The Rose-Tinted Speculation of Progressive Pop Culture
Alternate histories in fiction can be a powerful method of questioning our own reality. Comparisons between the author’s invented world and our own can highlight iniquities, or invite new ways of imagining the future.
However, speculative fiction can be used to obfuscate as well as to expose. Take three recent examples: the Broadway musical Hamilton, the novel (soon-to-be Hulu series) Rodham, about Hillary Clinton, and the HBO series Watchmen. In each case, the work seems to come from a liberal perspective, but the more I tried to understand how these imagined realities contrasted with our own, the more I became convinced that these stories actually disguise, and therefore serve, power, rather than reveal it.
This is a bold claim, especially for shows and figures that are so beloved by progressives. To help me back it up, I looked to two of my favorite storytellers, writer Ursula K. Le Guin and filmmaker Paul Verhoeven.
Weaving Worlds with Le Guin
Ursula Le Guin wrote in many genres, but she’s best known for her works of science fiction, and particularly for her detailed, anthropologically-minded world-building. In an essay, she describes how she created the genderless inhabitants of the planet Gethen, in her novel The Left Hand of Darkness:
Why did I invent these peculiar people? Not just so that the book could contain, halfway through it, the sentence “The king was pregnant”––though I admit that I am fond of that sentence. Not, certainly not, to propose Gethen as a model for humanity. I am not in favor of the genetic alteration of the human organism––not at our present level of understanding. I was not recommending the Gethenian sexual setup: I was using it. It was a heuristic device, a thought-experiment.
Physicists often do thought-experiments. Einstein shoots a light ray through a moving elevator; Schrödinger puts a cat in a box. There is no elevator, no box. The experiment is performed, the question is asked, in the mind. Einstein’s elevator, Schrödinger’s cat, my Gethenians, are simply a way of thinking. They are questions, not answers; process, not stasis. One of the essential functions of science fiction, I think, is precisely this kind of question-asking: reversals of a habitual way of thinking, metaphors for what our language has no words for as yet, experiments in imagination.
Is Gender Necessary? Redux, 1988
Key to understanding the underlying aims of an author of speculative fiction is understanding what questions the author is hoping to ask in the first place. Le Guin explains further:
Because of our lifelong social conditioning, it is hard for us to see clearly what, besides purely physiological form and function, truly differentiates men and women. Are there real differences in temperament, capacity, talent, psychic process, etc.? If so, what are they? How to find out? Well, one can always put a cat in a box. One can send an imaginary, but conventional, indeed rather stuffy, young man from Earth into an imaginary culture which is totally free of sex roles because there is no, absolutely no, physiological sex distinction. I eliminated gender, to find out what was left. Whatever was left would be, presumably, simply human.
Is Gender Necessary? Redux, 1988
In order to interrogate the effects of gender, Le Guin eliminated it from this society entirely. (Critic and theorist Fredric Jameson discusses her technique of “world reduction” at greater length here.) The subject of Le Guin’s thought-experiment is conspicuous by its absence. However, the same rule applies when an author wishes to avoid controversial questions. The inverted power dynamics and changed outcomes of an alternate history (or the pattern of which elements remain unchanged) can reveal which real-world conflicts the author would rather we not examine too closely.
The Gospel Untruth
Although not a work of fiction, the Bible is probably the most famous account of history whose politically- and theologically-charged edits have been studied extensively. A surprising authority on the subject is filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, best known for films like Robocop and Showgirls, which depict heightened, satirical versions of the world. Verhoeven is also an earnest scholar of Christianity. In his book Jesus of Nazareth, he approaches the story of Jesus Christ from his perspective as an atheist (raised Catholic) historian, with a math and science background. He understands Jesus as a man of his time and place, and assumes the same laws of physics apply to him as to us. He also approaches the subject as a storyteller, with a deep understanding of how narrative can be used to promote ideology. He suggests that the supernatural events in the Bible were added deliberately, and that we can deduce the motives of the authors by examining linguistic and narrative inconsistencies, understanding the political dynamics of the era, and triangulating the purpose of their edits by determining what has been left out.
In one example, Verhoeven recounts the story of the feeding of the multitudes, and the miracles of multiplying bread and fish and walking on water. He shows inconsistencies in language between various Gospels, and assumes that Jesus didn’t actually multiply five loaves to feed five thousand men, “like some kind of Harry Potter”. Verhoeven also incorporates the political context of John the Baptist’s recent execution, as well as Jesus’ increasing popularity as an exorcist and preacher. He concludes that a big, shoreside feast likely did take place, with fish provided by the local fishermen to Jesus and his followers in solidarity. The fisherman would normally be expected to give 10-30% of their haul away to the Romans as a tax; if they kept that and instead served it to these men, it would have been a memorable political act. Over the course of this meal, Jesus was likely pressured by his increasingly zealous followers to take up a more active leadership role, which Jesus turned down, trying to calm the crowd before fleeing into the mountains.
Verhoeven surmises that this politically charged scene was distasteful to the Evangelists writing their accounts for the Bible, so they invented the miracles of multiplying loaves and fishes and walking on water to distract from this power struggle.
I think that the Evangelists had Jesus walk on water to neutralize the negative aspects of his actions. Just as they had presented the miracle of the wine in Cana to defuse the conflict between John the Baptist and Jesus when the latter began to baptize on his own initiative, here they present the walking-on-water miracle to soften the impact of Jesus’ fleeing by endowing him with supernatural powers.
It could even be argued that the Evangelists always tried to mask politically dangerous or otherwise disagreeable truths by “overpainting” them with an impossible miracle. To mask the stigma of Jesus’ illegitimate birth, they presented the miracle of the virgin birth. To disguise the fact that Jesus died a humiliating death, they came up with the miracle of the resurrection.
Jesus of Nazareth, p108
Hamilton‘s Founding Falsehoods
We can certainly take this same approach to the alternate history presented by the popular musical Hamilton. Much of the content of the play comes straight from Ron Chernow’s historical biography of Alexander Hamilton. Chernow acted as a consultant on the play, and he and the writer/director/lead actor of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, maintain they were committed to historical accuracy in their telling the story of the Founding Fathers. This makes the departures even more glaring.
Writer Ishmael Reed compared Hamilton‘s historical account with several others, which closely investigated the lives of Hamilton, his wife Elizabeth Schuyler, and the slaves owned by the Schuyler family. In an interview with Current Affairs, he describes the same kinds of omission and overpainting that Verhoeven outlined: “I draw attention to what was left of out Hamilton by giving speaking parts to those who were left out of the narrative. […] How can someone have slaves and be considered an abolitionist?”
The musical hardly addresses slavery at all, in fact.
Sure, it mentions slavery a couple of times, but it’s twice mentioned in the context of just slavery existing and Alexander Hamilton being opposed to it. And then a couple times it’s mentioned in the context of abolition specifically, and Alexander Hamilton supporting that. […] He worked on a slave ship. I mean, chances are probably pretty high that he was in favor of it; that was his livelihood. So few white people were opposed to slavery, especially white people in the Caribbean. It’s kind of bonkers to suggest that he was somehow suffering and feeling like slavery was an injustice at that time. There’s no historical evidence to back that up.
A Hamilton Skeptic on Why the Show Isn’t As Revolutionary As It Seems, Lynn Montero, Slate
In his review of the play, Reed cites further historical evidence that show Hamilton himself bought and sold people. The subject becomes conspicuous for not being addressed, as an ugly truth that contradicts the version of Alexander Hamilton that Chernow and Miranda want to portray.
This brings us to the more obvious alternate reality presented by Hamilton. Instead of white, English-descended, propertied gentlemen, in this musical, the American Revolution is led by an interracial, mostly Black and Latino cast. Reed puts it bluntly: “They cast black people in order to defend projects that [black people] might find objectionable.”
This casting also has a dazzling effect on how audiences perceive the story. While watching the play, it is impossible to forget that the actors are real people living in modern America, experiencing the racial injustices of our shared society. Indeed, the cast of Hamilton interacting with modern politics reliably generates press for the musical. Viewers then subconsciously apply the righteous fury of the contemporary struggle for racial equality onto the Founders, who claimed the ideal of equality while justifying their ownership of people. When young Black actors sing passionately about revolution, the audience is more likely to think about Black Lives Matter than slave-owning one-percenters concerned with taxes levied on tea. This is the complicated reality Lin-Manuel Miranda didn’t want to address. And in order to distract from that reality, he conjured a miracle of post-racial idealism.
Lin-Manuel Miranda also personally benefits from the way Hamilton is treated as a cultural totem of progressive ideals. The popularity of Miranda’s vision among Hollywood and Washington elite (as well as Lin-Manuel himself being the son of influential lobbyist Luis Miranda of MirRam Group) has granted him a degree of political capital that he has used to undermine social programs in Puerto Rico, under the guise of relief work. New York-based contractor Acacia Network have paid hundreds of thousands to MirRam Group to evade consequences horrible conditions in their shoddy, badly-maintained homeless shelters all over New York; now they’re doing the same in Puerto Rico. Miranda is literally invested in maintaining the status quo.
Hillary the Ally?
In her novel Rodham, Curtis Sittenfeld conducts her own thought experiment on American politics: where would Hillary Clinton be if she hadn’t married Bill Clinton? It’s a feminist project on its surface: assuming most people think her political success has to do with being First Lady of Arkansas and then the United States, perhaps Sittenfeld is making a case that her own formidable legal knowledge and ambitions would propel her down a different path. “Instead,” writes Andrea Long Chu for Jewish Currents, “the novel obeys what we might call the caterpillar effect: the principle that an apparently major change in the initial conditions of a complex system may, many iterations later, make almost no difference at all.” Despite not marrying Bill in 1975, Sittenfeld’s Hillary follows a very familiar trajectory. She still becomes a Senator, and still runs for President (losing to Barack Obama in 2008, again, although in 2016… she wins). Maybe Sittenfeld is less interested in political science than she is in personalities. So, rather than comparing histories, we have to examine what in Hillary’s personality Sittenfeld has altered.
As Hillary Rodham is walking through a grocery store parking lot, she finds a woman waiting for her at her car. The woman explains that she was a volunteer on the campaign, and that Bill Clinton sexually assaulted her. The incident she describes bears a striking similarity to Juanita Broaddrick’s allegation that Bill Clinton assaulted her when she was working on his 1978 gubernatorial campaign. It’s the first of several similar reports in the novel, each of which resembles those of Clinton’s real-life accusers (none of whom are mentioned by name).
When Hillary eventually confronts Bill about the encounter in the parking lot, it becomes one of five reasons she can think of for breaking up with him. The way she conceptualizes the alleged crime, however, leaves no room for ambiguity: “Already, he’d been accused of assault.” And as time goes by, her narrative about the end of the relationship hardens into one in which the assault was the breaking point. Later, she’ll hesitate to vouch for him when campaign reporters call her. (“How can I when you could be publicly accused of rape at any time?”) She’s clear on the reason he should never become president: “He’s a sexual predator.”
This is the novel’s third big counterfactual: What if Hillary Clinton had chosen to believe a victim of sexual assault over loyalty to the man she loved? […] It’s notable that this incident takes place in 1974, four years before the one Broaddrick has described; by 1978, the Clintons had already been married three years, and Broaddrick’s story would not become public for another 20 years. Nonetheless, the moral certainty of the fictional Hillary Rodham makes an awkward contrast with real Hillary Clinton’s position on similar stories, which remains at best unclear.
The Flawed Fantasy of a Different Hillary Clinton, Laura Marsh, The New Republic
Here, then, is the alteration to Hillary’s character that the book’s premise hinges on. Rodham posits that Hillary Rodham was sufficiently moved by an account of her partner’s sexual transgressions that she ended her relationship with him. In reality, the opposite is true. Multiple allegations of sexual impropriety of varying degrees have followed Bill Clinton through his entire career, and it is completely clear that Hillary chose to stay married to him in spite of these accusations. Sittenfeld performs other sleights-of-hand to complement the miracle of the Compassionate Hillary. By shifting Broaddrick’s assault to an earlier point in time, it then also takes place earlier in Bill Clinton’s political career, when he held less power. The many systemic reasons Broaddrick may have felt fearful of coming forward about being assaulted are magicked away. In reality, Broaddrick says, the real Hillary Clinton approached her shortly after the assault in 1978. She described the encounter:
“[Hillary] came directly to me as soon as she hit the door. I had been there only a few minutes, I only wanted to make an appearance and leave. She caught me and took my hand and said ‘I am so happy to meet you. I want you to know that we appreciate everything you do for Bill.’ I started to turn away and she held onto my hand and reiterated her phrase — looking less friendly and repeated her statement — ‘Everything you do for Bill’. I said nothing. She wasn’t letting me get away until she made her point. She talked low, the smile faded on the second thank you. I just released her hand from mine and left the gathering.”
The Rape Allegation Against Bill Clinton, Explained, Vox
Sittenfeld making this the turning point of the alternate history shows us what she desperately wishes were true––that Hillary would be a feminist ally to survivors of sexual assault––and illuminates the sad reality by contrast.
Watching Out For Watchmen
Alan Moore’s 1985 graphic novel Watchmen transplants the black-and-white, childlike morality of superheroes into an exaggerated version of contemporary America. A third-term Nixon is swapped in for Reagan, but the fascist and imperialist tendencies of this fictional country and its inhabitants are otherwise very familiar. Moore uses costumed vigilantes and super-humans to illustrate the outcomes of violence as a method of control, the inevitability of abuse of power, and our own inability to grapple with the causes and effects of our actions. The close parallels between our reality and Moore’s invented world allow the audience to assess the behavior of his characters in a familiar, if heightened, context.
The 2019 HBO adaptation of Watchmen, written by Damon Lindelof, instead takes place in a world that bears superficial similarities to our own, but every underlying power dynamic has not only been exaggerated, but completely inverted. This means the backdrop against which his characters act is unfamiliar, nonsensical. Cause and effect are scrambled, which makes it impossible to discern meaning in anything. The show garnered near-universal praise for its apparent ability to confront important, politically-charged subjects like white supremacy and police brutality. I contend Lindelof used the trappings of these issues to obscure the fact that he has no position on anything. Worse, the effect is to make the viewer feel it’s pointless to have a position on anything, either.
In Lindelof’s Watchmen, the actor Robert Redford has been president for 26 years, evidenced in a series of supposedly liberal reforms. Some form of reparations have been meted out, dependent on one’s ability to prove a genetic link to a documented victim of a racist atrocity (conservatives call these “Redfordations”- an “Obamacare”-esque slur). Cops’ access to their weapons now requires special authorization. The first present-day scene of the series plays out like Blue Lives Matter propaganda: a Black cop pulls over a white driver, and senses that he’s up to no good. He goes back to his car to run the plates, and asks the station to release his weapon from its locked console holster. While the dispatcher dilly-dallies, the white driver comes for the cop with a gun, and kills him.
In this universe, police are persecuted by white supremacists, to the point where police have to wear masks in public to avoid identification. The white supremacists are depicted as economically marginalized, living in trailer parks, illiterate. In reality, the police as we know them don’t exist without white supremacy: the earliest forms of policing in America were explicitly enlisted to protect property. Under slavery, property included Black people. The six-pointed sheriff’s badge, worn by Watchmen‘s police and police-allied vigilantes alike, was originally the badge of slave patrols. Police only conceal their identities in order to threaten protesters and commit violence with impunity. Throughout history, and well into our present, law enforcement works with white supremacist organizations to violently suppress Black people.
The series opens with a depiction of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, a violent, deadly attack by white supremacists carried out against a Black community, resulting in an estimated 200 deaths. The show was praised for drawing attention to a horrific part of American history that is criminally underrepresented. But the series doesn’t depict how the white supremacists carrying out the massacre were supplied with weapons and aid by city officials. The KKK were carrying out the will of the state.
Although Watchmen‘s plot eventually reveals that a police chief and power-hungry Senator have been involved in a massive white supremacist conspiracy, the problem is still just a few power-mad individuals. Posing white supremacists and police in hypothetical opposition doesn’t illuminate anything about either group. Instead, the scenario obscures the racist economic motivations that form the foundation of policing in America.
The series protagonist is Angela Abar, a retired cop who works alongside the police as masked vigilante Sister Night.
In her pursuit of justice against the white supremacists who are targeting police, she employs brutal torture practices to successfully extract information. This seems to pose a moral question: is it acceptable to use brutality against really, truly, unquestionably bad guys (like all of Lindelof’s villains), if it results in justice? However, the truth is, torture doesn’t work. It couldn’t be morally rationalized in the way the story poses, because the basic premise is flawed. In reality, the brutality deployed by police is a direct result of the ideology on which they are founded: that some human lives are worth less than others, and can be made subordinate through violence.
In the world of Watchmen, the United States has used their control over a literal superhuman, Doctor Manhattan, to “win” the Vietnam conflict. The US has annexed Vietnam as the 51st state, which makes no sense politically or geographically, but that’s all right, because Lindelof depicts the Vietnamese people near-universally celebrating this development.
Saigon, post-annexation, celebrates with mass-produced Doctor Manhattan merchandise against a backdrop of Soviet-kitsch commercial fast food chains. Footage of Doctor Manhattan razing Vietnamese villages is juxtaposed with cheerful Vietnamese children placidly observing a puppet show depicting the same scene.
This alternate reality, in which the Vietnamese gratefully welcome complete U.S. dominance, goes almost entirely unchallenged in the narrative, with a couple small exceptions. An anti-American suicide bomber results in the death of Angela Abar’s parents during her childhood in Vietnam. A pair of Saigon police arresting (and violently interrogating, it is implied) the bomber’s accomplice is what inspires Angela to become a police officer. The story acknowledges that while some people reject American supremacy, they are aberrations, they have no voice in the story, and their resistance only creates trauma for our protagonist.
Later on, Angela has the opportunity to confront Doctor Manhattan directly about his involvement in Vietnam, accurately pointing out that his destructive actions led to the bombing that killed her parents. His justification? “I was trying to be a hero, I regret it.” Angela accepts this, and the plot moves on. It’s never addressed again. Not questioning the dominant American hegemony is natural, understandable, and forgivable, even if it leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Lindelof asks, “If the U.S. had won the Vietnam conflict using [a metaphor for] nuclear weapons and peacefully assimilated a nation full of people on the other side of the world, then would it be worthwhile?” Again, the question is unanswerable because the premise is faulty. The United States’ military presence in Vietnam was the result of a series of cascading imperialist failures. Our military committed hideous crimes against humanity based on manufactured fear about the spread of an ideology that might challenge the dominance of capitalism. There is no way to end this kind of conflict with the sort of mostly-peaceful colonization Lindelof depicts.
Over the show’s nine episodes, Lindelof takes every opportunity to muddy the moral waters, to upend expectations, and shock the viewer’s sensibilities. Lindelof’s intricate story construction distracts us from baffling plot holes in the same way these convoluted counterfactuals distract from the conservative worldview that lies behind the question. By asking, in earnest, whether the ends can justify violent, deadly means, Lindelof misses the closest thing Alan Moore’s Watchmen has to a moral:
So What?
I’m not just here to dunk on Damon Lindelof’s storytelling (though I could go on; for Patreon subscribers only), but to show that while speculative fiction can encourage us to question basic assumptions about hierarchy and power, superficial gestures towards progressive ideals, like a happily-colonized Vietnam or racially-diverse Founding Fathers, mask a conservative desire to keep things as they are: a rose-tinted view of reality.
Stories are how we interpret the world to one another. It’s how we universalize unique experiences, find common ground, and develop empathy. We need to be able to interpret the stories, too, to understand what they tell us about our world. I hoped here to demonstrate one possible lens for such interpretation: a reminder to reflect on what isn’t seen, to listen to those whose stories aren’t being told.
Confession: I haven’t seen Hamilton in its entirety, nor read Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham. Life is short. I’m not getting paid for this. I’m writing this for my own amusement, for the five to eight dear friends and family members who will read it, and that’s all. Thank you to the noble reviewers I cited extensively for doing the reading, so I don’t have to.