This is What We
Did in Our Class
Watchmen & Vietnam Screencast
Katie Meyer
Katie Meyer's essay on Watchmen.
Transcript
[00:00]
[Typing on screen: The War Drags on: Watchmen,
Vietnam,
and
America's National Identity Crisis]
[00:28]
[Video: Google image search: "The Vietnam War," showing various images
of
wounded villagers, soldiers]
The Vietnam War. No military conflict exists in a vacuum, but this one
is particularly branded into our nation's memory. Vietnam was the
first television war. Advancements in TV broadcasting and photography
brought the horror and violence of war into American living rooms for
the first time. Although not all media coverage of the war was graphic,
it offered the public glimpses of cruelties that would have otherwise
gone unseen, like napalm strikes and mistreatment of villagers.
In this iconic still, we see the Republic of Vietnam's Chief of
National Police right before he executed a prisoner on the streets of
Saigon. This was broadcast by NBC in 1968.
[01:05]
[Video: Images of Vietnam War protests]
Of course, people reacted strongly to this inflammatory material.
National unity disintegrated, people began to distrust the government.
This became more than a political division. Soon, it was a generational
conflict. A class conflict.
The Vietnam War lasted 19 years and 180 days. An entire generation of
Americans grew from toddlers to college students in the span of this
era.
[01:35]
[Video: Google image search for "Vietnam war soldiers"]
58,159 American soldiers died in the Vietnam War, which is less than
World War I and World War II and even less than the estimated over
400,000 that died in the Korean War which had ended only 2 years before
America became involved in Vietnam. But unlike previous wars America
fought, we lost this one.
Returning soldiers were not welcomed home as heroes, but stigmatized.
They were damaged goods, a reminder of a national embarrassment.
[02:07]
[Video: Clips of old Superman cartoons]
Before the Vietnam War, we thought we were the good guys. The
superheroes. We were new; we were strong; we were fighting to keep the
weak safe from evil.
By the conclusion of the war, America felt weak. We felt divided. We
lost the confident, swaggering optimism we once had and were forced to
question who we were as a nation.
[02:33]
[Video: Images of the Vietnam Memorial: "The Wall at
Night," "These Colors Don't Run," "The Three Soldiers," "Wesley ~ 23
months old"]
It took 7 years before the Vietnam Memorial was built and at its
dedication ceremony, a voice rose up from the crowd and asked, "What
were we fighting for?"
[03:00]
[Image: "I Want YOU for US Army" poster, "We Can Do It!" Rosie the
Riveter poster, then the Watchmen
book cover.]
For decades, Americans have struggled with that question but today we
still have no definite answer. What were we fighting for? If we had won
the war, what would we have won?
[03:14]
[Video: Film scene from Watchmen
of shooting and fire]
These are questions that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons explored in their
wildly popular graphic novel, Watchmen.
In
the
world of Watchmen,
superheroes are real. In this alternate history, President Nixon
recruits the Comedian and Dr. Manhattan to aid the war in Vietnam. This
is a clip of the war scene from the novel's 2009 film adaptation.
[03:40]
[Video: Pages from the Watchmen
graphic novel with applicable quotes on
them, zooming in to the quotes as narration references them.]
With superheroes, America easily conquers Vietnam, preventing it from
falling into communism, and adding it as the 51st state by 1985. After
winning the war, Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian watch the victory
celebrations from a bar. The Comedian mentions to Dr. Manhattan, "If
we'd lost this war, it might have driven us a little crazy, y'know? As
a country."
[04:02]
The bottom left frame of this page shows President Nixon stepping from
a helicopter and raising his arms to a cheering crowd. The Comedian
references this as "the first press chopper into Saigon." This is an
obvious reversal of the famous photo of the last chopper out of Saigon.
On the next page, the Comedian is confronted by a Vietnamese girl he
impregnated. After telling her he is leaving, the girl says, "But me, I
cannot walk away from what grows in my belly. I cannot forget."
[04:30]
The Comedian turns his back, the way America tried to turn its back and
put the Vietnam War in its past, but the Vietnamese girl slices his
face with a broken bottle. The resulting gash across the Comedian's eye
is highly symbolic for the scar the Vietnam War left on America's face.
In the Watchmen universe, the
US victory in Vietnam does significantly
alter the course of history. However, some very important things did
not change. There is still disunity and rioting in the streets. People
still distrust their leaders. There is still divisive partisan
politics.
[05:07]
[Video: Clips of Kennedy's space announcement, and a Cold War classroom
instruction video for nuclear attack drills]
Rather than ending the Cold War, victory in Vietnam only intensifies
the conflict and the inevitable threat of nuclear holocaust persists
throughout the entire novel.
[05:18]
[Video: Vietnam War footage of children, some naked, running through a
paved street amidst fields being bombed. A Vietnamese mother carries a
burned an scarred child and runs through the road]
Maybe Moore and Gibbons are suggesting that the Vietnam War wasn't
traumatizing because we lost, but because of the way that we fought. We
were confronted with facts that contradicted the way that we wanted to
see ourselves. Superman wouldn't drop napalm on villagers. The Vietnam
War, like the novel Watchmen,
forces us to ask, "Who are the
superheroes? And who are the villians?"
[05:40]
[Image: picture of all the Watchmen from the book]