You Can't Bury the Past

Easily one of the best speculative shows currently on television, HBO’s Watchmen carries the universe of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ classic graphic novel into the present. The series follows an African-American Tulsa police detective and masked hero, Angela Abar, investigating the murder of her police chief. In doing so, she confronts the racist past and present of her town, as well as ghosts from her own family history. Watchmen’s interest in individual and social memory is so adept and complex, it reminded us of another favorite of the blog—Kazuo Ishiguro’s fantasy novel The Buried Giant, about a medieval Britain plagued by a spell of forgetfulness. Gemma Webster and Theodore McCombs take a look together at the similarities between these three works—the Watchmen graphic novel, the Watchmen series, and Ishiguro’s novel—and how they’re in conversation with each other, whether or not they remember it. [Editors’ note: *** spoilers for all three works abound—like, a lot of them, we’re not kidding—you have been warned; if you are not caught up on the show and do not experience all time simultaneously, read at your own peril ***]

Watchmen promotional still: Angela Abar (Regina King) as Sister Night.

Gemma Webster: When it comes to conflict, we are most often told to forgive and forget. It is one of the most clichéd pieces of relationship advice. In both Watchmen and The Buried Giant, it is deployed in reverse, forget and thus effectively forgive. The more I think about this advice, the more I struggle with it personally; I have a hard time forgetting; my dad and I are both well known for our terribly good memories. It makes forgiveness a little harder when you remember all the insults, and in the case of Watchmen and The Buried Giant, the crimes are huge: genocide, murder, the betrayals of family and friends. I think that is why the heroes choose to hide the truth, to allow the past to be buried and remain unexamined. To forgive at that level is a monumental ask, and yet.

The promise of forgetting is peace and maybe even love. In The Buried Giant, Axl and Beatrice are married, but there is a deep sense of unease between them, and since they have forgotten the source of it, they never get to reach that point of forgiveness. In Watchmen, this manifests time and again for Angela as her friends and partners betray her, particularly the chief of police hiding his past and his true aims, and her masked colleague Looking Glass, selling her out in part for true knowledge of the past. The ease with which he did it gave me chills: it was such a big betrayal, granted he may not have known how big a betrayal and the bad guys threatened her entire family, but still I think she would have preferred that head-on conflict over being stabbed in the back by a friend. The consequences for Angela are terrifying: she overdoses on her grandfather Will’s Nostalgia, pills which contain and infect her with his most traumatic memories as a black patrol cop in 1940s New York. Through the Nostalgia overdose, we see that these betrayals are a matter of constant repeat; Will suffers similar and worse, which prompts him to become a masked vigilante. The erasure of his identity in the TV version of his life was not surprising, but the way his lover and crime fighting partner blithely abandoned him at the peak of his crisis, was stunning and horrifyingly honest. The fundamental problem with forgetting is that there’s no justice in it, and we’re doomed to repeat the past. It remains to be seen if Angela and Looking Glass’s new insights on the past can lead to anything like true reconciliation.

“Gawain and the Priest,” c. 15th century.

Theodore McCombs: Both Watchmen and The Buried Giant express deep skepticism, too, about attempts to build a society on top of a forgetting. In the Watchmen graphic novel, costumed hero Adrian Veidt engineers a hoax alien incursion that kills half of New York City to horrify the world into peace—uniting the Cold War powers against a perceived common threat. The heroes who uncover his plot choose to bury the knowledge, reasoning that exposing Veidt will only unravel the unity those three million deaths have secured, serving no one. In the TV series, Veidt’s ruse has worked, somewhat, ushering in at least a progressive President Robert Redford and a United States that pays reparations for past racial violence. Similarly, in The Buried Giant, King Arthur installs an enchanted dragon, Querig, to exhale a magic mist that sinks everyone in a constant amnesia, obscuring the bitter history of the Briton and Saxon communities that cycled through countless atrocities and reprisals before Arthur’s solution. In both worlds, the justification for mass ignorance is the assurance that knowing will only breed enmity, resentment, and more violence.

But both stories likewise confront the shaky, corrupt nature of a peace bought with such silence, and the deep moral cost on those who sustain it. In The Buried Giant, Querig may have ended the cycle of violence, but not injustice, and the weight of corruption grinds down the knight Gawain, who protects the dragon’s enchantment. In Watchmen, even the progressive Redford administration is complicit in sustaining Veidt’s hoax, and its liberal utopia is riven with resentments and white supremacist terrorist cells waiting for their moment. The series has rightly been applauded for its forthright, unflinching look at white terrorist violence against black communities—especially the Tulsa massacre in the pilot—and implies, metatextually, that widespread ignorance of our racist history, in the real world, is as corrupting an influence as preserving Veidt’s hoax is in the show.

GW: Forgetting only benefits the powerful. Based on Lady Trieu’s speech in the last episode, railing against people’s addiction to the dark memories of Nostalgia, I predict the Millennium Clock is going to be a countermeasure to that destructive remembering. Like the enchanted dragon’s breath in The Buried Giant, it will erase the memory of the past and the powerful will get to rewrite the history of the people. Power loves to maintain the status quo but narrative cannot abide it; there’s going to be a fight!

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