Who Will Watch ‘Watchmen’?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/arts/television/watchmen-hbo-damon-lindelof-regina-king.html

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The chapters of “Watchmen” are marked by illustrations of a clock ticking toward an apocalypse. But on a recent morning, Damon Lindelof, who just adapted the influential comic for HBO, was focused on a different countdown.

“Five hours from now, 2,000 people will have seen the ‘Watchmen’ pilot,” he said, looking ahead to the show’s debut at New York Comic Con that afternoon. “Conservatively speaking, 1,000 of them are going to hate it.”

The reception ultimately was much warmer than that. But Lindelof’s apprehension was understandable given both his past adventures in fan rage as a creator of “Lost” and the audacity of his “Watchmen,” debuting Sunday on HBO.

The ambitious comic series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, which first appeared in 1986, imagined a realistic group of “costumed vigilantes” enmeshed in the nuclear arms race and Vietnam War, among other geopolitical conflicts. Set in 1985 at what seems like the brink of World War III, “Watchmen” replaced the usual pieties and gamma rays of the superhero genre with existential musings on time and trauma, history and hero complexes, and remains hallowed by fans like Lindelof, who called it “a masterpiece.”

A 2009 film version was faithful to the source material, arguably to a fault. But HBO’s version is a daring departure, replacing the original’s Cold War themes with a new story based in America’s legacy of white supremacy, beginning with a depiction of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 before moving to an alternate version of the present day. Now masks are even more abundant, worn by both the police and the white nationalist terrorist cell they’re battling. Known as the Seventh Kalvary, the group has taken as its uniform the black-and-white-splotched face mask of Rorschach, probably the best known of the original “Watchmen” characters.

“That connects with what I think is the central core of all ‘Watchmen’ ideology,” Lindelof said. “Which is when you put a mask on, it brings out this part of you that is basically like, ‘[expletive] all y’all. I’m going to do what I’m going to do.’”

Regina King stars as Angela Abar, a purportedly former cop who actually still works with the police as her masked alter ego, Sister Night. The role appealed to an actor who has “wanted to be a hero for as long as I can remember,” she said, but one more in line with the kind of vulnerable, complicated characters King has played in films and series like “If Beale Street Could Talk,” “American Crime” and “The Leftovers,” her previous collaboration with Lindelof.

“This woman is complex, she’s flawed,” King said of Angela. “Heroes struggle, too.”

Other stars include Jeremy Irons and Jean Smart playing older versions of the “Watchmen” characters Adrian Veidt and Laurie Juspeczyk, and Tim Blake Nelson and Don Johnson in original roles. The show received a blessing from Gibbons, but the famously irascible Moore, who is even more famously contemptuous of screen adaptations of his work, insisted that his name be left off the series entirely. (The credits read, “Based on characters cocreated for DC by Dave Gibbons.”) Regardless, “if this becomes a gateway drug to go and read those 12 issues or that graphic novel, I’m like, mission accomplished,” Lindelof said.

In a hotel near Gramercy Park, King and Lindelof discussed how “Watchmen” channels the comic and how it doesn’t, and why the series itself will be a Rorschach test for viewers. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

The first couple episodes are disorienting, even if you know the “Watchmen” story. Was that intentional?

DAMON LINDELOF Yes, definitely. First off, that’s the kind of storytelling that I’ve always gravitated to, what I call the “Thursday crossword puzzle.” It’s manageable but difficult, and it’s going to take some time. More important, I was trying to replicate the feeling that I had when I read the original “Watchmen” when I was 13, which was not dissimilar from being dropped on my head. I didn’t know what I was supposed to know versus what I wasn’t supposed to know.

REGINA KING In interviews I’ve had only one person who, bless his heart, just could not put things together. Like, things that were actually spelled out, he still couldn’t wrap his mind around it.

LINDELOF They’re spelled out like a “Wheel of Fortune” puzzle, though. That’s our version of spelling things out.

You get the R, the S, the T, the L ——

KING The N and the E.

LINDELOF We all know; we all play the “Wheel.” The good news is there is a tool for the audience and that tool is called the internet. If there is any confusion, all they have to do is go on Twitter and say, “Am I supposed to know what that joke means?” And there will be 100 people there to explain it.

KING And 50 of the explanations will be all different. I was not familiar with the comic book and I was able to follow, which is important because I do represent a huge part of the audience.

There are many Easter eggs but the most prominent echoes are structural. How did you approach adapting it?

LINDELOF It started with a very specific plan: There’s a murder in the first episode, and by the ninth episode, we’re going to know who did it and why, just like in the original “Watchmen.” There are going to be other mysteries and those mysteries are going to be resolved by the end, too. Why are these people behaving in this way? Why does Angela call herself Sister Night?

But then there’s the other thing: What’s our relationship with the original? When the New Testament came along, it didn’t erase the Old Testament; it just said, “We’re going to focus more on Jesus Christ here. Adam and Eve still happened.” That was sort of our approach. We needed to be in a conversation with it, but I also didn’t want the audience who hadn’t read it to feel like all the cool kids were whispering about an inside joke that they didn’t get.

As a fan of “Watchmen,” I was like, O.K., Adrian Veidt has to be in the show. I want to see what that guy looks like 30 years later. And Laurie Juspeczyk was the other character I was really interested in. But I want people to embed with this new story, which was why we set it in Tulsa and not in New York. Those characters are going to be supporting characters in new characters’ journeys, versus the other way around.

Race is at the center of the story. Nuclear holocaust was the big existential threat in the comic, but here it’s white supremacy. Why did you make that choice?

LINDELOF What’s the equivalent now of impending nuclear war? What’s creating the big cultural anxiety? For me, it’s the anxiety of a reckoning. Not because there are white supremacists, but because I am complicit in white supremacy. Because I’m a white man, I’ve gotten to take this entirely different path through life.

So that reckoning, that process, the identification of white supremacy as a bad guy in a superhero comic book that could not be defeated — the Klan wears masks, but why are they never the villains in a superhero story? Those ideas felt like natural fits for “Watchmen.” The original is provocative, it’s dangerous, it’s groundbreaking, it’s political, it’s unsafe. The idea for the show had to check all those boxes.

How did you arrive at that idea?

LINDELOF I had read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Atlantic essay, “The Case for Reparations,” and it totally shifted my perception of United States history. He mentioned Tulsa, the massacre of Black Wall Street, which I had never heard of. Tulsa just felt like Krypton to me. It felt like the destruction of a world. It felt like this peaceful utopia with all these intelligent people who had built this safe haven, and it was just destroyed overnight. I was like, “That’s the idea.”

I was really nervous about it. I didn’t know if it was a story that I necessarily should be telling. I went into HBO and I said to them, “This is kind of what I’m thinking,” and they really gelled to the idea.

Is it a story you should be telling?

LINDELOF That’s not a question I’m qualified to answer. But I will say I’ve spent a lot of time driving around looking at billboards and going, like, Oh, there’s only white people on these billboards. And then I’m like, Oh, I’ve made a career of basically putting white people on billboards, and I keep making television shows about really attractive men in their mid-40s who are having existential and spiritual crises. I’m in a position to do something different and this is something that I care about, too.

I’m not deflecting responsibility, but there were 12 people in the writers’ room and only four of them, at any one time, were white men. So this question that you asked was vigorously debated over and over again. But if the criticism is “this wasn’t your story to tell,” but a lot of people learn what happened in Tulsa almost 100 years ago as a result, I’m willing to take that hit. Not because I’m a white savior, but because I think this is a compelling story worth telling.

KING Is it O.K. for him to be telling that story? Well, Damon is American. This story is American history. Has there been revisionist history? Absolutely. That’s the reason we have so many things stuffed away and so much pain and fear that hasn’t been addressed. I feel lucky to be a part of pushing people to look at it, and I am happy that Damon has created the opportunity for us to do this.

Were there ever actual events that bled into the show, or vice versa?

LINDELOF Episode 6 had been shot when … I’ll just say that it had some very uncanny similarities to the Jussie Smollett case, except it actually happens. As soon as that story broke, in its initial incarnation — it certainly didn’t occur to me that it might not have actually happened — I was like, “Oh my God, people are going to think we are ripping this from the headlines.” And then, of course, that story took a lot of twists and turns.

The original was pretty male-heavy — it was called “Watchmen,” after all — but the show is driven largely by women, starting with Angela. Was that a conscious subversion of the source material?

LINDELOF It wasn’t like we sat down and said, “Let’s pass the Bechdel test.” But in that room of 12 writers, seven of them were women. So they were like, “We want to tell these stories,” and I was like, “That feels like a story I haven’t heard before.”

KING This woman was someone I had never seen before. Obviously, because she’s black, that has a lot to do with that. But even more than that, just being the lead and being so strong, but so vulnerable. We see that inner turmoil. Even when you’re waiting for her to become unhinged, you don’t know exactly what “unhinged” is for her.

The original was a subversive take on superheroes at a time when they were mostly limited to comic books and cartoons. Now that they dominate pop culture, how does that change the context of your show?

LINDELOF There have been superhero movies like “Deadpool” or “Logan” that are incredibly irreverent. You have to drown out all that noise and say, “Is there a way for us to do something different in this space?” We should be able to do stuff in “Watchmen” that they can’t do in the “Avengers” movies. And I love those movies, by the way.

KING We still have nods to those films and stories. Sister Night doesn’t have a cape, but her skirt is like a cape and it flows like a cape when she moves.

LINDELOF And she has a hood, which is totally charged as a costume, especially for a woman of color.

“Watchmen” echoes some of America’s societal ills, and things like “Joker” have been condemned recently for doing so irresponsibly, according to its critics. Does that concern you regarding how people will receive your show?

LINDELOF Are we trying to be topical just for the sake of being topical? No. But we did want to tap into what was happening around us and tell a story that was reflective of the times we’re in. That’s what the original “Watchmen” did, and that’s what we wanted to do.

At the same time, it’s a TV show and it’s a parable. So you will see people in Klan robes, which is a real thing, and then squids will fall from the sky, which is not. We know we’re playing with fire and we know that the audience is increasingly having a difficult time telling fact from fiction, when fact feels so absurd and fiction feels so real. I also think that there’s a clickbait-y culture right now that is saying “Joker” is a dangerous movie before anyone has even seen it, just because it feels dangerous. So if the filmmakers of “Joker” come out and say, “We had no idea we were making a dangerous movie; we’re incredulous about it” — how could that be?

We know that we made something that’s potentially dangerous and upsetting. We know that we appropriated a beloved graphic novel and we know that white supremacists appropriating the mask of someone who was construed as a hero in that graphic novel is not going to be loved by everyone. But we still feel like it’s interesting. The show in and of itself is a Rorschach test — everybody’s going to see something a bit different, based on who they are and what their relationship with “Watchmen” is.

KING I would hate for people to walk away and just say that they didn’t feel anything. We didn’t do our jobs if we didn’t make people feel something. My hope is that people are honest about what they feel.

LINDELOF I mean, I’ve done a lot of therapy to get to the place where I can say, “I want to generate strong feelings, and I may not have control over what those strong feelings are.” But it beats the hell out of apathy.