Thoughts on Watch Me
While I didn’t lead a movement to reclaim the Watchmen copyrights, I did kickstart an internet frenzy that got someone famous ‘canceled.’
Note: This is an essay on my short story Watch Me — read it first!
Based on the feedback that I got on the essay about The Host (which boils down to: “TMI”), I feel compelled to clarify that Watch Me bears very little resemblance to my life and experiences. While all the real-word trappings of the story are true (a quick Wikipedia search into Watchmen will fill you in on the copyright issues) and the Moore quotes are really lifted from his essay in the Graffiti edition, the only things in the story that did happen to me are:
I first read Watchmen after buying it from a street book seller in Central Park on my first visit to New York (although it was a regular paperback copy, not some priceless edition);
The copy of Watchmen I currently own (the Deluxe Hardcover; the paperback didn’t make it in my move to the US) does have “To the only brother I ever chose to love” inscribed on its first page — although that was written for me by a dear friend, not some random stranger;
While I didn’t lead a movement to reclaim the Watchmen copyrights, I did kickstart an internet frenzy that got someone famous “canceled.”
* * *
It all started, very fittingly, with a joke. Sometime this summer, as I started seeing people in person again, I hosted a friend at my place for an afternoon of drinking and shooting the shit. At some point, I quoted a scene from 30 Rock in which Alec Baldwin's Jack has to talk to Tina Fey's Liz by only using sentences that can also apply to the conference call he's in, as his schedule won't allow the meetings to be separate. I couldn't remember the specifics, and no easy clips were available on the internet, so I decided to load up the episode, which after a little Googling, turned out to be “Believe In The Stars,” Season 2, Episode 3. I went to Hulu and, to my surprise, could not find it: the listing jumped from Season 2, Episode 2 to Season 2, Episode 4.
Why could that be? My first thought was some sort of production renumbering ; sometimes episodes air in different orders in different markets. But in that case they'd renumber it, not skip it altogether. I Googled what the episode was about: Tracy Morgan's Tracy and Jane Krakowski's Jenna have one of their typical blowouts, this one about who has it hardest, Black men or white women. If you’re familiar with the show, you can see where this is going, and so did I: back when I first watched that episode, circa 2015 (it was the first show I watched after moving to New York, which seems fitting), I had a sort of Spidey sense that backface was coming when Tracy showed up in white makeup — although, inexplicably and hilariously, wearing claws for hands. And that’s indeed what happens; you can see several shots of Krakowski in blackface, even though Liz tries to shut it down quickly. Back then, I clocked the whole thing as risqué and unnecessary, but not overall damning, as the blackface was decried by other characters — and also because I didn’t even know blackface was considered offensive until I was in my 20s (which could be in part attributable to the fact that I wasn’t born or raised in the US, but also to the fact that I am white. One can be Latino and white at the same time — shocking, I know).
But then it happened again, in an episode where Jenna and her boyfriend (Will Forte's Paul) dress up as “two black swans” for New Year's Eve, which in her case means donning blackface to portray Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Lynn Swann. That time I was way more shocked. There was no context to the joke, nor did anyone correct or scold Jenna, who closes the episode in blackface while singing Oh, Holy Night (which I had never heard before, and found conflictingly beautiful). I remember Googling it to see if people had been upset but, not finding a lot about it, I eventually shrugged it off, believing that if no one had said anything, it was because there was nothing to say. Maybe it wasn’t such a big deal.
But five years later, when I saw that S2E3 was missing on Hulu and contained blackface, news of the Black Lives Matter protests and of HBO Max temporarily removing Gone With The Wind from its platform came to mind, and I searched for the “two black swans” episode, which turned out to be Season 5, Episode 10, “Christmas Attack Zone.” It was also missing. Curiouser and curiouser. I wondered if had somehow missed some announcement from the producers that they were rethinking those episodes, but all I could find was a Reddit thread that didn't provide any new information (though I did find that, in its move from Netflix to Hulu, the show had edited out a Chris Brown reference, which seemed foreboding). So I took to Twitter, explaining what I had found and tagging Vulture editor Chris Heller about maybe doing an investigation, which he confirmed they would do a few minutes later.
In a matter of hours, the story was up, confirming that indeed those episodes and two more (there was more blackface than I remembered) had been pulled so that, as Tina Fey put it in the statement that was sent to streaming companies, “no comedy-loving kid needs to stumble on these tropes and be stung by their ugliness.” I was credited at the bottom of the article as the original tipster with a link to my tweets (which have since been deleted — I was afraid of trolls). I began to feel uneasy. I hadn't known for sure that I was right regarding why the episodes were removed, and I certainly didn't think things would happen so fast. Had I done damage? Maybe there was a more nuanced conversation planned, and I interrupted it with my Twitter sleuthing? Unlikely, since the statement hadn't been produced in response to the investigation; it had been revealed by it. But still, maybe there was a reason for it to happen in secret other than cowardice, and my tweets T-boned it.
By the next day, the story had been picked up by every major entertainment outlet (and the New York Times!) , all citing Vulture as the original report — which meant all of them indirectly cited my tweets as the original tip. It became a trending topic on Twitter, where people were pointing out other instances of racism in Fey's work. The whole thing had spun way beyond me and my friend making a joke and stumbling upon a missing episode. Of course if I didn't point it out, someone else eventually would have, as the Reddit thread made clear. But in this reality, it was me who did it. I had gotten Tina Fey “canceled,” and I didn't know how to feel about it.
I also couldn’t look away.
* * *
I’ve often described the internet as a sort of warped mirror that takes what we give it, processes it through its recommendation algorithms, and gives it back to us only slightly changed. We get caught in this cycle of trying to adjust to better match our reflection, as our reflection adjusts to better match us — perhaps to the point that we end up becoming someone completely different. David, the protagonist of Watch Me, feeds the internet his desire to restore the Watchmen copyright to Alan Moore, and the internet reflects back a righteous crusader, so David becomes one, even though that opposes his core beliefs.
It’s worth noting that I didn’t write the story thinking about my experience; I only made the connection after, when a friend (and later, my therapist!) pointed it out. Because the parallels are definitely there. I find it hard to parse what was going through my mind when I decided to tweet about the missing 30 Rock episodes, but it’s something similar to what David thinks in the story: am I the only one who’s stumbled upon this? Unlike David, I wasn’t taking a stand against 30 Rock, even though it really deserves the criticism (don’t get me started on the only Latina character, played by Salma Hayek), because I do not consider myself in any way an authority or example to be followed when it comes to racial sensitivity; I’m very much in the process of learning. My feelings upon discovering what Fey and co. had done were that it was wrong to hide a past mistake like that. It felt quasi-1984: we delete it and it doesn’t exist, it never happened (something that our streaming, subscription-based society has facilitated because we don’t own anything — things are up in some cloud from which they can be shot down). The fact is that the blackface did happen and, to me, the most pressing discussion is: how come a few years is all it takes for something to go from being on broadcast television to being deleted from everywhere it’s available? There are a staggering number of steps between someone writing something down in a script and that script becoming an episode on TV, and a substantial number of people involved in each step — no one, at any point, said “hey, guys, we shouldn’t do this?” Not once, but four times? How come? I mean, I know how come, we all know how come, but shouldn’t we talk about it? Instead of deleting the episodes and calling it a day, can we talk about what should be done so it doesn’t happen again?
It felt most pressing because I really like 30 Rock; it’s a show that informs my relationship to this city, to comedy, and to writing. Grappling with what it got wrong, with the ways that it brought pain to viewers instead of joy, felt very important in order to learn from its mistakes as well as its successes; to make sure that as a writer (and a human being), I would try and repeat only the latter, and that any praise of the show would be tempered with the acknowledgment of the harm it caused as well. Suffice to say, that’s not what the internet gave back to me. I cannot account for the many takes and points of view that arose, but polarized opinions seemed to dominate the conversation: you either get on board with every joke and stop being a sensitive snowflake, or you decry the entire show — and its creator — as inadmissible and unforgivable. The warped mirror of the internet tends to flatten nuance because nuance demands time and effort, and the instant gratification of unconditional support or a fiery takedown releases more dopamine and keeps users more engaged (plus it doesn’t help that each retweet expands the reach of a “take” exponentially — snow balls become avalanches very fast on the internet).
This “no-nuance” approach is a common phenomenon that I observe in a lot of people in my life: their internet personas suggest inflexible pundits, but in person, they reveal a capacity for empathy or benefit of doubt that surprises me. I’m not immune to the warping of the mirror either. As much as I was terrified by the size of the shitstorm I kicked up, I acknowledge that, even if subconsciously, I foresaw it happening, and there was something amazing about it. The thing I tweeted ended up in The New York Times — isn’t that wild? Like David before burning his book, I was caught between the instinct of deleting everything (as I eventually did) and disappearing into the night, or doubling down and using this thing to gain notoriety (which I also did, pitching variants of “I canceled Tina Fey” articles to several outlets, all which thankfully passed). The abyss gazes also, and it does so with a sort of siren call that feels at times irresistible.
It’s hard to admit, much less in these terms, but: it feels good to be the center of attention.
* * *
Before I trigger my own cancelation, let me be clear: this essay, nor the story it refers to, are a sweeping indictment of any and all internet movements. Some things need to be said, and some people need to suffer consequences (though my thoughts about our conception and practice of justice may need their own story and corresponding essay). What I’m reflecting on here is the personal experience of being the initiator of one such movement, and how principles and interests, selflessness and self-centeredness get mixed up in the process. As much as Watchmen ridicules the notion of superheroes, of believing that a single person could be the one to save us all, and especially of believing oneself to be that person, it doesn’t shy away from the fact that some injustices exist, and they shouldn’t. Some jobs need doing, which means someone needs to do them.
Whether Tina Fey needed canceling is debatable (and by “canceling,” that murkiest of concepts, I here mean being dragged digitally in a way that results in her being impeded from doing any more writing or producing). Whether I tried to cancel her is also debatable, as I a) was hoping for a discussion as opposed to a trial — although I knew things could go down that route, and b) didn’t do much more than point out how she was censuring herself, albeit in secret.
But if she did need to get canceled, and I was trying to do it, I did a piss poor job of it: literally weeks after the whole thing, a 30 Rock special aired to promote NBC’s Peacock streaming platform, and no one prevented it from happening or complained that it did. She currently has multiple TV and stage projects in development. She’s fine. If she happened to not be on social media for those couple of days, she might have missed the whole thing entirely. The storm abated as quickly as it had formed, leaving barely a trace behind. The world moved on.
After reading a draft of Watch Me, one of my friends showed me a clip from the 1976 movie Network. I was delighted and surprised to find the film shares many parallels with my story, as it also focuses on an activist of sorts who finds success railing against the very system that engendered him (some ideas float in the collective unconscious pool, I guess, because I never watched the movie and knew very little about it).
The clip in question shows him being dressed down by the head of the conglomerate that owns the TV channel he’s been doing all his ranting on:
It reminds me a lot of the ending of my short story, although mine involves more seduction and less badgering. But both communicate the same idea: “you’ve threatened us enough to warrant a meeting, but make no mistake, this is too big for you to change on your own.” Is that last part true, I wonder? Or is it a lie the powerful tell us in order to discourage us from upsetting the status quo?
More often than not, the storm abates without a trace. But every once in a while, the stars align and things get signed into law, or greenlit for production, or approved for general use. Often, there isn’t a single person who’s responsible for all of it. But if someone didn’t refuse to move from their seat on a bus in Alabama, or don armor and take charge of the armies of France, it’s quite likely things would’ve stayed the same, at least for a while longer. Is it delusional to think we could be that person? To think we could affect the whole world, or a sizable chunk of it? I don’t know.
What I do know is that my experience changed me more than anyone else involved (there’s that thought again — “I’m the only one.”) I’ve slowly but surely retreated from social media, posting sporadically (do check out my Lego-building stories on Insta, which tease the next short story) and not scrolling through my feed at all. I’ve become very hesitant, almost opposed to, endorsements of any kind, be it signing open letters or sharing hashtags or posting squares of any color as my profile picture. Perhaps I’ve become too cynical. I’m okay with that. I don’t think the world needs me. I think my loved ones do, or the people I work with, or those with whom I’ll collaborate with on projects. And I’ll still engage in volunteer work, or donations, and I do still believe that I could aid a cause if called upon. But I don’t think I’d ever want to be at the center of it.
The thing I learned, from something that I didn’t know was a teaching moment, is something I’ve learned many times over and I fear will continue to learn in the future: I need to save myself, first and foremost. Not in a “I am my own hero #confidence” kind of way, but in the “I’m far from perfect and I need to work on that” way. I am not really in a position to sacrifice myself for others, at least not in my current circumstances. If I try, I’m probably just gonna make matters worse for everyone involved.
And if I’m not ready to sacrifice myself for other people, what business do I have leading them?
Illustration by Deepti Sunder, revision by Lilly Camp.
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