(From my essay “Remembering the future: Time and memory in the Mars chapters of Watchmen,” 10 pages.)

Unlike dismantling weapons with one’s mind, which only he is able to do, Jon (Dr. Manhattan) seems to think that even ordinary humans are quite capable of perceiving time in the way he does (even, perhaps, of seeing the future), if only they would allow themselves to. In fact, he tries to explain and even demonstrate this to Laurie, who, apart from her predilection to get dressed up in costume and fight crime, is just like the rest of us: emotional, flawed, and mortal. “There is no future. There is no past. Do you see?” he asks her. “Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet” (Ch. 9, pg. 6).

Jon’s understanding is that unidirectional time, and the mapping of existence onto a stable timeline, is a matter of perception, a sort of filter created by the human mind, rather than an objective, external truth. If, as Jon’s father once said, citing Einstein, “time is not true” (Ch. 4, pg. 2), then it could follow that, if the mind can break out of its habit of thinking time is true, then it is possible for humans to “see.” Once one understands that time is not what one thinks it is, then it is even possible to break free of it. He tells Laurie, “if only you’d relax enough to see the whole continuum, life’s pattern or lack of one, then you’d understand my perspective. You’re deliberately shutting out understanding, as if you’re afraid” (Ch. 9, pg. 23).

In hopes of showing her what it is he’s talking about, Jon asks Laurie to consider her earliest memory. In doing so, he tries to point out to her that her past is not “gone” (i.e., is not separate from the present). In fact, when Laurie looks into her memory, she is experiencing it now, and it is playing out, exactly like Jon’s were in Chapter 4, in the present tense. So, while remembering, she is simultaneously in the present (on Mars) and in the past (in her parents’ house, as a child). If we accept, as many scientists do, that consciousness has neural correlates, then both the past and the present exist, simultaneously, in the brain of the person perceiving. In Laurie’s mind, the past is present, and it only really exists as she is thinking it, right now.

The notion that the past is neither static or separate is perfectly consistent with current scientific thinking on the nature of memory, which holds that every time a stored memory in the brain is “accessed,” or brought to mind, it is modified, even if ever so slightly. This is like actually living the experience again when we remember it, but differently. Similarly, every time we, the readers, experience one of the repeating panels in Watchmen, like the photograph of Jon and Janey on the ground, or the falling watch gears thrown by Jon’s father, or Laurie’s falling bottle of Nostalgia perfume, it is different from the last time, in light of what we’ve read in the intervening frames. Though the image looks the same, the observer has changed since the last observation.

Laurie’s earliest memory, of overhearing a fight between her mother and her mother’s husband, changes when she figures out, years later, through the course of her conversation with Jon on Mars in 1985, what her parents were talking about when she overheard them. Many of her memories change in the light of discovering, on Mars, who her real father is. Thus things which come “after” in a linear view of time can actually change events that come “before.”