Even Superheroes and Vigilantes Need Support Groups Sometimes
Warning: the following story contains spoilers for Episode 5 of HBO's Watchmen.
Both Watchmen and Avengers: Endgame have featured key characters leading support group sessions.
Watchmen creator Damon Lindelof frequently used support group scenes in his last project, HBO's The Leftovers.
It's a rare way to show vulnerability in characters that often don't have that opportunity.
Anyone who's seen the first several episodes of Watchmen could tell that Tim Blake Nelson's character, Looking Glass, is an intense, guarded kind of guy. Seemingly a moral absolutist much like Rorschach in the original graphic novel, LG is the Tulsa Police's top interrogator—his signature device, The Pod, helping him separate every bit of fact from fiction. While Looking Glass—real name Wade Tillman—has only been featured in a supporting capacity to this point, the show's fifth episode, titled "Little Fear of Lightning," shifted entirely to his point of view. We saw why he is the way he is, and the history behind it—which included a trip to a universe-specific support group.
As the episode showed, Looking Glass—who most of the time hides his face under a mirror-faced mask and has earned the moniker "Mirror Guy" from Laurie Blake—has had a number of traumatic experiences shape him into the character we've been seeing. As a teenager in Hoboken, New Jersey, just across the river from Manhattan, not only was he humiliated by a girl who got him naked and ran off with all of his clothes, but only moments after that humiliation had to deal with an entirely different bit of trauma: millions of dead bodies surrounding him. Yup—at the very moment of the deepest humiliation most teenage boys could probably imagine, he had to begin dealing with the fallout of Adrian Veidt's Giant Squid attack, an event that took over 3 million lives from the Watchmen universe. It's a moment of extreme personal, and societal trauma that not only contextualizes the character we see for the remainder of the episode, but in every episode that's come already to this point.
And it leads directly into a scene that sets up the remainder of the episode's plot: Wade leading a support group for people impacted, directly or indirectly, by the aftermath of that very Squid attack. One person we hear speak wasn't even born until a decade after Manhattan was hit; a woman who comes in and eventually gets beers with Wade wasn't there for the attack, but got through her trauma by watching a (fictional) Steven Spielberg movie over and over again.
Wade is far from "over" his trauma. You've heard the phrase 'tin foil hat' for someone over-theorizing and paranoid about unrealistic outcomes? Not to oversimplify this, but his 'Looking Glass' mask is, in essence, a face full of tin foil. Every hat he wears is lined with something Damon Lindelof says is called "Reflectatine," which he believes will protect him from the same psychic blasts that took so many lives on '11/2,' the 9/11-esque way that the show refers to the day of the Squid incident. But through his support group, he manages that trauma; he's a character who's shown nothing but an unflappable strength and rigidity to this point, whether talking to Angela or the late chief Judd Crawford. Here, we see behind-the-scene; we see the vulnerability behind that opaque mask.
Watchmen wasn't the first superhero-centered movie to feature a prominent support group scene this year. A little movie called Avengers: Endgame—the highest-grossing film of all time, in case you missed it—prominently featured a Captain America-led support group scene in the early part of the movie. That scene took place just after a five-year time jump, with half of society wiped out of existence and the other half still struggling with what to make of the world in the absence of all those who vanished.
Of course, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is grounded in a significantly more inflated world than Watchmen; in the Endgame scene, one man talks in a tone of pure sorrow, loss, and grief. He's just gone on a date, and both men spent a portion of their dinner crying. Captain America, leading the session, relates by relaying a story of him meeting the love of his life, and then getting lodged in an icicle for 70 years. Relatable? Not quite. But it's another way to show that even Captain America has moments of vulnerability that he can find an outlet to open himself up to.
In many ways, the early parts of Avengers: Endgame are remarkably similar to a number of scenes, and the central premise, of Watchmen creator Damon Lindelof's last show, The Leftovers. The Leftovers centers on the people who remain when 2% of the world's population suddenly vanished; it's a catastrophic event that the show refers to as "The Sudden Departure." That show, too, features constant scenes of people opening up and sharing their trauma; if not a literal support group scene, still a conversation or social setting that functions in a similar, undressing fashion. They work to great effect—it's a way of showing people with shared trauma, and how they can open up and work their way past it.
That the support group scene setting has made its way to the superhero genre should, really, come as no major surprise; when someone is as strong and with seemingly as little weakness as Captain America, you need to find other ways to fully mesh these characters out. You need to show that despite their strengths, they still feel, at their core, like a human. And whether that strength is superhuman strength, hiding behind a mirror-faced mask, or anywhere in between, there are always going to be moments of vulnerability, too. And as Avengers: Endgame and Watchmen have taken time to show, there's solidarity in that vulnerability too.
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