Nostalgia of History

Quick Precis : Watchmen

  

  Watchmen, an immaculately executed television series, adopted from the 1986 DC comic series, exceeds its genre merely as a superhero drama. It bravely zeroes in on historical racism and volatile identities mainly through the eyes of Angela Abar and Will Reeves. For a short recap, Angela’s alternate America is one where the police conceal their identities with masks and code names to protect themselves from the Seventh Cavalry, or the racist and white supremest terrorist groups. Within the search for her roots and investigation of Will, or Angela’s grandfather, who supposedly lynched her best friend, her leader, and a respected man, Judd Crawford, she discovers the pill, “nostalgia.” When consumed, Will and Angela’s memories interweave, where she experiences Will’s past in real time. 

    Like the implications of the pill, “nostalgia,” Watchmen plays with the pillars of historical romanticization, especially in relations to identity. In fact, the exaggerated, lurid, and racially biased light shone through the medium of the mask and costumes undeniably distorts identity to ultimately conceal and reveal. 

Will Reeves as Hooded Justice

    Will’s heroic costume of hood and noose reveals his trauma against the insatiable desire for social justice. From the opening scene, we see Will’s infatuation with Trust in the Law, a propagandized movie where a police badge guarantees the power to reinstate justice within the bigoted society and even as to console him for the loss of his parents during the Tulsa Massacre. His overbearing past trauma leaks into his present; When Will walks home and denies Officer Gourguin’s offer to join for a beer, he sees dead African Americans dragged behind the car driving away. The garish streaks of blood mirror his crushing trauma and alarm the urgent need for its termination. However, the police badge of reality does nothing but display him as an exquisite pawn. Thus, his costume also conceals his identity and justifies his frenzied rage against such frustration. In fact, Reeves, the protagonist in Trust in the Law romanticizes lawful rule and condemns mob justice. However, Will relies on this very means to fulfill his desires of justice: When he faces near death lynching, violence bubbles within, thus he later burns down a warehouse full of mercilessly shot Cyclops members. His fractured identity, like how he wears the heroic mask along with the police outfit, walks a fine line between crime and a heroic odyssey, protagonist and antagonist, and police and vigilante. Such slippery mishmash, alike memory, projects his desires, but at the same time, becomes a vice: Neither does such violence undo his childhood trauma nor bring justice. Rather, it drowns him further within his fantasies of Hooded Justice and poisons those around him. Thus, the relics of trauma and identity are inherited by his granddaughter, Angela, who is also left powerless within the encumbering search for her own identity.

Angela Abar in the crime scene where Crawford is lynched

Note to self: Explain relation between the fractured identity, inherited trauma, and historical romanticization