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alibi_shopI'm not planning to write a lot of reviews of this show [update: I eventually wrote about the whole thing here], but the first episode (and the background text pieces for it) made me think about what it's trying to do, and what I'd like it to do, and how it relates to the comic that was pretty much my favorite thing in the whole world 33 years ago.
First, I think this is really interesting so far. I don't know if what I think they're up to is what they are really up to, and it could still go bad in so many ways. But I do think that if it is a good idea to do any kind of Watchmen follow-up at all(*), then this is the right approach in general: set it in the present day; treat all of the outlandish events of the original series as history; try to create an alternate 2019 that has a similar relationship to our world as Alan Moore's 1985 did to our world then, rather than imitating the style of Moore's 1985; and don't worry about trying to say anything about comic books per se, but do say something about power and fear.
(* I realize that "should this even exist" is a whole other can of worms. Moore is absolutely justified in resenting DC's behavior regarding the Watchmen rights among other things; any project like this is at least partly the fruit of a poison tree, although Dave Gibbons's involvement helps a bit. I'm going to just try to look at this as if I didn't know about any of that, for now.)
Moore's Watchmen, besides being a ridiculously ambitious formal experiment (if you're into that kind of thing), and not the first but the most elaborate version of the "what would such-and-such fantasy characters be like if they had to deal with the real world and vice versa" game, is basically about whether individualist power fantasies can ever be anything other than destructive. He argues pretty strongly that they can't, which he illustrates on the one hand with unbalanced loners taking the law into their own hands, and on the other hand with agents of right-wing ideology and imperialist authority (though he hedges a bit by giving us one lovely scene of costumed do-gooders sincerely doing good). The setting is an '80s liberal's nightmare of Nixonland blurring seamlessly into Reaganland; America (this is written by a young Brit, more on that later) is painted in broad strokes with a corrupt tyrant at the top, Bircherite madness bubbling up from underneath, and mostly apolitical regular folks in between who can't really do anything but wait for the Bomb to drop. Other than the one big science-fictional demigod character, it's unclear whether the various human costumed heroes have really had much of an effect on the situation—which is sort of the point: running around punching people, even if you have a cool outfit and a flying car, can't accomplish much except to get you lost in your personal mythology. The one really large-scale thing that a human being does in the book, ostensibly to save the world, is both logical and arbitrary, and it's horrible.
It wasn't the first time something like this was expressed in fiction; it wasn't even Moore's first time (see Marvelman and parts of Swamp Thing). But it was very influential and as a result, this is pretty familiar territory now. There are plenty of comics and movies about superheroes as neurotic disasters or tools of oppression; there are also plenty that still appreciate individualist power fantasies as plain old escapist fun (Moore has done some of those too). I haven't read DC's Watchmen sequel and prequel comics, but from what I've read about them, they seem to have been geared partly toward producing more of the same and partly toward integrating Watchmen into DC's other superhero stuff, both of which sound to me like misguided and terrible ideas. Also (as the movie inadvertently demonstrated) the book is very much a thing of its time, and adapting it literally as a period piece can't convey what it was saying to readers at that time.
And, while I think the book is brilliant in many ways, it's not a sacred text. Moore was a smart young British guy whose ideas about America were largely what you could get from mass media; the US setting worked in Swamp Thing because it was through a horror filter, and it worked in Watchmen because of the alternate-history angle, but I think writing convincing American characters wasn't really his strong point (I'm a huge Swamp Thing fan, but I think the only consistently well-written non-British human being in it is Chester). It's a very detailed world, but not exactly a lived-in one—the stuff about regular people is on the level of a decently-written TV drama of the time. Even though it's a story whose roots are in crime-fighting pulp, the police and the criminals are nonentities, because the story doesn't really deal with authority or anti-authority on any level in between vigilantes and military madmen. And apart from the nostalgic stuff about heroes in the early 20th century (the timeline seems to have diverged from ours in the 1930s), there's not much of a sense that US history existed or mattered prior to the Nixon years. All of this is just to say that there's plenty of room to explore this premise on levels that the book didn't really get into, and I don't mean "what if Nite Owl met Batman".
So, as someone with those opinions, I was pretty much the exact target audience for how this show chose to start out. It's in no way subtle: we're not in New York any more, we're not even in the alternate history yet, it's 1921 and we're witnessing one of the worst man-made disasters in the USA (prior to the one depicted in issue 12 of Watchmen); the show is saying it's not going to treat racism as just one of many facets of Reaganite politics, but as a long-running nightmare in its own right that definitely would not die down just because we made peace with the Soviets and elected a liberal President. The massacre in Tulsa was in effect a reaction against the birth of an alternate future, and juxtaposing that with the legend of Bass Reeves (a real person, but seen here in legend form) is very clever, because it's immediately obvious how Reeves would work perfectly as a template for another kind of costumed hero but it's also obvious why no such influence was seen in the 20th century of Watchmen. And when it becomes clear that 21st century Black Tulsa has regained strength in part due to reparations—a concept that many Americans still regard as basically science-fictional—it's as if that old alternate future has finally emerged within the new one, and the resurgence of violence against it is directly responsible for the new generation of pseudo-superheroes.
If that turns out to be the only really good idea the show has... that's not nothing. It's something Alan Moore would be very unlikely to write, but still, I think, weirdly appropriate to Watchmen.
I say "weirdly" because the other obvious big contrast to the comic is that in some ways it has an exactly opposite perspective on its costumed characters. As quite a few critics have complained, a lot of the ostensible heroes are in fact cops. We're given a lot of reasons to find them sympathetic(*) and yet their little costumed division, mirroring the use of Rorschach's costume by Klan types, has clearly adopted a lot of the worst qualities of the '80s heroes; they're getting off on beating up suspects and playing with gadgets (admittedly very cool gadgets—the bit with Tim Blake Nelson and his Parallax View-style room is visually beautiful), and it seems pretty clear that this can't end well. Where the comic dealt with individualist power fantasies, this seems to be more about collective power fantasies: that is, supposing that (unlike in 1985, or the real 2019) you actually agreed with the goals and values of society at large, what form would those old vigilante daydreams take for you? This isn't exactly a depiction of a liberal tyranny, like "If we took over, we'd end up being just like them"; it's more ambiguous, some of what's going on is positive, and it's undeniably satisfying to see Nixon reduced to a cartoon mascot for idiots but on the other hand that means you can't point upward to any one villain.
(* By "we" I mean a basically liberal audience. Right-wing viewers may think these characters are all villains from the start, but I'm pretty sure that's not who the show is for.)
And on some level, no one's completely in power. In an obvious but effective climate-change metaphor, Watchmen 2019 includes absurd unexplained phenomena reminding everyone that the world might be going down the toilet no matter what we do. It's hard for me to communicate to younger people now what it was like in 1986 to think that there was a strong chance of everything suddenly blowing up, but that if it didn't, then there might be a shiny future (the ending of Moore's comic was both cruel and cathartic in that you basically got both at once). Thirty-three years from now, if things go relatively well but we are having our asses dramatically kicked by the Earth, I imagine it'll be hard for someone looking at the fear-filled fiction of 2019 to really identify with this kind of creeping dread, where the threat hasn't entirely shown its face yet but we know it doesn't look like our previous apocalyptic ideas so we can't get our heads around it. The only thing that's clear is that collective action is necessary, and that it'll require somehow getting past our old habits and old demons.
In the meantime, I hope this show continues to surprise me.
First, I think this is really interesting so far. I don't know if what I think they're up to is what they are really up to, and it could still go bad in so many ways. But I do think that if it is a good idea to do any kind of Watchmen follow-up at all(*), then this is the right approach in general: set it in the present day; treat all of the outlandish events of the original series as history; try to create an alternate 2019 that has a similar relationship to our world as Alan Moore's 1985 did to our world then, rather than imitating the style of Moore's 1985; and don't worry about trying to say anything about comic books per se, but do say something about power and fear.
(* I realize that "should this even exist" is a whole other can of worms. Moore is absolutely justified in resenting DC's behavior regarding the Watchmen rights among other things; any project like this is at least partly the fruit of a poison tree, although Dave Gibbons's involvement helps a bit. I'm going to just try to look at this as if I didn't know about any of that, for now.)
Moore's Watchmen, besides being a ridiculously ambitious formal experiment (if you're into that kind of thing), and not the first but the most elaborate version of the "what would such-and-such fantasy characters be like if they had to deal with the real world and vice versa" game, is basically about whether individualist power fantasies can ever be anything other than destructive. He argues pretty strongly that they can't, which he illustrates on the one hand with unbalanced loners taking the law into their own hands, and on the other hand with agents of right-wing ideology and imperialist authority (though he hedges a bit by giving us one lovely scene of costumed do-gooders sincerely doing good). The setting is an '80s liberal's nightmare of Nixonland blurring seamlessly into Reaganland; America (this is written by a young Brit, more on that later) is painted in broad strokes with a corrupt tyrant at the top, Bircherite madness bubbling up from underneath, and mostly apolitical regular folks in between who can't really do anything but wait for the Bomb to drop. Other than the one big science-fictional demigod character, it's unclear whether the various human costumed heroes have really had much of an effect on the situation—which is sort of the point: running around punching people, even if you have a cool outfit and a flying car, can't accomplish much except to get you lost in your personal mythology. The one really large-scale thing that a human being does in the book, ostensibly to save the world, is both logical and arbitrary, and it's horrible.
It wasn't the first time something like this was expressed in fiction; it wasn't even Moore's first time (see Marvelman and parts of Swamp Thing). But it was very influential and as a result, this is pretty familiar territory now. There are plenty of comics and movies about superheroes as neurotic disasters or tools of oppression; there are also plenty that still appreciate individualist power fantasies as plain old escapist fun (Moore has done some of those too). I haven't read DC's Watchmen sequel and prequel comics, but from what I've read about them, they seem to have been geared partly toward producing more of the same and partly toward integrating Watchmen into DC's other superhero stuff, both of which sound to me like misguided and terrible ideas. Also (as the movie inadvertently demonstrated) the book is very much a thing of its time, and adapting it literally as a period piece can't convey what it was saying to readers at that time.
And, while I think the book is brilliant in many ways, it's not a sacred text. Moore was a smart young British guy whose ideas about America were largely what you could get from mass media; the US setting worked in Swamp Thing because it was through a horror filter, and it worked in Watchmen because of the alternate-history angle, but I think writing convincing American characters wasn't really his strong point (I'm a huge Swamp Thing fan, but I think the only consistently well-written non-British human being in it is Chester). It's a very detailed world, but not exactly a lived-in one—the stuff about regular people is on the level of a decently-written TV drama of the time. Even though it's a story whose roots are in crime-fighting pulp, the police and the criminals are nonentities, because the story doesn't really deal with authority or anti-authority on any level in between vigilantes and military madmen. And apart from the nostalgic stuff about heroes in the early 20th century (the timeline seems to have diverged from ours in the 1930s), there's not much of a sense that US history existed or mattered prior to the Nixon years. All of this is just to say that there's plenty of room to explore this premise on levels that the book didn't really get into, and I don't mean "what if Nite Owl met Batman".
So, as someone with those opinions, I was pretty much the exact target audience for how this show chose to start out. It's in no way subtle: we're not in New York any more, we're not even in the alternate history yet, it's 1921 and we're witnessing one of the worst man-made disasters in the USA (prior to the one depicted in issue 12 of Watchmen); the show is saying it's not going to treat racism as just one of many facets of Reaganite politics, but as a long-running nightmare in its own right that definitely would not die down just because we made peace with the Soviets and elected a liberal President. The massacre in Tulsa was in effect a reaction against the birth of an alternate future, and juxtaposing that with the legend of Bass Reeves (a real person, but seen here in legend form) is very clever, because it's immediately obvious how Reeves would work perfectly as a template for another kind of costumed hero but it's also obvious why no such influence was seen in the 20th century of Watchmen. And when it becomes clear that 21st century Black Tulsa has regained strength in part due to reparations—a concept that many Americans still regard as basically science-fictional—it's as if that old alternate future has finally emerged within the new one, and the resurgence of violence against it is directly responsible for the new generation of pseudo-superheroes.
If that turns out to be the only really good idea the show has... that's not nothing. It's something Alan Moore would be very unlikely to write, but still, I think, weirdly appropriate to Watchmen.
I say "weirdly" because the other obvious big contrast to the comic is that in some ways it has an exactly opposite perspective on its costumed characters. As quite a few critics have complained, a lot of the ostensible heroes are in fact cops. We're given a lot of reasons to find them sympathetic(*) and yet their little costumed division, mirroring the use of Rorschach's costume by Klan types, has clearly adopted a lot of the worst qualities of the '80s heroes; they're getting off on beating up suspects and playing with gadgets (admittedly very cool gadgets—the bit with Tim Blake Nelson and his Parallax View-style room is visually beautiful), and it seems pretty clear that this can't end well. Where the comic dealt with individualist power fantasies, this seems to be more about collective power fantasies: that is, supposing that (unlike in 1985, or the real 2019) you actually agreed with the goals and values of society at large, what form would those old vigilante daydreams take for you? This isn't exactly a depiction of a liberal tyranny, like "If we took over, we'd end up being just like them"; it's more ambiguous, some of what's going on is positive, and it's undeniably satisfying to see Nixon reduced to a cartoon mascot for idiots but on the other hand that means you can't point upward to any one villain.
(* By "we" I mean a basically liberal audience. Right-wing viewers may think these characters are all villains from the start, but I'm pretty sure that's not who the show is for.)
And on some level, no one's completely in power. In an obvious but effective climate-change metaphor, Watchmen 2019 includes absurd unexplained phenomena reminding everyone that the world might be going down the toilet no matter what we do. It's hard for me to communicate to younger people now what it was like in 1986 to think that there was a strong chance of everything suddenly blowing up, but that if it didn't, then there might be a shiny future (the ending of Moore's comic was both cruel and cathartic in that you basically got both at once). Thirty-three years from now, if things go relatively well but we are having our asses dramatically kicked by the Earth, I imagine it'll be hard for someone looking at the fear-filled fiction of 2019 to really identify with this kind of creeping dread, where the threat hasn't entirely shown its face yet but we know it doesn't look like our previous apocalyptic ideas so we can't get our heads around it. The only thing that's clear is that collective action is necessary, and that it'll require somehow getting past our old habits and old demons.
In the meantime, I hope this show continues to surprise me.
