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According to the prompt and the comment to rewrite the whole essayWord minimum 600 wordsRequirement in the attachment I dont wanna a summary pls be more thoughtful to writing this article, need to contrast with those four articles butler__is__watchmen__a_bold_critique_on_white_supremacy_or_more__copaganda____1_.pdf nussbaum_the_incendiary_aims_of_hbo___s____watchmen______the_new_yorker__1_.pdf poniewozik____watchmen____is_an_audacious_rorschach_test___the_new_york_times__1_.pdf young_maybe_it___s_time_to_just_burn_down_every_plantation__1_.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview Is Watchmen A Bold Critique On White Supremacy Or More Copaganda? Butler, Danielle Within the first minutes of Watchmen’s debut episode on HBO, It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice, viewers are sent a very clear message. That message is that this is a show that is going to talk about race; more specifically racism, and attempt to do so without pulling any punches. The graphic novel adaptation thats more of a remix of the source material rather than a continuation of the original story, opens with a scene of a young Black boy in an empty theater in Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood district. The boy is attentively watching a silent film called Trust in the Law! by legendary Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux (based on a very real Black sheriff named Bass Reeves) while his sobbing mother plays the accompanying piano. This quickly unfolds into what is probably the most graphic and realistic depiction of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 ever seen on television or film. Storefronts are vandalized and set ablaze by laughing white men KKK members; screaming and crying Black women are executed; armed, scrambling Black residents trip over the slain bodies of their neighbors while attempting to flee; Black children are crying while carrying their limp, unresponsive infant siblings; explosions and aerial attacks demolish homes; and the lifeless bodies of Black men are dragged across the battlefield, hitched to the back of pick up trucks. It is very much depicted as a war on the thriving Black residents of the Greenwood district (or, Black Wall Street), which by all accounts, it was. While the casualty count is much disputed among surviving witnesses and historians--ranging from estimates of 55 to 300 deaths (heavier losses for Black residents in all estimates)--it’s thought to be the worst incident of racial violence in US history and more than 6,000 Black Greenwood residents were arrested and detained. It’s an arresting, anguish-inducing introduction that leaves the audience breathlessly glued to their screens. That gives the impression that HBOs Watchmen may be a series that is unafraid to display the full scale of white supremacist violence, a territory often neglected in entertainment, and doing so while centering a historical event that is often left out of standard U.S. history education. That boldness in the opening scene is what makes the subsequent scenes and messaging of the episode more difficult to reconcile. Shortly after the recreation of the Tulsa Race Massacre, we are transported to an alternate reality of present-day Tulsa, Oklahoma. A Black cop pulls over a redneck who is blasting rap music in his pick-up truck on a highway. While the driver is reaching for his license and registration, the cop notices a Rorschach mask (a telltale sign of belonging to a white supremacist group called The Calvary) falling out of the driver’s glove compartment. Unnerved by the sight, the cop asks the man to remain in his car, while he retreats back to his patrol vehicle. In this alternate reality, cops are not allowed access to their firearm until they get permission granted by some sort of risk assessment dispatcher, whose job is to ascertain the level of threat and determine the need for firearm access. The cop is frustrated by the lackadaisical response of the dispatcher on the other line who slowly greenlights the release of his firearm from its locked holster while the cop’s safety is in apparent danger. Eventually, the cop gets control of his gun, however, when he glances up, its too late--the Rorschach-masked redneck shoots him several times in the chest before fleeing. This scene supports a talking point often employed by champions of law enforcement, that cops are restrained by harm reduction reforms at the possible expense of their lives and ability to do their jobs. Former FBI Director James Comey cited police body cams as a reason for a spike in crime since it inhibited cops who were ‘afraid of doing something wrong.’ Though Comey incurred the wrath of the public after those statements--and despite the fact that police work is getting progressively safer and is not as dangerous being a fisherman, logger or a farmer--its still a popular belief among the Blue Lives Matter crowd that is often supported through entertainment (or copaganda) like Law & Order: SVU, NYPD Blue and so many other copcentered shows. What Watchmen does is blur the intent of this trope by making the police force visibly more nonwhite, and making the bad guys flannel-clad, hillbilly white supremacists. In the series, cops are in constant mortal danger as they are targeted by a violent and racist militia called The Seventh Kalvary, and are forced to use masks to hide their identity. Oscarwinner Regina King’s character Sister Night is a retired cop-turned masked vigilante, taking on white supremacists in a way that is understandably satisfying to watch for an audience who rarely sees this kind of retribution in real life. She operates both alongside and outside of the law as a renegade. She kidnaps and physically assaults suspects, even going a little overboard with interrogations, but it’s okay because she’s just so passionate about justice and it’s a white supremacist-- albeit a poor one who lives in a trailer, the most easily contemptible kind. This is one of Watchmen’s more glaring contradictions. It is a show that boldly dives headfirst into a critique of white supremacy only to use common tropes to impugn the usual suspects of racism and engender sympathy for an occupation that largely functions to enforce it. Even in a world where it spontaneously rains tiny squids, a reality in which law enforcement is an impassioned combatant to white supremacy seems even more fantastical by comparison. In a recent interview with Vulture, show creator Damon Lindelof comments on being confronted by this critique: “When we went to TCA [a Television Critics Association panel], the very first question was asked by Eric Deggans from NPR, a writer who I think is phenomenal. He also happens to be a man of color. He said, “I think the only interpretation that you can possibly take from this pilot is that we’re supposed to believe that the cops protect Black people in this world? I don’t buy that for a second.” I was like, “Well, I think we should revisit this question after you’ve seen all nine episodes.” I’m not going to hide behind the fact that this is an alternate world. I’m not telling anybody how to feel about the police. It’s a TV show. At the end of these nine episodes, are you going to feel that the police are racist? No. You’re going to feel like some are, and you’re going to feel like some aren’t.” While his comments don’t necessarily inspire much confidence that the show’s takeaway regarding law enforcement’s place in systemic racism will amount to more than “a few bad apples spoiling an otherwise salvageable bunch,” it still may be worth doing as Lindelof said: watching the remaining episodes to see how it all plays out. The adaptation is markedly different from the original graphic novel and seems like it’s intending to reconcile critiques of the novel’s depiction of women and people of color with contemporary sensibilities. But much like the movie, the series is heavy with pre-existing context from the source material and shrouded in mystery, especially for those of us unfamiliar with that source material. Between mentions of interdimensional collisions, “Redfordations, (reparations handed out to Black people under this universes president, the actor Robert Redford) Jeremy Irons inhabiting a medieval castle while being waited on by creepily attentive house staff who call him master; and Sister Night and her Black husband (Yahya Abdul-Mateen) being parents to presumably white children, there are many questions that need to be answered. Danielle Butler With already commanding performances from King, and *spoiler alert* Don Johnson who portrays the recently departed character Chief Judd Crawford, one can’t help but want to tune in to see where this world that juxtaposes the brutally familiar with the fantastical leads us--even as it toggles between fresh refreshing candidness and tired tropes. Butler, Danielle. “Is Watchmen A Bold Critique On White Supremacy Or More Copaganda?” SHADOW&ACT Home, Https://Shadowandact.com/, 24 Oct. 2019, shadowandact.com/is-watchmen-a-bold-critique-on-white-supremacy-or-more-copaganda. 3/26/2020 The Incendiary Aims of HBO’s “Watchmen” | The New Yorker On Tel ision December 9, 2019 Issue The Incendiary Aims of HBO’s “Watchmen” Damon Lindelof ’s update to Alan Moore’s graphic novel is a bombshell, reordering the ctional universe and writing buried racial trauma back into comic-book mythology. By Emily Nussbaum December 2, 2019 “Watchmen” is Lindelof ’s third series about a society struggling with trauma. I Illustration by Tomer Hanuka n the opening sequence of Damon Lindelof ’s version of Alan Moore’s 1986 graphic novel, “Watchmen,” a seven-year-old black boy sits alone in the Dreamland, a Tulsa cinema, staring rapt at a ickering silent Western called “Trust in the Law.” The hero is Bass Reeves, the Black Marshal of Oklahoma, a handsome gure who pulls off a black hood to reveal a badge. Onscreen, another boy, this one white, gazes in admiration at the Marshal, as he saves the day. “There will be no mob justice today! Trust in the law,” Reeves says, as the boy in the audience says the words with him, smiling. Just then, a siren goes off outside the theatre. The black boy is about to be swept up in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre—the country’s most signi cant incident of racial terrorism, during which the city’s “Black Wall Street” was strafed by planes and burned to the ground by white supremacists, abetted by the National https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/the-incendiary-aims-of-hbos-watchmen 1/4 3/26/2020 The Incendiary Aims of HBO’s “Watchmen” | The New Yorker Guard. It’s a true story that will be left out of schoolbooks, mislabelled a “race riot,” and deliberately forgotten. So will Reeves’s story, also real. We don’t nd out what happens to the boy until ve episodes later, but, when we do, it’s a doozy. That opening sequence pulls to the surface themes of racial violence that never appear directly in Moore’s graphic novel, although they seethe at the margins, coded in Reagan-era fear of urban chaos. It’s not necessary to read the source material in order to “get” the show, but it wouldn’t hurt. A quick primer: the original “Watchmen” is set in an alternate time line, beginning in the nineteenforties, among a group of bickering masked vigilantes, the Minutemen. The team includes one guy dressed like an owl and another like a moth; a savvy sexpot, Silk Spectre, and her cynical daughter, Laurie; a mentally ill antihero named Rorschach; the allAmerican Captain Metropolis; a Vietnam vet; a bright-blue, naked, nuclear-powered Übermensch; a preening billionaire, Ozymandias; Hooded Justice, who wears a noose; and others, some barely walk-ons. In the nal passages, Ozymandias decimates New York with an attack designed to look like an alien-squid invasion—his aim is to avert nuclear war by unifying the United States and the U.S.S.R. against an imaginary foe. Crazily, the plan succeeds. A foundational work for comics fans, “Watchmen” is a lurid, freewheeling satire, interrogating the American worship of violent superheroes. (And, in certain ways, glamorizing that tendency: it’s one of the comics that launched the gritty-reboot trend that led to “The Joker.”) Lindelof ’s update, on HBO, is equally swashbuckling and absurdist, but it has complex aims: it focusses on what’s missing from the original. Though it jumps around in time, it is set largely in Tulsa in 2019, three decades after that alien-squid attack, a national trauma that is memorialized as “11/2.” (There’s also a major subplot, so baroque I don’t even have the space to cover it, that is set on one of Jupiter’s moons, in a mansion lled with slave clones.) Robert Redford is the President; Vietnam is the fty- rst state. There are new characters, several of whom work as cops, under bizarre conditions: after a wave of anti-police violence, Tulsa cops are required to adopt secret identities, wear masks, and conceal their jobs even from their family members. Initially, Lindelof seems to be modernizing the story in the earnest way that many TV shows do: by making the cast diverse. Angela Abar (Regina King), a.k.a. Sister Night, is a gun-toting maverick who snaps, “I got a nose for white supremacy and I smell bleach,” and who beats information out of racists. The series also reboots the villains, now the racist Seventh Kavalry, a cult of redneck terrorists who live in a trailer park called Nixonville and worship the quasi-fascist Rorschach. But, from early on, there’s a tingling, cathartic uneasiness to this inversion. What are we to make of a story in which the starkest narratives of Black Lives Matter are replicated, only with a black cop and a white victim? In which the police kidnap suspects, then test them for bigotry? It takes a while to sort out the history, but, once it begins to unfold, it’s a bombshell. Lindelof ’s “Watchmen” reorders the ctional universe, writing buried racial trauma—from slavery to lynching—back into comic-book mythology, as both its source and its original sin, stemming from the Ku Klux Klan, a group reawakened, back in 1915, by the original masked-hero blockbuster, “The Birth of a Nation.” “W atchmen” is Lindelof ’s third series about a society struggling with unresolved trauma, and in certain ways it’s a natural follow-up to both “Lost,” a post-9/11 story about a mysterious plane crash, and “The Leftovers,” about the disappearance of two per cent of the population. Like those series, and like its source material, “Watchmen” is a gaudily selfconscious puzzle box, with a chopped-up chronology, playful references to its own arti ciality (one episode is called “If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own”), and art-within-art elements like “Trust in the Law,” comic books, TV shows, puppet shows, and museum displays, some telling the myths of the Minutemen, who are celebrities in this ctional world. Like “Lost,” “Watchmen” includes fable-like psychological ashbacks. Like “The Leftovers,” it’s fuelled by cockeyed, hyper-saturated imagery, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/the-incendiary-aims-of-hbos-watchmen 2/4 3/26/2020 The Incendiary Aims of HBO’s “Watchmen” | The New Yorker including dreamlike visions—piglets racing across a courtroom; cracked eggs that resolve into a smiley face—that don’t need to be fully understood to be effective. But there’s been a fascinating progression in the creator’s approach to race. “Lost,” when it débuted, in 2004, had a refreshingly inclusive concept, with diverse survivors forced to form a new society. This variety proved super cial, as the seasons passed; by the show’s nale, four white men were vying for leadership. “The Leftovers” began, in 2014, with a mostly white ensemble, but in the second season—like several other TV dramas during that period—the creators added black characters, including a family whose mother was played by King. By the nal season, however, those characters had faded in importance, suggesting something thin, if well intended, about their presence. In “Watchmen,” in contrast, blackness is the root of the story, as well as its underlying purpose: it’s a show about the potential for pop culture to treat black identity as a default, and, more speci cally, about the idea of African-Americans playing roles (in both senses) from which they’ve often been excluded, among them soldiers, cops, and superheroes. It is in conversation with a wide set of modern debates about representation: the fan wars that ame up around pop hits like “Star Wars,” “Black Panther,” and “Spiderverse,” as well as discussions about reboots like the all-female “Ghostbusters,” cross-casting and appropriation, and so on. But the show is also in synch with conspiratorial fears about American justice, the sense that there’s no way to wear the badge without being stained. Or conned, for that matter. All of Lindelof ’s shows are full of grifters and shills, and in “Watchmen” that situation is racialized, through stories about the vulnerability of black people in white institutions, trusting white allies only to be betrayed. In the opening episode, Angela’s beloved boss, a white sheriff named Judd, is lynched by an elderly black man, who turns out to be her grandfather, whom she’s never met. Later, when Angela opens the closet in Judd’s bedroom, as her grandfather has advised her to do, she discovers her worst fear: a Klan robe. It seems as if Judd had been secretly working with the Seventh Kavalry. There are multiple plots woven together in the show—there’s an amazing episode about Looking Glass, a masked cop who survived 11/2— but Angela’s journey is its center. In the phenomenal sixth episode, co-written by Lindelof and Cord Jefferson, Angela overdoses on a drug called Nostalgia, which lets the user reëxperience old memories—but the pills belong to her grandfather. “It’s dangerous to take someone else’s Nostalgia,” she’s warned, in a line that could be the show’s motto. She drops down a tunnel of inherited trauma, and what she nds there rewrites not just her own history but the mythology she’s inside. As it turns out, her grandfather, Will Reeves, was the Minuteman Hooded Justice. In Moore’s version, Hooded Justice was a minor character, the one Minuteman whose face we never saw—although he’s coded as white, and hinted to be both a Russian strongman and a Nazi, in a secret gay relationship with Captain Metropolis. Hooded Justice is also present in Angela’s universe: on a cheesy TV dramatization called “American Hero Story,” he’s portrayed as a gay white man. In both versions, though, he’s the original masked hero, who inspired the other Minutemen to ght evil. In reality, he’s black—he’s the sweet boy we saw watching “Trust in the Law,” a survivor of the Tulsa massacre who grew up to be a cop, imitating (and taking the surname of ) the black marshal he admired. Only then, as the pride of his community, featured in the Amsterdam News, did he confront the truth: not only would his white colleagues never accept him but they were also secret racists, part of a Klan conspiracy called Cyclops. Will is nearly lynched by other officers—and when he pulls on a hood, to ght crime https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/the-incendiary-aims-of-hbos-watchmen 3/4 3/26/2020 The Incendiary Aims of HBO’s “Watchmen” | The New Yorker anonymously, he continues to wear the noose. It is his white lover, Captain Metropolis, who tells him to keep his face hidden: audiences aren’t ready for a black hero. The Minutemen shrug off his battle against the Klan, too, forcing him to ght alone. It’s a radical revision that is logical and emotionally resonant, a new myth that burns off the old one. How could Hooded Justice be anything other than black? In a set of elegantly edited sequences, Angela’s face and Will’s face trade places. She gets his badge, she’s hanged, she absorbs his rage—it’s like a dark twist on those jokes about how black people are the least likely to want to try time travel. But the episode itself is a kind of time traveller, revising Moore’s myths. In Lindelof ’s shows, stories are always a kind of con —they’re how we shape the truth, to suit our fantasies. And, if you ... Purchase answer to see full attachment