Watchmen (continued)

One of the many things I liked about Watchmen was its portrayal of the physicist character, Dr. Manhattan. When I read Moore's graphic novel, I thought he got it quite right, and Snyder's movie was a smooth adaptation of this to the screen.

To put it bluntly, most of the physicist characters in popular movies and televison are just flat out wrong. They don't correspond to the really physicists I have known. The problem, I think, is a quintessentially Postmodern one: most physicist characters are not written based on real physicists known by the writer/director/actor, but on other stereotypes they have known. Thus the physicist characters are fourth-generation copies of falsehoods, but ones with the weight of Postmodern "reality" in the minds of those creating and watching them.

Understanding this was actually one of the most important mental breakthroughs I had in understanding Postmodernity as a whole: the concept that the simulacrum has become more real than the underlying reality.

The most jarring "real" aspect of the Dr. Manhattan character is how he becomes, over time, increasingly detached from concerns about humanity. This is exactly how I came to feel over many years in graduate school, assembling a thesis that was very close to the sci-fi material in the movie, namely tachyons and time synchronization issues in the relativistic realm.

Specifically I came to regard the social sciences as somewhat quaint and meaningless. The idea of trying to elicit "truth" out of the study of human nature seemed increasingly like a parlor game unworthy of serious academic study.

Moreover, the idea of studying such banal things as the Stock Market and international finance seemed like the greatest waste of time of all. They seemed so evanescent, so transitory, that any mental effort devoted to them was tantamount to the work of insects, not human intellect.

But everything changes. What seemed so clear to me ten years ago when I was writing about relativistic phenomena has now become so blurred. A decade of exposure to the world outside physics has made me much less like Dr. Manhattan and much more like the Rorschach character, mumbling in the streets about the Communist conspiracy to destroy America.

The Dr. Manhattan vs. Rorschach dichotomy is actually the final showdown in both Moore's book and in the movie. I feel like I've lived both sides of it now, which is perhaps one reason why I connected so strongly to the movie.