Thoughts on Doctor Strange

I just got back from seeing Doctor Strange. And as I said on Twitter, while it might not be the best Marvel movie ever, it may have come closest to feeling like the original comic come to life, overflowing with the trippy visuals, corny but evocative mysticism, and just a dash of problematic orientalism that pretty much characterized Steve Ditko’s original run in Strange Tales.

For a more thorough and spoilery discussion, see below the cut:

Character:

Despite the fact that having Benedict Cumberbatch do his best Greg House impression is a bit of a waste (there’s absolutely no reason why he couldn’t speak with a British accent. Hell if it was up to me, I would have told Cumberbatch to do the whole thing as a Vincent Price impression), I thought Benedict Cumberbatch was quite good as Doctor Strange. After doing Sherlock, the insensitive asshole genius bit is pretty much second nature, so it would be easy for him to coast through the role.

What I liked about his performance is that he didn’t stick to doing that bit: he gets pretty damn goofy throughout a lot of the movie, damn near doing Charlie Chaplin in moments where he’s literally running in place because magic is making the floor stretch into infinity under his feet or where the magic cloak (going to talk more about this in a bit) is tugging him around. And that goofiness nicely leavens what otherwise could be a rather leadenly pompous character. Likewise, while Strange is often pompous, you get the sense that he knows he’s being pompous and is playing with people from behind the mask. And while I actually would have liked a bit more Vincent Price nastiness under the surface (the original Doctor Strange was a bit like the Doctor in that he’s a technical pacifist who somehow doesn’t mind Worse Than Death punishments for his enemies or just people who piss him off).

Other characters:

Mads Mikkleson/Kaecilius

is ALMOST as one-note a villain as you’ve come to expect with Marvel movies, with one rather interesting exception. There’s a moment in the film where Strange has almost accidentally captured him and Kaecilius does something rather unusual for a Marvel villain: he actually tries to persuade Doctor Strange that Kaecilius is the hero, that he’s literally trying to save the world, and arguably the universe, by stopping entropy itself through shifting the world into a dimension where it doesn’t exist. And while I was a bit surprised they didn’t fully draw the connection between his desire to abolish death by the fact that Kaecilius lost his entire family violently, it’s a rare Marvel villain who actually has a point.

Let’s bite the bullet. Tilda Swinton does a great job playing the Ancient One – balancing wisdom with a secret hypocrisy – but so could any number of actresses who weren’t white. Yes, the Ancient One is an orientalist trope. But the way to fix it is to write the character to be a real character that subverts and plays with those tropes. And while some people have said that this is all because Marvel wants the film to play in China and thus can’t say the word Tibet, the movie itself refutes that by just moving the Ancient One’s sanctum across the border over into Nepal. No reason the Ancient One couldn’t have been Nepalese. And honestly, I think the filmmakers realized that they’d kind of fucked themselves, because rather than having the Ancient One be saved in the nick of time, they kill her off two-thirds through the movie so they won’t have that problem in the future.

To be scrupulously fair, however, I do think the movie actually significantly improved on this very problem with two of the other secondary characters, which is what makes their decision not to do it with the Ancient One all the more strange. Benedict Wong, playing Wong, isn’t Doctor Strange’s Chinese manservant – instead, he’s the chief librarian of the Ancient One’s collection of magics, and ends the film as the master of the Sanctum of Hong Kong, making him very much Stephen Strange’s equal. And he’s allowed to be deadpan funny as well as a wise mystic, which makes him feel like more of a well-rounded character. Rachel McAdams as Doctor Christine Palmer isn’t given enough screentime, but I really like the decision to have her be Doctor Strange’s ex and stay that way through the movie, a friend not a love interest.

But above all, the person who arguably turns in the best performance of the movie is Chiwetel Ejiofor as Baron Mordo. Now, Baron Mordo is a villain that only an Objectivist like Steve Ditko could have thought up: he’s literally someone who chooses to become capital-E evil, turning on the Ancient One because he wants to be the most powerful, that’s it. But there’s no reason for him to seek power – he doesn’t have any deep psychological need for power based on his life experiences, he’s not trying to do anything with the power (like say, Doctor Doom trying to win back his mother’s soul from the Devil), he just wants it in the same way that a Heel wants the WWE Championship belt.

But Ejiofor’s Mordo is something entirely different. His Mordo is a hero for 9/10ths of the movie, a devoted lieutenant of the Ancient One, the one who brings Doctor Strange into the Sanctum, who teaches Doctor Strange to fight back against evil, and who gives his all in the service of the ideals of the order he’s dedicated his life to. The problem is that he’s so inflexibly devoted to those ideals – imagine Javert as the Instructor for Dark Arts – that when he finds out that the Ancient One has been bending the rules by tapping into magics she herself has forbidden, because magic is all about bending the rules for a higher purpose, he rejects the order, because he argues that there are always consequences. And by the very very end of the movie, he’s decided that the way to ensure that there are consequences are for him to wipe out all the sorcerors in existence. And that kind of villain is so good that I really don’t care that Kaecilius is mostly rather dull, because Mordo has the potential to join Loki in the otherwise-empty (mostly because good villains have a habit of dying in Marvel movies) pantheon of actually interesting villains.

EDIT:

Oh, right, the cloak…forgot I was going to talk about the cloak. It’s one of the best bits of the movie – think the carpet from Aladdin by way of tinyGroot in Guardians. It’s playful, protective, useful, and it both looks really damn cool but also is willing to play with the goody side of it. There’s a little moment where Doctor Strange pops the collar and the cloak almost materally wipes something off his cheek and it got the biggest laugh of the whole movie. So here’s my note for Doctor Strange 2: like 10-20% more cloak. Not so much that the joke gets tired, but more.

Story:

I’ve heard some people complain that the story in Doctor Strange is a bit rushed, that it rushes through too much of the Hero’s Journey too quickly so that it can get to the big fight at the end. I find that a bit odd – right now, the movie is a fleet-footed hour and fifty-five, if you tried to make it longer, it would start to bog down, and the potential holes (why did Kaecilius wait around until Doctor Strange was advanced enough in his training to fight back to cast the ritual to summon Dormammu?) would get bigger.

What I liked about the story’s speed is that it felt like a comic book, where you only have 16 pages to tell a beginning, middle, and end. So yes, brush through the early stages of the Hero’s Journey because we’ve seen it all before and because they’re the most boring parts of it – again, one of the best parts of Captain America: Civil War was that they did both Black Panther’s and Spiderman’s origin in two-three scenes apiece.

And specifically, it felt like a Doctor Strange comic. See, early Ditko Doctor Strange stories always went the same way: Doctor Strange is confronted with some new magical threat that would put him in an impossible position and figures out some trick to overcome that threat. They really weren’t action comics or character studies but more like drawing-room mysteries where the fun is in seeing how Poirot or Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple solves the puzzle. So when the big setpiece ends with Doctor Strange first using a forbidden ritual to turn back time and undo the destruction of Hong Kong and then realizing that if he brings this spell into the Dark Dimension of Dormammu where there is no time, he can drive Dormammu nuts by sticking him in a time loop where Dormammu kills Doctor Strange over and over and over until Dormammu goes nuts and promises to leave our dimension alone if Strange freeze him, that is a uniquely Doctor Strange plot that Ditko would have written.

Indeed, it even has Doctor Strange doing something a bit morally dark, by banishing Kaecilius to the Dark Dimension he’d been trying to pull the entire Earth into, where Dormammu promptly turns him into one of his Mindless Ones.

Visuals:

Yes, the visuals are every bit as amazing as you’ve heard, although honestly I think people have undersold them somewhat by saying that the director swallowed Inception whole. Yes, the movie does the whole bending city-scapes thing, and the changing gravity thing, but it does so so much more (I would argue it actually does that trick with a bit more panache than Nolan did). There are whole chunks of this movie that are literally Steve Ditko’s psychedelic panels come to life:

It is so visually distinct from every other Marvel movie ever made that anyone after this who says that all Marvel movies look the same is a damn liar.

And while I don’t know whether or not the movie looks any better in 3D, I will be very curious to see if audience responses change after Prop 64 passes in California…

What’s the appeal of Kraven? As a kid I loved his episodes in the 90’s cartoon but I’ve seen very little of him in comics of late.

First of all, he’s got an absolutely ridiculous costume that is a fashion nightmare. Cheetah-print pants, zebra-stripe belt and cuffs, and a lion’s head vest with no shirt, plus the giant 70s stache and soul-patch. You couldn’t forget that look if you tried. So he passes the first test of a great villain: he’s instantly memorable.

Second, he’s got an amazing concept – a big game hunter who insists on killing hand-to-hand because anything else would be insufficiently manly, and who runs out of dangerous animals to kill with his bare hands so decides to hunt…Spider-Man. He doesn’t have some stupid grudge against Spider-Man because of something in their past, he’s not a career criminal or mobster – he just wants to prove he’s stronger than Spider-Man. There’s a purity and simplicity (and to be honest, irrationality – I mean, why Spider-Man and not the Hulk?) there that’s refreshing and novel.

Third, Kraven shot Spider-Man with a tranq dart, buried him alive, put on Spider-Man’s costume, and then went out to prove that he could out-Spider-Man Spider-Man…and actually succeeded, saving Mary Jane Watson’s life and single-handedly defeating Vermin (something Spider-Man hadn’t accomplished). When Spider-Man escaped from the grave, Kraven refused to fight him, having proven his point, and promptly confessed and committed suicide.

What I love about that is that Kraven’s ultimate villainous scheme is that he pulls off a permanent victory over Spider-Man that got into his head and affected him profoundly – you don’t get over being buried alive lightly – in a brilliantly orthagonal way. He doesn’t kill Spider-Man or one of his loved ones (looking at you, Green Goblin), he doesn’t clone Spider-Man or try to merge with Spider-Man or any of that nonesense. He beats Spider-Man thoroughly by out-doing him and then goes out on top so that Spider-Man doesn’t even get the chance for a come-back.

So there you have it, the basics of a quality villain: good look, good concept, memorable scheme/victory.

Anon Asks: Spiderman

Following your response to the Iron Man question, do you have any thoughts on Peter Parker you could elaborate on?

Before you read this, go watch anything MovieBob has ever done on Spiderman, because that dude gets Spiderman.

He’s the ur-nerd power fantasy, that a pure accident could come along and transform you, the weak and socially awkward nebbish, give you super-strength, toughness, agility, and the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound (webslinging basically being how people who grew up with skyscrapers all around them think about flying). Peter Parker isn’t born on Krypton and he’s not a billionaire playboy with a tragic past, he’s a nerdy kid from Queens who went to a science exhibit and became magic. Without Peter Parker and all the characters who followed him, you don’t get Harry Potter.

What saves him from becoming the Gamergate/Rapid Puppies/etc. toxic nerd is Uncle Ben and “with great power comes great responsibility.” It’s pretty remarkable that, out of Steve Ditko’s objectivist anti-populism, Marvel somehow ended up with a working class hero with a conscience. Spiderman rejects the path of personal fame and fortune in favor of selflessly protecting the people of New York because it’s the right thing to do. And despite J Jonah Jameson libelling him every damn day, the people of New York know he’s on their side:

Another thing that sets Spiderman apart from a lot of superheroes is that, even though he’s super-strong, he doesn’t look it. Spiderman doesn’t have the Charles Atlas body of so many superheroes – he’s scrawny, and though he’s pretty lanky, he’s still on the small side and he looks even smaller when you put him up against supervillains who are giant mountains of muscle. By his very design, Spiderman is an underdog:

Partly that’s because the nerd power-fantasy doesn’t work if the secret identity falls apart because Peter Parker suddenly looks like a linebacker, but mostly because Spiderman’s strength comes from within. At his best, he is the David against the Goliath, the little guy who stands up against the big guy and refuses to give up, ever.

Does Professor X actually do all that much for mutants? In the movies at least he seems like a terrible activist

I’ve discussed this in some depth over at Graphic Policy. A lot of this stems back from the way that the mutant metaphor was originally developed – early on, there’s just not that much exploration of anti-mutant prejudice that mutants need protecting from, so the emphasis in on this weird strategy of improving human-mutant relations by fighting evil mutants. (since the original idea was that mutancy was just an easy way to introduce a bunch of heroes and villains without having to think up individual origin stories)

His biggest pro-mutant moment in the early comics is the X-Men taking down the sentinels. However, even then, you see Professor X engaging in a narrow form of activism – his first instinct when Bolivar Trask whips up an anti-mutant witch hunt is to engage him in an academic debate, trying to use his credentials as an expert to influence public opinion. It doesn’t go very well, even before Trask sends in the genocidal robots.

And when I have time to write my essays on how Claremont approached the mutant metaphor, you’ll see that this is kind of his main mode of political activism. He’ll testify against Senator Kelly’s Mutant Registration Act, he’ll engage in TV debates with Reverend Stryker, he’ll organize Magneto’s legal defense at the International Court of Justice, etc. And he’ll have his school, where he’ll educate several generations of mutants (OGs, Giant-Sized, New Mutants).

But, in no small part because these are still superhero comics where the main event is introducing problems that can be solved with punching, we never see Xavier engaging in movement-building: we don’t see mutant rights groups being formed at a local, state, or national level, we don’t see a Mutant Equality Bill being proposed to counter the Registration Act, we don’t see Xavier leading protests or direct actions, etc.

Would Steve Rogers ever have been a fan of Father Coughlin?

I don’t know if he would have been a fan, per se. But as an Irish Catholic with leftish political leanings, he certainly would have been familiar with the Little Flower’s radio broadcasts.

But I think Rogers would have turned against Coughlin pretty early on – Coughlin started attacking FDR’s New Deal in 1934, by 1936 Coughlin’s anti-communism led him to support Franco in Spain, and between ‘36-38, Coughlin went all-in on his anti-semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion/Jewish Bankers are Bolsheviks theory.

Given Rogers’ strong anti-fascist tendencies, I think he would have broken with Coughlin in ‘36 if not before.

Okay, they’re lying right? When they say that Nazi Steve Rogers isn’t mind-controlled or a clone or whatever. Because if that’s actually Steve acting on his free will it’s a hundred times worse than One More Day. Who thought this up?

“Not a clone, not an imposter, not mind control, not someone else” does not include “no time travel shenanigans involving a cosmic cube/Kang/Doom’s time machine/Mephisto’s powers”, so I’m willing to bet that the same bright ideas that brought us “One More Day” are responsible for this new twist. Oh well, in a few months this will be re-retconned anyway.

Look, there are a couple of possibilities here:

Nick Spencer is lying because the company line is following some JJ Abrams-style mystery box plan to gin up controversy and thus sales. This isn’t a good way to treat your customers. You get more money in the short run, but you’ll also lose some fans in the short run, and you run the risk of damaging a very valuable brand.
It’s time travel or cosmic cube or whatever. As I said, that’s still bad writing. It’s not the kind of twist that adds rather than detracts from the character, it doesn’t suit the character, and it’s going to lead to clumsier writing to fix it.

Whichever one is the case, this run is going to be remembered as “the one where Cap’s a Nazi,” and that’s terrible.

I’ve heard complains that Captain America never undergoes character development. He starts the films believing in some things, and at the end of them he still believes the same. This seems to be specially true when you compare him to, say, Iron Man, who changes a lot between the start and the end of the movies he appears in.

I don’t think staying true to yourself is the same thing as not undergoing character development. And I don’t necessarily agree with either characterization.

In CA: First Avenger, Steve Rogers goes from a skinny kid on Brooklyn who wants more than anything to do his bit for a cause he believes in, to America’s bond drive mascot, to actually becoming a real leader rather just a figurehead, and then suddenly loses everyone he’s ever loved and becomes a Man Out of Time.

In CA: Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers starts the film as a company man, obeying orders because that’s what he’s used to, and ends up as a rebel bringing down the national security state. He also starts out the film as a Man Out of Time who doesn’t know how to adapt to civilian life or the present and ends the film as someone who’s made important friends – Nat and Sam – and has found a purpose in life (finding Bucky).

In CA: Civil War, Steve Rogers starts the film as an Avenger contentedly leading his team, and then has to choose between keeping his team together and doing what’s right, and then choosing between Tony and Bucky. By the end of the film, he’s lost Peggy Carter, he’s essentially resigned as Captain America by leaving the shield with Tony, his friendship with Tony is permanently damaged, Bucky has lost a limb and becomes a Popsicle, and he’s a wanted fugitive. And he’s now in a nascent relationship with Sharon Carter.

By contrast, I think Tony’s got some real issues with making permanent changes in his life – he built a bunch of weapons and then realized that was wrong, so he built some new ones and then realized that was wrong when his tech was turned against him, first by Obadiah Stane and then by Ivan Vanko. Then he built a bunch more and realized that was unhealthy and blew them all up in Iron Man 3. Then he went back on his promise and built a bunch more and built Ultron. He comes right out and says it in Civil War – he didn’t stop because he doesn’t want to stop.

(via A People’s History of the Marvel Universe, Week 11: The Mutant Metaphor (Part III))

Have you read “Two Americas”, by Ed Brubaker (Captain America #602-605)? If so, which were your thoughts?

I love me some Ed Brubaker Cap. Hell, I love anything Brubaker writes.

To give some background here, “Two Americas” was heavily influenced by a storyline in Captain America #153-156 (note, also a 4-issue run), where writer Steve Englehart retconned the “commie-smasher” Captain America from the 1950s as an impostor named William Burnside who had rediscovered the Super-Soldier Serum and undergone plastic surgery to turn himself into a dead-ringer for Steve Rogers. Burnside, along with a replacement Bucky, turned out to be mentally unstable – his anti-communism turned into full-blown paranoia, where he was convinced that everyone in the country was a secret commie. Also didn’t help that both he and Bucky turned out to be massive racists. The story was an interesting meta-reflection on comics continuity and changing politics between the 1950s and the 1970s.

So how did Brubaker riff off of Englehart? Well, basically he updates Burnside by dropping him into modern American politics and showing how much Burnside (an actual crazy person, remember) is simpatico with the current hard right in America. He’s recruiting from among Tea Party activists (yes, Marvel tried to say that “Tea Bag the Libs Before They Tea Bag You!” was a mistake, but A. it’s not like those sentiments weren’t around in 2010, and B. “No Government in my Medicare” is also on the signs and that sign was out there in 2010), into a Bundie-type militia movement aimed at overthrowing the government and bringing back “real America.” Burnside says quite clearly “there are a lot of other militia groups just like them living off the grid out there in the real America, just waiting for a leader to rally around…This country’s at war, and most of you don’t even know it…I’m talking about right here in America.” And so Bucky Barnes and Sam Wilson have to stop him from blowing up Hoover Dam as his “shot heard round the world.”

The storyline was a tad controversial (I say only a tad, because really it only pissed off Tea Party folks who didn’t like getting called racists, even though racial attitudes are the best predictor of Tea Party support) at the time, but honestly it’s pretty damn accurate (if somewhat exaggerated for superhero comics purposes). If anything, I think Brubaker was a bit too generous in his argument that Burnside was driven by the decline of America’s industrial heartland since the 1950s, and by keeping the discussion of racism w/r/t Sam Wilson to a minimum. The original Burnside was both a paranoid anti-communist and a virulent racist, and we shouldn’t shy away from it.

I’ve really enjoyed your analysis of the Marvel universe. You’ve forced ne to reconsider my opinion of Captain America, who I previously had little interest in. Could you recommend any particular storylines revolving around him? Thank you! (Fingers crossed that you’ll do something with Spider-Man someday!)

I could definitely recommend some particular storylines!

The Sleeper Awakens (Tales of Suspense #72-74, Cap #101, #148) – Captain America fights a bunch of the Red Skull’s giant Kirby robots. They are awesome Kirby robots.

The Cosmic Cube (Cap #115-119) – the Red Skull gains the powers of God, Cap fights him and wins, thanks to Cap’s determination and the power of love.

MODOK! (Tales of Suspense #94, Cap #119, 124, 132, 133) – Kirby’s giant Olmec baby head assassin is hilarious and surprisingly socially conscious, if still evil.

Cap vs. Nixon (Cap #166-176) – Captain America is targeted by the Committee to Re-Elect the President, foils the Secret Empire’s attempt to overthrow the U.S government, unmasks Nixon as the head of the Secret Empire, Nixon commits suicide rather than be arrested. Cap resigns and goes in search of America.

Madbomb! (Cap #193-200) – Captain America and the Falcon team up to save America from a bomb that will turn all of America into mad rioters, a conspiracy to restore monarchy to America, an underground murderball league, Captain America travels through time, and Arnim Zola tries to transplant Hitler’s brain into Captain America. One of the best Kirby runs ever, therefore one of the best comics runs ever.