Who listens to the watchmen? a sound study on the filmic adaptation watchmen

Abstract

Sound can be a tricky aspect in film analysis. Upon watching a movie, people tend to pay attention to visual aspects. Thus, sound is generally forgotten, observed as a merely background to mise-en-scène and narrative. The present discussion raises the relevance of sound in the film Watchmen (2009), adapted from the eponymous graphic novel. The sound analysis based on Bordwell and Thompson’s theory (1996) suggests that the observation of such aspect unveils: (1) the importance of sound phenomenon to the movies; (2) the use of songs to illustrate certain historical situations; (3) a better understanding of the different use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound in fiction.