Watchmen (Lindelof, 2019)
Imagine my surprise to find that the 2019 HBO series Watchmen was still available on Neon in New Zealand.
Stuff disappears all the time these days. I put my archives behind the paywall, but posts more than six months old are not guaranteed to be useful if you want them to be outlet specific! (They are obviously still gold from a general advice or prose point of view.)
Back in 2019 I wrote an excellent guide to Watchmen and why you should watch it.
Still true today, I think.
Watchmen takes the fundamental American stain of racism as its theme and starts with a bang: a chilling recreation of the Greenwood Massacre in which a racist mob – deeply offended by the fact that the black community had created prosperity and security for themselves – burned down 35 blocks of downtown, killing hundreds and leaving 10,000 people homeless. Some of the destruction was even caused by aerial bombardment, it was so demented.
That part of Tulsa was known as Black Wall Street, it was so prosperous, but the outraged whites could not stand to see such success paraded in front of them and were determined to see it wrecked. It’s hard to know what the greatest scandal is – the fact that it happened at all or that to this day so few people even know about it.
The Greenwood Massacre is the inciting incident of a very dense and layered plot that slowly ravels and unravels but always comes back to America’s crimes against the humanity in its care. It’s thrilling to see a big budget fantasy epic deal with a topic like that with such fury.
Where to find Watchmen
Aotearoa: Streaming on Neon
Australia: Streaming on Binge
USA: Streaming on Max
UK: Streaming on Sky
