After spending five hours stacking questions, “This Extraordinary Being” was Clear Watch’s most daring episode yet.
The sixth episode of the HBO series revealed not only the identity of Judd Crawford’s murderer, but also that of Hooded Justice, one of the few crossover characters from the original comic book. The revelations put much of the meaning of the series in focus, especially in the strict dissection of the breed.
(Ed. Note: This post contains important spoilers for the Watchmen Episode 6.)
There is a long tradition of black history overwritten by white American culture. The truth was buried in the interest of a safer and tastier legend. In the Guardian world, Hooded Justice is a basic figure, a founder of the Minutemen and a cornerstone of costumed crime fighters in the US as “the first masked adventurer.” As we know from the fictional American hero story, this is also assumed to be white. After the sixth episode, Watchmen is now dealing with the blackout of African-American history, first by eradicating ancestral knowledge, then by suppressing injustices such as the Tulsa massacre and similar untold crimes committed during the post-rebuilding American era to prevent the self-determination of the blacks. This silence goes back to modern times, with seemingly innocuous things like appropriating stories like those of William Reeves.
The Watchmen premiere created a parallel between William and the legendary Bass Reeves, the first black deputy to the US Marshal west of the Mississippi. The film, which runs during the massacre, begins with a screen version of the judicial officer arresting a corrupt white sheriff who has stolen from a community in Oklahoma. It ends with Reeves (whose outfit resembles that of Hooded Justice) pledging “trust in the law” to the population, because the law ultimately aims to protect the righteous and the innocent. But William will learn better soon; Episode 6 examined the individual’s ability to seek collective justice and the limitations of a person working for positive change within a system directed against them.
A few decades after fleeing the Tulsa massacre, William adopted the surname Reeves and trusted the law by becoming a police officer. “They gave you a gun and a stick – what do you do with them?” Asks Williams’s wife, who also fled Tulsa in 1921. She speaks for fear of where Williams’s anger might lead, but also plays to his limits to a black police officer.
Mark Hill / HBO
Shortly afterwards, a black officer congratulates Williams on the police operation by whispering the vague, menacing warning “Beware of the Cyclops” regarding the “Third Eye” symbol that Klu Klux Klan members are signaling to each other. The reality of being a black policeman quickly sets in; After Williams has urged the arrest of a racist arsonist, he is attacked by his alleged officer colleagues. The soul of the clan is everywhere: Obviously among the riders of the Tulsa massacre, who are simmering under William’s police forces, and alive and well in contemporary political groups, as Senator Joe Keene’s involvement in the white supremacist group The Seventh Kavalry helps us do so understand.
In the most frightening scene of the episode, the Bulls scorn mockingly before he can spot the conspiracy. When he gets home, with the noose and hood still around his neck, he encounters a robbery, waits for a blow before putting his hood on and attacking the criminals. At that moment, the point of the show begins to focus: The story of the Minutemen, the saga of the costumed Watchmen characters, almost everything that happened in the TV sequel, is due to William. Angela is the heir of history.
But nobody knows. William deliberately obscured his role in the story by painting his eyebrows and eyebrows to create the illusion of whiteness so that his violent actions become socially acceptable. But even if he is recruited to the Minutemen, Captain Metropolis urges him never to reveal his identity. It is not for his safety, but for Metropolis.
The show-in-show story of American Hero, once an amusing, seemingly disposable satire of Ryan Murphy shows and Zack Snyder’s Watchmen movie, now has a greater impact on Damon Lindelof’s series. Although the historical bass Reeves as inspiration for The Lone Ranger (a figure whose earliest depictions showed him in a full face mask and William reflected) as well as confirmed, the figure was always shown as white. Hooded Justice is the Bass Reeves of his generation and is again portrayed as a white man in episodes of the American Hero story played by a brooding Cheyenne Jackson (by Ryan Murphy). Crucially, neither version extinguishes the sexuality of Hooded Justice and its relationship with Captain Metropolis, even though one is more sensitive than the other.
The revelation also solidifies Williams’ bow as a dark mirror of the Superman myth in a way that things like the Doomsday Clock (the enduring Geoff Johns Watchmen / Mainline DC crossover) could only dream of. And like William Reeves, Superman is also a reflection of an American minority experience created by the two Jewish writers Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster as a power fantasy in a period of intense anti-Semitism.
In these original stories, Superman aggressively targeted entities such as lynch mobs and corrupt politicians. He actively fought for social change and even took radical measures (which now seem out of place), such as leveling property to force the government to provide better housing for the poor, and fought against the National Guard. Later, he fought the clan in a story that goes back to the climax of “This Extraordinary Being.” But his goals have changed since then; after Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel fights Superman’s most prominent depiction of the US military. Looked at this way, Hooded Justice and his retcon ask how the superhero imagination applies to minorities, and how the idealism and the pursuit of civil rights are gradually being overruled to better fit the establishment. Hooded Justice is immortalized as a “white” man, while Superman takes on a fight for “The American Way,” a phrase that was linked to him only at the height of the Cold War. and not by his creators of the first generation, but by the creators of his radio series.
Mark Hill / HBO
Did Alan Moore know where Jefferson and Lindelof could go with their sequel to Watchmen? A recent dubbed interview with the comic writer combined modern nostalgia for superhero stories with the “first superhero story,” DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. Both Moore and the Watchers are wondering at how far the ideals of white power and white superman have gone into superhero fiction, and whether we are too blinded by regressive nostalgia to realize it. The fact that Angela uses a drug called nostalgia to remember her grandfather’s actions makes this even clearer: the idealized America of the past, which is so often called for, is a false history made up of ideals inherent in nature corrupt and suffering-based are from others. Nostalgia is often a symptom of fear of change, and with Watchmen Lindelof criticizes the conservative nature of this world view. The memory of the past is always only violent.
The revelation of Williams’ past as a survivor of the Greenwood massacre, and later as Hooded Justice, crystallizes the main purpose of the series and draws attention to the erased or forgotten black story, in particular the reactionary political violence that followed the era of rebuilding Moment that gave rise to) the KKK) – staged terrorism to dissuade the black voters, destructive events to such an extent that the scars are still felt today. Lindelof’s dramatization of the forgotten Tulsa massacre also recalls another example of a black community being attacked by air-to-ground bombing: the 1985 police raid on MOVE in Philadelphia, which was also virtually wiped out of public memory. Bass Reeves and William Reeves are the harbingers a once repressed, now resurgent African American story. William, a survivor of an atrocity that still exposes bodies, uses the tools and symbols of his oppressors and tormentors and turns them into a weapon.
The episode also fundamentally changes the dynamics of the Minutemen themselves, not only in the show, but also in the work of Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, as the Retcon of Hooded Justice alters our perceptions. While the original portrayal of the group was anything but virtuous (lest we forget The Comedian), Jefferson and Lindelof emphasize the corruption of the group from the start. It is clear that the minutemen were never really concerned with justice, it was a white power fantasy. William’s story and mission of just revenge jeopardize this fantasy, and so Captain Metropolis insists that he stops the mask and the group only remains white while their appropriation of his image is complete. The Minutemen supplements in various editions of Watchmen have always had an undercurrent of hearsay and unreliable procurement, and Lindelof’s attitude towards the group reveals a cold reality.
Will’s desire for genuine justice is suppressed by the deep-rooted institutional racism that has rebuilt America. The reactionaries resist the idea of black self-determination. His desire to achieve justice from a moral point of view is gradually coming to grips with what the law allows. The “Cyclops” add a secret perspective and are aware of the machinations of the white Supremacists who play a role in their work. In response, William, like the original portrayal of Superman or the real Lone Ranger before him, decided to be the one who would hold the corrupt white law to account, as if he were referring directly to the famous (altered and misused Latin) refrain of Moore’s book wanted to answer: Who watches the guards?
