Watchmen: 7 Ups And 0 Downs From 'It's Summer And We're Running Out Of Ice'

Ups...

7. Contextualising Watchmen In The Horror Of Tulsa

Watchmen HBO Tulsa
HBO

One could be forgiven for mistaking Watchmen's opening scene as a fiction - another event that comprises a part of the original text's alt-history. Horrifically it wasn't, and the show should be applauded for shining a light on such a terrifying chapter in American history, given it's scarcely taught in schools across the globe, let alone in the United States.

The Tulsa massacre took place in 1921 and is pretty much the worst example of racial violence in American history. It occurred during a time in which the Klu Klux Klan were resurgent, and where the Civil Rights Movement was still decades away. White mobs descended on the affluent black town of Tulsa and massacred dozens, with the city even being bombed from the air. It was appalling, and the opening of Watchmen captures the horror in excruciating detail.

It also serves to re-contextualise the idea of Moore and Gibbons' original story. For all that Watchmen was an excellent satire on superheroes, American culture and the Cold War, race was a blind spot. And if you're talking about America, you have to talk about race.

By kicking off the new show with the Tulsa Massacre, Watchmen centres its new story on the most important element of American history, and the most pertinent to us today. White supremacy is a historic enemy, and it's one Lindelof's series is evidently eager to confront.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.