<em>Watchmen</em> Is a Blistering Modern Allegory
HBO’s Watchmen is the strangest show to come to TV in a minute: the kind of fictional world where FBI agents carry locked briefcases that contain giant blue dildos, police interrogations incorporate Grant Wood’s American Gothic, and a brazen set piece of a shoot-out between superheroes and white supremacists relies heavily (and explosively) on cows. Damon Lindelof’s new series, a long-anticipated “remix” of the cult 1980s graphic-novel series, is sublime and absurd. It’s a symphony in which the loudest note in every bar is proudly out of key. The plane it portrays, an alternative-history America in 2019, is at once disturbingly peculiar and unmistakably our own.
In this mirror version of reality, a superstar liberal president has managed to pass both a reparations bill and a gun-control bill, twin policies is set in a world where there is no internet. But itself the internet. It’s a fictionalized manifestation of the things life online has begotten: polarization, anonymity, doxxing, red-pilling, weaponized nostalgia, conspiracy theories. The supposed imposition of cultural orthodoxy. A sense of victimization that’s twisted into racist resentment.
