The One Problem with The Watchmen TV Show.

I’ve been watching a show called The Watchmen on HBO. The show is very interesting to watch as it isn’t like any other show. Obviously, that is a huge compliment but the bigger compliment I give it is when I say that it is a worthy successor to the original graphic novel. I actually mean that and I think that the graphic novel is one of the greatest works of fiction of all time. This show is very very good, though my two readers, mom and dad, would hate it. Everything I’m about to say is me focusing on one very small issue that most people would never even think about. I’m harping on one aspect of a great show but I really seem to care about this little aspect alot.

I think that so far, the only thing I don’t like about it is the soundtrack and to explain why might make me seem douchey. Let’s start at the beginning of what is going on in my mind with this soundtrack. For a long time I have loved classical music and also loved the idea of using it for soundtrack in a movie or show. I have always had ideas about grand space war scenes with no diegetic sound and instead with epic classical pieces over it. A good example of classical music use that I like is 2001: A Space Odyssey. When Stanley Kubrick uses classical music he is letting the music be the primary input to the audience. When the ships are slowly landing on the moon there isn’t exactly a whole lot going on the way of visual motion. There certainly isn’t any dialogue or anything new and very interesting being presented to the audience. Kubrick isn’t combining the complex and powerful music with any other information aside from what we already know. We already know the ship is landing so the only new exposition we get is simply a visual description of the moon station and how it’s landing procedure. This information is not complicated or anything so the audience can sort of sit back and let the feeling of the music and the simple yet well thought out visuals wash over them. Johann Strauss’s op.314 can fill almost all the senses and it does so splendidly. It should be allowed to occupy the majority of the audiences mental abilities.

You can think of your audience of having a limited amount of things they can pay attention to at once. This is why there are close ups of things like eyes and important objects. In the wide shot you have all sorts of stuff to see. The wide shot communicates something other than detail. It establishes positioning and relationships essentially. Close ups allow for detail like the squint of Clint Eastwood’s eyes or the shot gun leaning on the wall in the corner that will probably be used in the next act of the story. It’s a little moment letting the audience focus on the one thing and then you let that knowledge impact the way the next shot feels. If you show a shotgun than transition into a shot that holds the tension in the mind of the audience or a shot that is the opposite and is very happy so that the audience gets a feeling of fear that this happiness might be gone at some point. If you understand that a movie is an education and communication and you know that the mind acts a certain way than you can plan around it and deliver a better experience. If I’m about to show my audience alot of confusing information that has far reaching ramifications and meaning that they will probably have to guess at than you should probably want your sound design to let the audience do those things. If you overload them than how can they focus on having the thoughts you want them to have?

If you want them to be surprised and questioning and wondering about the details of what is happening don’t flood the screen with fast cuts and insane colors and motion and don’t use a classical piece written with the purpose of standing on it’s own. These classical songs are written to be given to an audience that is sitting in a theater or auditorium or whatever. Felix Mendelssohn is trying to write a musical piece that communicates a whole host of emotions by itself. It is telling it’s own story and has it’s own plot and feeling and message. The last thing you want to do is have a song like this going in the background of a complex scene with shit loads of new information and concepts and confusion. That wold be like trying to listen to a college lecture on physics while also trying to play a video game. The two things are both designed to hold your entire attention with your entire brain available to process what is going on. It’s almost a disrespect to the strength of music to use it that way. Kubrick in a movie like 2001 understands that when complex plot ideas and world building is the focus of a scene then the best thing to have is a minimal sound for the scene.

The more I think about the sound design of Watchmen the more I think it’s a problem for the show. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of what classical music is. Let’s try to think of a few more good scenes with classical music. I think a pattern we might find is that they are all essentially montages. How about the helicopter scene from Apocalypse Now? The hugely powerful and complicated song by Wagner is used in a scene where nothing really important is being revealed to the audience. The fighting hasn’t started yet and we all know what is happening. The entire scene is just them transporting themselves to combat. Nothing is happening but the song is used and focused on by the film and the result is a powerful sense of feeling in the audience. We feel all sorts of scared and amazed and excited and we know that the people on screen feel the same. Classical music should be used to evoke a certain feeling and when it is used it should be used only with simple visuals in a montage setting.

Before now I never really connected montages with the use of classical music but I see now that having a rule about that is important. Every great montage, and I don’t just mean Rocky type montages but montages in the sense of almost half of 2001 as a film. Even the Rocky montages though have great and really interesting music that is combined with incredibly simple plot points and new information. The audience isn’t being asked to take in all sorts of new and complicated concepts while also having to deal with a classical song that is designed to introduce new and complicated concepts with only sound. It’s like having a magazine that covers both high concept physics and also cover shopping trends. That goes past multi tasking and enters a state of just pointlessness. Maybe if your audience isn’t paying attention to the classical music at all than they can get the feeling of it but the music is designed to get your attention because it wasn’t written as sound design for a complex scene.

I’ll end this little post with a clip from the movie that shows what I mean. First though I have to figure out how put youtube videos into this blog. um… Let me set the scene before the video starts.

At this point in the show we know very little about any of these characters. We don’t know who the “Game Warden” is or even exactly who the two characters in the scene are. We may have educated guesses about their names but those are just guesses. One of them is possibly very insane and the other one might be a clone or something. If that sounds confusing just know that it is confusing. At this point in the story we, the audience watching the show are also looking for clues to see where any of this is happening. Me and my brother were trying to figure out if the took place on the moon or on earth. We have no idea of so many things and our brains are trying desperately to grasp at any straw of information possible. The contents of the letter refers to things in a very modern way where we slowly get more and more information about what is actually happening. This pacing is fine but leaves the brain in a state of desperation for more. It’s fun but forces a certain amount of focus. Every phrase of dialogue is designed to be vague and to evoke a certain amount of questioning and prediction from the audience as we try and put the pieces together. Phrases like “Consequences” “Criminal Activities” “Terms Upon Which We Agreed” are all supposed to give us tiny bits of information and tease us. While the audience is trying to do all of this Bizet’s Carmen starts to play. Bizet’s Carmen is not a background song to begin with and now it’s in the background of a scene that is already asking so much of us. I don’t know what song I would use here and maybe you think the song works but believe me when I say that there are multiple scenes every episodes that use even more complicated classical music while still expecting a certain amount of focus.

I’ll link Kubrick’s use of Strauss as well just so you can see both sides of what I’m talking about. Strauss’s “Blue Danube” piece, by the way, is much less complicated and has much less going on in the way of plot than the song Watchmen used. Carmen’s song is from it’s own story with it’s own plot and characters and meanings that have nothing whatsoever to do with the scene it’s being used in. Youtube does not have the entire 2001 scene so the only clip I could find was the first half of the scene. Really stupid but youtube gotta make that money I guess. Kubrick let’s the music be front and center in the mind of the audience as it works with the simple information of the visuals to provide the right feeling.

-The classical music comes in at around the 1:24 mark.