"So You've Taken Someone Else's Nostalgia": Trauma, Nostalgia, and American Hero Stories

This chapter explores the many ways that Watchmen challenges nostalgia, its alternative history acting as a conective to the nostalgic view of American history as one that is righteous and just, a narrative reinforced by the superhero narratives that are so currently in vogue (and so often present the superhero as almost exclusively white and male). Echoing Watchmen comic co-creator Alan Moore's statement that the first superhero film was DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation, the television series, just as the comic did before it, provides an alternative history (and present) that deconstructs the superhero narrative, revealing the trauma that is so often (literally) masked.