Watchmen Character Profiles: Dr. Manhattan

Doctor Manhattan is different from the other characters of Watchmen. He’s different, in fact, from everyone else in the Watchmen universe. While other heroes push the limits of human ability, he transcends them.

Dr. Manhattan is the only character in Watchmen with powers. At minimum he can restructure subatomic particles at will, perceive happenings on the subatomic level, live forever, resize himself at will and teleport. By following these powers through to their logical conclusion, there is probably nothing that Dr. Manhattan couldn’t do. Instead of focusing on these powers though, Alan Moore focuses on how access to these powers has affected the man who has them- Jon Osterman.

Cold War Conflicts: “God Exists, and He’s American”

Between the chapters of Watchmen Alan Moore would insert a few pages of prose- documents from the world of the comic. After Dr. Manhattan’s chapter, a scientist describes the phenomenon of Dr. Manhattan’s creation in the quip “God exists, and He’s American.”

While the speaker was using the phrase to illustrate the political implications of Dr. Manhattan’s existence vis-a-vis the cold war, in the graphic novel as a whole it is a good summation of the Dr. Manhattan/Jon Osterman split.

Jon Osterman was a Watchmaker…

And like so many detail-oriented, intelligent young men he was a bit nerdy and a bit of a pushover. One day his father approached the 16-year old Jon told him that he would not study watches anymore but would be a nuclear scientist. Jon acquiesced and fourteen years later he received his Ph.D.

In the course of his doctoral work, Jon accidentally locked himself inside an intrinsic field separator and blew himself up. Through some quantum mumbo-jumbo which amounted to a ghost haunting, he was able to reassemble his body and bring himself back to life (Alan Moore fans may notice a resemblance between the story of Jon’s resurrection and the ghostly astral projections in From Hell.)

Once he pieced himself back together, gaining control over the subatomic world in the process, he hadn’t changed all that much. He was still a pushover at heart, and that’s displayed through his acquiescence to government-assigned work. As a representative deity on the planet, he could not be forced to do anything. He still has those threads of humanity, though, which incline him to do as he’s told.

A Growing Sense of Alienation

Dr. Manhattan probably changes the most of any of Watchmen’s main cast. Between his original self-creation and the beginning of Watchmen he begins to shed the things which superficially tie him to humanity. For example, in twenty years that his flashbacks cover in chapter four he wears progressively less and less clothes, until by the start of the novel he’s naked most of the time.

Spoiler alert!

It isn’t until the events of the story that he finally starts to stand up for himself, though. In his career as Dr. Manhattan, Jon Osterman merely observed world events. By the end of the story, he passes judgment on the world: abandoning it to rip itself apart. His decision to leave Earth is an interesting inversion of Rorschach’s proclaimation in prison to the prisoners that “you don’t understand. I’m not locked in here with you, you’re locked in here with me.” The Earth isn’t exiling Dr. Manhattan, he is exiling the Earth from himself.

End spoiler alert.

Dr. Manhattan is an Interesting Speculation

On what a normal man might do with absolute power. He has ingrained in him a prosocial sense of right and wrong, and didn’t have to follow a megalomaniacal path to his power. It was thrust upon him. Even if Dr. Manhattan condemned humanity, his goodness is a surprisingly positive argument against the old axiom about absolute power.

Dr. Manhattan

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