Is there anything so dissociative as a mirror? That face that stares back at us is somehow neither what we see, nor what people see when they look at us. It’s an illusion of reflection, there for us to use to project, and which shows us the limitations of our own sense of self.
Wade Tillman should know. He literally wears a mirror around as a mask. He’s a member of the masked-police force in Tulsa, Oklahoma in HBO’s Watchmen. As we learn in “Little Fear of Lightning,” he joined the force because he was among those in the November 2, 1985 attack on New York City, when a giant squid teleported into our dimension and killed half of NYC’s population in the process. This is the event that ends the comic, but it’s only given rise to the story of Watchmen today. The trauma from “11/2,” as it came to be known, left him with mental scars, pushing him to protect himself and those around him as “Looking Glass,” giving his head the look of liquid mercury.
What he hopes to elucidate with this reflection is the facts. All he wants is truth — which isn’t particularly special; in a world of jaded intrigue and betrayal, we’re all just looking for the truth. And so Tillman makes for a neat microcosm of Watchmen’s greater aims, as a warped mirror to the society we know now. For Tillman it matters greatly that he is doing things right, keeping people safe. And so it doesn’t matter to him that he’s a pawn for larger entities — whether as a teen missionary or the Tulsa police force, or even the Seventh Kavalry, a conspiracy organization largely populated by loners and white supremacists. He is willing to take the risk and push the boundaries based solely on his drive for the truth.
And so, “Little Fear of Lightning” gives him the truth, in the worst way, the kind of way that makes you careful what you wish for. After going on a date with a girl from his support group, he follows her to a warehouse, and discovers the lie at the heart of Watchmen: the squid was not an alien attack but an orchestrated effort by Adrian Veidt to help avoid mutually assured nuclear destruction and unite humanity. Maybe he didn’t see through the bullshit as clearly as he thought.
This shakes Tillman. The man still wears Reflectatene (the fancy fabric that is believed to protect from “psychic attack” fallout of 11/2) every day, whether as part of his mask or sewn into his hat. But in some ways he’s still trapped in that hall of mirrors in 1985, just as naive and unwilling to see the way truth can be the best seed of a lie. (“What hot-blooded Oklahoma male is gonna admit he’s scared?” Tillman asks, before we see 50 minutes of him trying to play it cool.) He forgot that life is so infrequently smooth and contained.
This has always been the delicious, rotted core of the Watchmen universe: as a comic, the story pushed for fallibility in our caped crusaders — they weren’t untouchable, they weren’t magic, and they certainly weren’t idols. As a series it was intensely interested not in the right and the wrong, but the decisions that lead to those lines being drawn at all. In the 1980s, author Alan Moore ultimately crafted Watchmen to tackle themes of power, and the “idea of superman manifest within society,” by putting superheroes in a “credible, real world.” They were humans with fancy gear and a glitch that made them seek out the dangerous role of vigilante. By the time Moore’s series ends, Adrian Veidt, one of the core “heroes,” has dropped a squid in the middle of New York City, killing millions and scarring more. Dr. Manhattan, an honest-to-God superhuman, couldn’t stop him.
“I did the right thing, didn’t I? It all worked out in the end,” Veidt asks Manhattan in the comic. “‘In the end?,’” Manhattan counters. “Nothing ever ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.”
It’s in these two panels that the show builds out from the original comic, creating its own funhouse mirror of the 21st century. Like the comic before it, the story’s universe is obsessed with reflecting back a distorted version of the politics of our own time, in this case remixing the authoritarianism of the 1980s to the racism of today. Like our world, Watchmen is a space forced to finally reckon with the centuries of malice and carelessness of those in power and in uniform. And like anything, there will never be a stable steady state, never an infinite moment where the world stops and comes together; Veidt can’t bring true peace because time flows into the next moment and the one after that and the one after that.
The remarkable thing about Watchmen as a show is how it refuses to kowtow to an expectation of there being a clear order in this universe. The Seventh Kavalry are, as far as we can tell, racist cop killers. They are also right about this one major conspiracy. The man whose mask they emulate also spoke and fought for the truth, even if he his actions were still horrific. The senator that leads them now makes a point to separate himself from their racism. As does the murdered chief of police who had KKK robes in his closet. As does Tillman.
It’s here that the parallels to our world feel more muddled, less clearly understood. But perhaps no show in recent history has demanded a “wait and see” approach as much as Watchmen, because no presentation, no mask is ever simple; just because it’s the cops that wear masks now doesn’t mean they’re the heroes. There are no easy answers, no easy shading, vigilantes can’t save themselves, let alone us. Watchmen as the show seems to be making the same argument, 34 years later: you can’t trust anyone. Not even the person staring back at you in the mirror.