The Marketing of Black Power and Black Rage in The Watchmen TV series

No doubt taking its cues from the global fiscal and critical success of Ryan Coogler’s 2018 film Black Panther and also the racially divided national politics of the US, David Lindelof has revamped the superhero Watchmen series to address the actual history of anti-Black violence in the United States and globally. The series has been considered groundbreaking with actress Regina King in her role as Sister Knight racking up a variety of awards and recognition from the cover of Essence magazine to features in Marie Claire and Vanity Fair. It quickly became a fan favorite while becoming the most watched series for HBO since its 2017 hit Big Little Lies. Watchmen garnered 7 million viewers on average per episode in comparison to Game of Thrones, HBO’s all-time most successful series, ten million viewers per episode.

With the finale being the most watched episode of the series, it has been suggested that the show profited from a strong word of mouth as it was much praised and discussed on social media. Salon television writer Melanie McFarland claims Watchmen “exonerates the power of black rage in a way I’ve never seen before on television.” This is an opinion echoed across the internet. The series seems to work very hard to show that the distrust of white people and white institutions that Black people carry as a result of a history of racialized trauma is completely justified. So what does the series’ groundbreaking investment in a previously underacknowledged moment of Black suffering and survival mean?

With its opening sequence set during the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921, the series made its first big impact from the very first moment of its first episode. It is safe to say that most viewers of the series had not heard of the seldom discussed event in US history let alone seen a gripping visual representation of anti-Black violence of that scale.  Watchmen dramatically depicts how over a two-day period, more than thirty-five blocks of the Black middle-class and upper middle-class section of the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma were burned to the ground. At the time, the community in Tulsa was one of the wealthiest Black communities in the United States and was known as “the Negro Wall Street” in the African American press. Vigilante mobs combined traditional white terror methods such as tarring and feathering and lynchings with the use of newer technologies such as utilizing private airplanes to drop homemade bombs on Black-owned hotels, hospitals, churches and numerous shops. In addition to the physical damage done to the community, several thousand African Americans were detained in makeshift custody and detention centers. Though the federal government called out National Guard troops to quell the violence, the damage had been done and there is much evidence to suggest that both they and local law enforcement were contributing to the violence. 

There are many theories as to what provoked the burning of “the Negro Wall Street” and the Watchmen series incorporates many of them into its comic book driven storylines. In one flashback, a US soldier receives an enemy propaganda flyer that asks Black soldiers why they would fight for a country that doesn’t grant them any rights. He saves this flyer and it plays a pivotal role later in the series. One of the theories about what triggered the violence in Tulsa in 1921 is that African American servicemen returning from World War I were seen as arrogant and no longer “knew their place.” Some of the most compelling images in the opening sequences of the first episode of Watchmen involve witnessing the violence done to African American men in US army uniforms. Other theories of the causes of the violence rotated around the idea that the economic prosperity of “the Negro Wall Street” provoked jealousy in less prosperous white communities. Watchmen showcases successful African Americans with middle-class jobs and businesses including Regina King’s character who is a police officer but also the owner of a bakery. White resentment is also on full display to this sort of success as well as to the fictionalized reparations that have been paid out to descendants of the massacre.

An obvious and indisputable cause for the Tulsa Race Riots was the rebirth of the premier US white supremacist organization the Ku Klux Klan following the success of D. W. Griffith’s groundbreaking 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. The film, which was originally called The Clansman, is credited with reviving and popularizing the Ku Klux Klan in its powerful depiction of white victimhood and eventual triumph over recently emancipated Blacks. At the time of Griffith’s film, the Klan—originally a regional movement concentrated in the south—had all but disappeared. Griffith’s film revived interest in the group nationally and gave the group a new symbolism of the white hood and robes and burning crosses, which would become internationally recognizable iconography for white supremacy. Griffith was a master filmmaker with many of the techniques he pioneered in The Birth of a Nation still the primary techniques used in narrative filmmaking. For film historians, he is variously known as the Father of American Cinema or the Father of Narrative cinema. The Klan revival that his film sparked was responsible for anti-Black violence not only in Tulsa but in Rosewood, Florida; Elaine, Arkansas; Ocoee, Florida; Omaha, Nebraska and many other locations.

Watchmen appreciates the relationship between cinema culture and white supremacy in the US and many of its key scenes occur in a movie theater. In the historical flashbacks and in its futuristic moments, Watchmen locates the power of visual culture to influence and change history. Regina King’s character even draws her crimefighting name and persona from a fictionalized blaxploitation film Sister Knight. The HBO series is the second major iteration of the story originally based on a comic strip but the Sister Knight character did not appear in either the original comic book or in the 2009 Zack Snyder film Watchmen. In the Snyder film as in the original comic book, African American characters play no major roles. They and their history are certainly not central to the Watchmen stories. In fact, two of the only characters who remain from the original series in Lindelof’s version, Dr. Manhattan and Hooded Justice, are played by Black actors rather than the white characters they have been previously represented to be.

Sister Knight could easily be seen as the most empowered African American female character in recent film and television culture but what does this power mean in relationship to an adaptation by a white creator, David Lindelof, of material created by other white creators, Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore? The birth of narrative cinema in The Birth of a Nation demonstrates that Black bodies have always been a significant commodity for cinema culture, perhaps, the most significant commodity. In a post-civil rights era, where media consistently struggles to heed the call for the inclusion of more Black voices, Black authenticity has become as valuable a commodity as Black bodies were to The Birth of a Nation. While David Lindelof is credited as the creator of the series, it must be noted that the writers room for HBO’s Watchmen is significantly more diverse than most Hollywood writers rooms with three of nine writers for the series being of African descent. Despite its origins in material created by and for a white audience, the show obviously attempts to showcase a perspective that might be seen as authentically Black.

Black states of feeling including Black rage and Black pride—the cornerstones of Black authenticity—are now highly valued commodities and as such are not always in control of Black people. Colin Kaepernick branded Nike Air Force 1 sneakers sell out in a matter of minutes when they go on sale on the Nike website and Black Power movement symbols are available on everything from t-shirts and mugs to underwear. Beyonce’s film Lemonade is seen as a preeminent statement on Black female identity and pain but only one of the six people credited with directing the film besides Beyonce herself occupies that identity category. It is significant that in The Birth of a Nation many of the African American roles were played by white actors in blackface makeup. Just as The Birth of a Nation didn’t require any actual Black people to occupy the Black bodies that it portrayed on the screen maybe Black Power and Black rage no longer require the specific presence or permission of Black people to exist on screen. Our pain, our trauma and our history—even in its most horrific manifestations--become just another commodity for sale.