Tiffany Boone, Saul Rubinek, Carol Kane, and Logan Lerman in Hunters. Hunters is a revenge fantasy, one very heavy on the fantasy. Watchmen’s primary preoccupation is the heritability of hate and the decade-spanning trauma of racism. But this comedic feel, all winks and bloodshed, contrasts jarringly with flashbacks to the horrors of the Holocaust. The series, with its comic fourth wall-breaking public service announcements and a dance sequence set to the Bee Gees “Stayin’ Alive,” is full of the grim cheekiness that buoys its network neighbor The Boys. In Hunters, the very real Nazis who left footprints large and small in midcentury America, building modest lives as Queens housewives and celebrated ones as NASA rocket scientists, are reimagined as an organized cabal, working within the Carter administration to establish a Fourth Reich in the U.S. In the Damon Lindelof-helmed television sequel, the intergenerational pall of American racism replaces themes of nuclear angst, following Angela Abar (Regina King), a current-day Tulsa cop, as she battles government-embedded white supremacist terrorist groups, just as her grandfather, a survivor of the Tulsa massacre, did nearly a century ago.īoth Watchmen and Hunters are deeply engaged with comic books and classic superheroes, though the crusaders in the latter show-a band of 1970s New Yorkers who pursue and kill Nazis hiding out in America-forego capes and costumes. that won the Vietnam War with the aid of the superpowered Doctor Manhattan, and used its tale of masked hero intrigue to probe Cold War anxieties. The comic book series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons takes place in a U.S. Watchmen has alternate history in its bones. The aftermath of the Tulsa Race Massacre. But they also take comfort in the idea that other horrors were narrowly avoided. These shows, which include Amazon Prime’s Hunters and HBO’s The Plot Against America, revel in a newfound desire to confront our racist past, and at their best, martial TV magic to support under-told narratives like that of the Tulsa killings. Watchmen is just one in a spate of recent TV series to examine the racism of the Trump era through an exercise in speculative fiction, combining factual American history with fanciful forays into versions of our nation in which bigotry is allowed to run even more unchecked. It made a big difference in pointing out how serious this issue was, and how important in U.S. “The opening scene of was so graphic and real that it brought intense empathy from local people and people across the nation. But it’s even more impactful when you can visualize and see it,” Matthews told Esquire. “It’s one thing to get a story told to you. For years, he's worked to increase awareness of the attack. Oklahoma State Senator Kevin Matthews, who grew up in Tulsa’s African-American community, just a few blocks away from Greenwood, founded the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission. Thanks in part to Watchmen, the massacre is becoming a widely-acknowledged chapter in American cultural memory. ![]() If the murderous raid hadn’t been featured on the buzzy series, it seems unlikely that its inclusion in state textbooks would have been covered by national news outlets. ![]() ![]() But Google Trends data shows that search interest in the term “ Tulsa massacre” spiked after Watchmen’s debut, and samplings of social media testimonials suggest that the series marked the first time many Americans had ever heard of the event. The effort to make the too-little known piece of American history mandatory learning for Oklahoma students predates the debut of HBO’s Watchmen, which kickstarted its premier last fall with a harrowing depiction of the massacre. But it wasn't until this February that Oklahoma announced that the Tulsa Race Massacre will be included in its state-wide curriculum. Hundreds were murdered, and dozens of city blocks filled with black-owned homes and businesses were bombed. In 1921, white mobs attacked Tulsa's Greenwood district, then home to one of America’s most prosperous black communities.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |