On WATCHMEN and the Audacity of Black Heroism
It is May 24, 2018. 140 days into the production of Season 1 of HBO’s Watchmen, the show’s creator — a term he’s hesitant to use considering Watchmen is an adaptation of the work of one of his idols — Damon Lindelof, pens an open letter to fans, potential viewers, and skeptics in part as an act of penance for the blasphemous act of adapting Alan Moore’s sacred work. But he also wants to prime viewers for one of the show’s most audacious acts. In the letter, Lindelof writes: “Some of the characters will be unknown. New faces. New masks to cover them. We also intend to revisit the past century of Costumed Adventuring through a surprising, yet familiar set of eyes…and it is here where we will be taking our greatest risks.” At this time, there is no way to know just how risky what he and his collaborators are attempting to pull of truly is.
It is November 24, 2019 and one of the great television episodes of 2019 has just aired, in which a world-altering secret has finally been revealed. In an incredibly bold recontextualizing of the source material that Lindelof refers to as “the Old Testament”, it has been revealed that the original costumed hero of the Watchmen universe, the mysterious Hooded Justice, was not (as many had always assumed) white, but a Black man by the name of Will Reeves. The very same Will Reeves introduced in the first episode of the show, who was orphaned and traumatized during the Black Wall Street Massacre of 1921. With this revelation, the show upends and reimagines the genesis of superheroism as a uniquely Black response to a racist act of domestic terrorism. Though he wouldn’t don the costume for years to come, it was there, in the Dreamland Theater in Tusla, Oklahoma in 1921 that Will Reeves became Hooded Justice.
In many ways, the thoughtfulness with which Lindelof’s show presents the birth of Hooded Justice nearly places the idea that he could have been anything but a black man outside the realm of imagination (though he may well have been in Moore’s imagining). In fact, it now seems obvious that Justice was always coded as a Black man in disguise (the noose, the ropes), and that vigilantism in response to acts of white supremacy were a natural outcome.
So, let’s return to the mention of the “familiar set of eyes that would be used to revisit the Costumed Adventuring” of the 20th Century. This was, of course a reference to the eyes of Will Reeves behind the mask of Hooded Justice, which he covered in makeup to hide his racial identity. Lindelof says one of the primary ideas that drew him to adapting this beloved property (an opportunity he turned down twice before) was the chance to both explore Hooded Justice in-depth, while also making what he calls a “radical retcon”. In the original comics, not only is Hooded Justice’s face never shown, no one in the Minutemen is even on a first name basis with him. This led Lindelof to ask “what and why is he hiding?” At the same time these ideas were simmering in his head, he came across Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” the thought came to him that perhaps Hooded Justice was hiding his face because it was the only way he could safely carry out justice. And thus, Will Reeves was born. The original masked hero was Black, but he couldn’t let you know it.
Other than his physical form while donning the costume, all we ever see of Hooded Justice in the Moore’s comics are his eyes. But this presented an interesting challenge for Lindelof’s retcon, because the eyes we see behind the hood are white. How could Hooded Justice be Black if the only indication of his identity we are given in the original text are his clearly Caucasian eyes? Fortunately, the workaround Lindelof and team found in the writers room only strengthen the thematic resonance of the Hooded Justice reveal. Not only was Hooded Justice, the original hero, forced to hide his identity behind a mask, he furthermore had to present as ostensibly white. So, what he have is a Black man who at night becomes a white man in order to carry out the justice he couldn’t as a Black man – a black cop – in the light of day. When looked at through this lens, it is a profoundly sad situation that Will Reeves finds himself in. And this comes across in the show. Though it’s clear that Will only truly feels alive as Hooded Justice, what it is also true is that he takes no joy in it. The Hooded Justice persona, for him, is a responsibility, and later an albatross. It isolates him first from the world, and ultimately his family.
Will Reeves’ idol, inspiration, and namesake, was a Wild West lawman by the name of Bass Reeves, who served as the first black deputy U.S. Marshall west of the Mississippi River. Bass Reeves was, in fact, a very real person whom some believe to be the inspiration for the Lone Ranger. If true, this would make Bass yet another example of a historically black hero being whitewashed in the media (i.e. Hooded Justice in the show-within-a-show American Hero Story).
In Lindelof’s Watchmen universe, Reeves is the subject of the silent film Trust In The Law, directed by Oscar Micheaux (a real life figure, generally considered the first major African American filmmaker). The film plays on the classic black hat/white hat trope by depicting a figure shrouded in black pursuing a white man — both in apparel and skin tone — whom he soon captures. But unlike typical Western fare, in this story, the man in black removes his hood and displays his badge, revealing himself in shocking fashion to be Bass Reeves: the good guy. (To put into context how daring this would have been at the time, note that the film’s premiere would have been just 6 years after D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of A Nation”.) As a child, Trust In The Law was Will’s favorite film and Bass’ hooded visage seems to have been a direct influence on Will’s costume as Hooded Justice. But interestingly, even more than Will, Bass Reeves’ story in Trust In The Law is paralleled by that of Angela Abar over 100 years later.
As we learn in episode 7, Angela’s Sister Night persona was inspired by the fictional blaxploitation film of the same name that she discovered as a child, though Angela’s outfit features a hood, to better conceal her identity, which serves as an (unwitting?) homage to both her grandfather and his hero Bass Reeves. Angela’s story plays as a fascinating inverse of her grandfather’s. Will Reeves became Hooded Justice as a response to feeling hamstrung (and strung up) by the racism of the police force and of the era. Will couldn’t be a hero until he was Hooded Justice. Angela, meanwhile, experiences a ton of freedom within the police force as Sister Night. She even has a close friendship with Judd, the sheriff of Tulsa. But Sister Night is an agent of the police force, and thusly operates with the same authoritarian principles that they do. She beats information out of witnesses and leads a violent raid of Nixonville. As a police officer, she is complicit in the crimes of the police force.
But she does all of her best work as Angela Abar. Everything she uncovers about Will, Judd, and Lady Trieu she does in plain clothes, as Angela, not as Sister Night. Like Bass, it’s when she removes the hood that she becomes a hero. This is cemented in the final scene of the season (of the series?) when Angela eats the egg left to her by Dr. Manhattan and, presumably, absorbs his power. Moments before, her grandfather criticized the deceased Manhattan for not doing more with his power. It seems, in retrospect that he was aware of the power Angela would inherit and tasked her with being better than both he and Manhattan had been. And with that, the world’s first masked hero, a black man, had challenged it’s most powerful, an unmasked black woman, (who, after taking her grandfather’s Nostalgia pills, has now experienced over a century of racial and social injustice), to be the greatest of all.
It is December 27, 2012, I have just seen Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained for the first time. It is a movie I liked, but would later grow to love. While, at the time, the primary discussion around the movie was whether a white man was qualified to make this movie, my primary issue with it was its length. For years afterward, I contended that the movie should have ended ambiguously, but hopefully, with Django riding back to Candieland to save Broomhilda after escaping the captivity of the LeQuint Dickey Mining Company.
It is January 05, 2016. Evan Saathoff of Birth.Movies.Death (a wonderful site dedicated to film news, discussion, and criticism) publishes a piece entitled “From Slave to Superhero: The Django Supremacy”. The piece, a favorite of mine, argues Django as Tarantino’s best character, and in the process justifies the existence of the very same half hour I took issue with. Saathoff’s argument is that while Django spends much of the film as an observer of Schultz’s brash showmanship and incautious violence, it’s in those final 30 minutes when Django ascends to not only the active main character, but the hero – of the story. This is due not only to the firearm and horsemanship training that Schultz has provided Django, but also the impossible situation Schultz’s wounded pride has left him in:
“Remember, there could be a version of this story in which Schultz pays top dollar for Broomhilda and the whole crew leaves Candie’s plantation, bruised but alive. Instead, a petulant Schultz throws away everything – his, Broomhilda, and Django’s life for all he knows – for the immature pleasure of shooting Candie.”
It’s that quote and that scene that finally convinced me that racial politics aside, Quentin Tarantino understood the importance of the story he was telling, and was indeed qualified to tell it. There is a lot of ugliness in the script, but he uses that ugliness to illustrate the horrors of that era, (even if some of it was embellished). The third act is where Django overcomes those horrors. If Django Unchained ends with either Schultz placing his tail between his legs and purchasing Broomhilda, or Django riding back to Candieland, gun in tow, he never gets to take his story, and his life, into his own hands. It’s in that final half-hour that Django ascends to something mythic. He is now, as Schultz predicted “the fastest gun in the South”:
“Here we finally see the Django Tarantino has been saving for us – not the poor fellow in a tight spot but the all-out superhero doling out the vindictive wrath befitting an entire culture of dehumanization and cruelty…He’s unstoppable and unflappable, a killing machine with a killer sense of style. Yeah, he just blew up a massive plantation in the middle of Mississippi, but he still has time to make his horse bow to his lady.”
Django returns to the Big House dripping with swagger, dressed to the nines, and full of audacious, righteous fury.
Well, what the hell does Django Unchained have to do with Watchmen? I’ll tell you. It is October 17, 2019. In a profile written by Alan Sepinwall of Rolling Stone, Damon Lindelof again expresses his overwhelming trepidation about working on the show. But this time, it’s not just worry about bastardizing Alan Moore’s work. This time, it’s the fear that as a white man, he may not be qualified, or justified, to tell the story he wants to tell. He fears it may be the “hugest mistake of [his] life”. And early in the season, many others feared it would be too. The depiction of the Black Wall Street Massacre seemed to many like a cheap, exploitative move that served no greater purpose. All the business with the black cop pulling over the white citizen appeared to be a flimsy reversal of the police violence we see in the world today. But then the story comes together, little by little, until finally episode 6 airs and it becomes clear that everything was done with purpose and intention to serve the story. The point of creating Will Reeves isn’t to ask “wouldn’t it be interesting if Hooded Justice was black?”, it’s “what if superheroes were borne out of America’s ugly past?” With that in mind, let’s re-read a portion of the article quoted above: “Here we finally see the Django Tarantino has been saving for us – not the poor fellow in a tight spot but the all-out superhero doling out the vindictive wrath befitting an entire culture of dehumanization and cruelty…” Replace a couple names in the quote and it starts to sound a lot like a certain masked vigilante I know.
Making Hooded Justice a black man and giving Angela Dr. Manhattan’s powers (though we never see her use them) could have ended up as acts of performative white pseudo-wokeness were they not explored with the weight of Black history on top of them. But, by tackling the subject matter with a sense of history and delicacy, Lindelof and his team of writers were able to successfully represent just how bold the idea of black heroes can be when they are examined with the proper lens. The trepidation Lindelof experienced in advance of the show airing can only be expected once you realize he intended an audience who came to see a disaffected glowing blue demigod to contend with the ongoing repugnancy of white supremacy.
