[Along with Bosch, another acclaimed show I’ve
finally had a chance to check out during lockdown is HBO’s Watchmen,
and it lived up to the hype. Among its many strengths, I’d emphasize in
particular its remarkable depth when it comes
to American history, and this week will focus on five sides to those themes
and threads. Leading up to a special weekend post sharing student perspectives
on both the show and its graphic
novel source material!]
[NB. SPOILERS
will abound all week—go check the show out and then come back to read these
posts and share your thoughts!]
On two small
details that make a stunning scene even better, and why the scene needs further
contextualization nonetheless.
Because I
watched Watchmen nearly a year after
it initially aired (I don’t get HBO, so I always catch up on HBO shows well
after the fact), I knew from scholarly Twitter and other commentaries that the
series opens with an
extended sequence set during the 1921 Tulsa massacre (even if you
haven’t seen the show yet, I recommend watching the multi-part clip hyperlinked
under “an extended sequence”; it’s the series’ opening so it’s not really
spoiling anything). I can only imagine how stunned I would have been to watch
that scene with no foreknowledge; I’ve long lamented that histories
like Tulsa’s (and the many, many other such
massacres across American
history, on which more below) are largely absent from our collective
memories, and one central reason is that there have been very few pop culture
portrayals (John Singleton’s 1997
film Rosewood is an exception,
but even that film has been mostly ignored since its release). But even knowing
it was coming, I was blown away by the raw realism of this sequence, from the
senseless individual murders to the aerial bombardment to the sheer
terror of the African American protagonists facing this horrific communal
terrorism.
Great TV and
film sequences are made from small details as much as the big picture, and two
in particular stand out to me in Watchmen’s
bravura Tulsa sequence. The more obvious but still crucial one is to begin with
the youthful protagonist watching a silent film, a fictional one depicting a
real historical figure, the legendary African American US Marshal (and likely
inspiration for the character of the Lone Ranger) Bass Reeves. That
choice not only immediately contrasts mythic pop culture ideals to the
unfolding brutal reality outside of the theater, but also implicitly points
audiences toward a very different cultural text: the white supremacist silent film Birth of a Nation. More understated
and unspoken still, but even more crucial, is the choice to have that young
African American protagonist’s father dressed in his WWI uniform; without
saying a word, that choice links this massacre to the Red
Summer of 1919, and the tragic and awful gaps between the service of WWI
African American soldiers and the realities of the discrimination and
violence they faced on the homefront.
But should those
words have somehow been said, those histories more overtly spoken? On the one
hand, it’s obviously not a dramatic TV show’s job to depict many different
histories, or even contextualize one history as fully as scholarship might;
again, just featuring this Tulsa sequence sets Watchmen apart from most other American pop cultural works. But at
the same time, one potential downside to depicting Tulsa’s extremes (like that
aerial bombardment, which did stand out from other massacres) is that it can
make it seem like the event was a one-off or an aberration. To put it bluntly, racial
massacres were between the Civil War and (at least) the
1940s much more the norm than the exception; indeed, if we see such massacres
as lynchings writ large and thus link
them to the lynching epidemic as a whole, it becomes even more difficult to
see events like Tulsa as anything other than a constant presence and threat for
African Americans. I don’t know that there’s any way a single TV show could (or
should) depict those overarching histories—but at the very least it’s crucial
that we follow up this stunning sequence with further work to make clear just
how tragically typical such events were.
Next
WatchmenStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other takes on the show you’d share?
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