Issue #14: Gian's Reflections on Doctor Strange (2016)

When I was a kid, I never really liked Dr. Strange. His costume seemed to goofy to me, which is funny considering that I loved superhero costumes which, in the early days with their underwear on the outside, could have all been considered pretty goofy. But to Dr. Strange just didn’t look right. He first appeared in Strange Tales #110, and Stan Lee noted, he was meant to be “a different kind of super-hero”:
 
 

I definitely thought he was different and too “weird” for me to like as a kid. I think, too, that I didn’t care for the gray streaks in Dr. Strang’s hair. (Let’s just say I’m a lot more accepting of gray hair now than I was at age 6!) At any rate, all of this reticence toward Dr. Strange made me a bit skeptical when Marvel decided to introduce the master of the mystic arts to the MCU. But as usual, Marvel knew exactly what it was doing when it released Doctor Strange in 2016 from director Scott Derrickson and staring the fantastic Benedict Cumberbatch.
 
The film goes for lots of laugh as well as some cool special effects. The lightness of Doctor Strange felt needed after the anguish left in viewers watching Captain America and Iron Man battle almost to the death in the previous MCU installment, Captain America: Civil War.
 
What interests me, though, is Marvel’s attempt to weave some religious themes into this film. Prior to Doctor Strange, there has not been any exploration of religion or philosophy in the MCU except, perhaps, for Loki in Avengers telling people to bow down to him like a god, which, of course, one brave man refuses to do.
 
At the beginning of the film, Stephen Strange has it all. As a top-notch surgeon, he has wealth, a beautiful girl friend, and so much ego that his head he can barely enter a room. But after recklessly speeding and crashing his sports car, his nerves are injured too badly to ever perform surgery again. Strange spends his fortune chasing one experimental cure after another, but all of those prove to be dead ends. In the end, broke and having cruelly driven his lover away, he stumbles upon a man whose paralysis was cured by some sort of mysticism. Strange goes to Tibet in search of this dream of a cure.
 
But instead of a cure, Dr. Strange finds religion and magic or, put another way, he finds faith. At first, Strange can’t accept things beyond his understanding of the physical realm. Strange is a doctor, after all, a man of science. He even shouts at the Ancient One (played with cool reserve by Tilda Swinton), “There is no such thing as spirit! We are matter and nothing more!” The Ancient One responds by pushing Strange’s spirit right out of his body, offering him startling proof of the existence of magic.

In “Doctor Strange Is The Most Religious Superhero Movie Ever,” a post for the website Watching God, Paul Asay discusses how Doctor Strange breaks new ground for the MCU:
 

There’s an undeniable aspect of faith to it all, even beyond the obvious occult trappings in which these spells are used. Strange is forced to embrace spiritual paradoxes, to relinquish his idea of control, to set aside the very things that made him so great at his job. “Your intellect has taken you far in life,” the Ancient One says, “but it can take you no farther.” At another juncture, she tells Strange one of the secrets of faith, particularly Christian faith. “It’s not about you.

Stephen Strange thought he had everything: Money, prestige, a beautiful lover, intellect. He was on top of the world, and that made him arrogant, self-righteous, and sometimes cruel. But everything we have can be taken from us in an instant. Strange learns this all too hard lesson, and then he has to learn that when the trappings of the world desert us, we must rely on faith and love to get us through.

 

Strange does not know everything, as the Ancient One shows him. And, eventually, this leads Strange toward humility, understanding, and finally courage. While he gains great mystical power, he also has to come to trust that there are things greater than himself. He must trust in others, for it is not only about him.

 

The other day, in yet another argument with my 17-year-old son, I found myself saying, “I remember when I was seventeen and knew everything, too. How I miss those days.” When I was 17, I didn’t care for that gray hair at Dr. Strange’s temples, but little did I know that I would find myself in the Ancient One’s shoes soon enough.