Let's Talk About That Superhero Sex Scene on Watchmen

[Ubiquitous]

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 M〕ler, 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.

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