Episode 54 - Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009) (with Drew Morton)

Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009).

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

In an alternate 1985, Chris and Alex sit down to watch the recent comic book feature film Watchmen (Zach Snyder, 2009), a neo-noir/superhero blockbuster that adapts the popular DC Comics series for the big screen. They are joined in this Cold War-era tale of Soviet Union-United States relations by Dr Drew Morton, Associate Professor of Mass Communication at Texas A&M University, Texarkana, and author of Panel to the Screen: Style, American Film, and Comic Books During the Blockbuster Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2016), as well as a number of articles and chapters on motion comics, media convergence and comic book adaptation. Topics up for discussion in Episode 54 include Watchmen’s pivotal place within Hollywood comic book feature films of the 2000s; formal issues in adaptation and the graphic decompression of time and space; digital technology and the spectacle of Baroque aesthetics (including director Zach Snyder’s balletic slow-motion visual style); the film’s depiction of psychologically repressed superheroes and noir-esque vigilantism; and how Watchmen presents a crucial case study for thinking about the movement of media products within a broader transmedia flow.

Suggested Readings

• William Brown, Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013).

• Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

• Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

• Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993).

• Scott McCloud, Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form (New York: Paradox Press, 2000).

• Drew Morton, Panel to the Screen: Style, American Film, and Comic Books During the Blockbuster Era (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016).

• Bob Rehak, “Adapting Watchmen after 9/11,” Cinema Journal 51, no. 1 (Fall 2011): 154-159.

• Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (New York: Random House, 1981).

• Steven Shaviro, “Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales,” Film-Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2010), available at: http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/biopolitics/PostCinematicAffect.pdf.

• Deborah Tudor, “The Eye of the Frog: Questions of Space in Films Using Digital Processes,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 90–110