Retcon, Race, and Retransmission: The Role of HBO’s Watchmen in Contemporary Storytelling

Although its starting-point is a graphic novel that uses the totems of the superhero genre, Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen sequel presents itself as a mind-bending crime drama, situated in a counter-historical ‘present day.’ Thus, Lindelof’s claim that he was not so much producing an adaptation as a ‘remix’ is true: the series effectively ‘remixes’ the crime genre, introducing foreign elements into a knotty story of historical injustice. Drawing on notions of ‘preemption’ (Toni Pape, Figures of Time) and ‘durational slippage’ (Mark Amerika, remixthebook), Twomey examines how Watchmen moves past murder, corruption, conspiracy and cover-ups to press the crime genre to its limit, also taking in war, vigilantism and space/time travel. History and counter-history collide, as the legacy of Jim Crow and Klan ideology, on the one hand, and civil rights discourse and anti-war protest, on the other, re-emerge in twenty-first-century Tulsa—anticipating recent debates about Critical Race Theory, The 1619 Project, and police reform, which draw attention to the darkness that still haunts American identity.