Don't take the red pill. Pause!
HBO Series: Watchmen (2019) (drops 10/20/19) Thread
- Thread starter fonzerrillii
- Start date
This wasn't a scene for scene retelling of his past. These were memories he had stored in pill form. Its not supposed to flow from one build up to the next within an hour. We don't even know how he was raised and by who or see his training as HJ among other things. Its meant to be the important parts. Like how the Minutemen were blurred and they didn't cover him beating the shit out of The Comedian for trying to rape Silk Spectre I.
The script is flipped though.
This episode went from one of the greatest tv episodes in television history to fucking Moonlight.
Read the Peteypedia that @Database Error dropped. It is explained that, "While it is VITAL
that LGBTQIA+ representation..."Petey alludes to this as a misrepresentation and that it used the rape of Silk Spectre to come up with that shit. I'm paraphrasing here but THEN there is memories that Angela saw that would seem to say otherwise.
Idk man Alan Moore has nothing to do with this
no - the show is comic accurate as in its a direct sequel 30 years after the end of the novel
I don't think they should call it that
And they touched hands (actually fingers) when cac gave dude his card.
I figured out then, that the cac was a pickle kisser. I didn't think homie was though.
Watchmen Beautifully Wrestles With Toxic Nostalgia
By Jen Chaney@chaneyj
Angela Abar (Regina King) looking directly at the past. Photo: HBO
“Nostalgia is toxic.”
Damon Lindelof, the creator of HBO’s Watchmen, told me he wrote those words in a notebook when he first started thinking about adapting the famed comic for television. That idea has served as subtext in much of the series so far, but in Sunday’s episode, “This Extraordinary Being,” it leaps to the foreground as outright text, in all caps and bold font.
The episode picks up where the previous installment left off, with Regina King’s Angela Abar having quite literally overdosed on Nostalgia, an illegal drug given to her by her grandfather, Will Reeves. The result is an hour-long head trip into two heads simultaneously: Angela’s, as she feels the effects of the drug, and Will’s, as his life as a police officer and the masked vigilante Hooded Justice is depicted in detail. But “This Extraordinary Being” doesn’t simply illuminate Will’s backstory. It also serves as a commentary on the ways in which history regularly gets whitewashed and sanitized in American culture, and how nostalgia — the sense that things were better back in the day, which is usually only true if you happen to be a straight, white, Christian man — makes it that much harder for social progress to happen.
And yes, all that is relevant to the Current Climate™ in terms of its politics (“Make America Great Again” is toxic nostalgia’s official catchphrase) and its pop culture. Watchmen is, after all, a series that has sparked a backlash among some fans of the comic, who see Lindelof’s version as inferior to the one created by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins in 1986. That sort of response has become a standard feature of modern fandom, where a stubborn reverence for what came first makes it nearly impossible for some people to even consider new interpretations of beloved artistic works. Lindelof had all of these things on his mind when co-writing this episode with Cord Jefferson. “The meta notion of saying nostalgia is toxic whilst waxing on that very nostalgia in relation to that very original text was not lost on me,” he told me in an email.
Lovers of that original text will certainly recognize the name Nostalgia. It appears in the Watchmen comic as a brand of perfume, created by Adrian Veidt to capitalize on the human tendency to glorify the past. (“Where is the essence that was so divine?” asks one advertisement for the fragrance.) The HBO Watchmen version of Nostalgia is, instead, a prescription drug. As explained by the show and this advertisement posted on Peteypedia, it is supposed to treat dementia, anxiety, and psychological trauma. Each pill, manufactured by the company owned by Lady Trieu (Hong Chau), contains one to five memories harvested from the patient it’s intended to help. But as Laurie Blake (Jean Smart) tells Angela right before she falls into a coma: “You’re not supposed to take someone else’s Nostalgia.”
That advice comes too late to be heeded. Angela has swallowed a whole bottle of pills that do not belong to her, which means that Will’s memories start flying through her brain, often overlapping or colliding with one another. Visually, “This Extraordinary Being” does an absolutely elegant job of capturing this mental short circuitry, switching to black-and-white to capture Will’s experience as an adult in New York City and turning to a more sepia tone when the action flashes back to his childhood in Tulsa.
Sometimes Will is rendered as a young man, played by Jovan Adepo. Other times Angela becomes a stand-in for Will, altering our perspective on who is participating in and witnessing this personal history. As directed by Stephen Williams, it’s an incredibly subtle, effective way to convey the connection between grandfather and granddaughter, as well as how our perception of an event can shift simply by altering the position of the lens that captures it. Even the casting here is inspired: Adepo played King’s son on The Leftovers, a previous Lindelof project, so it feels right to immediately see the two of them as kin, albeit in a different context, because our memories of that other show signal that it makes sense.
Every element of craft in this episode — direction, writing, costume and make-up, music — speaks directly to that toxic-nostalgia theme. The portrait of Will’s life during the 1930s and 1940s, when he’s a young man married to June (Danielle Deadwyler) and trying to enforce the law as the only black cop in an extremely racist New York City police force, plays like an old movie from that era. If you turned on Turner Classic Movies and found a film from this general time period — the sort of film that might make older white folks start talking about the good ’ol days — it might even look similar.
The difference, of course, is that almost all Hollywood pictures from that era weren’t told from a black man’s perspective. This approach is Watchmen’s way of reminding us that pop culture rarely captures the experiences of people like Will Reeves. Case in point: Fred, the racist, anti-Semitic shop owner portrayed by Glenn Fleshler, says wryly in one scene that he wants to get home in time for Amos ’n’ Andy, a radio show awash in racial clichés that focused on two black men famously portrayed by two white ones. Another case in point, per the opening sequence of the episode: The fact that American Hero Story, the modern day show-within-the-show about the world’s first masked vigilantes, depicts Hooded Justice as a white man.
By essentially making a classic movie that tells a black man’s story about generational trauma, this episode is doing what the series as a whole is doing: It’s taking a known narrative, the Watchmen comic, and altering it in a way that makes race absolutely central to the story.
Even the music choices in “This Extraordinary Being” cleverly highlight how the episode’s intentions intersect with the comic world. A trio of jazz standards by the all-black group the Ink Spots appear on the soundtrack. (Ink spots … like a Rorschach test.) One of those songs, “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire,” was famously used in commercials from the 1980s, the same decade that gave us Watchmen. Those commercials happened to be for a perfume: not Nostalgia, but Chanel No. 5. The song “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” also makes an appearance, as performed by Eartha Kitt, a black woman who put on a mask on television herself, in her role as Catwoman on the ’60s series Batman. But the song was originally written for a Broadway show called Roberta. Actress Fay Templeton, who played Roberta in the original production, was briefly married to William “Billy” West, a fellow performer known for appearing in … wait for it … minstrel shows.
There are layers and layers to dissect in this episode. But maybe the most essential takeaway is this: Even in the alternate history of Watchmen, the central history of the black experience is the same. Black people are still marginalized, traumatized, and victimized by white supremacists.
We watch as Will, in his dual roles as a police officer and a member of the Minutemen, tries to dismantle a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan that’s using mesmerism to make black people attack one another. But he can’t get any support, not from his police colleagues or even Minutemen founder Captain Metropolis (Jake McDorman), who thinks Will is trafficking in conspiracy theories. After becoming Will’s secret lover and promising to back him up in his efforts, the white supposed savior eventually tells him: “I’m afraid you’re going to have to solve black unrest all on your own.” Which, as Hooded Justice, is what Will commits to doing.
When you imagine taking a pill called Nostalgia, you assume it’s going to bring back warm memories. In Angela’s case, it doesn’t, seemingly by design. If you remember back in episode four, Will and Lady Trieu have a conversation about using Nostalgia to fill in the blanks for Angela about her grandfather’s past. “If you want her to know who you are, just tell her,” Trieu suggests. But Will is adamant that she has to take the pills. “She has to experience things herself,” he says. That’s the other point that “This Extraordinary Being” is making: To fully understand trauma and injustice, you have to walk in the shoes of the people who lived it. Angela is no stranger to either trauma or injustice, but gulping down those pills is the best way for her to truly feel the way it felt to be her grandfather all those decades ago. She’s sliding directly into his shoes.
All of this made me think of a famous line from Mad Men, another show that, in its way, examined toxic nostalgia. In its first-season finale, Don Draper declares that, “In Greek, ‘nostalgia’ literally means the pain from an old wound.” For Will, nostalgia and Nostalgia is just that: pain from an old wound that won’t heal, pain that he needs his granddaughter to understand.
The message of this rich, beautifully executed, thought-provoking episode, then, isn’t that people should never be nostalgic. It’s that they should look backward with clearer and more critical eyes. There are more sides to every story, even the ones that you think you know.
By Jen Chaney@chaneyj
Angela Abar (Regina King) looking directly at the past. Photo: HBO
“Nostalgia is toxic.”
Damon Lindelof, the creator of HBO’s Watchmen, told me he wrote those words in a notebook when he first started thinking about adapting the famed comic for television. That idea has served as subtext in much of the series so far, but in Sunday’s episode, “This Extraordinary Being,” it leaps to the foreground as outright text, in all caps and bold font.
The episode picks up where the previous installment left off, with Regina King’s Angela Abar having quite literally overdosed on Nostalgia, an illegal drug given to her by her grandfather, Will Reeves. The result is an hour-long head trip into two heads simultaneously: Angela’s, as she feels the effects of the drug, and Will’s, as his life as a police officer and the masked vigilante Hooded Justice is depicted in detail. But “This Extraordinary Being” doesn’t simply illuminate Will’s backstory. It also serves as a commentary on the ways in which history regularly gets whitewashed and sanitized in American culture, and how nostalgia — the sense that things were better back in the day, which is usually only true if you happen to be a straight, white, Christian man — makes it that much harder for social progress to happen.
And yes, all that is relevant to the Current Climate™ in terms of its politics (“Make America Great Again” is toxic nostalgia’s official catchphrase) and its pop culture. Watchmen is, after all, a series that has sparked a backlash among some fans of the comic, who see Lindelof’s version as inferior to the one created by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins in 1986. That sort of response has become a standard feature of modern fandom, where a stubborn reverence for what came first makes it nearly impossible for some people to even consider new interpretations of beloved artistic works. Lindelof had all of these things on his mind when co-writing this episode with Cord Jefferson. “The meta notion of saying nostalgia is toxic whilst waxing on that very nostalgia in relation to that very original text was not lost on me,” he told me in an email.
Lovers of that original text will certainly recognize the name Nostalgia. It appears in the Watchmen comic as a brand of perfume, created by Adrian Veidt to capitalize on the human tendency to glorify the past. (“Where is the essence that was so divine?” asks one advertisement for the fragrance.) The HBO Watchmen version of Nostalgia is, instead, a prescription drug. As explained by the show and this advertisement posted on Peteypedia, it is supposed to treat dementia, anxiety, and psychological trauma. Each pill, manufactured by the company owned by Lady Trieu (Hong Chau), contains one to five memories harvested from the patient it’s intended to help. But as Laurie Blake (Jean Smart) tells Angela right before she falls into a coma: “You’re not supposed to take someone else’s Nostalgia.”
That advice comes too late to be heeded. Angela has swallowed a whole bottle of pills that do not belong to her, which means that Will’s memories start flying through her brain, often overlapping or colliding with one another. Visually, “This Extraordinary Being” does an absolutely elegant job of capturing this mental short circuitry, switching to black-and-white to capture Will’s experience as an adult in New York City and turning to a more sepia tone when the action flashes back to his childhood in Tulsa.
Sometimes Will is rendered as a young man, played by Jovan Adepo. Other times Angela becomes a stand-in for Will, altering our perspective on who is participating in and witnessing this personal history. As directed by Stephen Williams, it’s an incredibly subtle, effective way to convey the connection between grandfather and granddaughter, as well as how our perception of an event can shift simply by altering the position of the lens that captures it. Even the casting here is inspired: Adepo played King’s son on The Leftovers, a previous Lindelof project, so it feels right to immediately see the two of them as kin, albeit in a different context, because our memories of that other show signal that it makes sense.
Every element of craft in this episode — direction, writing, costume and make-up, music — speaks directly to that toxic-nostalgia theme. The portrait of Will’s life during the 1930s and 1940s, when he’s a young man married to June (Danielle Deadwyler) and trying to enforce the law as the only black cop in an extremely racist New York City police force, plays like an old movie from that era. If you turned on Turner Classic Movies and found a film from this general time period — the sort of film that might make older white folks start talking about the good ’ol days — it might even look similar.
The difference, of course, is that almost all Hollywood pictures from that era weren’t told from a black man’s perspective. This approach is Watchmen’s way of reminding us that pop culture rarely captures the experiences of people like Will Reeves. Case in point: Fred, the racist, anti-Semitic shop owner portrayed by Glenn Fleshler, says wryly in one scene that he wants to get home in time for Amos ’n’ Andy, a radio show awash in racial clichés that focused on two black men famously portrayed by two white ones. Another case in point, per the opening sequence of the episode: The fact that American Hero Story, the modern day show-within-the-show about the world’s first masked vigilantes, depicts Hooded Justice as a white man.
By essentially making a classic movie that tells a black man’s story about generational trauma, this episode is doing what the series as a whole is doing: It’s taking a known narrative, the Watchmen comic, and altering it in a way that makes race absolutely central to the story.
Even the music choices in “This Extraordinary Being” cleverly highlight how the episode’s intentions intersect with the comic world. A trio of jazz standards by the all-black group the Ink Spots appear on the soundtrack. (Ink spots … like a Rorschach test.) One of those songs, “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire,” was famously used in commercials from the 1980s, the same decade that gave us Watchmen. Those commercials happened to be for a perfume: not Nostalgia, but Chanel No. 5. The song “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” also makes an appearance, as performed by Eartha Kitt, a black woman who put on a mask on television herself, in her role as Catwoman on the ’60s series Batman. But the song was originally written for a Broadway show called Roberta. Actress Fay Templeton, who played Roberta in the original production, was briefly married to William “Billy” West, a fellow performer known for appearing in … wait for it … minstrel shows.
There are layers and layers to dissect in this episode. But maybe the most essential takeaway is this: Even in the alternate history of Watchmen, the central history of the black experience is the same. Black people are still marginalized, traumatized, and victimized by white supremacists.
We watch as Will, in his dual roles as a police officer and a member of the Minutemen, tries to dismantle a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan that’s using mesmerism to make black people attack one another. But he can’t get any support, not from his police colleagues or even Minutemen founder Captain Metropolis (Jake McDorman), who thinks Will is trafficking in conspiracy theories. After becoming Will’s secret lover and promising to back him up in his efforts, the white supposed savior eventually tells him: “I’m afraid you’re going to have to solve black unrest all on your own.” Which, as Hooded Justice, is what Will commits to doing.
When you imagine taking a pill called Nostalgia, you assume it’s going to bring back warm memories. In Angela’s case, it doesn’t, seemingly by design. If you remember back in episode four, Will and Lady Trieu have a conversation about using Nostalgia to fill in the blanks for Angela about her grandfather’s past. “If you want her to know who you are, just tell her,” Trieu suggests. But Will is adamant that she has to take the pills. “She has to experience things herself,” he says. That’s the other point that “This Extraordinary Being” is making: To fully understand trauma and injustice, you have to walk in the shoes of the people who lived it. Angela is no stranger to either trauma or injustice, but gulping down those pills is the best way for her to truly feel the way it felt to be her grandfather all those decades ago. She’s sliding directly into his shoes.
All of this made me think of a famous line from Mad Men, another show that, in its way, examined toxic nostalgia. In its first-season finale, Don Draper declares that, “In Greek, ‘nostalgia’ literally means the pain from an old wound.” For Will, nostalgia and Nostalgia is just that: pain from an old wound that won’t heal, pain that he needs his granddaughter to understand.
The message of this rich, beautifully executed, thought-provoking episode, then, isn’t that people should never be nostalgic. It’s that they should look backward with clearer and more critical eyes. There are more sides to every story, even the ones that you think you know.
n Watchmen’s Clothing, the Past Is Present
By Samantha Powell
Looking Glass’s mirror mask is one of Watchmen’s most literal reflections of past trauma, but it is far from the only one. Photo: HBO
Watchmen is a story about history. It’s also a story about giant squids and a blue man who lives on Mars, but mostly it’s about history. Its narrative spans almost a century, touching on events unknown by some, like the Tulsa massacre, and events familiar to us but with different outcomes from our own history, like the Vietnam War. Its characters reckon with a past that’s at once inspirational, painful, and forgotten by those who would like to pretend that it never occurred.
But just as it does every other part of our culture, the past has an impact on the how and why of our clothing; it can live on in something as simple as the ticket pocket that now sits unused on so many suit jackets, a vestige of a time before rideshare apps and electronic fares. The histories of our hometowns, our countries, and our world at large are laced through the pieces that we put on our backs, but perhaps what most influences our clothing is the ways in which those broader histories connect to our personal ones. In the Watchmen costume-design work of Meghan Kasperlik, we can see how all of those historical threads, the small and close as well as the universal, come together to aid, but never overwhelm, a story that brings to light some of those moments previously hidden away.
“I think the research is the most exciting part of it, because you are really going back and learning about history and what people were doing,” says Kasperlik. “I really like to take little details and little moments that I’m finding not only within the costumes but what was happening in their houses and what their professions were.” It’s that sort of attention to small details — a flash of a print, a fabric choice, a specific hue — that help bring this layered story to life.
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Kasperlik was drawn to Damon Lindelof’s HBO adaptation of Watchmen because she had worked on a few other projects in the superhero realm as an assistant and knew this world would be “complex and interesting,” but she never imagined that “the story would be what the story is of our Watchmen.” Her work throughout builds on the costume-design work of Sharen Davis in the pilot, which included the sleek look of Sister Night, to further build out this fascinating world that looks like our own while also being alien in many ways.
One of the ways Watchmen expands its world beyond our own reality is through a history that diverges from our own, as in the Vietnamese influences that are a result of the war ending in 1971 and the country being annexed as the 51st state. At the same time, the costuming shows how the same historical moment can differently affect the clothing of different characters. For both Lady Trieu and Angela, Vietnam is the place of their birth, but the ways in which they relate to that place, the ways in which they honor it, play differently through their costumes.
Angela has a connection to Vietnam as the place of her birth and where she met her husband, Calvin, but how that history weaves its way into her clothing is more subtle. Of course, we see it very strongly in our introduction to Angela in the pilot, in one of the costumes designed by Davis; there she is telling a classroom of children a story directly related to that history, and her outfit feels almost as much as a costume as when she is dressed as Sister Night. But in her day-to-day life, far removed from Vietnam, that past is quieter. When Kasperlik came onto the project, she looked for ways to more subtly acknowledge Angela’s history, presenting Regina King with options reflecting “elements not only of Vietnamese culture, but also African-American culture, and adding in little prints or little details without making it the entire story of the character.”
With Lady Trieu and her daughter, Bian, however, Kasperlik explains that because they have a more recent connection to Vietnam than Angela, the country’s influence comes through much more strongly. Notably for a story that is also very much about how the past echoes through generations, we see it most explicitly not in Lady Trieu’s clothing, but in that of her daughter. Kasperlik often kept Bian “in more of an áo dài,” a traditional Vietnamese costume. Upon Lady Trieu’s first meeting with Angela, she tells the other woman, “On her deathbed, my mother made me promise I would never leave Vietnam, so I found a loophole. Now Vietnam never leaves me.” She is speaking in that moment specifically about the vivarium in which the women are speaking, but in the clothing of Bian we can see another, more subtle manifestation of how Lady Trieu has taken her past with her to Oklahoma and how she is, in a very literal way, passing it on to her child.
While clothing like that of Lady Trieu and Bian can serve to showcase the parts of our past we want to celebrate, for other characters that occupy this world, clothing serves as a sort of protection from the trauma of the past. In the opening of episode five, we view the destruction of New York City through the eyes of a young Wade, who experiences a traumatic personal humiliation mere moments before witnessing the horror of the extradimensional squid unleashed on the world by Adrian Veidt as a weapon of mass destruction. And with that glipse into Looking Glass’s past, we are given a deeper understanding of the ways in which he has been using his clothing to shield himself.
This shielding takes its most literal form in Looking Glass’s reflective mask, which protects him from the lingering psychic blasts of the squid incident. Kasperlik explains that while the mask effect was mostly CG, “We had a lamé mask, like a spandex lamé, when the CG element didn’t need to happen.” But the mask isn’t the only piece of Looking Glass’s look that has its roots in the historical thread that opens episode five. His detective look is closer to what one might expect of a character in a police procedural, unlike the more slapped-together, masked-vigilante looks of Red Scare and Pirate Jenny, or the sleek look of Sister Night. “It’s Wade’s interpretation of what a ‘cool’ detective would look like, so his colors are slightly darker,” Kasperlik explains. It’s an understandable reaction on his part to being stripped bare and made a fool of all those years ago: His mask physically protects him from the continuing psychic blasts experienced by survivors of 11/2, while this somewhat underwhelming reach for a Cool-Detective persona is a balm to that more emotional hurt.
All of these types of histories — the deeply painful, the complicatedly heroic, the seemingly insignificant — come together in episode six, when Hooded Justice, a character from Alan Moore and David Gibbons’s graphic novel who has never been unmasked, is revealed to us as the most obvious example of Laurie Blake’s observation from episode four, that masks are protection from pain.
When I’m watching a show like this one, one with so many interlocking pieces, I can’t help but look for connections everywhere, and I thought I saw one, a straight line from Bass Reeves, the Black Marshal of Oklahoma whom Will Reeves loved as a child, to Hooded Justice, to Sister Night. But when I asked Kasperlik about it, she reminded me that the costuming of Bass Reeves and Sister Night, as characters specific to the series, had been part of Davis’s work for the pilot, and that while the specifics of Hooded Justice’s history and personal pain were created for the series, his costume’s roots lie the graphic novel.
“For the original characters, it was really important that we stay true to the graphic novel,” Kasperlik says. “In the [2009] film, they heightened everything in a different direction, but it was more about going back to those original characters and making sure that they almost jumped off the page.”
Prior to episode six, our primary exposure to Hooded Justice and other figures from the graphic novel came via the show within the show, American Hero Story. We watched a color-saturated deli scene with Topher and Calvin in episode two; we saw lovers Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis reflected in Looking Glass’s mask as he sat in a dreary robe eating his dinner in episode five. And before both the audience and Angela are thrown back into the black-and-white past of Will Reeves in episode six, we get an alternate telling of Hooded Justice’s origin story that whitewashes the past in significant ways.
Kasperlik notes that “we collectively, as a production, wanted to make sure creatively that [American Hero Story] was heightened … the lights are brighter, the colors would pop more. Everything was a little more, as you say, cartoonish.” That approach extends to the version of Hooded Justice’s costume we see via AHS in those opening moments of episode six. “Because Hooded Justice’s costume has such a simple line, I wanted to make sure that there was a little bit of texture in there, but that it didn’t overpower the simplicity of what needed to be and really the statement of having it be so simple.”
The heightened simplicity of this version of Hooded Justice makes it all the more powerful when Will Reeves decides to don the literal remnants of his trauma — the hood used to cover his face as he was spirited away and the pieces of the ropes used to bind and hang him — in order to deal with the painful history that is eating away at him. The noose and the hood exist in the world of the graphic novel and the still-unknown Hooded Justice who resides there, but here in this Watchmen, the costume’s true significance is once that can’t be simplified, and can’t be separated from the pain of the person who wears it.
By Samantha Powell
Looking Glass’s mirror mask is one of Watchmen’s most literal reflections of past trauma, but it is far from the only one. Photo: HBO
Watchmen is a story about history. It’s also a story about giant squids and a blue man who lives on Mars, but mostly it’s about history. Its narrative spans almost a century, touching on events unknown by some, like the Tulsa massacre, and events familiar to us but with different outcomes from our own history, like the Vietnam War. Its characters reckon with a past that’s at once inspirational, painful, and forgotten by those who would like to pretend that it never occurred.
But just as it does every other part of our culture, the past has an impact on the how and why of our clothing; it can live on in something as simple as the ticket pocket that now sits unused on so many suit jackets, a vestige of a time before rideshare apps and electronic fares. The histories of our hometowns, our countries, and our world at large are laced through the pieces that we put on our backs, but perhaps what most influences our clothing is the ways in which those broader histories connect to our personal ones. In the Watchmen costume-design work of Meghan Kasperlik, we can see how all of those historical threads, the small and close as well as the universal, come together to aid, but never overwhelm, a story that brings to light some of those moments previously hidden away.
“I think the research is the most exciting part of it, because you are really going back and learning about history and what people were doing,” says Kasperlik. “I really like to take little details and little moments that I’m finding not only within the costumes but what was happening in their houses and what their professions were.” It’s that sort of attention to small details — a flash of a print, a fabric choice, a specific hue — that help bring this layered story to life.
ADVERTISEMENT
INREAD INVENTED BY TEADS
Kasperlik was drawn to Damon Lindelof’s HBO adaptation of Watchmen because she had worked on a few other projects in the superhero realm as an assistant and knew this world would be “complex and interesting,” but she never imagined that “the story would be what the story is of our Watchmen.” Her work throughout builds on the costume-design work of Sharen Davis in the pilot, which included the sleek look of Sister Night, to further build out this fascinating world that looks like our own while also being alien in many ways.
One of the ways Watchmen expands its world beyond our own reality is through a history that diverges from our own, as in the Vietnamese influences that are a result of the war ending in 1971 and the country being annexed as the 51st state. At the same time, the costuming shows how the same historical moment can differently affect the clothing of different characters. For both Lady Trieu and Angela, Vietnam is the place of their birth, but the ways in which they relate to that place, the ways in which they honor it, play differently through their costumes.
Angela has a connection to Vietnam as the place of her birth and where she met her husband, Calvin, but how that history weaves its way into her clothing is more subtle. Of course, we see it very strongly in our introduction to Angela in the pilot, in one of the costumes designed by Davis; there she is telling a classroom of children a story directly related to that history, and her outfit feels almost as much as a costume as when she is dressed as Sister Night. But in her day-to-day life, far removed from Vietnam, that past is quieter. When Kasperlik came onto the project, she looked for ways to more subtly acknowledge Angela’s history, presenting Regina King with options reflecting “elements not only of Vietnamese culture, but also African-American culture, and adding in little prints or little details without making it the entire story of the character.”
With Lady Trieu and her daughter, Bian, however, Kasperlik explains that because they have a more recent connection to Vietnam than Angela, the country’s influence comes through much more strongly. Notably for a story that is also very much about how the past echoes through generations, we see it most explicitly not in Lady Trieu’s clothing, but in that of her daughter. Kasperlik often kept Bian “in more of an áo dài,” a traditional Vietnamese costume. Upon Lady Trieu’s first meeting with Angela, she tells the other woman, “On her deathbed, my mother made me promise I would never leave Vietnam, so I found a loophole. Now Vietnam never leaves me.” She is speaking in that moment specifically about the vivarium in which the women are speaking, but in the clothing of Bian we can see another, more subtle manifestation of how Lady Trieu has taken her past with her to Oklahoma and how she is, in a very literal way, passing it on to her child.
While clothing like that of Lady Trieu and Bian can serve to showcase the parts of our past we want to celebrate, for other characters that occupy this world, clothing serves as a sort of protection from the trauma of the past. In the opening of episode five, we view the destruction of New York City through the eyes of a young Wade, who experiences a traumatic personal humiliation mere moments before witnessing the horror of the extradimensional squid unleashed on the world by Adrian Veidt as a weapon of mass destruction. And with that glipse into Looking Glass’s past, we are given a deeper understanding of the ways in which he has been using his clothing to shield himself.
This shielding takes its most literal form in Looking Glass’s reflective mask, which protects him from the lingering psychic blasts of the squid incident. Kasperlik explains that while the mask effect was mostly CG, “We had a lamé mask, like a spandex lamé, when the CG element didn’t need to happen.” But the mask isn’t the only piece of Looking Glass’s look that has its roots in the historical thread that opens episode five. His detective look is closer to what one might expect of a character in a police procedural, unlike the more slapped-together, masked-vigilante looks of Red Scare and Pirate Jenny, or the sleek look of Sister Night. “It’s Wade’s interpretation of what a ‘cool’ detective would look like, so his colors are slightly darker,” Kasperlik explains. It’s an understandable reaction on his part to being stripped bare and made a fool of all those years ago: His mask physically protects him from the continuing psychic blasts experienced by survivors of 11/2, while this somewhat underwhelming reach for a Cool-Detective persona is a balm to that more emotional hurt.
All of these types of histories — the deeply painful, the complicatedly heroic, the seemingly insignificant — come together in episode six, when Hooded Justice, a character from Alan Moore and David Gibbons’s graphic novel who has never been unmasked, is revealed to us as the most obvious example of Laurie Blake’s observation from episode four, that masks are protection from pain.
When I’m watching a show like this one, one with so many interlocking pieces, I can’t help but look for connections everywhere, and I thought I saw one, a straight line from Bass Reeves, the Black Marshal of Oklahoma whom Will Reeves loved as a child, to Hooded Justice, to Sister Night. But when I asked Kasperlik about it, she reminded me that the costuming of Bass Reeves and Sister Night, as characters specific to the series, had been part of Davis’s work for the pilot, and that while the specifics of Hooded Justice’s history and personal pain were created for the series, his costume’s roots lie the graphic novel.
“For the original characters, it was really important that we stay true to the graphic novel,” Kasperlik says. “In the [2009] film, they heightened everything in a different direction, but it was more about going back to those original characters and making sure that they almost jumped off the page.”
Prior to episode six, our primary exposure to Hooded Justice and other figures from the graphic novel came via the show within the show, American Hero Story. We watched a color-saturated deli scene with Topher and Calvin in episode two; we saw lovers Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis reflected in Looking Glass’s mask as he sat in a dreary robe eating his dinner in episode five. And before both the audience and Angela are thrown back into the black-and-white past of Will Reeves in episode six, we get an alternate telling of Hooded Justice’s origin story that whitewashes the past in significant ways.
Kasperlik notes that “we collectively, as a production, wanted to make sure creatively that [American Hero Story] was heightened … the lights are brighter, the colors would pop more. Everything was a little more, as you say, cartoonish.” That approach extends to the version of Hooded Justice’s costume we see via AHS in those opening moments of episode six. “Because Hooded Justice’s costume has such a simple line, I wanted to make sure that there was a little bit of texture in there, but that it didn’t overpower the simplicity of what needed to be and really the statement of having it be so simple.”
The heightened simplicity of this version of Hooded Justice makes it all the more powerful when Will Reeves decides to don the literal remnants of his trauma — the hood used to cover his face as he was spirited away and the pieces of the ropes used to bind and hang him — in order to deal with the painful history that is eating away at him. The noose and the hood exist in the world of the graphic novel and the still-unknown Hooded Justice who resides there, but here in this Watchmen, the costume’s true significance is once that can’t be simplified, and can’t be separated from the pain of the person who wears it.
A Guide to Watchmen’s Stealth Easter Eggs
The HBO series is packed with subtle background references to the original comic. Here, some of the deepest deep cuts you may have missed.
www.vulture.com
Who Is Hooded Justice? Watchmen Has a Stunning Answer.
Watchmen writer Cord Jefferson talks Hooded Justice, generational trauma, and the show’s best episode yet.
www.vulture.com
I will respond to this part of the discussion once I have viewed.
However, what I was commenting on was the normal mainstream reaction versus the skewed focus here. And my assessment of the predictable and lamentable difference was not based in ignorance, but a direct and informed comparison.
Are y’all dudes watching the show of just skimming through it. The episode before literally had a gay sex scene with hooded justice fucking captain metropolis in the American Hero Story show within a show. The beginning of the most recent episode starts off with American Hero Story showing Hooded Justice talking to agents and basically saying we know you fucking Captain Metropolis. But we know he's fucking other dudes, he's also fucking J Edgar Hoover. Yet y'all dudes are surprised to see essentially the same sex scene.
Showing the brother doing that gay shit is the issue with most in this thread. It's like they can't show a black man as a strong lead without some kind of fuck shit.
That’s what the fuck I’m talking bout? Who the fuck is the dude getting interrogated? If Hooded Justice is black then who fuck is the other dude in the same costume that’s white? Shit is confusing the fuck outta me.
The scene with the white guy is the Hooded Justice tv show, its been on tv since the first episode.
its kinda like how the lone ranger was actually a black guy but all the movies and tv shows about him has a white actor.
This is an interesting take from someone who doesn't appear to have a strong understanding of or connection to the source material
Alan Moore your boy now? Lol
Oh, I completely missed that shit. I gotta rewatch these episodes.
I take the story as is, from one scene to the next and how it affects the story arc for that particular episode. The segregated law enforcement during the era, the white hero followers were only in it for the fame and not wanting deal with real social issues that affected black people because they themselves are racist. The Interesting take on how early cinema was used as a mind control method to control us. Now I'm interested in the connection between Sheriff Crawford and Reeves what's their connection other than diggin out his father.
So lady trieu and the FBI lady are sisters.
We, the audience knows Hooded Justice is black. June, his wife and Captain Metropolis knows his true identity. But June convinced him to pretend to be white because people won’t respect him if they thought a black man was going around kicking the shit out of white people. Captain Metropolis tells him he can’t reveal his true identity the rest of the Minutemen for the similar reasons. So when you see a white Hooded Justice in the American Hero Story show within a show. The only people who knew Hooded Justices real identity are long gone by the time they made the tv show. History knows Hooded Justice as a white man.
Metropolis was using the brother in two ways. Made him look weak as fuck.
The same brother who killed all the Klan members and burnt their building down by himself?
hooded justice trying to tell him about kkk plot and mteropolis is like " you bugging , but hey come thru, i got wine". dogged homie out for the sake of getting the minutemen off the ground and get his nut.
yeah . he was played by metropolis. and that shit fucked with him. that's one of the main reasons why his wife left him.
You forgot his wife was worried about his anger issues the day he became a cop, which was long before he met the white guy?
He wasn't being played, Metropolis just didn't give a fuck about black issues. The minutemen wanted to take on crimes that would give them a press/marketing benefit.
Yeah he's my uncle
I read Watchmen probably 15+ years ago so it isn't fresh in my mind
Imo it wouldn't feel right to me either if you had wrote it and now someone else is steering it and calling it the direct sequel. Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't dc already try a sequel in the comics.
damn they just had to throw in some faggot shit in what couldve been the greatest bruh superhero ever...
I did like the way they show how mk ultra techniques are being used on our population by a lessor people.
the kluless kluts klowns are embedded all in society... they share technologies with each other..
but that dont mean shit we go the greatest tech of all.. eumelanin..
its disgusting tho.. finally had a super high quality show with bruh and his beautiful wife and child.. and had to fuck it up with a faggot scene..
thats why we really have to make our own movies..
nevertheless despite the unneeded faggotry...
the storyline is dope as fuck...and lettin you know how infested law enfarcement still is with the kluless klutz klowns aka the kkk..
I did like the way they show how mk ultra techniques are being used on our population by a lessor people.
the kluless kluts klowns are embedded all in society... they share technologies with each other..
but that dont mean shit we go the greatest tech of all.. eumelanin..
its disgusting tho.. finally had a super high quality show with bruh and his beautiful wife and child.. and had to fuck it up with a faggot scene..
thats why we really have to make our own movies..
nevertheless despite the unneeded faggotry...
the storyline is dope as fuck...and lettin you know how infested law enfarcement still is with the kluless klutz klowns aka the kkk..
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fair enough
He got whitewashed in the story like the Lone Ranger.
word.. and I think the Original Lone Rangers name was Reeves too..
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