Watchmen is probably one of the most political comics of all time, I’m not sure how this could be avoided, or why one would want to. You’d be left with a middling superhero comic devoid of theme. Pro wrestling.
Minor spoilers ahead.
The comic book, Watchmen, provided the source material for the movie and is the only canonical source of information about that story. The movie made a few digressions from the comic that are non-canonical, but tried very hard to stick to the source material where possible, so I’m going to answer about the Watchmen comic, which is anyway fuller and contains a clearer view of the author’s intention.
The author, Alan Moore, would be considered somewhere to the left of Bernie Sanders in contemporary American terms. Generically, a libertarian leftist. He’s English, and recently penned a fiery note urging his countrymen to vote Labour, seeing this as the most urgent election of his life. This is not a writer who has a history of concealing his point of view.
Unsurprisingly, Watchmen was seethingly political, and for its time, hit the comics market with the force of a bomb. It’s not exaggerating to say every superhero comic that followed it was informed by it, and indeed some have to struggle pretty hard to get out from under it (looking at you, The Boys).
This was a part of a trend to re-interpret superhero mythology: other entries of the era that attempted the same thing included The Dark Knight Returns, which has hung like a shadow over every Batman story since, and Marvel’s Squadron Supreme, a story about a parallel-universe Justice League who ultimately murder each other in a civil war.
All of these stories deal with the notion of super-powered tyranny and fascism, and what a society loses when it cedes power to unaccountable ‘heroes’ and puts its faith in raw power. “Who watches the Watchmen” is a repeated coda. “If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker,” says another, lamenting the introduction of the atomic age. Watchmen is jam-packed with themes, and every reader will come away with a different point of emphasis: “no, it was actually about…” This is a sign of very strong work.
The 80’s, when Watchmen was published, continued a trend of grappling with the idea of America losing its innocence and self-image as a dominant but so-called ‘benevolent’ power, a notion sometimes called “American Exceptionalism.” Part of growing up, of course, is realizing you aren’t all that special: in the real world, we were still recovering from the 70’s and losing our faith in authorities: Nixon had been ousted in the Watergate scandal, and the American citizenry became aware of things like the FBI’s COINTELPRO programs that actively undermined elements of the civil rights, feminist, and American Indian movements. We started to unpack the role of the United States in conducting atrocities during the war in Vietnam and the influence of the CIA in suppressing democracy around the world. But neither could we put our faith in revolutionaries: the Weathermen Underground and Baader-Meinhof showed what an authentic leftist terrorism might look like, and the Soviets presented a real threat of nuclear annihilation, invasion or outright war. Meanwhile, the Bronx burned, and cities like New York lay on the brink of being overwhelmed by crime and violence. The “authorities as a force for good” narrative had cracked, and Moore jumped in. A new interpretation of the hero was needed.
His thesis was simple: the kinds of people who put on masks to fight crime are likely to be damaged: Reactionary right-wingers, amoral thugs who simply don’t care about right and wrong, but are nonetheless empowered by the state to go after its enemies, like the Comedian, or low-information deplorables like Rorschach, a powerful fighter and detective who nonetheless is paranoid and conspiracy-inclined, yet can’t connect the dots that his prostitute mother has been lying to him and has no idea who his father was.
On the left, they might be like Ozymandias, a personification of elites so elite that he’s the only one, also the only one smart enough and strong enough, with the will to save the people of Earth—whether they want it or not. He always knows what’s best, for you, you see. He’s so intelligent, that with his acumen and Dr. Manhattan’s omnipotence, they’ve actually advanced the sciences.
Or like Dr. Manhattan himself: checked out completely, fickle, out of touch, increasingly disconnected and antihuman, emotionally vulnerable and unreliable.
Moore staked out an alternate-history 80’s: one where the events of American history that revealed these truths had never occurred, because superheroes had prevented them. Thanks to Dr. Manhattan, America had won Vietnam! The Comedian, it is implied, had a hand in the murder of JFK, but Nixon was still in office, having never been revealed in the Watergate scandal. Superheroes, working behind the scenes, has successfully defended America from defeat, from ruin, also from having to do any introspection at all, and so their America hadn’t changed in a lot of ways that our America had.
As heroes go, the Watchmen are really shitty. But yeah, it was definitely political.
When people talk about the TV show being political, I think a lot of readers may have simply been too young to pick up all the political references in the original comic, but vibed with the action scenes and the terrific dialogue (given to Rorschach in particular, and lifted liberally from Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.) Its DNA is John Kerry in the Winter Soldier reports of the 70s on Vietnam, Chomsky explaining what “Necessary Illusions” are needed to deceive the public, The Clash, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin. All of that stuff was percolating together.
In its dependencies, the United States must often turn to violence to “restore democracy.” At home, more subtle means are required: the manufacture of consent, deceiving the stupid masses with “necessary illusions,” covert operations that the media and Congress pretend not to see until it all becomes too obvious to be suppressed. We then shift to the phase of damage control to ensure that public attention is diverted to overzealous patriots or to the personality defects of leaders who have strayed from our noble commitments, but not to the institutional factors that determine the persistent and substantive content of these commitments. The task of the Free Press, in such circumstances, is to take the proceedings seriously and to describe them as a tribute to the soundness of our self-correcting institutions, which they carefully protect from public scrutiny. —Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions
The plot of the original Watchmen: the construction of a massive, society-spanning lie designed to save humanity. A necessary illusion. And who gets to see the man behind the curtain? Is that question political? Probably.
Meanwhile, the world has moved on. The subtextual preoccupations of the original are passé, now, the Soviet Union dismantled, trust in authorities lower than ever. And the comic ended in a very bleak place. It’s hard to imagine the point of a sequel.
Continuing all this for TV was a challenge, especially given Moore’s distancing himself from the project. But they went a far more interesting direction, by suggesting this time around that it was the political LEFT spectrum that had been in power following the attack on NYC that concluded the comic. A celebrity left-wing president, Robert Redford, has been able to enact sweeping changes such as reparations payments (The “Redfordations”) and total gun control that has made the police into walking targets that can’t shoot back. Superheroes are illegal, or, co-opted by and indistinguishable from the police, who now hide behind masks following attacks by radical militia terrorists (“The 7th Kavalry”), a crypto-fascist underground group who clearly derive aesthetic and spiritual inspiration from the original Rorschach, a hint that his journal, the narrative apparatus of the comic, was discovered by political extremists.
A lot of people are calling the show “political” now, but I think I’ve explained that this has always been the brand’s DNA. I think what they mean to say is, “it’s confusing.” The series is light on hand-to-hand battles and movie-style set-pieces, but heavy on mystery and puzzle-solving. It flows a lot more like an episode of The Leftovers or Lost, showrunner Damon Lindelhof’s other properties. It’s quite cerebral and deliberate, in many ways not a superhero show at all. A lot of the writing has been so impressive, it feels like watching a high-wire act, to know you’re watching some of the best television drama writers in the world at their business.
Additionally, compared to the original, the show has a conspicuous number of women and minority characters and stridently centers their histories and storylines, in a way that seems indifferent to the comfort of white audiences. This will be jarring for some people who have traditionally been accustomed to seeing white heroes as the protagonists, as we have for the history of television up until now and certainly the last iteration of Watchmen. The show opens with a violent depiction of the Tulsa race riots, and only continues from there—a big part of the story is a black female superhero going through her family tree to uncover a mystery (and its connection to the riot). That puts black stories front and center on the stage, and some people just aren’t used to seeing that from a marquee property—imagine the outcry if, for example, Luke Skywalker was a girl instead, or a black female 007. I mean, some people would be confused, even annoyed, and they would call the casting process ‘political’ (*Clears throat*).
While it hews closely to Moore’s sense of radical, paradigm-shifting storytelling, I suspect it’s not the kind of decision Moore himself would have made, mainly because I don’t think he’d see himself as qualified or well-educated enough on American history to imagine a tapestry of this type, but I don’t think he’d object. (Not that he would admit this.) Frankly, the show’s backstory of the Hooded Justice is far more complete and fleshed-out than the comic’s. Captain Metropolis’s, too.
If that’s all an issue for you, it might affect your enjoyment. Also the Klan plays a very specific part in the story, and it deals with their ongoing domestic terrorism (not for nothing is ‘7th Kavalry’ spelled with a ‘K’), so if hearing about racial violence or seeing it treated as a real thing is a bummer for you, you should skip it. Crucially, the writer’s room is deliberately staffed with people of color who are clearly using America’s segregationist past and the resentment accompanying the aforementioned “Redfordations” as this go-round’s ticking time bomb (the original Watchmen used, well, a literal ticking bomb). So again, it’s political in the sense that it ‘echoes current politics’, but I think many of the critiques I’ve seen in the other answers use “political” to mean “concerned with perspectives that I don’t really connect with as mine.” This go-round is a story about racism and the pull of history, and there is no escaping this.
So it’s definitely political, it also enriches and extends the source material in a uniquely American direction. I’m on the second-to-last episode and have been nothing short of dazzled. Everyone should definitely check it out. If I were to recommend the show or the comic, I’m picking the comic, as you need that for the show to make any sense. But why not both?