This week, I want to talk about Watchmen, the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, and carried on in the stunningly good HBO series of the same name, helmed by Game of Thrones showrunner Damon Lindelof.
When the TV series debuted last fall, many of my friends talked about how good it was, but as usual, I’m a little slow to get around to things.
I started watching the HBO series a couple of nights ago…and binged the first three episodes. They knocked my socks off.
The wild thing is how incredibly relevant it is now, in the midst of nationwide protests about racial inequality and police brutality and white supremacists slithering out of the woodwork. Over the 4th of July weekend, a black activist escaped an attempted lynching, caught on video, in Indiana.
The first episode opens with one of the worst instances of white supremacist violence in the history of the U.S., the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, where hundreds of people were slaughtered, thousands left homeless, and an entire, affluent black suburb was erased from the map in a single day.
This new story dovetails, becoming kind of a sequel, with the events of Moore and Gibbons’ graphic novel and the Zack Snyder film adaptation. The story is so different thus far, three episodes in, and yet it feels 100% Watchmen.
I teach the graphic novel in my university SF Literature class, and when Time called it “one of the best novels of the 20th century,” I think they were spot on.
So these first three episodes were so good, I felt compelled last night to go back and watch The Ultimate Cut of the film, which includes the Tales of the Black Freighter animated side-story. A lot of people hate on Zack Snyder for changing the ending from the graphic novel, but I’m not one of those. I understand why he did it. (I do hate on him for what he did to Superman in Man of Steel, but that’s another story.) I’ve long admired how effectively he took an incredibly complex work like Watchmen and translated it to a different medium. Tons of shots and visual motifs in the film are taken directly from the graphic novel.
And that’s part of what makes the HBO series so effective. It is full of shots, ideas, visual motifs, and dialogue that hearken back to both the film and the graphic novel. The same dark and gritty themes, familiar shades of moral ambiguity. It is a picture of an alternate history America eating itself alive. Just like now.
After watching the movie, I have Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin'”, Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence”, and Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” on endless loop in my head. The music coupled with the film’s visuals are burned into my brain.
Since showrunner Damon Lindelof left the series at the end of Season 1, saying he’d told the story he wanted to tell, HBO is calling it a Limited Series with no plans for a Season 2, so this is all we’re going to get, but it’s shaping up to be a real gem.