Let's Talk About That Superhero Sex Scene on Watchmen
From
Ubiquitous@21:1/5 to
All on Mon Nov 18 12:02:06 2019
XPost: rec.arts.tv, alt.tv.hbo, aalt.comics.alan-moore
XPost: rec.arts.comics.other-media
So far, Watchmen hasn't exactly been demure when it comes to sex-it's not TV, it's HBO, after all. We've seen Angela (Regina King) and her husband do it in
a closet. We've watched as Laurie Blake (Jean Smart) fondled a Doctor
Manhattan dildo, shortly before engaging in a secret motel rendezvous with Agent Petey. Episode five even opens with a young Wade Tillman being fellated inside a carnival funhouse. Also, there's gotta be something a little pervy going on with Lube Man, right? Still, even these few stolen moments didn't fully prepare us for this week's scene of costumed penetration, wherein the elder Wade (Tim Blake Nelson) sits down to a baked-bean dinner in front of
his TV, just in time to catch O.G. vigilante Hooded Justice passionately
taking another masked man from behind.
The unexpected detour into superhero porn hails from American Hero Story, the Ryan Murphy-esque show-within-the-show that occasionally delves into Watchmen history, albeit with some fairly liberal dramatic license. As Agent Petey informs us in his Peteypedia files, the fictional series' first season
covered the life of Rorschach, which Petey laments was filtered through "a sensationalistic hyper-pop narrative that plays recklessly with history." (In case it's not obvious, Watchmen also uses American Hero Story to offer a wry critique of itself.) In the show, American Hero Story's second season has
just premiered, this time dramatizing the early days of pioneering crimefighting team The Minutemen as told through the permanently obscured
eyes of Hooded Justice.
He's a good choice for some showrunner to spin their own narrative around, since Hooded Justice remains one of the most inscrutable figures in the
entire Watchmen mythology, even to its characters. In fact, what little is known about him is relayed secondhand, largely around the margins of the
comic, through excerpts from Hollis Mason's fictional memoir, Under The Hood. It's here we learn how a mystery man with a wrestler's build, his face
totally hidden by a mask, became an instant legend in late-`30s New York,
after foiling a series of robberies and attempted homicides by brutally attacking the perpetrators. The exploits of Hooded Justice quickly attracted the attention of the press, inspiring others-like Mason, the original Nite Owl-to don their own costumes and exact a similar brand of vigilante justice. And so, the golden age of regular-people-pretending-be-superheroes was born.
Eventually, someone thought to bring all these newly minted "mystery men"-and women-together. Assembling the team was spearheaded by a former Marine named Nelson Gardner, who put his tactical skills and vast wealth toward
reinventing himself as Captain Metropolis. Those who responded to Gardner's call to come out of the shadows included other early heroes Dollar Bill, Mothman, Silhouette, Mason's original Nite Owl, the first Silk Spectre (Laurie's mom), and a young Edward Blake/The Comedian. After Gardner finally recruited Hooded Justice to the cause, they became The Minutemen, and quickly set to work doling out all-American justice. During World War II, they foiled the nation's foreign enemies; at home, they all but eradicated the threat of masked villains. And under the guidance of Silk Spectre's manager (and later husband), Larry Schexnayder, The Minutemen also became a lucrative brand, lending their likenesses to various ad campaigns (like that racist Dollar
Bill poster glimpsed in the premiere). Meanwhile, Schexnayder worked to cover up any potential scandal that could tarnish their virtuous, "modern patriot" image.
As we learned from the book-and saw graphically depicted here-one of Schexnayder's biggest headaches was the secret romance blossoming between Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis. The comics included a letter from Schexnayder to Silk Spectre, in which he warns that the "steady alibi" she's provided by pretending to be Hooded Justice's girlfriend surely can't last
much longer, given that "H.J." and "Nelly" are now behaving like "an old married couple in public." Schexnayder also complains about Gardner calling
him up, distraught that Hooded Justice has been getting up to some "rough stuff" with some younger boys-an overt wink to Hooded Justice's rumored BDSM kinks, which The Comedian had accused him of during an earlier confrontation. Schexnayder worries this will be "the Silhouette fiasco all over again," and
in a subsequent clipping, we see what he means: The press had exposed Silhouette as a lesbian, prompting the Minutemen to vote her out-even though, as Silk Spectre admits, "a couple of the guys" from the team were gay as
well.
Although this is about as explicit as the comic gets, the illicit love story has long fueled fan interest, leading to theories like James Gifford's
popular 1999 article, "The True Fate of Hooded Justice and Captain
Metropolis," which posited that the two had faked their deaths to be
together, and could even be glimpsed (older, happier) in a panel from the
very first issue. Their romance also became a central plot of the Before Watchmen prequel comics, where we learned that an original draft of Under The Hood had actually spilled everything, nearly driving Gardner to suicide,
before The Comedian bullied Mason into cutting it. So while it's unclear how much of The Minutemen backstory is considered canon to HBO's series, you can certainly see how a "sensationalistic" cable show might want to entertain the rumors.
Gratuitous as all that thrusting might have seemed, the scene is actually pretty significant to the story Watchmen is trying to tell, which is at least partially about interrogating which stories we choose to believe and those we choose to ignore. Even in the comic, Hooded Justice's story remains a
mystery: After refusing to remove his disguise before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he disappears, his true identity never revealed.
Although ultraconservative newspaper The New Frontiersman suggests that he
was really East German circus strongman Rolf Mller, whose body was discovered three months after Hooded Justice went missing, this was never proven conclusively. Hooded Justice is a canvas as blank as the one he pulls over
his face, onto which can be projected various notions of hero, violent thug,
or even S&M-loving hornball. Given that the show has been dropping hints at a major Hooded Justice reveal, we'll presumably get some more thoughts on how
his story has been so thoroughly twisted-and hopefully, on how accurately it captured the sex.
--
Watching Democrats come up with schemes to "catch Trump" is like
watching Wile E. Coyote trying to catch Road Runner.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)