How did Peacemaker/Chris Smith become an uber-patriotic and violent killing machine? It’s a question that James Gunn seeks to answer in the eponymous HBO Max series. And viewers are quick to meet that answer in the form of Auggie Smith, Chris’s racist, misogynist, and deeply cruel father. Played with grizzled menace by the incomparable Robert Patrick, Auggie is a hateful and truly evil man. In many ways, he embodies the very worst of white male American rage, and his villainous alter ego, the white supremacist White Dragon.
When Peacemaker and Vigilante pull up to Auggie’s house, Vigilante clocks the upside-down American flag. Peacemaker describes it as a “Deep State thing.” The true meaning of an upside-down American flag comes via the United States Flag Code from 1998, which details the rules, care, and protocol of the flag. Section 8.a. of the code reads that “the flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.”
Basically it’s a warning that the country is in danger, and for men like Auggie Smith, it is. It’s the kind of fear and hatred (of immigrants, women, people of color, LGBTQ+ folks, etc.) that right wing extremists tap into. Donald Trump tapped into these very fears of the erosion of White America with his slogan “Make America Great Again”. The “great” time he is referring to, of course, is when conservative whites ruled the land and everyone else was discriminated against. The upside-down flag was spotted on the lawns of many Trump supporters, often accompanied by a Trump 2020 flag.
Episode 4 sees Peacemaker try to make excuses for his father, but both Vigilante and Leota force him to confront his father’s toxicity. When Chris meets with his father at the prison, Auggie tells him that he never loved him and always preferred his dead brother. We also see flashbacks of Chris as a child, where his father goads him into stabbing a stranger. Chris also clearly had some sort of involvement with his brother’s death, which weighs on him.
The arc of the series is clearly going to pit Chris and Auggie against one another, with Peacemaker working through his trauma and unlearning everything that Auggie taught him. In an interview with Syfy Wire, James Gunn said, “It was very hard to write Auggie, because Auggie is such a piece of s*** racist, … I didn’t want to pull back on who he was as a racist, and to make him this McDonald’s-lite version of what a racist is, which is what you would normally see in television shows. But I didn’t want to serve his bulls***, either. That to me was the most delicate stuff in the show that I really was careful about and tried to do the best that I could to be sensitive and also be authentic at the same time.”
(via Syfy Wire, image: HBO Max)
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