Was ‘Looking Glass’ Watching Gay Porn on HBO’s ‘Watchmen’ Sunday?

Fans of HBO’s new revisionist superhero series Watchmen, loosely based on the classic 1986 comic book series (later collected into a graphic novel) by British writer-artist team Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, have already been treated to a giant, blue dildo replica of one superhero’s penis. But in Sunday’s Episode 5, titled “Little Fear of Lightning,” viewers got what appeared at first glance to be a costumed gay porn scene, taking place on a large television screen. The episode focuses on the personal life on one of the show’s central, and until Sunday most enigmatic characters, “Looking Glass,” who is so named because his “costume’ consists solely of a full-head reflective mask with no eye holes or openings to breathe. In the scene, the character, in his maskless real-life alter-ego as Tulsa police interrogation specialist Wade Tillman (played by actor Tim Blake-Nelson, perhaps best-known for roles in the Coen Brothers films O Brother Where Art Thou, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs), sits down at home in front of his big-screen TV while dining on a can of beans.  The show-within-a-show on that screen is not exactly a gay porn video, but instead is the Season 2 premiere of American Hero Story, a fictionalized show depicting the story of the original “Minutemen,” the World War II-era masked vigilantes who preceded the Watchmen in the Moore-Gibbons graphic novel.  The graphic novel contained plenty of hints at the sexual sides—sometime dark sides—of its characters, but never went as far as the rather explicit,  sweaty thrusting depicted in the HBO version. In fact, viewers familiar with the graphic novel, and its DC Comics prequel series Before Watchmen (with which neither Moore or Gibbons was involved), will recognize that the sex scene-within-a-scene is more romance than porn. Sort of. The two costumed characters involved in the scene are “Hooded Justice,” and “Captain Metropolis,” whose relationship forms a plot point in the original graphic novel, and receives further elaboration in the prequel. In fact, one scholarly article about Watchmen suggests that the pair faked their own deaths in order to live together more freely. But the true identity of Hooded Justice is never revealed. And in fact, even in the HBO version’s sex scene, the character refuses to let his partner get a look at the face under the hood. The true fates of the two characters remain a mystery. “Gratuitous as all that thrusting might have seemed, the scene is actually pretty significant to the story Watchmen is trying to tell,” writer Sean O’Neil noted, in his analysis of the episode, “which is at least partially about interrogating which stories we choose to believe and those we choose to ignore.”  Photo via HBO Screen Capture