As the United States grapples with its relationship to the police, Hollywood has tried to reflect that struggle through storytelling. Two texts, in particular – Netflix’s American Son and HBO’s Watchmen – have managed to find divergent avenues into those stories that give us specific but diametrically opposite ideas about what we should be taking away from this cultural moment.
Taken together, the adaptations are in strange conversation with each other about the very nature of policing. In American Son, the narrative apparently seeks to bring sympathy to “hard-working police officers” who are simply trying to make it home to their families. In Watchmen they never did, and the cops who were left behind have been empowered to ensure that doesn’t happen again.
American Son is, unfortunately, nothing more than a series of pedantic lectures. Based on the Broadway play of the same name, the 90-minute film is a bloated and unnecessary exploration of race and the state of American policing. The empty treatise somehow manages to incorporate every facile argument about police brutality and respectability politics without saying much of anything at all.
Set entirely in the waiting room of a lonely police station in the early morning hours of a torrential downpour, the film stars Kerry Washington as Kendra Ellis-Connors, a desperate mother worried about the whereabouts of her son. The sparse chamber play makes no attempt to provide real answers about how race functions in the United States, opting instead to pontificate in contradicting terms about the state of blackness and the unyielding determination of whiteness. Respectability will either save you or it will make no difference in the face of a white supremacist system that transits guilt through melanin. Arrogantly, American Son thinks it can have it both ways.
With just four characters (three of whom are men in law enforcement) American Son accomplishes what should be impossible: an insistence on the primacy of black respectability as a means of survival that somehow exists smoothly alongside a validation of the misplaced fear police have of black bodies.
Watchmen–a sprawling, mythic sequel of sorts to the 1986 comic and 2009 film of the same name–at first glance appears to be more of the same. Here is a world beset by illegal masked vigilantes and a police force under siege by yet another iteration of the Ku Klux Klan (here named the Seventh Kavalry). After a deadly attack known as the “White Night,” the police themselves hide their faces behind bright yellow masks that anonymize and homogenize them; the last line of defense against anarchy.
Curiously, Watchmen has accomplished something much more interesting and alchemical than American Son; it has pushed its police force onto the side of justice by making them the enemies of white supremacy but has maintained the very same fascistic structures that make the police a deadly threat in the real world. With its canonic attacks on the police by a revived Klan and a legal mandate that officers shield their identities from the public, the text of Watchmen is that the police are the heroes. The subtext, however, is that they’re always the villains.
The two stories give different entry points to the same idea: police are the problem. If in even a fantastical world where they are the ostensible victims of the story, police officers still manage to make white supremacists the underdogs, then there is a rot at the root of the very institution. Watchmen reveals that the much-beloved police chief whose lynching catalyzes the story was secretly a racist with a Klan hood hidden among his things. The moment manages to be both shocking and entirely mundane, because, in the real world, police officers dedicated to battling white supremacy are the aberration, not the norm. Chief Judd Crawford’s (Don Johnson) secret racist inclinations were almost a relief—a reconciling with the unjust world we already know and understand. To be frank, that’s fucked. But it is a true reflection of the way American society interactions with institutions of law and order.
American Son goes a step further by having Kendra loudly and repeatedly proclaim her fears for her black son. Any interaction with police is potentially deadly. But it is the interaction her white husband Scott has with the officer on duty that shows just how insidious the shared notion of whiteness can be. After failing to placate Kendra, the officer sees Scott’s FBI badge and assumes he’s the superior he’s been waiting for. His pointed, racist description of Kendra is made in hushed, conspiratorial tones—surely this white man understands how difficult these black bitches can be. The presumption that they occupy the same social position and impulse to oppress is what makes whiteness such a powerful collective weapon.
Watchmen is smarter and better with its commentary than American Son but under all the narrative flourishes, they both understand that these terrifying issues stem from the very nature and history of policing. Their mandates are clear: institutions deserve interrogation, most especially when they use force to insist upon their benevolence.