What the masks are for

Reading ICE through the ambivalent copaganda of Watchmen (2019)

Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen (HBO, 2019) is one of my favorite shows of all time, an absolute masterwork of adaptation. Despite being a response to a decades-old comic book—and being deeply immersed in the lore of said comic book—it also enjoyed a remarkable cultural salience. By reworking the backstory of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ original Watchmen (1986-87) to include Black characters and, more importantly, real Black history (the Tulsa Massacre), the series seemed to foreshadow the Black Lives Matter movement. Indeed, whether it was intentional or not, the famous Black Lives Matter street painting in Washington, D.C., with its yellow block font, looked uncannily like the opening titles for the show.

Teaching the show for a second time, as part of a course on the emergence of “darker grittier” comic book adaptations in the neoliberal era, I cannot help but notice another symbol from the show that has a new salience: the masking of police. The show’s omnipresent masks had already been credited as prophetic during the pandemic, when—get this!—everyone was wearing masks. That parallel was more superficial and silly. Now, however, with the emergence of masking for ICE agents, the reference seems more obviously relevant, and painful. After all, part of the stated rationale for ICE’s masking is parallel to that in Watchmen, namely to protect police officers and their families from doxxing and vigilante violence. The difference, of course, is that in Watchmen’s universe, the threat is very real. The Tulsa police really were victims of a massive terror attack, orchestrated by a white supremacist group known as the Seventh Kavalry, who continue to menace the police and have themselves adopted the mask of the main protagonist of the original Watchmen, Rorschach:

By contrast, the threats against ICE agents are entirely fantasized—when they’re not openly manufactured in order to justify their wanton violence as self-defense. As far as I can tell, the organized resistence to ICE is, like virtually all American resistence movements within anyone’s lifetime, committed to non-violence. Any actual threats made against ICE have been made by isolated cranks who were easily apprehended before they could even make an attempt. Every ICE agent is perfectly safe.

My attempt to make this contrast clear in class started to fall apart, however, almost as soon as I started laying it out. Fortunately for us, I started to say, we don’t have a highly organized white supremacist terrorist group determined to attack the police for being (could one believe it?) too anti-racist…. And in those exact terms, we don’t. The fantasy of police being persecuted for loving Black people too much is indeed a fantasy—surely a unique outlier in the annals of copaganda.

Yet we do obviously have a group like the Seventh Kavalry, with the key difference that they are on the government payroll. Interestingly, the show does get us part of the way there, because the Rorschachs are allied with a powerful senator who seems likely to become president. And in that connection, it’s interesting to note that their masking does not actually protect their identities or render them immune from apprehension or even violent attacks. Our heroes are able to round them up more or less at will. Their masks serve rather to identify them as part of a project—that of taking back their country by any means necessary.

That, then, is the first real function of ICE’s masks, to depersonalize the agents in their own minds and make them merely the adjuncts of their great task. It serves as a less subtle version of previous police practices like covering up badges and ID numbers when dressed in riot gear. The preemptive avoidance of accountability is a promise of limitless violence. It is an announcement that they believe everything is permitted to them and that they intend to take full advantage. But whereas the cops in riot gear represent an exceptional circumstance, the masked ICE agents enjoy the same unfettered permission at all times, allowing them to vent their lazy, stupid brutality at will.

Trump and Stephen Miller need that lazy, stupid brutality because their goal is one that is stupid and brutal—and one for which they realize they have only a narrow time window. Both clearly see an opportunity not simply to expel all illegal immigrants (much less a subset carefully selected for their criminality), but to ethnically cleanse the country. Hence the empowerment of laziness—including the Supreme Court’s endorsement of the laziness of racial profiling—is a bid for speed. They don’t really care about the legal niceties of who has been found guilty of what charges or filled out which paperwork or was born where or has which passport. They literally want to get rid of as many non-white people as possible, by any available means. They don’t care where they wind up, or what happens to them, or whether they live or die, as long as they are no longer a stain upon our great white nation. As Trump’s acolytes have repeatedly said, this is their number one priority, the thing that absolutely must happen—compared to the demand for ethnic cleansing, nothing else matters.

That is obviously extremely scary. Relatedly scary is the fact that elected Democrats only found it in themselves to attempt to impede this push when ICE murdered two white American citizens. Even now, the obvious and only answer to this problem, namely fixing illegal immigration by legalizing it, is radically absent from the public debate. Yes, we should secure our border; yes, we should enforce our immigration laws; yes, we should remove dangerous criminals from our country—but not like that. We should do it kindly, smartly. Immigration agents should be clean-cut and compassionate, acting more in sorrow than in anger, always acknowledging the humanity of all concerned, always up to date on the latest HR training webinars. We don’t need ethnic cleansing, just a light ethnic tidying up.

And while all the reasonable people dither and strategize, lives are being ruined and lost in the impossible and irreducibly stupid and brutal attempt to make sure only the right people live within these certain lines we’ve drawn on the ground. They know it’s a crime. They know that it can’t go on forever. And that’s why they’re already planning for the morning after—by assuring all of their disinhibited, masked agents that they can never be held accountable for what they did, that their reputation cannot be ruined, that they will never be shunned from polite society, because no one will know it was you. No one has to know that you dislocated a grandmother’s shoulder or used a child as bait to draw out the parents or threw someone in a crowded room with no food or water or toilet and let them rot for weeks. You can return to your secret identity when all of this is over and live out your life as a mild-mannered normal citizen.

I hope they’re wrong about that, but I fear that what they’re really wrong about is worrying that such precautions are even necessary. It may seem implausible that even this could be swept aside in yet another round of “looking forward, not backward,” and “uniting the country”—but I’m old enough to remember the last time a Republican administration engaged in horrible crimes in the service of an agenda that the Democrats supported in principle but hoped to implement in a smarter and more nuanced way. And returning to Watchmen (2019), maybe its biggest fantasy was not that of the poor victimized woke cops, but the notion that now, finally, the good guys would take the risk of holding the guilty accountable, regardless of their past complicity and regardless of what other political settlements it might blow up.