Stop/Watch: Repressing History, Adapting Watchmen

Abstract

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1986 graphic novel Watchmen was long understood to be an unfilmable work. This opinion surely has a great deal to do with the novel’s notorious chronological density: over the course of its 12 chapters, Watchmen’s narrative moves backwards, forwards, and sideways in time, now with jarring suddenness, now with subtle ease. In the process, it weaves together a dizzying array of real and imagined histories in a way ill suited to the limited scope of Hollywood narrative form. Against this playfully plural approach to history, the polarizing 2009 film adaptation defines itself by a fidelity to the original novel’s historical moment so absolute that it all but abolishes the chronological gamesmanship of its source material.