Yellow Peril and Black Power: Racial Positionings in HBO’s Watchmen(2019)
In their roundtable discussion for Film Quarterly, four Black scholars—Michael B. Gillespie, Jonathan W. Gray, Rebecca A. Wanzo, and Kristen J. Warner—are “Thinking About Watchmen,” the 2019 American superhero drama limited series. In their exploration of Watchmen and “the issues of medium, genre, fandom, and African American history,” Gillespie et al. laud the series as “some of the most consequential television of the century, particularly with regard to its concentration on history, culture, and race” (Gillespie et al. 50). While the conversation thoroughly explores the creation of the Black superhero and their origin stories rooted in trauma at the hands of white supremacy, the topic of Vietnam, a significant and recurring theme in the context of the series, is brought up only in passing. In particular, Gillespie counters criticisms made of the show’s representation of Vietnam and Vietnamese characters in its “failure to address imperialism and treatment of Lady Trieu” (56), the show’s only leading Asian character. He claims to “understand those critics who wanted the show to engage more deeply with the history of Vietnam, but … question whether the show must, or even could, do so in any way equivalent to the show’s radical regard for American/African American history” (57). Through the framing of the scholarly discussion as well as Gillespie’s comments in particular, this roundtable situates the Vietnamese/Asian presence in Watchmen as existing in opposition to Blackness and outside the realm of historical American race relations.
This essay argues that in its depiction of Vietnam and treatment of Asian (American) characters, Watchmen asserts Asians and Asianness to be fundamentally incompatible with either the white supremacy of American imperialism or the reparational justice of Black American heroism, relegating it to a tertiary position in which it is neither granted the complexity of its racial counterparts nor permitted to seek its own power among them. The series’s unapologetic affirmation of Blackness and its thoughtful treatment of the Black-White racial reckoning taking
place in its plot—including both depictions of “real life” historical events such as the Tulsa race massacre as well as reinterpretations of in-universe superheroes from the comics—has been acclaimed by viewers, critics, and scholars alike. However, it accomplishes such a feat by setting Blacks and Blackness in opposition with Asians and Asianness in an affirmation of Black American belonging as derived from Asian Othering. Building off Claire Jean Kim’s theory of racial triangulation, this essay posits that Watchmen situates Black bodies as the agents by which the threat of Asian Otherness is abated in order to uphold narratives of American exceptionalism and structures of White American hegemony. Reading Jessica Hatrick and Olivia González, I connect their argument on the ways Watchmen reinforces “copaganda” narratives to my own on racial triangulation by highlighting the way Black characters are not only complicit in the white supremacist system of policing but do so on behalf of American imperial interests. Finally, through the framework of techno-Orientalism as coined by David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu, I perform a close reading of the character Lady Trieu and how her portrayal reflects American anxieties of Asian technological dominance.
Adapted from the superhero comic series of the same name, Watchmen (2019) was created by White executive producer and writer Damon Lindelof for prestige subscription television network HBO. In her essay “Politicizing the superhero genre: The case of Watchmen (HBO, 2019),” Evdokia Stefanopoulou delves into the production context of the series. Taking on the events of the original comics as a canon, Lindelof’s Watchmen “remixes” its source material by adding new characters and storylines that center racial conflicts as “the central historical trauma of our era” (Stefanopoulou 230). Concerned about his ability to tell stories about racial reckonings as a White showrunner, Lindelof assembled a “diverse” team of artists of colors and women “in order to shape the material from their unique perspectives.” Specifically, the writer’s room consisted of “six black writers, with half of them being women” as well as “seven white writers … with only four of them being white
men.” In the directing department, “six out of nine episodes [were] directed by women or people of color” (231). Notably, the absence of non-Black people of color as either writers or directors suggests that the racial tensions of Lindelof’s Watchmen do not involve Asian, Indigenous, or Latin American perspectives, reducing the race relations of the series to a “Black and White issue.”
This iteration of Watchmen takes place in an alternate timeline in which the United States wins the Vietnam War with the help of Doctor Manhattan, a godlike being with the power to manipulate matter at a subatomic level, and Vietnam becomes the 51st American state in 1985. In the present day (2019), the Tulsa Police Department is fighting against a white supremacist group known as the Seventh Kavalry, who attacked and killed numerous officers on Christmas Day, 2016 in a terrorist event that came to be known as the White Night. As a result, all members of the TPD wear masks to protect their identities, and some detectives even take on an alternate costumed identity, including Black protagonist Angela Abar.
As members of law enforcement, Watchmen’s leading Black characters serve to uphold a state-sanctioned system of violence and white supremacy. In their article “Watchmen, Copaganda, and Abolition Futurities in U.S. Television,” Jessica Hatrick and Olivia González argue that HBO’s 2019 Watchmen reproduces conventions of copaganda despite its work to critique the history of white supremacist violence in U.S. policing. Hatrick and González explain the function of copaganda in American media:
“[C]opaganda” (a portmanteau of “cop” and “propaganda”) … describe[s] media content that “actively counters attempts to hold police malfeasance accountable by reinforcing the ideas that the police are generally fair and hard-working and that Black criminals deserve the brutal treatment they receive” … [it] normalizes the power, presence, and violent practices of the police. (Hatrick & González 2)
They go on to discuss the function of police as “violence workers” on behalf of the state, enacting the state’s monopoly over violence and maintaining racial capitalism through their state-sanctioned
responsibilities to “protect the property of the capitalist class; maintain stable conditions for capital accumulation; and defend against any threats to these unequal conditions of rule” (3). In popular culture and media, copaganda plays a role in normalizing the state’s monopoly over violence and the social order of racial capitalism by encouraging audiences “to empathize with law enforcement and with the ideology that policing and police violence are necessary” (4). This naturalization of policing consequently serves to prop up white supremacy through “the gratuitous ‘repetition of violence as standard operating (police) procedure.’” Citing Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton, Hatrick and González draw a connection between policing and white supremacy, whose inherent instability requires “a constant paranoia of loss and the resulting constant reinvention of whiteness via state absorption and co-option” (2).
Hatrick and González highlight the way Watchmen perpetuates copaganda narratives through its depiction of central law enforcement characters as heroes. The series’ protagonist, Angela Abar, is a detective for the Tulsa Police Department under the alias Sister Night, taking on the persona of a masked nun. Throughout the first few episodes, we witness the TPD’s ongoing crusade against the white supremacist group Seventh Kavalry, employing excessive physical force in acts that are portrayed as “necessary and noble.” Hatrick and González single out Angela as a figure who “repeatedly abuses her power as an officer … with the support of law enforcement colleagues” (8). In the first episode, “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice,” Angela is encouraged to utilize violence to force a suspected Kavalry member to reveal information, upon which she brutalizes the suspect in a separate room to the point of his blood seeping out under the door. Similarly, in the second episode, “Martial Feats of Comanche Horsemanship,” Angela participates in a police raid of Nixonville, a community of Nixon supporters in Tulsa, repeatedly battering one suspected Kavalry member to the point of blood streaming from his nose and mouth as he loses consciousness. This use of physical violence is not only depicted as normal and justified within the Tulsa Police
Department, “behavior that its members not only encourage but enjoy” (8) but also positions Angela as a perpetrator of systemic oppression that has historically targeted lower-class Black and brown bodies. As Hatrick and González point out, “While Detective Abar has, in theory, been fighting a white supremacist organization as a member of the police force, she ultimately protects the white supremacist nation-state … validat[ing] a notion of justice rooted in the necessity of state punitivity [sic] and violence” (8-9).
Despite their roles in perpetuating state-sanctioned violence, Watchmen’s Black characters are still afforded the room to explore their complexity as flawed but ultimately sympathetic figures. In episode two, Angela discovers that the wheelchair-bound, elderly Black man she apprehended on suspicion of his involvement with Chief of Police Judd Crawford’s murder is in fact her grandfather, Will Reeves, a former police officer and vigilante known by the alias Hooded Justice. Through the parallels in their lives, Will and Angela are shown to be mirrors of one another: both had fathers who were members of the United States Army, both lost their parents at a young age, both are fighting against white supremacist groups, and both possess a strong sense of personal justice for which they are willing to go to drastic ends, including physical violence to the point of killing. In taking on their alter egos as Sister Night and Hooded Justice, the show suggests that Angela and Will use their secret identities as a means of freely expressing the violence tendencies that stem from their repressed fear and rage, with their masks serving not only to protect their identities but to embolden them to acts beyond their normal means. Though Sister Night and Hooded Justice’s acts of violence are not unequivocally endorsed by the show, which makes sure to demonstrate the hurt inflicted on themselves and their loved ones in addition to that meted out to their enemies, Angela and Will are still depicted as righteous characters fighting on the side of justice. Angela and Will’s (abuse of) power does not prevent them from receiving a nuanced
treatment as characters with backstories and motivations, strengths and flaws that make them as sympathetic figures worth rooting for.
However, the sympathy that Black characters like Angela and Will are able to evoke despite their violent enforcement of white supremacist state power comes explicitly at the cost of Asian American acceptance through a model of racial triangulation. In her momentous essay in Politics & Society, Claire Jean Kim delineates a theory of U.S. race relations between Blacks, Whites, and Asians using “a field of racial positions” that delineates Asian Americans as “racially triangulated” with respect to Black and White Americans. In this triangular construct, Asian Americans are relatively valorized (by White Americans) relative to Black Americans but are civically ostracized (also by White Americans) in their construction as “immutably foreign and unassimilable … on cultural and/or racial grounds” (Kim 107). In other words, while Asians occupy a “higher” racialized social status in American society relative to Blacks (yet always “lower” relative to Whites), they are never seen as “truly American” like their Black and White counterparts. In the universe of Watchmen, the Asian presence is centralized in Vietnam, whose existence as a de jure state but a de facto American colony complicates its position as a member of the Union yet still an alien Other subordinate to White American imperial hegemony. Lady Trieu, the show’s secondary antagonist, is an American citizen by virtue of her birth in Vietnam post-statehood but is nevertheless viewed as a foreign threat whose very existence endangers the American way of life as we know it. All the while, Black characters such as Angela and Cal (both preceding and following the reveal of his true identity as Doctor Manhattan) are presented not only in relation but also in opposition to Vietnam, tasked with abating the threat posed by Asian forces ranging from the Vietnamese Liberation Front to the conglomerate Trieu Industries on behalf of (White) American interests.
The shadow of Vietnam permeates the background of Watchmen’s Oklahoma setting. Prior to Trieu’s introduction in episode 4, Angela Abar’s Vietnamese origins are revealed in the first
episode, when she prepares a batch of mooncakes for her adopted son’s school career day. Though she works for the Tulsa Police Department, she runs a Vietnamese bakery called Milk & Hanoi as a front for her secret occupation. Angela wears a blue silk vest, replete with floral embroidery and frog closures, as Oriental-style string music plays non-diegetically in the background. She recounts her background as a girl growing up in Saigon, just around the time it had joined the United States, as the daughter of a U.S. Army officer who had fought against the Viet Cong. As such, our first introduction to this universe’s version of Vietnam is not presented through an examination of the land or the locals itself but instead mediated through the (Black) body of Angela Abar, whose very upbringing reflects the American imperialist presence in the aftermath of the war’s destruction. In a scene later in the episode, Angela, her family (her Black husband and White adopted children), and the Crawfords (the White chief of police and his White wife) gather for a dinner party; they are eating pho, as evidenced by the soup spoons, chopsticks, and porcelain bowls. It is a subtle detail, one the show does not linger or comment on, but it reflects the exclusion of Asians at a table where Black and White people alike are consuming Asian food. In these early episodes, Asian alterity is reduced to cultural goods, such as clothing and cuisine, that can be more safely consumed by Black and White bodies.
At the same time, Watchmen depicts acts of Vietnamese resistance to American imperialism as tantamount to acts of white supremacist terrorism. In episode seven, “An Almost Religious Awe,” Angela re-experiences memories of her childhood after having overdosed on her grandfather’s Nostalgia, a drug containing his memories. She remembers the day her parents died in 1987 on VVN Day (Victory in Vietnam Day), a celebration of Doctor Manhattan’s deeds replete with blue masks, puppet shows, mooncakes, and fireworks. While the ten-year-old Angela steps away to return a video tape to the rental store, a member of the Vietnamese Liberation Front leaps toward a group of U.S. Army servicemen and detonates a suicide bomb, shouting “Death to the invaders!” (E7
05:16), killing Angela’s parents in the process. The episode intercuts this scene with flashbacks of Will’s memories of the Tulsa race massacre, drawing a thematic link between the terrorist bombing that killed Angela’s parents and the racial violence and mass murder committed by white supremacists in Tulsa, Oklahoma that killed her great-grandparents. In doing so, the show suggests that the act of armed Vietnamese resistance against American imperialism is analogous to an act of white supremacist terrorism against a Black community, situating the Vietnamese Liberation Front as equivalent to the Ku Klux Klan. However, this reading ignores the power dynamics inherent in American occupation of post-war Vietnam, which despite its admission to the Union is functionally an overseas colony, and diminishes the suffering experienced by the Vietnamese people as well as their own desires for political independence and reparation. Instead, Vietnamese anti-imperialist sentiment is uncritically denounced in favor of upholding the authority of the state, one that is exercised through Black complicity in police violence.
The only ethnically Vietnamese/Asian character of the main cast, Lady Trieu (Hong Chau) is a genius scientist and the owner of Trieu Industries, a mysterious corporation that manufactures a number of products, from technology to pharmaceuticals. She is the daughter of Bian My, a Vietnamese refugee who worked as a cleaning lady for narcissist billionaire industrialist Adrian Veidt (formerly known as the costumed adventurer Ozymandias) and inseminated herself with the latter’s sperm as an act of retribution against her employer. Trieu’s conception is depicted in the final episode, “See How They Fly,” during which Bian quotes Lady Triệu, the legendary warrior from Vietnamese mythology who serves as Trieu’s namesake: “I want to ride the
strong winds, crush the angry waves, slay the killer whales in the Eastern sea, chase away the Wu army, reclaim the land, remove the yoke of slavery. I will not bend my back to be a slave” (E9 03:02–03:26). Born of her mother’s suffering following Vietnamese defeat in the Vietnam War and her resentful wish to “reclaim the land” from the forces of American imperialism, Lady Trieu makes it her goal to harness the power of the omnipotent Doctor Manhattan for her own humanitarian purposes.
We are introduced to Trieu at the beginning of episode four, “If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own,” when she appears at a White couple’s house to demand the sale of their land.
Dialogue with the couple reveals that the local residents know Trieu only as the reclusive trillionaire who moved to Tulsa a year prior and never leaves the silicon tower of Trieu Industries. Despite hailing from an American state (Vietnam) and living in the mainland for a year, Trieu occupies a foreigner status and is perceived as someone removed from the “common” people. The couple is reluctant to sell their home at first, but Trieu coerces them into the sale by presenting them with a baby, which she had created after having researched the couple’s fertility difficulties. In her initial appearance, Trieu comes off as an eccentric yet blunt and ruthless figure, willing to resort to emotional manipulation and Machiavellian means in order to achieve her goals.
The same episode also sees the first depiction of Trieu Industries, which up until this point has been only a recurring name spotted on various pieces of technological equipment. The main interior resembles an airport hangar, with tall ceilings and white fluorescent lights. Workers are dressed in all-white jumpsuit uniforms emblazoned with the Trieu Industries logo. Lady Trieu lives with her daughter Bian II, a clone of Trieu’s mother, in a separate glass-enclosed vivarium populated with native plants from Vietnam (so that “Vietnam never leaves me”), an eco-brutalist haven with a
mixture of synthetic tech and organic biology. Towering overhead is the Millennium Clock itself, which is revealed to actually be a quantum centrifuge that Trieu has been constructing in order to isolate Doctor Manhattan’s powers from his body.
Both the character of Trieu and the entity of Trieu Industries are examples of a trope known as techno-Orientalism. Coined by David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu in their book Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media, techno-Orientalism is defined as “the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hypertechnological terms in cultural productions and political discourse” (Roh et al. 2). Building off Saidean Orientalism, in which the Western gaze essentializes Eastern cultures in the service of imperial power, technoOrientalism imaginations are also deployed to “the West’s project of securing dominance as architects of the future, a project that requires configurations of the East as the very technology with which to shape it” (2). In other words, the conflation of Asia and Asians with technoOrientalist imagery allows the Western consciousness to not only mitigate anxieties about Asian technological dominance but also harness the Asian-as-technology for the sake of their own cultural advancement. Trieu Industries is the very embodiment of this Asian technological dominance: owned by a Vietnamese trillionaire, staffed by obedient and interchangeable workers, and constructing a machine whose powers and dangers are inscrutable to the average onlooker. Its omnipresence in the mainland American society of Watchmen—from its collection of personal data via the Blue Booth Network to its role in the development of pharmaceutical drugs such as Nostalgia—renders Trieu Industries (and by extension, the Asian figure) as the site of American anxieties about corporate and technological power crushing the everyday American and positions Trieu and her company as anathema to the American way of life.
Lady Trieu herself as a character embodies the traditional cultural values of the East as well as the intellectual prowess purportedly possessed by the West. As the daughter of a Vietnamese
refugee and a White American industrialist, Trieu is a hybrid figure who has inherited a legacy of both suffering at the hands of American empire and perpetrating destruction in the name of American empire. In Techno-Orientalism, Roh et al. specifically reference the figure of Dr. Fu Manchu, the character created by British author Sax Rohmer in 1912 as a “figure of unnatural, unknowable peril who must be kept from acquiring knowledge lest it be used against the Western subject” (1).
Lady Trieu can be seen as a contemporary iteration of the Fu Manchu figure, whose genius and hubris pose an irreconcilable threat to the safety and endurance of Western civilization. As the sole major Asian character in the show, Trieu’s cold and calculating qualities are made to stand in for “all the cruel cunning of the entire Eastern race” (qtd. in Roh et al. 1), and she is not permitted the nuance and ambiguity allotted to all other main characters, Black and White alike. Even her very humanity is ambiguous in nature: as a daughter conceived through “non-natural” means and as a mother who produces a child through “non-natural” means, Trieu’s ties to human biology and hence even her relationship to personhood are called into question. Her unemotional and intellectual nature suggests a greater kinship with automatons, perpetuating a trope of Asian bodies as androids that is prevalent throughout American history and media.1
Despite her contributions to taking down the white supremacist groups known as Cyclops and the Seventh Kavalry, Lady Trieu is positioned as a threat tantamount to or even worse than the main antagonist of the series. At the beginning of the series, Trieu has formed an alliance with Will Reeves, Angela’s grandfather formerly known as Hooded Justice. In exchange for information about Doctor Manhattan’s whereabouts, Trieu promises to help Will destroy the remnants of Cyclops, a white supremacist group active in New York City during Will’s time as a police officer, as well as its
1In his book Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton, Long T. Bui provides a comprehensive overview of the racialization of Asians and Asian Americans through their association with the robots/machines in an analytic he terms “the model machine myth.”Under the model machine myth, Asian bodies are perceived as simultaneously superhuman and infrahuman, and examples range from the “labor machines”of Chinese coolies in the United States and “war machines”of Japanese citizen-soldiers fought during WWII.
current-day counterpart, the Seventh Kavalry. For months, she allows the Kavalry to steal equipment from Trieu Industries for a machine they are building to capture Doctor Manhattan, planning to steal him from them once they have succeeded. However, when the time comes for Trieu to hold up her end of the deal, Angela tries to warn the members of the Kavalry about Trieu’s involvement. Even though the Kavalry is a white supremacist group who has actively targeted both civilians and members of the police force, including Angela’s own loved ones, Angela still chooses to align with them in their final doomed moments rather than allow Lady Trieu to enact her plans, further reinforcing a reading of Black agents acting to uphold White hegemonic interests. Her warnings fall on deaf ears, and the Kavalry proceed to activate their machine, which malfunctions and liquefies their leader, Senator Joe Keene. On behalf of Will, Lady Trieu vaporizes the remaining Cyclops leadership and Kavalry members before preparing to kill the still-captive Doctor Manhattan for his powers.
Amidst the commotion, Doctor Manhattan teleports Veidt, FBI Agent Laurie Blake, and TPD Detective Wade Tillman to Veidt’s office in Antarctica for them “to save the day” (E9 40:00).
Veidt convinces Laurie and Wade as to the threat that his daughter poses to humanity: She claims she’s going to fix the world. [But] she is clearly a raging narcissist whose ambition knows no limits … Anyone who seeks to attain the power of a god must be prevented at all costs from attaining it. But believe me, that girl will not rest until she has us all prostrate before her, kissing her tiny blue feet. (E9 45:44–46:20)
In his appraisal of Trieu, Veidt invokes fears of Eastern dominance to reinforce a techno-Orientalist narrative of Western endangerment. He simultaneously underscores her power, describing her as a genius and “a most worthy adversary,” and demeans her status, referring to her as “that girl” and mocking her “tiny feet.” Ironically, the show chooses Veidt to assess the level of Trieu’s threat as a “raging narcissist,” as he is demonstrably (and self-admittedly) a dangerous narcissist himself who has committed far greater acts of violence against humanity than Trieu has or has yet to enact.
Back in 1985, amidst the ongoing threat of nuclear war, he unleashed a genetically engineered squid monster in the middle of Manhattan that resulted in the deaths of three million people, which serves as the inspiration for his next course of action.
Veidt sends a shower of frozen squids raining down on Tulsa, with the force of a “Gatling gun [firing] from the heavens” (E9 45:17), destroying Trieu’s machine and killing her (among many police officers) in the process. The series’ decision to kill Trieu alongside the members of Cyclops and the Seventh Kavalry aligns the Asiatic figure as an evil that the heroes must vanquish to “save humanity.” The positioning of Trieu as the “final antagonist” situates the Asian possession of power as a threat greater than even white supremacy, a Fu Manchu-like adversary who must be eliminated at all costs. Whereas other characters who have enacted acts of violence—including Veidt himself, who was responsible for the death of over three million people—are permitted to continue existing, Lady Trieu (who notably has never been depicted as physically harming anyone prior to the vaporization of Cyclops and the Kavalry) is not offered the same clemency.
Some viewers might believe that Trieu’s death is meant to reinforce a general disavowal of hubris, in that man ought not to possess the powers of a god at all. Instead, the show simply demonstrates that the powers of a god should not dwell in an Asian body. For the majority of the series, the character of Doctor Manhattan has been passing as a normal human named Cal Abar, Angela’s husband who had experienced total retrograde amnesia after a car accident. In reality, Jon Osterman had taken the form of a deceased Black man in order to be with Angela, implanting a ring created by Veidt in his brain to suppress his memory and powers. Doctor Manhattan is not a benevolent god: on behalf of the American military, he razes the people and land of Vietnam to secure victory, an act he justifies by saying he was “just trying to be what people wanted me to be” (E8 14:56). Disillusioned with humanity, he creates an inhabitable terrain and new life forms on Europa, but later abandons them when they do not live up to his expectations. Refusing to use his
powers for the betterment of society, he chooses to prioritize his personal fulfillment by pursuing a relationship with Angela. Despite all of the above, Cal/Jon is portrayed as a sympathetic figure whose powers must not be permitted to fall into the “wrong hands” (i.e. the Seventh Kavalry and Lady Trieu) and whose ultimate death is mourned by those who knew him. His positive characterization thus suggests that he was “deserving” of, if not his powers, then at least the right to exist, sanctioning godhood for a White, then a White-as-blue, then a White-as-blue-as-Black body. Nevertheless, Trieu’s device kills Doctor Manhattan, and his powers supposedly disappear into the ether, to be possessed by no one. Had the show ended with this status quo, it could have suggested an alternative framework that positions human collaboration and systemic change as the solution to global problems, rather than the brutal violence of Doctor Manhattan’s limitless godlike abilities. Instead, the final scene sees Angela returning home in the aftermath of Jon’s death, where she finds the remnants of a broken carton of eggs that he had telekinetically summoned from the fridge. As she prepares to clean it up, she finds one unbroken egg and recalls an earlier conversation with Jon in which he explains that if someone were to consume any organic material that he has atomically manipulated, they would inherit his powers. Angela brings the egg outside to her backyard, where she consumes it, and just as she reaches out a foot to the surface of the pool to test if she can walk on water, the episode cuts to black. Although the show does not explicitly confirm it, this ending strongly insinuates that Angela has inherited Jon’s abilities and become the new iteration of Doctor Manhattan. Though for what purposes she would use them is left up to speculation, her affiliation with policing and role as a vigilante suggests that she would, in Hatrick and González’s words, “enact her vision of justice” as an “almighty arbiter” of right and wrong, further validating an understanding of justice as rooted in the necessity of state-sanctioned violence (Hatrick and González 7-8). The very powers that other groups have killed and died for now dwell in the body of a state agent, one who is known for having repeatedly abused her power “to protect the state over
people” (9)—yet the series still suggests that this outcome is preferable to the alternative of an Asian technocrat ascending to godhood, cementing its alignment of the Oriental figure as an impermissible threat.
In his op-ed for The Washington Post, Vietnamese-American novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen writes about how HBO’s Watchmen (2019) fails its Vietnamese characters in its handling of the alternate timeline after-effects of U.S. victory in the Vietnam War. Nguyen makes a number of arguments expressed earlier in this essay, particularly that by refusing to acknowledge “America’s imperial power and its entwinement with white supremacy,” the series denies Vietnamese/Asian characters the interiority and complexity afforded to their White and Black counterparts. However, what is of particular interest are the comments responding to Nguyen’s article.
Some comments vehemently protest Nguyen’s portrayal of the United States’ historical relationship with Vietnam. User Emptyfoxhole asserts, “America is far from an imperialistic [sic] power. Am not a historian, but it isn’t difficult to judge that. America doesn’t hold and plunder. Post WW2 was an ideological struggle, pure and simple. Geopolitical dominance was the chess board and Korea and viet nam [sic] were the pieces,” while user Nick T T argues that “… the Viet communists’ willingness to commit to extreme violence … made those colonialists/imperialists look like school children … Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 90’s the Viet communist regime had no choice but to rejoin the civilized world [emphasis mine] and the rest is history.”
Others feel that Nguyen is “overreacting” to a piece of fictional media: “It’s a comic book, dude,” chides user Brunetto Latini, “Dr. Manhattan doesn’t exist, and so talking about how a comic misunderstands Vietnam is ridiculous.” “Fiction, fiction, fiction,” laments user Bobbob41. “Why does anyone try to compare it to true life?” However, as user soleil soleil points out,
All art—comic books, movies, television series, novels—is as much a part of reality as are [sic] war and peace … The racist, misogynistic stereotypes traded in the imaginations that created The Watchmen [sic] are the same archetypes in policymakers’ and soldiers’
imaginations during the [Vietnam] War: ‘the little brown people’ of the ‘Yellow Peril’ became ‘terrorists’ of the ‘Communist Menace.’
I highlight these comments in Nguyen’s article not only to highlight how divisive the issue of (representations of) Asian experiences of racism and American imperialism remains but also to emphasize the importance of media criticism toward understanding and challenging racial and political attitudes. After all, from its very inception, Watchmen (1987) was never “just a comic book,” but a synthesis of real-world anxieties and speculations on Cold War futurisms. While many events in American history might appear to be but relics of the past, their political afterlives remain a reality of the present, and the future requires that we consider alternatives to the same systemic systems of oppression—even those in which the racial roles of oppressor and oppressed are reshuffled—lest we fall victim to repeating cycles of the past.
Works Cited
Bobbob41. Comment on Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “How ‘Watchmen’s’ misunderstanding of Vietnam undercuts its vision of racism.” The Washington Post, 18 Dec. 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/12/18/how-watchmensmisunderstanding-vietnam-undercuts-its-vision-racism/.
Brunetto Latini. Comment on Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “How ‘Watchmen’s’ misunderstanding of Vietnam undercuts its vision of racism.” The Washington Post, 18 Dec. 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/12/18/how-watchmensmisunderstanding-vietnam-undercuts-its-vision-racism/.
Bui, Long T.. Model Machines: A History of the Asian As Automaton, Temple University Press, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/columbia/detail.action?docID=29195560.
Emptyfoxhole. Comment on Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “How ‘Watchmen’s’ misunderstanding of Vietnam undercuts its vision of racism.” The Washington Post, 18 Dec. 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/12/18/how-watchmensmisunderstanding-vietnam-undercuts-its-vision-racism/.
Gillespie, Michael Boyce, et al. “THINKING ABOUT WATCHMEN: WITH JONATHAN W. GRAY, REBECCA A. WANZO, AND KRISTEN J. WARNER.” Film Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 4, 2020, pp. 50-60. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48735304.
Hatrick, Jessica and Olivia González. “Watchmen, Copaganda, and Abolition Futurities in US Television.” Lateral, vol. 11, no. 2, 2022. https://doi.org/10.25158/L11.2.2.
Kim, Claire Jean. “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans.” Politics & Society, vol. 27, no. 1, 1999, pp. 105-138. https://doi-org.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/10.1177/0032329299027001005.
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “How ‘Watchmen’s’ misunderstanding of Vietnam undercuts its vision of racism.” The Washington Post, 18 Dec. 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/12/18/how-watchmensmisunderstanding-vietnam-undercuts-its-vision-racism/.
Nick T T. Comment on Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “How ‘Watchmen’s’ misunderstanding of Vietnam undercuts its vision of racism.” The Washington Post, 18 Dec. 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/12/18/how-watchmensmisunderstanding-vietnam-undercuts-its-vision-racism/.
Soleil soleil. Comment on Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “How ‘Watchmen’s’ misunderstanding of Vietnam undercuts its vision of racism.” The Washington Post, 18 Dec. 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/12/18/how-watchmensmisunderstanding-vietnam-undercuts-its-vision-racism/.
Stefanopoulou, Evdokia. “Politicizing the superhero genre: The case of Watchmen (HBO, 2019).” Cinej Cinema Journal, vol. 10, no. 1, 2022, pp. 224-248. https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2022.509.
Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media, edited by David S. Roh, et al., Rutgers University Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/columbia/detail.action?docID=3565206.