The Bleak Future of HBO’s Lanterns

Some cultural objects seem to tell the future. They may strike us as urgent or novel or strange when they first appear, but, in retrospect, we understand them to be prescient, to have seen something long before the rest of us. Moby-Dick seems to have gotten the message about literary modernism about six decades early; Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is one of the best novels about the post-9/11 global order despite coming out the year prior; The Matrix understood how digital cultures could warp and transform our social lives long before most people were continually logged on.

But there maybe isn’t an example of this kind of cultural prescience that’s more uncanny or uncomfortable than that of HBO’s Watchmen. Watchmen, Damon Lindelof’s “remix” adaptation of Alan Moore’s already revisionist superhero graphic novel, appeared in October 2019.