Watching the Watchmen Trailer Being Watched

Watching the Bloody Watchmen...

OK, so if you’ve been hanging out in geeky circles and in chat-rooms the past several weeks, you’ve obviously been hearing about the same awesome thing over and over again, with rave reviews and ululations of delight emitting from people’s oral cavities and keyboards.

That thing, of course, is Joss Whedon’s mini-series Dr. Horrible, which hopefully you caught while it was free between July 13th and July 20th.

Seen it? Good. There’s also that other awesome thing you’ve been hearing about over and over again, etc., which is the Watchmen Trailer and the topic of today’s blog.

“Watched” it yet? Great!

Before I get into the content of the trailer itself, a word on the discourse of its reception. “Discourse!?” you yell, arming yourself against the approaching Foucauldian logic of Ivory Tower cultural studies. Fear not! Discourse is merely the socially accepted boundary of what can be said about any given word and/or topic. The word itself is actually derived from the chariot racetrack in Roman arenas which served also as the boundary between spectator and spectacle, demarcating what is to be within the bounds of the games and what is out-of-bounds. It is perfectly OK within the socio-linguistic discourse of “movies,” for example, to say “I like all movies” or “those movies all suck bad” or “I haven’t seen movies in my life” or “You only find that in the movies,” whereas it’s outside the discourse to say “I would like to wear a size 32 movies for pants this summer.”

So, the sensible discourse of the Watchmen trailer among geek circles seems to revolve around two particular positions. These are the following: