TV Is Using Alt-History to Examine a Real Rise in White Supremacy In America. But Is it Helping?
In 1921, white mobs attacked Tulsa's Greenwood district, then home to one of America’s most prosperous black communities. Hundreds were murdered, and dozens of city blocks filled with black-owned homes and businesses were bombed. But it wasn't until this February that Oklahoma announced that the Tulsa Race Massacre will be included in its state-wide curriculum.
The effort to make the too-little known piece of American history mandatory learning for Oklahoma students predates the debut of HBO’s Watchmen, which kickstarted its premier last fall with a harrowing depiction of the massacre. But Google Trends data shows that search interest in the term “Tulsa massacre” spiked after Watchmen’s debut, and samplings of social media testimonials suggest that the series marked the first time many Americans had ever heard of the event. If the murderous raid hadn’t been featured on the buzzy series, it seems unlikely that its inclusion in state textbooks would have been covered by national news outlets. Thanks in part to Watchmen, the massacre is becoming a widely-acknowledged chapter in American cultural memory.
Oklahoma State Senator Kevin Matthews, who grew up in Tulsa’s African-American community, just a few blocks away from Greenwood, founded the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission. For years, he's worked to increase awareness of the attack. “It’s one thing to get a story told to you. It’s another thing to read about it. But it’s even more impactful when you can visualize and see it,” Matthews told Esquire. “The opening scene of [Watchmen] was so graphic and real that it brought intense empathy from local people and people across the nation. It made a big difference in pointing out how serious this issue was, and how important in US history it is.”
Watchmen is just one in a spate of recent TV series to examine the racism of the Trump era through an exercise in speculative fiction, combining factual American history with fanciful forays into versions of our nation in which bigotry is allowed to run even more unchecked. These shows, which include Amazon Prime’s Hunters and HBO’s The Plot Against America, revel in a newfound desire to confront our racist past, and at their best martial TV magic to support under-told narratives like that of the Tulsa killings. But they also take comfort in the idea that other horrors were narrowly avoided.
Watchmen has alternate history in its bones. The comic book series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons takes place in a US that won the Vietnam War with the aid of the superpowered Doctor Manhattan, and used its tale of masked hero intrigue to probe Cold War anxieties. In the Damon Lindelof-helmed television sequel, the intergenerational pall of American racism replaces themes of nuclear angst, following Angela Abar (Regina King) a current-day Tulsa cop as she battles government-embedded white supremacist terrorist groups, just as her grandfather, a survivor of the Tulsa massacre, did nearly a century ago.
Both Watchmen and Hunters are deeply engaged with comic books and classic superheroes, though the crusaders in the latter show—a band of 1970s New Yorkers who pursue and kill Nazis hiding out in America—forego capes and costumes. In Hunters, the very real Nazis who left footprints large and small in midcentury America, building modest lives as Queens housewives and celebrated ones as NASA rocket scientists, are reimagined as an organized cabal, working within the Carter administration to establish a Fourth Reich in the US.
The series, with its comic fourth wall-breaking public service announcements and a dance sequence set to the Bee Gees “Stayin’ Alive,” is full of the grim cheekiness that buoys its network neighbor The Boys. But this comedic feel, all winks and bloodshed, contrasts jarringly with flashbacks to the horrors of the Holocaust. Watchmen’s primary preoccupation is the heritability of hate and the decade-spanning trauma of racism. Hunters is a revenge fantasy, one very heavy on the fantasy.
The Auschwitz Memorial criticized this uneasy mixture, pointing out via Twitter that Hunters included invented Nazi atrocities like a human chess game set at Auschwitz in which guards forced Jews to stand in as chess pieces and murdered them when the game-piece they embodied was captured.
“Auschwitz was full of horrible pain & suffering documented in the accounts of survivors,” the memorial tweeted in February. “Inventing a fake game of human chess for @huntersonprime is not only dangerous foolishness & caricature. It also welcomes future deniers.”
Creator David Weil responded to the critique, explaining that he didn’t want to use real people’s torture as fodder for his series, which is understandable given the project’s pulpy, exploitation-film tone. Hunters at times demonstrates great care in depicting the Holocaust and its survivors, as in Weil’s decision to give his characters only Auschwitz tattoos numbers higher than 202,499, the last digits ever inscribed upon a real victim, to avoid trampling on their legacies. Other times, some of this care seems to evaporate. The series finale reveals that the lead Nazi hunter Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino) was actually himself a vicious Nazi doctor who adopted the identity of one of his Jewish victims in order to escape justice. Eventually remorseful for his crimes, he decides to devote his life to killing his former fellows. The grandfatherly Holocaust survivor the audience watched all season is revealed to be a Nazi in disguise, a twist that feels both unnecessary and distasteful. (It’s not aided by Amazon’s at times oddly sympathetic on-screen annotations, including one during a concentration camp torture scene that reads, “Nazis were very often drunk while committing atrocities It made the pain of inflicting pain easier.”)
Alternate histories, well-meaning though they may be, can inject confusion into living history even as they attempt to provide clarity on it. Recall the controversy around HBO’s planned series Confederate, which was to be helmed by the creators of Game of Thrones and to take place in a contemporary America in which the South had won the Civil War. The whole idea sounded so unpalatable and raised such significant backlash that the nascent show was killed off while in its crib.
The most successful of these recent efforts to examine the nature of racism through speculative history is HBO’s The Plot Against America, which isn’t entirely surprising as the series is based on a novel by the late Pulitzer Prize-winner Phillip Roth and adapted for television by The Wire creator David Simon. It also might be the least-discussed of these shows—perhaps the taste for dystopia that made Watchmen a minor pop culture sensation last fall has cooled in these truly apocalyptic-feeling days. But The Plot does the most effective job of getting at the slinking, slithering heart of American hate, both today’s variety and its historical forebears.
In the series, the Levin family lives a middle-class and relatively charmed life, shielded from the worst of American anti-Semitism in their largely-Jewish New Jersey neighborhood. This is until Nazi-sympathetic aeronautics hero Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election. The US never enters World War II, and as our government cozies up to the Third Reich, anti-Semites at home are emboldened, culminating in widespread attacks on Jews and their communities.
Unlike Watchmen and Hunters, which attempt to reveal subtler truths through improbable and entertainingly action-packed stories, The Plot Against America is content to concern itself almost exclusively with those subtle truths. This more overtly anti-Semitism poisoned America doesn’t spring directly to Germany-style horrors. Instead, American Jews are encouraged to participate in programs like the “Just Folks” initiative, which sends Jewish children to faraway Christian host families for the summer. It’s ostensibly to teach them about rural life, but the real goal is to separate them from their families and culture, eroding solidarity in the Jewish community. The injustices mount slowly, leaving parents Bess and Herman Levin to debate whether they should follow the example of many of their neighbors and flee to Canada. But the temperature raises on American anti-Jewish sentiment so slowly that even as it threatens to boil over, the family is unable to conceive of the severity of the threat they face.
It’s not coincidental that these series have all arrived as America grapples with a renewed surge in white supremacism. Last fall, the FBI announced that the number of reported hate crimes had reached a 16-year high. Regions that voted strongly for Trump recorded more acts of hate than areas that did not. Even exposure to the president's rhetoric has been shown to make survey respondents profess more racist beliefs. Far from uniting us against a shared inhuman enemy, the coronavirus pandemic has instead inspired a swath of anti-Asian attacks.
It’s hard to say just what effect these shows have on our understanding of the nation’s greatest sins. They identify turning points in American history—World War II, the Tulsa massacre, and imagine what could have happened if we'd chosen to go the wrong way. The Trump era, these series suggest, could be another turning point. Which path will we choose?
But in imaging the horrors of the road not taken, these alternate histories can hold an almost congratulatory subtext. Where is the TV show set in, say, a US that didn't commit a genocide against Native Americans, or one that rejected chattel slavery?
By only imagining fictional Americas that yielded to white supremacy even more thoroughly than our real nation has, these shows suggest that American racism is bad, yes—but it could be so much worse. We could have had a Third Reich-sympathizer as president. We could have allowed former Nazis to infiltrate government. By envisioning these narrowly-dodged worst case scenarios, these shows offer a perhaps false sense of reassurance. Watchmen, Hunters, and The Plot have used alt-history to varying degrees of success, demonstrating just how carefully showrunners must treat this subgenre to avoid minimizing the horrors already present in our history.
The underlying suggestion in all these shows is that the US had some sort of close call with truly truly frightening racism; they urge us to imagine what can happen when good people back down in the face of bigotry. But the facts of our history alone are frightening enough to fuel countless dramas, and are full of evidence suggesting that most good people do little in the face of white supremacism. That’s why the first scenes of Watchmen are the series’ best—they demand that America look at what really happened in Tulsa, rather than applaud itself for the dangers averted.
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