The Martian: Psychological Analysis of the Movie / Book

The Martian, a Psychological Analyisis.

The martian as a creative work, in my opinion, is one of the best things come out of the last decade in entertainment. As a production it is mostly well paced, being thoughtful and informative while at the same time being exciting and griping. Few works are able to be both realistic and exciting, as one tends to overshadow the other. However, the martian beats these hurdles in most respects. The book in particular suffers from a slow 2nd act, and the movie had it’s iron man moment. Still I will be shocked if the movie doesn’ receive several nominations at the the various awards ceremonies in the coming months.

The one part where the work waffles the most, and indeed this is the case for most works, is how grounded it is in real world psychology. It isn’t entirely awful, but a few problems exist. 

1. First of all, where are NASA’s psychologists? In the movie they are nowhere to be seen at all, and in the book they get about 3 pages worth of psych 101 stuff that, while true, isn’t a really good descriptor of why / how he survived. In the real world NASA would have gotten a team of the best psychologists on the planet to figure out how to combat his loneliness and helpless feelings. This would have been more important than anything else, because if he gives up one time, it’s over. 

2. The psychological ramifications of loneliness are ignored. Watney spends roughly 2 years on Mars alone with TV reruns and bad music. His only communication is text chat, and while that would go some way towards abating loneliness, it isn’t enough. People need human interaction. Even the most introverted person needs it to survive. Humans sociability is what allowed us to evolve to be what we are now.  He is shown to go a bit loopy towards the end, but in all reality even the most resiliant person would eventually slip into deep depression from the lack of human contact. On top of that, loneliness has the medical ramifications of reducing the effectiveness of your immune system, causing you to feel overly or unesicarrily tired, and extreme cases of loneliness cause psychosis in the forms of auditory hallucinations. A person who is alone for to long will literally start to hear voices around them, much like someone who suffers from schizophrenia. Those are just the big ones, but for the sake of time we’ll move on.

3. The Herme’s crews reactions are wrong. The Hermes crew does react with guilt and anguish to be sure, but psychologically and statistically speaking, at least one of them should be angry about leaving him behind, while one of them should be defending the decision to do so. Yet they all essentially mourn what happened and band together to fix it. While not impossible, people rarely react this way in crisis situations. More often than not, one or two individuals work against the “greater good” in order to preserve the self. That’s millions of years of evolutionary instinct at work, and even in astronauts going to Mars it will still be present.

3a. Furthermore, the hermes crew should be suffereing from guilt responses. Guilt typically impairs judgement, shortens tempers, and can cause severe psychological trauma depending on the situtation. Leaving a friend on Mars to die would rank up there pretty close to the top, as essentially they would feel the colective guilt of leaving a friend to starve to death cold and alone.

4. Even after returning, Watney would be a psychological wreck, and need years of therapy. While the book doesn’t get into this, the movie makes it seem that he comes home and goes back to work. That isn’t the case. Watney’s personality seems likely to recover, but he would be suffereing most likely from sever depression, PTSD, potentially anxiety disorder, and the left over affects of hallucinations. Not to mention the completely unknown effects that months in a highly radioactive low gravity environment would have on his brain. For the movie they needed a happy ending, and for the book it may have been to hard to tackle, but it still is an area that deserves a mention of some kind.