Watchmen, Episode 6: Black Like Hooded Justice
We finally have a good issue of Before Watchmen. It just so happens that it’s a TV episode.
Before Watchmen, you may recall, was DC comics' first big Watchmen-related cash grab under DC’s new editorial regime. It consisted of eight miniseries and one one-shot, coming to a grand total of 37 issues—three times the number of the original series (I provide my usual, unbiased assessment here). It’s possible that HBO’s Watchmen team has been giving us their own take-down of the prequel in the brief excerpts we’ve seen of American Hero Story (which also functions like a cross between the original comics’ interpolated Tales of the Black Freighter and Twin Peaks’ mock soap opera Invitation to Love). Agent Dale (Dale! A Twin Peaks reference?) Petey is uncharacteristically vehement in the three-page memo about AHS published on the peteypedia site: “I have suffered through two episodes of this dreck. …I am not looking forward to the third. But I will watch.” Sometimes I think Petey is a stand-in for the conflicted Alan Moore fan in all of us.
In confirming many viewers’ suspicions that Will Reeves, the Last Survivor of Black Wall Street, is actually Hooded Justice, Lindelof & co. reveal that, even though the series takes place decades after the Squidpocalypse, we have been watching Before Watchmen all along. More than that, we’ve even been watching a version of Geoff Johns’ still-unfinished, but generally godawful Watchmen sequel Doomsday Clock (still more dispassionate commentary from Yours Truly here). The cardinal sin of Doomsday Clock is making Dr. Manhattan (and therefore Watchmen) responsible for every stupid decision made by DC editors in the last four decades. The HBO series turns things around: Hooded Justice, the first hero in the Watchmen universe, is older than Superman, and clearly recognizes his own story when a news vendor (it’s always news vendors!) tells him about the new comicbook hero from Krypton.
When Dr. Manhattan is introduced to the public, a news anchor intones: “The superman exists and he’s American.” HBO’s Watchmen is far more radical: the American hero exists, and he’s black.[1]
Black Skin, White Masks [2]
The Hooded Justice reveal was facilitated by the original comic and a set of televised fake-outs. In the graphic novel, the skin around his eyes looks white, and there is speculation that Hooded Justice was a German-born circus strongman. On AHS, the show-within-the-show, Hooded Justice is portrayed by a white man (and even unmasked a classically handsome one in this episode’s opening scene). While we know that AHS is not accurate, the repeated image of a white Hooded Justice is a red (hooded) herring.
By revealing Hooded Justice's racial identity several episodes after the depiction of the Tulsa massacre, and after seeing the ongoing threat of the white supremacist 7th Kavalry, HBO’s Watchmen takes the standard white liberal attempts at “not seeing color” off the table. Hooded Justice doesn’t “happen to be black;” his (hidden) blackness is the new series’ point of origin. It unequivocally matters that he is black.
Suddenly the shift from the original series’ threat of nuclear war to the current series’ preoccupation with white supremacy isn’t just a matter of the creators’ political consciousness. It’s integral to the plot. Moreover, where Moore and Gibbons’ original series deconstructs superhero mythology, Lindelof’s version takes one step further. Now superheroes are yet another example of mainstream American culture appropriated from black people. [3]
Oh, and grown men running around in skin-tight costumes while beating people up? It turns out that that’s totally gay.
Back to the masks, though. Everything about Will’s double identity points to an ingenious racial critique. We are (sadly) accustomed to the phenomenon of white people putting on blackface, and also of light-skinned black people passing as white. But as Hooded Justice, Will passes as white with carefully applied pale makeup, a kind of naturalistic whiteface.
Will covers up the area around his eyes, because that’s the only patch of skin visible through his costume.[4] The effect is powerful, especially when compared to the two other masked “heroes” of the past we’ve seen on the show so far: Ozymandias, and Will’s lover, Captain Metropolis. Both of them wear variations of the classic domino mask (like the one worn by Batman’s sidekick, Robin). They are white men who disguise their identity by clothing the are around their eyes in black cloth. Now Angela’s costume also begins to make sense, at least thematically: she covers her eye line with black make-up rather than white.
I like to imagine the television series’ approach to race as inspired by two key elements of the original comic. The first is Hooded Justice’s outfit. His very name suggests the costume’s metaphor, but if we step back from the name for a moment, the idea that, in the 1930s, a man is running around in a hood with a noose around his neck should remind us of something. Specifically, of the Klan. Thus Hooded Justice’s origin as shown in this episode is rooted in lynching, with the KKK covering will’s head with a black hood before stringing him up (and letting him go). I never made the connection between his costume and the KKK before the show began, but I do wonder if some black readers of the original comic might have had different associations come to mind when they saw Hooded Justice on the page.
The second element connecting the two Watchmen appears in this episode as a casual quotation. In the comic, we see an aging Captain Metropolis trying to unite the next generation of heroes in a new team called the Crimebusters. His failure is in many ways the origin of the entire comic, since it is the Comedian’s dismissal of the Captain’s efforts that leads Ozymandias down the path of squid-induced mass murder. Captain Metropolis tries to make his point with a handy visual aid, a map of America annotated with the names of the various ills that he proposes his team remedy: Promiscuity, Anti-War Demos, Drugs, and Black Unrest. Setting aside the absurdity of gathering together a bunch of men in costumes to fight promiscuity, we are still left with the unexamined conservative bias in Captain Metropolis’s assessment of society’s problems. What does he mean by “black unrest”? The Civil Rights Movement?
Moore makes clear that superheroes are a fascist fantasy, but with Captain Metropolis, he also reminds us that they can be the willing tools of white supremacy. The Watchmen team on HBO is clear-eyed about the matter, and makes sure to have Nelson (Captain Metropolis) refuse to help his lover fight racists cops by saying that the team doesn’t get involved in “black unrest.”
No wonder Hooded Justice stops working with the Minutemen. He’s been confronted with one of the truths black Americans have faced time and time again: it turns out that, when it counted, he was never really allowed on the team after all.
Assorted Observations
Will’s wife was the baby he saved on the day of the massacre. And she grows up to be his Lois Lane!
That drumroll motif used during several scenes sounds exactly like the one used occasionally in The Leftovers.
When Hooded Justice looks at the burning building with fire coming out of its windows, it looks a lot like the multiple screens Veidt watches in the comic (and reproduced in the scene when Looking Glass is confronted by Keene).
Will’s wife leaves him when their son starts putting white make-up around his eyes, just like Will. Here we have the conflation of two moral panics: first, the bad influence of superheroes (or superhero comics, in our world), and second, the feminizing threat of the queer parent (boys shouldn’t be putting on make-up).
I am nostalgic for a time when Nostalgia didn’t come in a bottle.
Notes
[1] The black superhero whose race is disguised by a mask is a familiar comicbook trope. John Ridley and George Jeanty’s The American Way (Wildstorm Comics, 2006) features a team of 1960s heroes, one of whom turns out to be an African American when he is unmasked. The title character in Kevin Grevioux's Adam: Legend of the Blue Marvel (Marvel, 2008-2009), is asked to retire from crimefighting when his race is revealed in 1962. Miles Morales, the Afro-Latino teen hero of Ultimate Spider-Man, is surprised by the flurry of reactions when a tear in his costume shows the world his dark brown skin (Spider-Man 2, 2016). And, of course, the Black Panther usually wears a full-face mask, but his race was never a secret.
[2] This reference to Fanon is not original to me. A Fanon/Watchmen meme has been circulating on the Internet since the sixth episode dropped.
[3] In this case, white America at least has the excuse of ignorance. Actually, that’s white America’s favorite excuse, but in this case it’s legitimate, since virtually nobody knew Hooded Justice’s real identity.
[4] Of course, it probably would have been simpler just to alter the costume, but then the show wouldn’t be consistent with the source material. Plus this is a lot more interesting.
Comments (8)
Hoschimoto 8 months ago · 0 Likes
I know this earlier post and I was referring to it. When you wrote the post you just pointed at, you could not have known whether this show was copying Moore by just using his caracters or this was double-Moore by reinventing Moore-characters in a Moore-way.
I was with you on the older post but I am not anymore since episode 6. What they did to Hooded Justice (and with that also to the history of comic books as you pointed out) was so strong and so much like Moore (in reinventing characters and rewriting their history) that I have no doubts anymore they have a right on their own to do what they do with the show.
Eliot Borenstein 8 months ago · 0 Likes
Ah, sorry about that. For me, it's still an ethical conundrum. I love this show, and will continue to watch it and write about it--it's the best show on television right now.
But does the fact that it is good make it justified (keeping in mind Moore's objections)? Or that it was a clever, Moore-like reinvention? Moore's revisions of existing characters were never made against the explicit wishes of their living creator(s) (the closest thing to an exception I can think of is Marvelman/Micracleman (whose creator everyone thought was dead, but I don't think has registered an actual objection)).
When it comes to creators, I find that (ironically, but totally consistently) my position is probably closes to that of Lindelof himself. Lindelof doesn't seem to think he had the right to do this, either; he jokes about getting cursed by Moore.
Lindelof and his team are brilliant, but brilliance isn't an ethical justification. The closes Lindelof has come to a tenable stance is pragmatic: someone was going to do it, so I may as well be the one and make it as good as it can be.
For me, this is a problem without a solution: no one should have touched Watchmen over Moore's objections, but, in this particular case, I'm really glad they did.
Hoschi 8 months ago · 0 Likes
"brilliance isn't an ethical justification"
This is where we disagree.
There is derivative stuff out there that is so bad, so devoid of any ambition and respect for the original that there is no ethical justification for doing it, just a financial one.
And if you believe in that, like I do, than there can be an ethical justification for derivative work simply by it being brillant.
Eliot Borenstein 8 months ago · 0 Likes
I still can’t get behind brilliance as an ethical justification.
But I have this fantasy scenario, in which I have a conversation with Alan Moore (never gonna happen). I quote his own (well, Dr. Manhattan’s) words to him: “your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged.” And I would say: “You were treated very badly. [1] Now please go watch the show and see what you think.”
[1] And, no, I”m not comparing DC’s treatment of Moore to rape. I’m talking about how one thinks about something created out of an unlikely act. An excellent show that results from the cooperation between two arms of a corporate media empire is a thermodynamic miracle.
Hoschi 7 months ago · 0 Likes
You have a wonderful blog here and I really enjoyed it as an addition to the show. That's why I won't point out that in your daydream Alan Moore would of course agree with you, thus giving the tv show his approval which leads to ethical justification due to its brillance.
Instead I will just thank you for the company during the last nine weeks. I am gonna miss that.
Eliot Borenstein 7 months ago · 0 Likes
You're right: if I'm going to daydream, I may as well go all in!
And thank you so much for the kinds words!
Hoschimoto 8 months ago · 0 Likes
Thanks for this post.
If I got it correct, than the showrunners made a character black that wasn't born (invented) black.
Isn't that that most Alan Moore-thing (= moorian thing?) you can do to a character? Taking someone the audiece thinks it knows and turning it completely upside down.
And if you agree with me: Doesn't that answer your question about whether it is okay to do a Watchmen-TV show? It is okay, if you do it like this.
Nobody who has based the bigger part of his career on reinventing other people's characters could be opposed to somebody else reinventing one of his own, few original characters and expect to be taken seriously. He could only be opposed to lame retellings of his original stories (Before Watchmen, anybody?), but that is not what we are watching here.
Eliot Borenstein 8 months ago · 0 Likes
It's definitely got an Alan Moore vibe, and I love the show. I also see your point. But I think there is a distinction, because Moore is still alive, has made his express wishes known, and was screwed multiple times by DC. FYI, I write about this at greater length in an earlier post: https://thewatchmenwatch.org/blog/after-watchmen-originality-and-moral-rights