assessed essay: Black trauma and the representation of time in Watchmen
This is my fourth and final assessed essay for my MA in Cultural and Critical Studies at Birkbeck, University of London written for the module Reading Time in the Twentieth Century.
This was written in March / April 2020 and, given the cultural context of Anglo-American protests against the violence of police structures and the killing of Black people by the state in May and June 2020, I think this essay would be very different if I were to write it now. There would certainly be some interrogation of Watchmen’s depictions of policing and police violence and more examination of how the show intersects racial trauma and policing.
Black Lives Matter: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ms_blm_homepage_2019
Watchmen (2019) is a television series sequel to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ comic series, Watchmen. [1] As their title suggests, both the comic and the TV series use time, clocks, and watches as thematic motifs and deal, in differing ways, with the representation of time. [2]
In this essay, I examine the representation of time in the Watchmen TV series and specifically the representation of time in relation to race and racial trauma. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s conceptions of time, I argue that Watchmen distinguishes between representations of time for Black people and white people based on different temporalities of trauma. Through its narrative and themes, Watchmen argues for a distinct temporality of what Tina M. Campt theorises as ‘black feminist futurity’. [3]
In his writings on time, Henri Bergson distinguishes between homogenous time — time-as-space — and heterogenous time — pure duration. [4] Homogenous time is the sense of time referred to by the clock in which time refers to the physical movement of the clock’s mechanisms. Bergson writes, ‘I say, e.g., that a minute has just elapsed, and I mean by this that a pendulum, beating the seconds, has completed sixty oscillations.’ [5] Bergson ties this sense of ‘clock-time’ to the figure of the physicist and to Newtonian science. [6] Homogenous time represents a spatialization of time — as Bliss Cua Lim articulates it, ‘project[ing] time into space’ — by tying temporality to the clock face and ‘inaccurately representing time as a simultaneous juxtaposition of distinct instants.’ [7] Conceiving time as a series of oscillating instants, one discrete moment after another, is conceiving of time through a metaphor of space and this spatialized sense of time does not have the sense of succession that Bergson argues is intrinsic to our conscious experience of time. [8] As David Scott writes, ‘time reduced to the measurable phenomenon […] will always fail to fully grasp the temporality of time.’ [9]
Bergson distinguishes homogenous clock-time from heterogenous time:
When I follow with my eyes on the dial of a clock the movement of the hand which corresponds to the oscillations of the pendulum, I do not measure duration, as seems to be thought; I merely count simultaneities, which is very different. Outside of me, in space, there is never more than a single position of the hand and the pendulum, for nothing is left of the past positions. Within myself a process of organization or interpenetration of conscious states is going on, which constitutes true duration. It is because I endure in this way that I picture to myself what I call the past oscillations of the pendulum at the same time as I perceive the present oscillation. [10]
Bergson argues that our subjective experience of time is uninterrupted and indivisible into the objective minutes and seconds measured by clock-time. [11] Our conscious experience of time is not of instants of discrete seconds following one another but as a duration of enduring experience and memory. Heterogenous time — or duration — refers to time without spatiality: ‘when time is lived as an organic whole, an interpermeating, indivisible, and hence, nonnumerical multiplicity.’ [12]
In the original Watchmen comic series, time is largely conceived as homogenous clock-time. The comics contain multiple references and motifs to time focused on the symbol of the clock: a clock face ticking down to midnight over the course of the twelve issues of the series appears at the end and as the back cover of every issue (see Figure 1); the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists appears in the background of the narrative as a symbolic representation of how close the world is to global nuclear destruction (see Figure 2); even the title ‘Watchmen’ can be interpreted as referring to timepieces. [13]
Dr. Manhattan, a god-like being who experiences time non-sequentially, is a pivotal character for the representation of homogenous time in the Watchmen comics. His background as the son of a New York watchmaker immediately ties him to representations of clock-time. Dr. Manhattan’s earliest scene in the comics takes place in 1945: in his pre-superhero state as Jon Osterman, he is distressed when his father throws the watch parts he was working on out of the window. His father says, ‘Professor Einstein says that time differs from place to place. Can you imagine? If time is not true, what purpose have watchmakers, hein?’ [14] Even before he becomes Dr. Manhattan, Osterman’s character is surrounded by imagery of clocks, cogs, dials, pendulums, and the other mechanisms to which Bergson refers in his descriptions of homogenous time. As an aspiring watchmaker, his sense of time is ‘the time which our clocks divide into equal portions… a measurable and therefore homogenous magnitude.’ [15]
Instead of becoming a watchmaker, Osterman becomes a nuclear physicist and gets caught in a lab accident that transforms him into Dr. Manhattan, a superpowered being able to rearrange atomic and subatomic particles and teleport himself at will. [16] Dr. Manhattan can also experience the totality of his past and future simultaneously: his consciousness is able to inhabit any point along his own timestream. The comic renders this graphically through sequential panels representing non-sequential events as well as by Dr. Manhattan’s narration providing details of the date he is currently inhabiting and demonstrating awareness of events that are yet to happen. [17]
Dr. Manhattan’s non-sequential temporality is an extreme manifestation of the spatialization of time in Bergson’s homogenous time. The character occupies points in time as if they were points in space, moving back and forth as if travelling across a spatial territory. His narration announces what date he currently occupies in close conjunction with his spatial location: ‘It’s 1945. I sit in a Brooklyn kitchen…’ followed by ‘It is 1985. I am on Mars…’ (see Figure 3). [18] He does not experience time as duration but as various instants of a homogenous timespan that he is able to inhabit discretely. His time is an ‘unbounded and homogenous medium’ through he which he can move: ‘nothing but the ghost of space haunting the reflective consciousness’. [19] His name and his background tie him to modern physics and the physicist’s account of the universe. In Suzanne Guerlac’s terms, he represents:
the empiricist laws of identity and causality through which we attempt to master time by drawing the future into the present. One can anticipate the future mathematically, but this reduces time to number and crushes our experience of the real time of duration, which differentiates as it becomes. [20]
Guerlac further explains that ‘[d]uration involves, as Bergson puts it, a relation that binds the present to the present’ and Dr. Manhattan experiences no such anchoring to a present. [21]
Through its repeated clock imagery and the key character of Dr. Manhattan, the original Watchmen comic series represents time throughout as homogenous clock-time. By contrast, the Watchmen TV series specifically associates homogenous temporality with antagonist characters, with white supremacy, and with institutional power.
Set 30 years after the events of the comic series, Watchmen depicts an alternate history of the United States of America in which the Black community were granted reparations by President Robert Redford’s government. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the white supremacist backlash to reparations led to the local police wearing yellow facemasks or adopting superhero-like personas to protect their identities. [22] Angela Abar (Regina King) is a retired police officer who secretly continues her police work under the name Sister Night. When the chief of Tulsa Police (Don Johnson) is hanged, seemingly by Angela’s estranged grandfather (Louis Gossett Jr.), Angela is drawn into unravelling the mysteries around the chief’s murder, the white supremacist terrorist group threatening the city, and the billionaire Lady Trieu (Hong Chau).
From its first episode, the series associates clocks, dates, and other symbols of homogenous time with antagonists, with white supremacy, and with institutional power. The Seventh Kavalry, a terrorist group of white supremacists, appear in the first episode delivering a recorded speech threatening to wash away the ‘black filth’ and ‘all the whores and race traitors’ of Tulsa. [23] The video ends with the identically-masked white supremacists mimicking the ticking of a clock by ominously chanting ‘Tick tock, tick tock’ over and over again (see Figure 4). The leader of the Seventh Kavalry is ultimately revealed to be Senator Keene (James Wolk): as a Republican member of the United States Senate, Keene serves to represent institutional power and associates the Seventh Kavalry with institutional power. Later in the series, another antagonist, Lady Trieu, is shown to be building a skyscraper-sized device called the Millennium Clock on the outskirts of the city. When Angela asks Lady Trieu’s daughter, Bian (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport), what the device does, Bian simply answers, ‘It tells time.’ [24] The antagonists are also associated with homogenous time through the strict timetables required for their villainous plans: both the Seventh Kavalry and Lady Trieu work to specific inflexible deadlines fixed to the dates and times of homogenous time. Homogenous time becomes associated with white supremacy through the Seventh Kavalry and with institutional power through the series’ antagonists seeking of power.
Unlike the comic series however, the Watchmen TV series also includes representations of heterogenous time and specifically associates these with Black characters and Black trauma experiences. There is a notable absence of Black characters in the Watchmen comic series. Osvaldo Oyola points out that neither of the comics’ significant Black characters (Dr. Malcolm Long and Bernie) are superheroes or even particularly heroic in the narrative and argues that this absence is a ‘performative contradiction’ to highlight the absence of Blackness in the superhero tradition. [25]
The TV series addresses the absence of Blackness in the superhero tradition through a strong and immediate focus on Black presence and historical Black trauma. In their separate reviews of the series, Gaylene Gould and Emily Todd VanDerWerff both refer to the series’ ‘tackling […] of white supremacy’s enduring power’ as well as its exploration of the intersection of race and power ‘specifically, how that power is so often handed to white people, while Black people are only allowed it if they uphold the white status quo…’. [26] The imagery of the Seventh Kavalry wearing copies of Rorschach’s mask from the comics establishes the TV series as conceptually divorced from the comics. Rorschach, a violent and angry white American man, was arguably the main character of the comics albeit as an unsympathetic protagonist: the TV series firmly associates him with the antagonists and their white supremacy. His white vigilantism is disavowed immediately in favour of the series’ new Black protagonists.
Watchmen’s main character, Angela Abar is a Black American woman raised in Vietnam. [27] The series’ main narrative through line is her investigation of her grandfather, Will Reeves, and his traumatic past. Through this, the series explores the historical racial trauma of her family specifically positioning this trauma as durational and extended through time. Black trauma is historicised through multiple flashbacks showing historical white violence against Black communities. Flashbacks to the 1921 Tulsa race massacre (see Figure 5), to Black American soldiers in the First World War, and to 1930s New York situate Angela’s present-day conflict with the Seventh Kavalry within the history of racial tension and Black trauma in the USA.
In representing time and the experience of oppression for Black characters, Watchmen emphasises duration and endurance. The first episode opens with a flashback to 1921 when Angela’s grandfather was smuggled out of Tulsa while the Ku Klux Klan and other white residents attacked the city’s Black community. [28] The second episode starts with a flashback to Angela’s great-grandfather reading German propaganda during the First World War asking ‘coloured soldiers of the States’ why they serve a country which does not have racial equality. [29] These flashbacks position Black struggle as enduring trauma that persists after the historical instantiation of specific acts of violence and that endure through long duration. This is line with Bergson’s emphasis on ‘endurance’ in heterogenous time:
Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states. For this purpose it need not be entirely absorbed in the passing sensation or idea; for then, on the contrary, it would no longer endure. [emphasis in original] [30]
Historical racial violence is presented in the series not as temporally distant but as present and immediate for its Black characters: past acts of racial violence endure and persist as racial trauma. In another scene from the second episode, Angela visits a cultural heritage centre and uses an automated terminal that allows descendants of the Tulsa race massacre to test their DNA and trace their family heritage. She tells the terminal that she ‘need[s] to know who I am’ and looks fixedly at it as an automated message offers the United States government’s ‘sincerest condolences for the trauma you or your family may have suffered.’ [31] While the series’ white supremacist antagonists focus on the future and planning towards specific homogenous dates, the Black protagonists are forced to look backwards to the detritus of the past to know who they are: to look back on a long historical duration of violence against Black people. Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin discussing Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, where white characters perceive a chain of events, Black characters see ‘a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage…’:
The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly impels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress. [32]
In an article thinking global Blackness through the frame of Angelus Novus, Patricia Northover positions Benjamin’s philosophy of history in line with Bergson’s heterogenous time. Northover describes the complex foldings of time for Blackness in a way that resonates with Watchmen’s depiction of enduring time for its Black characters:
Bergson’s concept of “duration” also places particular emphasis on the idea of time as a process in which the lived durée of the past folds unpredictably into our grasping of the present. […] Bergson’s durational time impresses itself, without determination, into our agential powers and politics of becoming. [33]
Watchmen depicts the lived durée of the past folding into the present in episode 6. At the end of episode 5, Angela takes a bottle of Nostalgia pills, a drug designed to hold memories. She takes her grandfather’s Nostalgia and starts to experience Will’s memories as if she were living them. Episode 6 is an extended flashback / drug-induced memory in which Angela experiences Will’s memories of his traumatic past as one of the first Black police offers in 1930s New York City and later as a queer man and masked vigilante as if they were happening to her in her conscious present (see Figure 6). This experiential mode of time and memory in which the past complexly folds into the present is distinct from the representation of time and memory in media like After Life (1998), The Final Cut (2004), or Black Mirror’s (2011–) ‘The Entire History of You’ in which memories are treated like recorded video that can be viewed back on a screen. [34] When Angela experiences Will’s memories, the experience is not of ‘an empty uniform space for the representation of objects […]. It is a full, heterogenous real.’ [35]
Eugene L. Arva identifies cognitive dissociation, forced forgetting, and the unknowability of truth as hallmarks of trauma. [36] Will’s removal of his memories is a clear forced forgetting of the trauma he suffered as a queer Black man in early 20th Century America. Watchmen uses the Nostalgia drug as a device to literalise the passing on of racial trauma and traumatic memories down through generations and ties the temporal experience of this racial trauma to Bergsonian heterogenous time. Angela experiences her grandfather’s memories as what Bergson calls ‘succession without mutual eternality’:
Withdraw, on the other hand, the pendulum and its oscillations; there will no longer be anything but the heterogenous duration of the ego, without moments external to one another, without relation to number. Thus, within our ego, there is succession without mutual externality; outside the ego, in pure space, mutual externality without succession… [37]
With the externalities of homogenous clock-time withdrawn, Will’s memories appear to Angela as an unbroken flow without spatialization to anchor the temporal experience homogenously. Northover invokes Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘chronotope’ defined in Arva as a traumatic event-time space that transforms and integrates individual and collective traumatic memories. [38] Through the chronotope, Northover gestures towards a complicated movement of temporality in which political formations are folded into historical time: quoting Bakhtin, ‘Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible…’ [39] This describes how Angela experiences the “thickness” of Will’s memories and the complexities of the political structures folded into the time that she inhabits through Nostalgia.
To show the racial aspect of how this durational Black trauma is tied to a heterogenous representation of time, contrast Will’s trauma (as experienced by Angela) with the trauma that Watchmen shows of a white character and how that (white) trauma is tied to homogenous time rather than heterogenous time. Watchmen’s fifth episode focuses on Wade Tillman (Tim Blake Nelson), a white Tulsa Police detective who works under the persona Looking Glass and reveals his PTSD after he was caught in the climactic events of the Watchmen comic series when Adrian Veidt teleported a supposedly-interdimensional giant squid-creature into the middle of New York City and released a psychic shockwave in which, as Wade explains, ‘three million people suffered a horrific, traumatizing, and inexplicable death’. [40]
Wade’s trauma is not tied to the long duration of racial violence in America like Angela and Will’s but to a specific event fixed in time and Watchmen demonstrates this difference by making sense of place and space specifically important in how it shows Wade’s PTSD. His trauma is fixed as originating in Hoboken, New Jersey at a specific time on a specific date: immediately after the event, there is a shot of a fallen clock covered in blood with the name ‘Hoboken’ on it (see Figure 7), a reference to the imagery of the Watchmen comic series and a representation of homogenous clock-time tied to a specific spatial location. The sense of spatialization is emphasised by a long tracking shot away from young Wade as the camera gradually moves away from him standing in a Hoboken fairground surrounded by corpses across the river to Manhattan and on to the squid-creature which devastated the city. As the shot continues, the instrumental score fades away and is replaced by Frank Sinatra’s Theme from New York, New York, further emphasising an indelible sense of place. The clock imagery in this scene and the sense of space all associate Wade’s PTSD with the homogenous time of clocks and the spatialization of time. His trauma as a white man is firmly fixed on one discrete instant rather than the lived durée experienced by Angela and Will.
The contrast between Angela / Will’s Black trauma and Wade’s white trauma brings to light a musical aspect of Watchmen’s association between Black trauma and heterogenous time. Guerlac explains how Bergson uses music as an analogy for heterogenous time.:
Duration implies a mode of temporal synthesis that is different from the linear narrative development of past-present-future. It involves a temporal synthesis of memory that knits temporal dimensions together, as in a melody. Melody, which implies a certain mode of organization, is a figure for duration. The identification of a melody implies an act of temporal synthesis. [41]
When we experience music, we hear a succession of individual notes as an organic whole: similarly, when we experience time, we experience the passing of homogenous minutes and seconds as a whole duration. Bergson writes:
…if we interrupt the rhythm by dwelling longer than is right on one note of the tune, it is not its exaggerated length, as length, which will warn us of our mistake, but the qualitative change thereby caused in the whole of the musical phrase. We can thus conceive of succession without distinction, and think of it as a mutual penetration, an interconnexion and organization of elements, each one of which represents the whole, and cannot be distinguished or isolated from it except by abstract thought. Such is the account of duration… [42]
Melody, rhythm, and the musical phrase are, for Bergson, figures of the experience of duration: movement that does not invoke space. [43]
Watchmen represents this association of rhythm and heterogenous time in its expression of Black trauma. Angela experiences Will’s life as a melody: linear history is disrupted as her consciousness moves rhythmically through Will’s life. Northover, referring to both Bergson and Benjamin’s conceptions of time, describes this when she writes that ‘[h]ere “time,” while being practically indexed by past, present, and future, nonetheless overlaps and incites pulses of rhythmic and arrhythmic moments, temporal movements as well as disjointed flows.’ [44] Alexander G. Weheliye similarly ties Black temporality to rhythm and the sonic:
Overall, it is sound that allows these diverse laborers in the kingdom of culture to mess with the strict cadence of Western modernity in order to present us with a disjointed and singular sonic Afro-modernity, giving credence to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s observation […] that “meter is dogmatic, but rhythm critical.” These writings or practices rhythmify temporality via syncopation, taking on variously the form of grooves, monadic shrapnel, and haunting echoes of the past, present, and future. Time ceases to behave solely as meter only when these three forces coexist, even if unequally and in a fragmented manner, and their contemporaneousness is aided by their proximity to the margins of Western modernity. [45]
Deleuze and Guattari expand on this idea of rhythm as critical by specifically associating rhythm with Bergsonian heterogenous time: ‘it [rhythm] ties together critical moments, or ties itself together in passing from one milieu to another. It does not operate in a homogeneous space-time, but by heterogeneous blocks.’ [46]
The criticality of rhythm to Black temporality in Watchmen further distinguishes the heterogenous temporality of Black trauma from the homogenous temporality of white trauma again through the representation of Wade’s trauma. Wade’s traumatic event is linked to the George Michael song, Careless Whisper, which was playing in the fairground immediately before the psychic-squid-shockwave and afterwards in a sinisterly broken slow-tempo version. At the instant of the event, the line ‘I’m never gonna dance again, guilty feet have got no rhythm’ is interrupted by screaming and the sound of the shockwave. [47] A slow instrumental version of Careless Whisper called ‘No Rhythm’ appears on Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ soundtrack for Watchmen and is a recurring musical cue used to signify Wade’s PTSD throughout episode 5. [48] Wade’s trauma has ‘no rhythm’: his non-racial trauma does not have the rhythmical temporality of Black trauma. Through explicitly positioning his white trauma as non-rhythmic, his trauma is established as having a different sonic-texture to the temporality of Angela and Will’s Black trauma.
In its final episode, Watchmen goes furthest in its representation of Black temporality as heterogenous by symbolically transcending the comic series’ ultimate representation of homogenous time, Dr. Manhattan. At the start of the series, Dr. Manhattan is believed to be on self-imposed exile on Mars. He is eventually revealed to be in Tulsa disguised as Angela’s husband, Cal (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). Episode 8 focuses on Cal / Dr. Manhattan and, like the representation in the comics described earlier, uses cuts between scenes happening in the past and future to represent Dr. Manhattan’s non-linear experience of time. [49]
Watchmen initially uses Dr. Manhattan as a way to signal its rejection of the homogenous time of white supremacy and its embrace of heterogenous Black temporality. When Dr. Manhattan chooses to become Cal Abar, he chooses to become a Black man rather than the white man he was as Jon Osterman. He uses an inhibiting device to suppress his powers and hence the experience of non-linear time that was pivotal to his representation of homogenous time in the comics. Through having one of the comics’ most iconic characters actively choose to reject homogenous time and live life as a Black man in America, the TV series signals its rejection of that conception of time and its embrace of Black temporality.
Watchmen goes further by revealing that, before he is killed by Lady Trieu, Dr. Manhattan transfers his powers to an egg which Angela consumes in the series’ final scene. The series’ last image of Angela stepping out on to her swimming pool to see if she can walk on water calls back to an earlier conversation between Angela and Cal and implies that she has received Dr. Manhattan’s god-like powers (see Figure 8). Embodied by a Black woman rather than the white man of the comics, Dr. Manhattan’s non-linear experience of time becomes a representation of futurity for Black feminism. Angela will experience time in the tense described by Tina M. Campt as the tense of the grammar of Black feminist futurity:
The grammar of black feminist futurity that I propose here is a grammar of possibility that moves beyond a simple definition of the future tense as what will be in the future. It moves beyond the future perfect tense of that which will have happened prior to a reference point in the future. It strives for the tense of possibility that grammarians refer to as the future real conditional or that which will have had to happen. The grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn’t yet happened but must. [emphasis in original] [50]
With Dr. Manhattan’s experience of time, Angela will experience the future real of a future that has to happen in a certain way and cannot be changed but that, through her perspective as a Black woman concerned with the future of the Black community in a way that Dr. Manhattan never was, becomes an experience of possibility. By consuming the egg, Angela, acknowledging the racial trauma passed to her from past generations, embraces the responsibility of Black feminist futurity:
[the] responsibility to create one’s own future as a practice of survival. The future real conditional is an essential component of a black feminist praxis of futurity as an existential grammatical practice of grappling with precarity, while maintaining an active commitment to the every labor of creating an alternative future. [sic] [51]
Through her experience of reliving historical Black trauma, Angela’s gaze remains fixed on the ‘pile of debris’ in the past of Benjamin’s angel of history but, through absorbing Dr. Manhattan’s power, she will become able to turn around to perceive the future to which the angel’s back was turned. [52] Watchmen kills Dr. Manhattan as a symbol of the homogenous time also associated with white supremacy and institutional power and gives his power to Angela who becomes the representation of the future real conditional of Black feminist futurity and demonstrates a synthesis of Black trauma’s heterogenous temporality and the homogenous time of institutional power.
Through its nine episodes, Watchmen signals its rejection of the homogenous time represented in the Watchmen comic series and addresses the absence of Blackness in the comics by focusing on Blackness and historical racial trauma. By associating Black trauma with Bergson’s heterogenous time and with the rhythm identified as critical to Black temporality by Weheliye and Northover, the series ultimately represents a sense of Black futurity offering the possibility of that which will have had to happen. [53]
bibliography
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Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007).
Bergson, Henri, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. by Frank Lubecki Pogson (New York: Dover, 2001).
Bojalad, Alec, ‘Watchmen: Doctor Manhattan Explained’, Den of Geek, 9 December 2019 <https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/watchmen-doctor-manhattan-explained/> [accessed 2 April 2020].
Campt, Tina M., Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
Collins, Sean T., ‘Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross: Watchmen (Music from the HBO Series)’, Pitchfork, 11 January 2020 <https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trent-reznor-atticus-ross-watchmen-music-from-the-hbo-series/> [accessed 1 April 2020].
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
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Guerlac, Suzanne, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
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Lim, Bliss Cua, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
Moore, Alan, and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (Burbank, CA: DC Comics, 2014).
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VanDerWerff, Emily Todd, ‘I think HBO’s Watchmen is tremendous television. Lots of people will strongly disagree.’, Vox, 20 October 2019 <https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/10/17/20918439/watchmen-hbo-review-damon-lindelof-regina-king-comic> [accessed 27 March 2020].
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filmography
After Life, dir. by Hirokazu Kore-eda (Engine Film / TV Man Union, 1998).
Black Mirror, created by Charlie Brooker (Netflix, 2011–).
The Final Cut, dir. by Omar Naim (Lions Gate Entertainment, 2004).
Watchmen, created by Damon Lindelof (Warner Bros. Television Distribution, 2019).
figures
Figure 1: Panel from Watchmen, ch. 1, p. 26 showing the clock at the end of every issue.
Figure 2: Panel from Watchmen, ch. 1, p. 18 referencing the Doomsday Clock in a newspaper on Ozymandias’ desk.
Figure 3: Panels from Watchmen, ch. 4, p. 2 showing Dr. Manhattan’s non-linear experience of time.
Figure 4: Still from Watchmen S01E01 showing the Seventh Kavalry chanting ‘Tick tock’ in a recorded threat.
Figure 5: Still of Watchmen S01E01’s opening scene depicting the Tulsa race massacre.
Figure 6: Still from Watchmen S01E06 showing Angela experiencing Will’s memories.
Figure 7: Still from Watchmen S01E05 showing clock imagery in the aftermath of Wade’s traumatic event.
Figure 8: Still from Watchmen S01E09 showing the series’ final shot of Angela stepping on to water implying that she has inherited Dr. Manhattan’s powers.
endnotes
[1] Watchmen, created by Damon Lindelof (Warner Bros. Television Distribution, 2019).
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (Burbank, CA: DC Comics, 2014).
[2] Throughout this essay, I will use ‘Watchmen’ as a shorthand to refer to the TV series. Where there are references to the comic series / graphic novel of the same name, these will be made explicit.
[3] Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 15.
[4] Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 46.
[5] Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. by Frank Lubecki Pogson (New York, NY: Dover, 2001), p. 104.
[6] Lim, p. 47.
[7] Lim, p. 46.
[8] Bergson, p. 108.
[9] David Scott, ‘The “concept of time” and the “being of the clock”: Bergson, Einstein, Heidegger, and the interrogation of the temporality of modernism’, Continental Philosophy Review, 39:2 (2006), p. 187.
[10] Bergson, p. 107–108.
[11] Alan Lacey, ‘Bergson, Henri-Louis’, in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 2nd edn, ed. by Ted Honderich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 91.
[12] Lim, p. 46.
[13] Moore and Gibbons.
[14] Moore and Gibbons, ch. 4, p. 3.
[15] Bergson, p. 107.
[16] Alec Bojalad, ‘Watchmen: Doctor Manhattan Explained’, Den of Geek, 9 December 2019 <https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/watchmen-doctor-manhattan-explained/> [accessed 2 April 2020].
[17] Moore and Gibbons, ch. 4.
[18] Moore and Gibbons, ch. 4, p. 2.
[19] Bergson, p. 99.
[20] Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 92.
[21] Guerlac, p. 92.
[22] Gaylene Gould, ‘Mask Appeal: Watchmen’, Sight & Sound, January 2020, p. 86.
[23] Watchmen, S01E01, 00:26:10.
[24] Watchmen, S01E04, 00:33:24.
[25] Osvaldo Oyola, ‘Invisible (Watch)Men: The Impossibility of the Black Superhero’, the middle spaces, 22 July 2013 <https://themiddlespaces.com/2013/07/22/invisible-watchmen/> [accessed 3 April 2020].
[26] Gould, p. 86.
Emily Todd VanDerWerff, ‘I think HBO’s Watchmen is tremendous television. Lots of people will strongly disagree.’, Vox, 20 October 2019 <https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/10/17/20918439/watchmen-hbo-review-damon-lindelof-regina-king-comic> [accessed 27 March 2020].
[27] In the alternate history of Watchmen, Vietnam is part of the United States of America after being annexed following the Vietnam War.
[28] Watchmen, S01E01.
[29] Watchmen, S01E02, 00:02:58.
[30] Bergson, p. 100.
[31] Watchmen, S01E02, 00:26:40.
[32] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), pp. 257–258.
[33] Patricia Northover, ‘Thinking “Global Blackness” Through the Frame of Angelus Novus: An Exploration of Racial Aporias and the Politics of Modern Power, Sovereignty, and Temporality’, Humanities Futures: Franklin Humanities Institute, 23 March 2017 <https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/thinking-global-blackness-frame-angelus-novus-exploration-racial-aporias-politics-modern-power-sovereignty-temporality/> [accessed 6 April 2020].
[34] After Life, dir. by Hirokazu Kore-eda (Engine Film / TV Man Union, 1998).
The Final Cut, dir. by Omar Naim (Lions Gate Entertainment, 2004).
Black Mirror, created by Charlie Brooker (Netflix, 2011–).
[35] Guerlac, p. 64.
[36] Eugene L. Arva, The Traumatic Imagination: Histories of Violence in Magical Realist Fiction (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2011), p. 5.
[37] Bergson, p. 108.
[38] Arva, pp. 5–6.
[39] Northover quoting Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 84.
[40] Moore and Gibbons, ch. 11, pp. 26–28.
Watchmen, S01E05, 00:10:46.
[41] Guerlac, p. 66.
[42] Bergson, p. 101.
[43] Guerlac, p. 67.
[44] Northover.
[45] Alexander G. Weheliye, ‘The Grooves of Temporality’, Public Culture, 17:2 (2005), pp. 319–338 (p. 336).
[46] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 313.
[47] Watchmen, S01E05, 06:25.
[48] Sean T. Collins, ‘Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross: Watchmen (Music from the HBO Series)’, Pitchfork, 11 January 2020 <https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trent-reznor-atticus-ross-watchmen-music-from-the-hbo-series/> [accessed 1 April 2020].
[49] Watchmen, S01E08.
[50] Campt, p. 17.
[51] Campt, p. 115–116.
[52] Benjamin, p. 258.
[53] Campt. p. 114.
