'Never take somebody else's Nostalgia!': Watchmen, liberal dreams and who gets to hijack the apocalypse

 Watchmen kind of hits different after one of your parents dies. 

I'm talking, of course, about the 2019 HBO series, not the Zack Snyder movie, or the DC Comics graphic novel created by Dave Gibbons and 'The Author'. You have to give Alan Moore props for an amazing lateral magical move there: his refusal to have his name on any of his published work he doesn't own has created an indelible link between his name and the concept of 'The Author' to the point where he becomes almost an archetype of authorship. Given that he has in the past mused on how the Creator of this universe might tip off 'readers' as to the identity of his self-insert character in a way which strongly suggests Moore himself is Jehovah's Mary-Sue, I'm not entirely sure that's coincidence. 

Moore was, after all, always fascinated by the idea of putting God in the picture. The superhero-as-god is something he returns to again and again in his work - arguably, Watchmen is not even his most successful exploration of the trope: Miracleman has the title character, an updating of Mick Anglo's British Captain Marvel rip-off, facing down human governments to outline his plan to build Utopia. In one memorable scene a character who is clearly Maggie Thatcher (though never named as such - a politeness also observed by the 2000AD strip Invasion! when Britain's new Volgan overlords execute a person bearing a startling resemblance to the then-Prime Minister on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral, giving the shotgun-toting Bill Savage a casus belli for his one-man war against the occupation) tells the blue-suited ubermensch that they cannot allow him to interfere so directly in the workings of the market, only to have the god-among-mortals simply look her in the eye and ask 'Allow?' 

I'm Miracleman, bitch

At this point it has been established, in an episode described by Elizabeth Sandifer as the 'absolute conceptual limit' of the superhero battle, that a being like Miracleman is capable of carrying out atrocities on a scale which is quite literally beyond even the very worst that humans - including even Thatcher's best buddy, General Pinochet - can do. So that single word, 'allow?', is more terrifying than anything in Moore's Watchmen - but it isn't Moore's Watchmen I want to talk about in this piece - it's Damon Lindelof's. 

I wanted to watch Watchmen again because this blog has become about the war against nostalgia - as embodied by the image and complex of associations I call KCACO - and this is, in its own way, one of the concerns of Lindelof's series. On one level, you can see Lindelof's Watchmen as a reaction against Zack Snyder's thoroughly nostalgia-driven adaptation of the original graphic novel, an adaptation concerned more with slavish recreation of individual panels of Moore and Gibbons' work than engaging with its themes (Lindelof satirises this quality of Snyder's adaptation in the 'American Hero Story' show-within-a-show: the shot of Hooded Justice under interrogation, in particular, is framed, lit and colour-graded in such a way that it literally looks like one of Gibbons' panels, even though no such scene ever occurs in the original comic). By framing his version of Watchmen explicitly as a possible sequel to Moore's work, Lindelof frees himself from Snyder's concerns and is able to engage more fully with those themes - one of which, of course, is Nostalgia - the name of a range of perfume created and sold by Adrian 'Ozymandias' Veidt in the original novel, and, in the TV show, of a revolutionary (and quickly outlawed) drug developed by Lindelof's upgrade of Veidt's evil CEO, Lady Trieu. 

Girls to the front, Adrian

'Never take somebody else's Nostalgia' is a warning referring to the drug in this show, but it could also apply to the wildly inaccurate version of the past envisioned in 'American Hero Story', or the version the series' major antagonists, the Rorschach-masked Seventh Kavalry, are seeking to reimpose. When challenged on the presence of a Klan robe in a secret compartment in his wardrobe, Don Johnson's Chief Judd Crawford avers that it's a matter of 'heritage', not hate, though his interlocutor, an aging Hooded Justice who is extremely far from the version AHS's producers imagine, doesn't let him get away that easily, asking why he then hides his 'heritage'. 

Sandifer has argued, in her series Last War In Albion, that Watchmen, though written long before Moore's formal announcement that he had decided to pursue a magical career, can be viewed as a spell to bring about the end of the Cold War (given the damage wrought by neoliberalism since its victory, of course, one might question the degree to which this was necessarily a good thing). One laudable aspect of Lindelof's Watchmen is the way it turns the spotlight on aspects of America's history that the official narrative would rather downplay, most notably in its decision to locate the story's origin in the Tulsa Race Massacre. Indeed, Watchmen portrays a world in which Veidt's plan to create an apocalypse of his own to short-circuit nuclear Armageddon has led to a decisive victory over this piece of what Milan Kundera would call 'organised forgetting': the Tulsa of Lindelof's Watchmen has a gleaming family heritage centre in which black Americans who want to trace their connections to the Tulsa massacre can do so, guided through the process by a friendly hologram of United States Treasury Secretary Henry Louis Gates Jr. The scenes featuring Gates' hologram represented, in 2019, a near-orgasmic fantasy for liberal West Wing fans frustrated with the damn Cheeto in the White House. A lot of aspects of Lindelof's Watchmen can be traced to dissatisfaction with the Trump regime: though Robert Redford's run for President is mentioned in Moore and Gibbons' original text, the idea that he enjoys a similar multi-term reign to that of the Richard Nixon who could call in the Comedian to deal with Woodward and Bernstein is an invention of Lindelof's show, as is the right-leaning segment of the white population opting to drop out of society and live in 'Nixonvilles' (we see one example of a Nixonville in the show: Peteypedia, HBO's equivalent of the bonus material which fleshed out the world of Moore's Watchmen in between chapters, tells us there are more).

To his credit, Lindelof doesn't allow the liberal viewer to luxuriate in their fantasies for too long. 'Little Fear of Lightning', one of my personal favourite episodes of the series, follows the story of Wade 'Looking Glass' Tillman, one of Tulsa's masked cops and a survivor of '11/2', the date when Veidt, in the original text, succeeds in teleporting a giant apparently alien squid into the centre of Manhattan and kills millions in order to save billions by ending the Cold War. Traumatised by both this event and a sexual assault that precedes it by seconds (Wade later locates the perpetrator among the dead), he lives his life in fear of another 'dimensional incursion', until the Kavalry, as part of their plan, show Wade proof of Veidt's handiwork, in the form of his taped address to the incoming President Redford outlining his plans (unlike Miracleman, Ozymandias lacks the power to force his Utopia into being, a fact he is, as we see in a later episode, bitterly frustrated by). Wade is as traumatised by this revelation as he is by the original attack, despairingly asking his colleague Angela 'Sister Night' Abar, the series' main protagonist, 'is anything true?' before betraying her in a scene which sees Abar violate the taboo on taking another person's Nostalgia in a way which has major revelations for the plot of the show as a whole. 

What all the villains in Lindelof's Watchmen share is a desire to impose their own version of the past on the present in some way. Senator Keene, the secret leader of the Seventh Kavalry, wants to turn the clock back on the era of 'Redfordations' and white people having to say sorry and go back to an America which doesn't commemorate the Tulsa Massacre. Ozymandias wanted to build Utopia on the false history that New York was attacked by aliens instead of him. His daughter, Lady Trieu, clones her own mother and feeds her Nostalgia based on the memories of her original body, in an act which, Peteypedia suggests, may be one of revenge on her mother for the pressure she put on her as a child. And all of them scheme to achieve their ultimate goal by hijacking the apocalypse - Veidt by staging his own, and Trieu and Keene by seeking to co-opt the power of the one man who really does have the power to change the world - the supposedly long-absent Doctor Manhattan. Kill God, become God - that's an apocalypse, alright. A revelation. 

Senator Keene would like to remind you covid is still out there.

Of course, none succeeds. Keene winds up liquidated, Trieu is killed by frozen fish and Ozymandias, in another scene guaranteed to elicit fist-bumps from writers of Robert Mueller fanfic, is arrested by Looking Glass and FBI Agent Laurie Juspeczyk moments after triumphantly thwarting his daughter's plan. So far, so liberal: no one man should have all that power, to quote Kanye before he went weird and started hanging out with heavy metal rapists. But the series' last trick, as everyone who's seen the final episode in which it's implied Abar absorbs the power of Doctor Manhattan with his consent, is to ask: what if one woman had that power, and she was black? 

It is, of course, only implied because Lindelof's Watchmen ends in the same way as Moore's, with a last shot pregnant with possibility, on the threshold of revelation but tantalisingly far from over it (and also, for good measure, quotes Snyder by cutting from that threshold to a cover of a sixties rock classic, though for my money Snyder's choice of My Chemical Romance covering Dylan's 'Desolation Row' is a rare instance of the usually tin-eared Snyder picking the better tune). But like Moore's ending, it's only superficial possibility: just as the entire weight of the preceding plot dictates that Seymour's hand is going to pick up Rorschach's journal, we know that when Angela Abar's foot touches water she'll learn she can walk on it. 

The real question, of course, is: what's next? As Abar's grandfather, the original Hooded Justice, observes of Doctor Manhattan, 'he could have done more'. What kind of Utopia will be created by a superhero-as-god who doesn't look like a neo-Nazi fantasy? Lindelof chooses to leave this to our imagination. 

For purposes of my current project, however, Lindelof's Watchmen has two things to tell us: first of all, nostalgia is political, which we kind of already knew; but secondly, in order to break the death-grip of nostalgia one might have to end the world. That seems especially likely in times like these, when the only alternative to permanent retrospection seems to be a future in which, beyond a few tech billionaires who will enjoy a moment's luxury in their New Zealand bunkers before being decapitated by their Heads of Security, humanity dies out after decades of utter misery in Climate Hell. When you phrase things like that, KCACO almost seems preferable. Why fight for the future when the future's running out?