Doctor Strange — Madness or Entertainment?

Even before Covid, Marvel Cinematic Universe was in the mind-control business. Now MCU admits it, with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. This prequel, sequel, origin, and midpoint story is like a series of tops, spinning off from both the Dr. Strange character (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), with cameo appearances from other MCU actors/franchise-holders. As in the current fad, they all split consciousness into different worlds, time periods, and good-vs.-evil identities. This schizophrenic storytelling is uniquely suited to Covid — the Simon Says era of government and media mandates where politics and science fiction can switch on a dime, the ultimate thrill ride.

Through the term “multiverse,” Hollywood justifies its endless means of marketing the same material, characters, and FX. This started with the cradle-to-grave fascination that adolescents develop from children’s fairy tales, to comic books, to TV shows, to graphic novels and then, finally, movies — but particularly movies that tie together all the previous forms of kid stuff.

Note the “multiverse” or psychic dimensions where proto-fascist Marvel figures Dr. Strange and Scarlet Witch face domestication through mundane relationships (such as Scarlet Witch’s housewife persona Wanda Maximoff, heroine of the streaming series Wandavision). Both superheroes are ambivalent about being ordinary. Flashbacks recall middlebrow Nineties drivel Pleasantville, which congratulated viewers on their familiarity with TV tropes. This film’s time-shifting parallel universes validate Millennial confusion about reality, existence, consciousness, and spiritual confidence, which now, post-Covid, is out of favor.

The film’s reference to “madness” says there’s nothing to hold on to in this or any other world. Bringing in director Sam Raimi, who based the first Spiderman movies on the innocuous fantasies of a different epoch, confirms that MCU has devolved from innocence. One trade paper praised the MCU as an “agnostic, nihilism-friendly new religion.” Raimi’s irreverent visions (Evil Dead–style creatures briefly appear) are mere CGI fodder. The sight of Dr. Strange’s face breaking into cubic fragments is pretty impressive; the rest is humorless, pseudo-Escher, imitating the upside-down imagery of Christopher Nolan’s Inception. That’s not an artistic advance, but it has turned naïve moviegoers into a dependable market who don’t expect revelation yet consent to Hollywood copycatism. It’s the endgame of cultural conformity: madness commercialized.

PHOTOS: Doctor Strange Premiere

MCU spectatorship discourages us from demanding that pop culture reflect our experience or teach us about our inner lives. Instead, a third character named America Chavez (played by Xochitl Gomez) represents a glorified superhero-victim. This shamelessly conceived America, who can shift “realities,” originated in a 2011 Marvel comic book as a lesbian Latina with two mothers, residue of Obama-era “change.” She now reflects Hollywood’s Biden-era equity. But since her political identity is essentially meaningless, she’s a drag on the plot. These psychically splintered characters represent the era’s deep-seated confusion — and bad acting. Olsen’s asinine Scarlet Witch is more emotionally expressive than Xochitl, and Cumberbatch’s Dr. Strange is another of his charmless androgynes. Not fun like Max von Sydow’s Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon, the wizardly wiles of this self-involved, goateed freak, attempting to control the world, could be a parody of the millennium’s wartime propaganda ministers. Strange’s incessant repositioning of perspective (courtesy of an anonymous FX team) lacks an auteur’s signature but simulates the relentless, unaccounted-for public manipulation we endure daily. It prompts a question for the midterms: Is Dr. Strange the man behind the curtain?

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is too jumbled and overanxious for coherent amusement. Hard to believe that Marvel is still churning out this garbage so long after Man of Steel rooted its characters to humane instinct throughout time. This film’s hyperbolic world-building, world destruction, and psychic bewilderment mimic the process of imagination but degrade the original purpose of comic-book fiction. When past love Christine (Rachel McAdams) confronts Strange’s egotism, Hollywood’s entire enterprise is exposed as mind control. It’s what Marx meant by “naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation,” designed for an audience that’s long been groomed to enjoy blatant commercialism.