symbol of evil and death, even as America mourns the homemade god that seems to have abandoned them for other worlds. Looking Glass and a generation of Americans remain traumatised by 11/2, even while those “in the know” from the original novel remember it as the event that prevented nuclear war. And so, through all this violence, Watchmen looks outward, to its audience, and asks what we are nostalgic for, and what pain we might be masking behind that nostalgia.
Before the show ever aired, there was an outcry from fans at the fact that the 7th Calvary hate group would be wearing Rorschach masks, tying them to the fan favourite character of the comic. Some were outraged by that connection. But behind Rorschach’s mask in the book was a character drenched in misogyny, bigotry, and violence. Behind our nostalgia for the Watchmen comic, was a critique of the superhero genre, and American patriotism.
In Watchmen, there was never a simpler time. The past and our nostalgia for it are a trap, preventing us from moving forward, making change, or healing. Even Doctor Manhattan, with power over space and time, is trapped, a being of inaction as nostalgic for the past as the future he can perceive with equal clarity.
“People who wear masks are driven by trauma. They’re obsessed with justice because of some injustice they’ve suffered, ergo masks. To hide the pain,” Agent Blake declares, tired from a lifetime of costumed adventurers and the world they inhabit.
Over nine hours, Watchmen takes our nostalgia, our yearning for sequels and catharsis and adventure and, peeling back the mask, we become that little boy in a theatre looking up at the screen depicting a black law keeper born in the time when American slavery was real, the show asks us: what do we really see?
Cast: Regina King, Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, Jeremy Irons, Jean Smart, Yahya Abdul Mateen II, Jovan Adepo, Andrew Howard, Tom Mission, Louis Gossett Jr, Dylan Schombing, Hong Chau, and Sara Vickers
Executive producers: Damon Lindelof, Tom Spezialy. Nicole Kassell, Stephen Williams, Joseph E. Ibert
Premiered: October 20th, 2019-December 15th (HBO)
Ben Berman Ghan is a Jewish-Settler, writer, editor, and academic based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Treaty 13 and Williams Treaty territory. He has served as fiction editor of The Spectatorial, associate editor of The Goose, the Hart House Review, prose editor of Terse Journal, and poetry editor of The White Wall Review. He’s the author of many short stories, essays, and a few poems, and is completing his MA in English literature at Ryerson University’s Literature of Modernity program. His novel What We See in the Smoke was published in 2019 with Crowsnest Books. You can find him at @inkstainedwreck and inkstainedwreck.ca
