Page 52 - Esquire (November 2019)

the Big Bite
out to make his own series, he knew he had to do some-
thing entirely new—to evoke the feeling he experienced
at 13. And that meant not worrying about whether he
angered people.
Make no mistake, people will be angry. With its equal
critiques of liberals and conservatives, Watchmen is shap-
ing up to be the most controversial TV debut of the fall—
and one of the most polarizing superhero stories ever
told. That’s in keeping with the spirit of the original text,
according to Lindelof. “It’s essentially saying we have dis-
dain for people at the center, because they’re not choos-
ing a side, but we also have disdain for people who are in
the extremes, because you can’t live in the extremes. And
so let’s just take the piss out of everyone and ourselves in Watchmen proved
the process,” he says. that the superhero genre
For nearly 35 years, scholars and fans alike have debated could be as political,
the political and social nuances of Watchmen, which controversial, challeng-
partly follows a sociopath with an inkblot mask named ing, thought-
Rorschach, who is investigating the murder of a fellow provoking, and deeply
vigilante in a time after masked heroes have been made human as any work
illegal. Back when Lindelof first read the comic, he con- of dramatic literature.
sidered Rorschach the good guy, but now he believes
“good guys and bad guys are not really even part of the
vernacular here.”
He mentions how in recent months Ted Cruz and
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have each referenced
Rorschach to defend points on opposite sides of the po-
litical spectrum. “There is a sliver of the Venn diagram
where Ted Cruz and AOC basically both have their arms
linked in excitement, and that sliver is called Rorschach,”
Lindelof says. “You look at him, and you describe what
you see in the inkblots. But that’s a reflection of your own
personality, or your own psychological profile, or, more
specifically, your own trauma.”
BUILDING
CHARACTER
Lindelof and King on the
set of “Watchmen.”
Above right: Rorschach in
the original comic.
48 November 2019_Esquire
In his adaptation—which is not a strict sequel but
more of an expansion of the Watchmen universe almost
four decades later—Robert Redford has been president
for about 20 years and the Supreme Court is stacked
with Left-leaning judges. And yet, even in a liberal-
controlled country, bigotry remains: A white-supremacist
group known as the 7th Kalvary has co-opted the idea of
Rorschach. Whereas nuclear war was the root of all evil in
the comic, the HBO series positions racism as the great-
est evil—one that
reaches back many
generations be-
fore the invention
of atomic weapons.
“In order for this
to be Watchmen,
we have to start
with an unsolvable
problem, a prob-
lem that the most
well-intentioned
superheroes and
cannot solve,”
Lindelof says. “And
now we’re in 2019 instead of the ’80s, where it feels like
you can’t tell a story about America in any kind of real,
historical context that doesn’t talk about race.”
Like the original Watchmen, Lindelof’s interpretation
operates with a subversive attitude that says no side is
right and there are no simple answers—which isn’t an
easy balance to achieve in an era when bothsiderism is
a bad word. Lindelof says he does this “very carefully
and wildly irresponsibly at the same time. You can’t be
Complex sci-fi and fantasy stories are exactly
what Lindelof does best. Along with J.J. Abrams
and Jeffrey Lieber, he cocreated the ground-
breaking ABC drama Lost, which took massive
risks for a network television show, with fearless
narrative twists. More recently, his three-season
HBO drama The Leftovers was a masterpiece of
fantastical surrealism—a twisting journey into
“I don’t want to be an imitator,” he says, referring