Thomas Johnson

University of Florida

SAMLA 92 Presentation Proposal

July 1, 2020

HBO’s Watchmen and Appropriation Anxiety

I will argue that HBO’s television miniseries Watchmen (2019) is a self-aware adaptation of the 1985 comic series of the same name. Showrunner Damon Lindelof's anxiety about adapting the 1985 Watchmen against the wishes of its writer Alan Moore informs the adaptation itself, which is concerned with the ethics of appropriation. The adaptation navigates a tension between Lindelof’s self-admitted reverence for the 1985 Watchmen and his stated intention to create something that is “fresh” and “contemporary” in a way that those twelve issues, by implication, no longer are (qtd. in Hibberd). As a result of this balancing act, Watchmen 2019 resembles what Thomas Leitch calls updates, which “are characterized by an overtly revisionary stance toward an original text they treat as classic even though they transform it in some obvious way, usually by…criticiz[ing] the original as dated, outmoded or irrelevant” (143).

Lindelof updates the 1985 Watchmen by expanding Moore's focus on the psychological trauma of costumed, Caucasian vigilantes to include people of color who don capes in response to racist injustices. This expansion allows the 2019 Watchmen to interrogate the intersection between the United States’ history of racism and the history of the superhero genre. Racial trauma and cultural appropriation are explored through narrative techniques that owe as much to

Lindelof’s previous work as they do to the 1985 Watchmen. Just as individual issues of the 1985

Watchmen are organized around the perspectives of specific vigilantes, and many episodes of

Lindelof’s Lost (2004-2010) feature flashbacks to the backstories of individual plane crash survivors, the 2019 Watchmen uses episodic structure to plumb the psychologies of particular members of its large ensemble. The 2019 Watchmen’s experimentation with point-of-view and temporality thus doubles both as an homage to the 1985 Watchmen’s stylistic interventions in comics and as the culmination of Lindelof’s narratological innovations in television.

Works Cited

Hibberd, James. “Damon Lindelof wrote a candid open letter to Watchmen.” Entertainment

Weekly, 22 May 2018, https://ew.com/tv/2018/05/22/damon-lindelof-watchmen-letter/.

Accessed 1 July 2020.

Leitch, Thomas. “Twice-Told Tales: The Rhetoric of the Remake.” Literature/film Quarterly,

vol. 18, issue 3, 1990, pp. 138-149. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,uid&db=hus&AN=509483274&site

=eds-live. Accessed 1 July 2020.

Bio: Thomas Johnson is a PhD candidate in the English department at the University of Florida, where he is writing his dissertation on representations of the supernatural in American “prestige” television. His scholarship broadly concerns the relationship between genre and aesthetic hierarchies in contemporary television, film, and 20th and 21st-century literature. He has given papers at SAMLA annually since 2015, most recently on the relationship between adaptation and theorizations of seriality. He presented on seriality and the fantasy genre at the 2020 conference for the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and participated in a seminar on the future of television at the 2018 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference. His review of

HBO’s Watchmen is featured in the latest issue of Adaptation.