16 - DeLilloesque: DeLillo’s Cultural Impact

Summary

Consider the conclusion of the 2019 HBO miniseries Watchmen. Damon Lindelof – previously the showrunner of ABC's Lost (2004–10) and HBO's The Leftovers (2014–17) – created Watchmen as a contemporary sequel to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1986–87 graphic novel of the same name, which was set in 1985 on an alternative earth on which superheroes existed and where Richard Nixon was in his fourth term as president of the United States. Lindelof's version stars Regina King as Angela Abar, a detective on the Tulsa police force who adopts the costumed identity Sister Night after surviving a coordinated 2016 attack on police officers’ homes by the members of a white supremacist group named the Seventh Kavalry. Over the course of the series, Abar discovers that her murdered boss and mentor Judd Crawford was secretly a member of the Seventh Kavalry, and that he was killed by her own grandfather, Will Reeves, who survived the 1921 Greenwood Massacre as a child, joined the New York Police Force in the 1940s, and became the world's first costumed vigilante after discovering that the force had been infiltrated by a racist group. In the seventh episode of the series, viewers learn that Abar's husband, Cal, is in fact the formerly godlike being named Dr Manhattan, who relinquished his power and memories to marry Abar after the two met in Vietnam. The final episode of the series culminates with Manhattan and other characters foiling two plots to steal his powers, although he dies in the process.

The final two scenes offer an epilogue of sorts focused on Abar, who – to the accompaniment of minor key piano music – contemplates an egg that remained unbroken when she smashed a carton on the floor during a final confrontation with Cal. She recalls a conversation in Vietnam, after he had first revealed himself as Dr Manhattan, when he produced an egg and told her that someone could acquire his powers by consuming organic material into which he had transferred his ‘atomic components’. We then see her taking off her shoes and walking outside to her home's swimming pool. The piano music ends, replaced by the sound of birds. Abar breaks the egg and swallows its insides, then places a hand on her chest. She places the shell on the ledge of the pool and hitches up her trousers.