I have a confession to make.
I hate time travel.
It just doesn’t work. Pretty much every story I’ve ever encountered that’s involved time travel is inevitably derailed by the paradoxes of relying on said plot device. From old Star Trek episodes to Lost, from Terminator to The Lake House, my disdain for the convention has only grown. Each plot devolves into a repetitive loop of causality that simply, aggravatingly doesn’t make sense. It’s true that 12 Monkeys—and its infinitely better predecessor, La Jetée—plays with this very idea, but the sight of Bruce Willis screwing up his own life for eternity was every bit as shallow (if beautifully designed) as it would later be in his Disneyfied attempt to redeem it in The Kid.
As a pure sidenote: I do confess a hypocritical appreciation for the sheer campy-ness of Back to the Future. It’s so ridiculous that I can overlook all of the improbabilities and accept it for the farcical comedy that it is.
But in general, it wasn’t until I encountered Joe Haldeman’s forward-only time travel in The Forever War that I was able to read a time-travel book without wanting to inwardly throw up at least a little.
I digress. All of this preamble is just merely to say that I found Dr. Manhattan’s existing outside of time to be rather distracting. Make that very distracting. I still can’t decide if I thought it was a well-handled discussion or not. It certainly seems to be a pretty major plot point…
I shared quite a bit of Laurie’s angst over Jon’s “predestination trip.” Can anyone ever explain that kind of thing? Maybe it’s because it’s just an infinite—“godlike?”—idea that my finite brain can’t comprehend. Well, damn it, despite his proclivity for the magic ‘shrooms, Moore’s brain is just as finite as mine, and I’m just not convinced that his character’s monotone “There is no future. There is no past.” schtick is that insightful (if at all).
True, are Jon’s pretentious metaphysical soundbytes even a serious story point? By the end of the story, as he fails to “save the day,” I can see why Moore would want to play with diluting the power of a too-perfect, too-omniscient hero—an ultimately fatalistic subversion that goes more than a step further than the grit of Miller’s Dark Knight. Indeed, the bitter deconstruction of all of society’s ideals is the real, persistent discussion drummed into our heads throughout Watchmen—and it’s a bleak one. Which I guess Jon’s soundbytes do reinforce…
Still, in the end, I found Jon’s insistence that “we’re all puppets, Laurie. I’m just a puppet who can see the strings” more than just an emotional downer. How many strings can he see? How does one exist both within and outside of a timeline simultaneously? Why can’t he do more to “fix things?” Is the eternal energy of the universe dictating his life (and in turn, everyone else’s)?
It seems to me that there are two kinds of mysteries in stories–ones that make you bend even closer to the page in wonder and appreciation, and ones that make you sit back and scratch your head in frustration.
Which direction did you lean?
I also found some of the depictions of time travel–or Doc Manhattan existing in past, present and future at once–distracting. But I think it serves a purpose. Doc Manhattan became a hero on accident while the other Watchmen all donned costumes because the behavior of people in the world sickened them and they wanted to change that. The most powerful of them all just wanted to get the watch he fixed for a girl he likes. Talk about tragic. I think Doc Manhattan’s existence in so many “times” shows just what he lost in the accident: his humanity. When he pieces himself back together after the accident, something more than his physical appearance changes–and that’s an important aspect of his character. For a person who knows well in advance who will die and when and how and who knows he can stop it, he sure doesn’t meddle in affairs much. This helps reinforce the notion of Doc Manhattan as an other, someone who was human but is now closer to being a god than a man. His omniscience only sets him apart further as a hero who can’t be bothered with heroics, and I think that sheds a lot of light on superheroes in general. What good is a god-like being who won’t bother saving a president from assassination? What good is a hero who doesn’t don a costume on purpose, who doesn’t understand humans, and who would rather not be bothered? He’s about as much good as a normal Joe who dons a costume and toughens up in a police department gym so he could fight them on their own before being forced into retirement by the Keeney Act. The only edge Doctor Manhattan’s time travel really gives him is one that prevents him from romanticizing and clinging to the past like so many other characters, since he’s always there, just like he’s always in a future he doesn’t particularly care to change–at least not most of the time.
Forgive some of the shifts in tense. Tried to edit them to uniformity but missed one or two it would appear. Apologies for the sloppy writing.
No problem at all.
Did you understand why Doc Manhattan didn’t both trying to save JFK? I think that’s a great example of a question that once raised, I needed to have tackled at least a bit more than it was to understand the character…
Here’s the real question–who’s the more tragic, pitiable character? Rorschach with his angry tears or Dr. M’s completely impassive blue face?
I’m definitely on the side of anti-time travel narratives. The time-dialation effects of Haldeman and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game series work a bit, but on the whole, the idea that you can change the past easily and without consequences is offensive and immature to me (and I cannot get past it with Back to the Future, unfortunately).
I think Moore it trying to apply classical Christian theology, which claims that God is indeed outside of time and sees all events simultaneously, and applying it to one man’s experience. Unfortunately, I think the real problem is twofold – first, Manhattan is finite, and thus becomes passive in his determinism. Second, and I think Moore’s artistic failure, Manhattan’s experience of time is too linear, and too unpredicatble to really make a statement about time and determinism – the rules of how he experiences time are either never laid out, or laid out and then ignored.
If (hilariously atheistic!) Moore is trying to apply classical Christian theology, I think it’s safe to say that he is consciously putting his own sardonic spin on it.
Your second point about Manhattan’s experience of time is exactly what I struggled with.
I think you bring out one of the more penetrating questions about the Osterman character. Since he cannot intervene to change the future, he becomes more and more withdrawn and depressed about the state of the world itself. Wouldn’t that lead to an eventual break with all reality?
That is what Manhattan believes (and to some extent acts upon in his leaving of this galaxy for another).
An interesting note is that the film explores a different side to Manhattan’s plight. Ozymandias comments that Jon actually remains connected to those around him – he merely cannot understand his own emotions and manifestations of feeling. “I’ve known Jon long enough to know he’s not devoid of emotion. His subtle facial twitches might not be obvious to the layman, but to me he might has well have been sobbing.” This sentence implies, despite Jon’s lengthy monologue on Mars, that he does still feel, but his massive increase in intelligence and knowledge overwhelms his ability to understand his own emotions, or even recognize them.
Whether this interpretation is valid given Moore’s character, I found it quite resonant. (this is not to say I consider the film to be anywhere close to the original’s achievement, but I think it does think through some of the implications of Moore’s visions and characters with the benefit of hindsight and twenty years of analysis)
Am I missing something obvious? Why can’t Manhattan intervene to change the future? He certainly seems to try, at points…
And was the reason he didn’t intervene in JFK because he was in league with Nixon? I was/am a bit confused by that, obviously.
I have to admit that there is at least one novel that uses the time travel device that I actually, maybe despite myself, truly enjoyed. But the whole thing had to be accepted with the assumption that time is not linear. If you can do that, then the “holes” of the device are more easily acceptable. Dr. Manhattan’s claim of time, however, seemed more or less irrelevant to me. It struck me as something that might be going somewhere really interesting, but it never went there and so I just accepted that he could partially see the future and that he was also always in the past. I wonder, though, if Moore isn’t trying to say something about how living in either the future or the past is detrimental and that it leaves one open to the kinds of difficulties Dr. Manhattan had in connecting to people in the present, or even really “living.”
I can’t resist: “Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. But Today is a gift! That is why it is called the Present.”
Yes, I know it’s inane and groan-worthy. But your comment was so insightful and yet irresistably inspired my memory…
I think Rorschach’s tears trump just about any other character when it comes to pity. I think Dr. Manhattan’s situation is pretty tragic, but I never get the feeling that he or Moore expects the reader to pity him.