Doctor Strange is an origin story about a man whose metahuman-like motor-skills and uncanny photographic memory enable him to excel as a neurosurgeon as well as a bonafide megalomaniac: Stephen Strange has a voracious appetite for accomplishing the impossible and gaining the esteem and material rewards that come with it. He is at the center of his rationalistic-materialistic perspective of the universe.
All of this drastically changes after Strange suffers a horrific car accident which permanently damages the nerves in his hands and consequently renders him unfit to ever perform surgery again. The crash sequence (along with several other scenes in the film) find that intense and compelling middle ground between the freeze-frame of the comic book aesthetic and cinematic movement. Albeit physically humbled, Strange is just as arrogant as ever. All he can say about the work the doctors did on his hands is, “I could have done better,” and he interprets the empathy from his only friend as pity, eventually driving her away.
Alone, broken, and desperate for healing, Strange journeys to Kathmandu looking for the “Ancient One” who had allegedly healed a paraplegic. However, his healing doesn’t happen as expediently or explicitly as he would like. When the superstitious topic of magic and seeing through the material world is brought up, Strange is ready to give up. Without warning the Ancient One sends Strange’s astral form out of his body and takes him through the multiple realities that his materialistic one excluded. Throughout this scene Strange visits realities with psychedelic colors and kaleidoscopic and out-right-bizarre images, which are an homage to Steve Ditko’s original visual aesthetics from the 1960s Doctor Strange comics. As you should expect, Strange learns to be a hero instead of a self-centered jerk.
Strange’s journey toward sacrificial heroism is truly holistic: along with learning to cope with his physical disabilities, he must rise above his crippling arrogance and fear, rebuild relational bridges that he had burnt, and learn to accept the ambivalent synergy of the physical and mystical aspects of reality in order to save it. Doctor Strange is a fun and visually captivating film supported by a creative director and a phenomenal cast. Filmgoers should find the film “strangely” refreshing; unlike the dour X-Men: Apocalypse and Batman V. Superman, Doctor Strange mixes suspenseful action with almost slap-stick comic humor that engages the viewer at different emotional levels.
It’s the materialism that Strange espouses at the beginning of the film that is subsequently and repeatedly critiqued throughout it. As the Stoic librarian, Wong, explains, “The Avengers protect the world from physical dangers. We safeguard it against more mystical threats.” If we interpret this as a regression into Jane Foster’s paradigm from Marvel’s Thor films—magic is simply science that humans have yet to understand—then we’ll miss the dynamic tension. Wong doesn’t necessarily bifurcate things again, but acknowledges reality’s multifaceted nature where the material and spiritual are more often intertwined. If that doesn’t make sense, that’s ok because “Not everything does; not everything has to,” as the Ancient counsels Strange. I hope Marvel continues to explore the complexities of life and resists disparaging the dynamism of human existence in future films, but even if they don’t, like all their other heroes, I will return to the theater, because Marvel’s films are consistently worth my time.
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