Reinvention - Watchmen as Peanuts, or Peanuts as Watchmen?
The film Watchmen may be saturated with latex draped vigilantes and clothes-phobic blue guys, but the film certainly isn’t your typical superhero movie. In fact, none of the characters in Watchmen, with the exception of Dr Manhattan, has super powers. But that alone is not enough to warrant its exclusion from the superhero genre; Neither Tony Stark nor Bruce Wayne has super powers either.
More importantly, the theme of Watchmen differs from other traditional superhero films. While Iron Man 2 started with the hollering drums and brazing guitars of AC/DC, Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin” riffed serenely in the introduction sequence of Watchmen. The lyrics “The slow one now / Will later be fast. As the present now / Will later be past” iterates, melodiously, the idea that superheroes are redundant; That the Watchmen team is part of a redundant past, no longer required by a society that they once served. The movie is about change. It is about a team of outcasts trying to find relevance in a world, only to end up realising that they are indeed no longer needed.
Even if the Chinese have never heard of the song, they have definitely embraced its essence. The Shanghai Expo adopted the theme of “Better City, Better Life”, a significant departure from the labour comparative advantage that appears time and time again in economics case studies related to China. China had, and still have relatively cost competitive labour. However, “cost competitive” is only a polite paraphrase for “cheap”, and cheapness will not get a country anywhere beyond cheapness. Staying true to its dogma of a centrally planned economy, the Chinese government took industrial development into its own hands by exploring and identifying new growth trends for itself. The Expo provides ample evidence for this as the green and silver industries take centre stages at the event.
What then lies ahead for Singapore? There have been enough celebration over Electronic Arts and Lucas Arts, and we agree that it is time to move on. How can Singapore further ride on the green wave? Given her strategic location in South East Asia and bountiful amounts of chemical and environmental engineering institutes supported by a world class technological infrastructure, how should Singapore position herself on the chess board? Should we be the part of the designing team for prototypes, the manufacturing line, or the testbed for these gadgets before they are shipped overseas? And how about the silver industry? Though we can rejoice in the extent of accessibility that our public infrastructure offers, how can we liquidate such advantages? Though the “1 in 5 Singaporeans being senior citizens by 2030” fact, which has been over-preached by newspapers and analysts alike, might be able to give us an edge in developing and testing silver industry products in Singapore, how can we compete with already aging countries such as Japan that can reach the “1 in 5” ratio 15 years ahead of us?
Going beyond the types of industries that we can seek to grow, what strategic advantages do we possess fundamentally? Do we still possess the type of skilled labour that we can boast of 10 years ago, or is the budget this year a reminder that we might have been a little slow for the previous few years? “Increased productivity” is now the flavour of the season. But again, we caution the loose usage of buzzwords. For the economists among us, productivity growth works in tandem with wage growth. As you can do more, you expect to get paid more, and you get paid more. Theoretically, that should not erode our advantage and should instead boost it, simply because Singaporeans can then produce more. But is that really true?
Dear contestants, these are the questions that you’ll be grappling with during the 3 day competition, and probably for a long time to come. It is time to get existential, and to avoid being superheroes caught in the wrong tide. That’d be kick ass.
- Linan and Janelle
