Re: Grace somehow managing to write a paper that destroyed his career being unbelievable and etc, a) you are absolutely correct here and b) my personal take since reading the book, where there's a blink-and-you'll miss it reference to Grace being really done with academia already by the time he wrote it is that he's one of those people who had an absolutely miserable PhD experience and felt stuck by the sunk cost fallacy of it all, which may have lead to him sort of self-sabotaging his career in other ways we don't know as much about.
Like, he felt like he put too much work in to just leave/quit, but at the same time, that's what he really wanted to do. And Grace is clearly someone who hates making decisions and choices for himself. He just wants someone to tell him what to do -- or in this case, that he's not allowed to do it anymore. So he got a postdoc but just started sort of quiet-quitting the whole thing, and everyone was really frustrated with him and his performance already. So when some controversy came along at the conference? It was a neat and tidy excuse to get rid of him.
Ohh interesting! And something I can also see. The whole thing makes a lot more senseāand also feels a lot more resonant to his character and his emotional arcāif he is kind of lying to himself about what actually went down and what everybody else thinks about him.
@bicherrim wrote something along somewhat similar lines in the comments of the post too:
I donāt remember where I read it, but I like the concept that Grace wasnāt actually ousted/blackballed from academia at all, it just feels better to him to frame it that way ā in reality, he couldnāt handle the criticism his paper received, lost his shit, and then afterwards was so embarrassed that he dropped out of the field entirely so he wouldnāt have to face anyone about it.
And both of these options feel way more believableāthat āI was kicked out because they couldnāt handle my UNCONVENTIONAL IDEASā is an ego-soothing narrative he built up around what happened to avoid acknowledging that leaving was his choice. Ending up as a middle school science teacher was clearly making him much happier than academia wasāis it because this is something that feels more genuinely fulfilling and meaningful than the relentless pressure cooker gristmill that is academia? Is it because children can never meaningfully be peers and canāt criticize him, and among 13-year-olds heāll always be unquestionably the smartest person in the room? Little of column A, little of column B, probably. And he can do that while also clinging to this fantasy of being Astrobiologyās Alfred Wegener and Someday Everyone Will See I Was Right And They Were So Unfair To Me, and crucial to the fantasy is that itās incumbent on everyone else to change their minds about him, not him to do anything.
And I like how the movie does allude to this interpretation that thereās some willful mental rewriting of what actually happened on Graceās part:
STRATT: Do you stand by what you wrote?
GRACE: I was fired for standing by what I wrote.
STRATT: You were fired for calling the leading scholar in your field a āstaggering waste of carbonā at the UNESCO conference in Denmark.
GRACE: Youā¦ you heard about that, huh?
Stratt like. You werenāt disliked for your ideas, idiot, you were disliked for your behavior. The problem wasnāt that you defended an unpopular idea, the problem was getting assholish and unprofessional about it. Luckily for you the world is ending and I donāt have the time to worry about your attitude!
And Stratt unintentionally is providing everything Grace actually wants: someone who will unpromptedly tell him āI need you for your brilliant and unconventional ideasā¦ and also you do not get a choice in the matter.ā
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