“Plenty of Room to Swing a Rope” (original) (raw)

After Midnight

Abstract

Watchmen’s scenes set in Oklahoma, New York, and Saigon were all filmed in Georgia to take advantage of state subsidies for film and TV production. An increasing number of contemporary TV series are filmed in precarious places, profiting from conditions that produce structural inequalities for people of color. Such shows contain disavowed critical knowledge about how government incentives to attract TV and film producers reproduce racial inequality and, more broadly, about the historical preconditions for cotemporary precarity. Drawing inspiration from Black, Chicanx, and Indigenous TV studies focused on the role of state power, this chapter brings together political-economic and textual analysis. It reconstructs a materialist history of Watchmen’s production, demonstrating how location shooting contributes to the reproduction of unequal spaces, while also examining the implications of such material histories for interpreting the show’s narrative. This chapter examines Watchmen’s implicit dialogue with its location, including the many Confederate memorials surrounding its production.

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