Eyes stare from the screen; we zoom out from stained-glass windows shaped like eyes. A superhero tilts her head to one side; we see a bronze bust tilted at the same angle, a purple mask over its eyes. The trunk of a car shuts; the trunk of a car opens. We zoom in on a detail of a white horse from an old painting of the genocide of Native Americans; a gentleman rides a white horse through a green countryside to his manor.
These are some of the striking visual moments in Damon Lindelof’s 2019 HBO series, Watchmen. The show is based on—really a sequel to—the 1986–1987 comic book series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, a gritty, virtuosic metafictional critique of superhero culture—including the comic form itself. These abrupt shifts from shot to shot are in fact one effort to capture the aesthetic of the original. In an interview about the show, the director of photography, Gregory Middleton, said:
A match cut “jumps” rather than flows from shot to shot. Unlike a splice cut, which moves smoothly from one angle or moment to another in a single setting, giving us a feeling of continuity, a match cut lasts long enough for us to notice that two shots in different settings have similar shapes or movements—we make the leap to connect them, to relate two things separated by space, time, perspective. You could think of a match cut as a visual analogy or metaphor: a purposive claim that one thing is like another thing, a “perception of the similarity in the dissimilar,” as Aristotle put it. Or you could think of a match cut as a visual pun: a trifling way to play with the fact that two things echo each other. Either way, as a technique for juxtaposition, match cuts raise two questions: What’s the relationship between the things juxtaposed? And how is the juxtaposition itself justified?
You can justify juxtaposition aesthetically, the way Middleton does: as nice, clever, interesting. The match cut between the eyes and the stained glass is indeed very pretty, between the opening and closing of the trunk deft. But what about the match cut between a painting of the genocide of Native Americans and a shot of a gentleman riding his horse to his manor? It seems to be making a point about the relationship between empire and mass murder. As the show progresses, we learn that the gentleman is essentially a colonial master over a race of amenable clones on a moon of a distant planet, and that decades earlier, when he was still on earth, he killed three million people, ostensibly to prevent the imminent nuclear holocaust of World War III.