Watchmen is one of those comics that’s so revered, the announcement of an adaptation brings more nervousness than excitement. The last time someone tried, we got an almost panel-accurate recreation of the comic, and even that had some baffling changes.
It doesn’t help that Rorschach as a character is so easily misunderstood. He’s not the hero of that story. He’s a lame loner parody of Steve Ditko’s objectivist hero The Question. That ideology is hard to satirize because no matter how ridiculous you make it, there’s always some section of the audience looks at it and goes, “hell yeah, badass.” That reaction was basically the movie. Director Zack Snyder made it into a superhero movie. He softened Rorschach’s racism and xenophobia so he’d be more palatable to audiences, completely missing the point of the character.
Watchmen, in its pilot, doesn’t have that problem. Its opening scene is the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, an event in American history that doesn’t get nearly the attention it should. Basically, white mobs attacked homes and businesses in a wealthy Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Between 100 and 300 people are estimated to have died. Here, we see it from the perspective of a young boy being rushed through the streets, seeing his neighbors be shot and dragged through the streets. It’s a horrifying tone-setter for the pilot, which doesn’t let up on themes of racial violence. The last we see of the boy, the wagon he’s escaping in flips over. He and a baby girl are the only two survivors.
Sara Vickers, Tom Mison, Jeremy Irons. (Credit: Colin Hutton/HBO)
HBO’s Watchmen isn’t a direct adaptation of the comic. It’s not trying to tell the story of the comic. It’s taking the themes of the comic and extrapolating them into an alternate universe 2019. Here, police wear masks and have to call for permission to release their weapons. Nixon is on Mount Rushmore. Robert Redford, not Ronald Reagan, was the actor who became president. The show has a tense and unnerving atmosphere hanging over every scene, and these little hints at how this alternate 2019 is different from ours provide welcome breaks in the tension.
There’s a ton of it, too. From the race massacre scene at the beginning, we go to a cop carrying out a traffic stop. The man being pulled over seems nervous and makes a joke about the cop’s mask. When he digs his license and registration out of the glove box, the cop sees a Rorshach mask and returns to his car to get his weapon released. Before he can, he’s shot through his windshield. The driver tosses a head of romaine lettuce through the hole in the windshield.
The whole series has a surrealism that not enough comic adaptations play in. It shows us the 2019 that logically follows from the end of Alan Moore’s comic. Police and masked vigilantes work together. Squids rain down from the sky, letting us know that the Cold War ended because of the sudden appearance of a giant alien squid, not an attack by Dr. Manhattan as in Snyder’s movie. So far, the series embraces the strangeness of Moore’s comic in a way I thought no adaptation ever would.
Even in the comics world, attempts to expand Watchmen’s universe have had mixed results. Before Watchmen was a needless prequel whose writing couldn’t come close to the original’s. And Doomsday Clock is fun, but feels more like a marketing strategy than a story that needed to be told. One episode in, and HBO’s new series is a much more faithful expansion of Watchmen than either of DC’s comic attempts.
(Mark Hill/HBO)
On its surface, the world of Watchmen in 2019 appears a lot more racially harmonious. 98 years after the terrorist attack in Tulsa, equality is the norm. It appears to be the society we pretend 2019 actually is. Where systemic racism doesn’t hinder Black progress. Wealth and prosperity in Tusla (at least the neighborhood we see, is the norm for all races. The police department is diverse. There’s an all-Black production of Oklahoma and, as far as we know, no one’s whining about reverse racism over it. The series doesn’t try to pretend racism magically stopped existing, though. When our main character Angela Abar tells her daughter’s class about her bakery, a white boy in the class asks if she got it through government-sponsored reparations or ‘Redfordations.’ For which he gets hit. So racism exists, but it’s widely discouraged and the only people the police appear to oppress are white supremacists.
We all know this is setting itself up for some twist down the line. I highly doubt this show will try and make us sympathize with the white supremacists. So far, it seems smarter than that. But the cracks are already starting to show in the facade of racial harmony. Countless states have been added to the country, including Vietnam. (Yay, colonialism?) And though the police force is racially diverse, their tactics are just as suspect as they are in the real world. Angela, working as a masked vigilante for the police, tracks down a suspected white supremacist and beats him for information until blood pours out from under the door. We don’t feel sorry for the guy, but these cops are still cops and shouldn’t automatically have our trust. The cops and vigilantes are playing with common American hero archetypes, and the show uses its violence to question how we view these local “heroes.” Which is everything I wanted from an adaptation of Watchmen.
Regina King (Credit: Mark Hill/HBO)
Even with the police skirting the law, the Rorschach-worshiping white supremacist groups are clearly the bad guys. At the end of the episode, the Chief of Police’s car is attacked. Angela gets a threatening call from someone who knows her name and the name of her father. She follows the caller’s directions to see the chief, who had just been singing showtunes to her family at the dinner table hours earlier, lynched. It’s a chilling image to end the episode on, and just as it did with the opening traffic stop, the show is forcing us to question our perceptions. This is a common image of racial violence in our world. Does it mean anything different when the roles are swapped? Why?
Watchmen kicked off the series with masked heroes, strange surrealism, and violence that started with the kind of exciting, polished superhero action we’re used to and escalated to bloody and horrifying. It’s a takedown of white supremacy that also aims to get us questioning our own biases. Who are our heroes, and what do we excuse because of the good they do? I admit I was nervous when I saw Damon Lindelof’s name attached to this. I expected something meandering and vague and ultimately unsatisfying. Instead, we got a pilot that might be some of his best work. It knows what it wants to say and says it with bombast, terror and beauty. This isn’t a straight adaptation of Watchmen, the way the 2009 movie tried to be. Instead, it’s a meditation on, and updating of the themes the original work was addressing. And because of that, it understands the original work so much more than the movie ever could.
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