It's interesting that "Watchmen" (in theaters now) is the Hamlet of a genre that is strongly anti-rational, yet has numerous rational elements. The most important, I think, is that the Earth is saved only by inhumanly rational people making rational decisions - rational decisions which the typical viewer cannot condone even after the fact, even knowing that they saved the Earth. In so doing, it proves to these viewers, not just consciously but deep in their gut, that they themselves would doom Earth by their irrationality.

On the other hand, Dr. Manhattan embodies the popular culture's prejudice against rationality perfectly when he explains why he isn't interested in life by saying, "A living body and a dead one contain the same number of atoms". People try to imagine why scientists are interested in little things under microscopes, but not in gossip or football games. They can't imagine that the little things under the microscope are actually more interesting, so they conclude that scientists are cold and boring, and thus unable to see how interesting gossip and football really are.