[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 ways the
HBO show humanizes the graphic novel’s most (literally) fantastic character.
I taught Watchmen (the graphic novel) in my Intro
to Science Fiction & Fantasy class this past semester (such
as it was), and as has been the case each time I’ve taught the book, we
spent a fair amount of time talking (well, in this case writing in shared
Google Docs) about how we would define its genre. Partly that’s because we read
Watchmen last, so by that time we’ve
spent a dozen weeks talking about science fiction, fantasy, weird
tales, and other related genres. But partly it’s because Watchmen defies easy genre
characterizations: it’s clearly a superhero comic in some key ways (even
published by DC Comics); but it also
has numerous elements of alternate history, or perhaps a dystopian science
fiction story that has emerged out of an alternate history. And speaking of
science fiction, then there all the elements that the character of Jon Osterman/Dr.
Manhattan adds into the mix—not just the supernatural powers caused by his
nuclear accident (a somewhat typical superhero trope, of course), but also the related
elements like time travel and telepathy that his situation brings with it. In
truth, Manhattan has always seemed to me to exist outside of the rest of Watchmen in not only genre but in those other
ways as well, and I’ve found it somewhat difficult to frame him within the
novel.
If you’re going
to have Dr. Manhattan in your story (and the HBO show, like the Snyder film
before it, does so), then you’re going to have to deal with those elements and
effects (and, yes, with the infamous giant
blue phallus, which is not a phrase I ever expected to write on this blog
but here we are). But HBO’s Watchmen
finds a couple smart and compelling ways to add humanity to Manhattan’s role
and identity, transforming this fantastic character into part of its world and
story much more fully in the process. One of them, considering the continued aftermath
of Manhattan’s supernatural victory for the US forces during the Vietnam War,
is perhaps an inevitable effect of making the show a temporal sequel to the
graphic novel, but is nonetheless handled with nuance and depth (more so, I’d
say, than in the novel, which is also set some years after the conclusion of
the war). On a broad level, that means for example the decision to make Vietnam
a U.S. state, and to make one of the show’s central new characters a
Vietnamese American woman (about whom I will say no more, even in a spoilerific
series). But it also means creating plot threads that depict continued conflicts
within Vietnam, ones caused specifically by both the US victory and its ongoing
presence. Dr. Manhattan might have decided that knowing everything that will
happen means nothing matters, that is, but the show’s depiction of Vietnam
reminds us that for everyone else that’s far from the truth.
And in fact, the
show’s other central choice related to Manhattan works very effectively to
change that omniscient, all-powerful side to the character as well. The show’s
8th episode, “A
God Walks into Abar” (serious SPOILERS in both that great Sepinwall piece
and the rest of this paragraph), dives into the story of how Dr. Manhattan met
and fell in love with Angela Abar, and how through that relationship he was
convinced to give up his omniscience and powers in exchange for the possibility
of a genuinely shared human love. That plotline works as an interesting counter
to Manhattan’s story in the graphic novel, where we only see his human
relationship with fellow scientist Janey Slater in flashback and where his
romance with Laurie Juspeczyk/Silt Spectre is consistently overshadowed by his supernatural
powers. HBO’s Watchmen imagines
instead how a profoundly human love might be powerful enough to overshadow the
supernatural, and what might result, for this fantastic character, his lover,
and the entire world, from that shift.
Last
WatchmenStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other takes on the show you’d share?
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