I saw Marvel's Doctor Strange last weekend. With its focus on magic, astral projection, and alternate dimensions, I figured it would be visually impressive and might deviate from the usual, standardized Marvel movie look and feel. On that front I was pleased; despite its obvious visual redundancies with Batman Begins and Inception, I basically enjoyed Doctor Strange, especially visually. However, I found its Euro-American imperialism and white-male-centeredness to be so bald-faced as to be, at times, unfavorably distracting.
This is not new news -- well in advance of Doctor Strange's release, many commentators expressed concern over the whitewashing of Doctor Strange's the Ancient One, that is, casting a white woman to play a role established in the comics as Tibetan. Sadly, the film's Orientalism runs even deeper than Tilda Swinton's casting. As Charles Pulliam-Moore writes in his essential and insightful article about Doctor Strange the character,
While no reference is made to Strange’s race or ethnicity in his early stories, he’s consistently drawn with slanted eyes and dramatic, convex eyebrows . . . to argue that Strange was always white is to willfully ignore the visual language that comics use to tell their stories.Pulliam-Moore concludes that "There’s no reason that this character has to be white and if canon is really as important as hostile fanboys make it out to be, then Strange should have simply been portrayed by an Asian actor." That is hard to imagine in today's Hollywood, but it's a compelling idea and a missed opportunity to diversify (rather than further whitewash) the MCU.
The Hollywood Reporter's Graeme McMillan notes that "the Ancient One role really could've/probably should've gone to an Asian actor" and much as I love Swinton, I must agree. Making the Ancient One white is an act of racism, just like Christopher Nolan's revealing the "real" Ra's al Ghul to be white in Batman Begins. This shit really needs to stop, as do the disingenuous, economically motivated protests of innocence.
The other weird racial thing going on that Chiwetel Ejiofor's Mordo is yet another magical negro of the Morpheus variety here to assist and mentor his white Neo-figure to world fame. Interesting to note -- my girlfriend spotted this -- that the only other time Ejiofor and Strange star Benedict Cumberbatch appear onscreen together is as slave and master in 12 Years a Slave (2013). Yikes!
Further orientalizing Doctor Strange is its climactic third act battle, which takes place in Hong Kong, depicted, like Beijing in the Transformers 4 finale, in a mode I call "developing nation poverty porn." I knew we were in trouble as soon as one of the sorcerers training Strange revealed that the three magic portals in their Tibetan base lead to London, New York, and Hong Kong. "In these three cities lie the strongest concentrations of magical energy on Earth or whatever," explains Wong (Benedict Wong). I instantly noticed that these cities are the seat of the British Empire, the seat of the American Empire, and one of the greatest Asian colonies England ever possessed. Hubs of global commerce that speak more to the politics of the real world this minute than they do any narratively explicable layout of magical lay lines. Why do globally significant events only ever happen in the same four or five highly developed world cities in movies?
Of course, I know the real-world answer: money. Global box office. China and East Asia are huge market these days, so influential they can prevent some domestic "flops" from losing money, so by featuring Hong Kong in the climactic sequence and giving sorcerer Wong some of the movie's goddamn funniest lines, Disney (who owns and runs Marvel Studios) hopes to draw in that audience. But these are token gestures -- delightful though it is, Wong's speaking part is quite small, and Doctor Strange is a story about an American white man who learns magic from a Tibetan white woman and uses his newfound powers to defeat another white man.*
Doctor Strange also hedges its financial bets by going mainly where other popular movies have gone before. Its Tibetan mise-en-scene (especially the Kamar-Taj training facility) is identical to that seen in the first act of Batman Begins (2005), and the movie's overall look and visual effects bear striking similarities to Inception -- the sorcery in Strange is basically the same as the dreaming sequences in Inception.** Buildings and landscapes bend and warp, gravity and orientation flips around constantly, character walk (and run, and chase, and fight) on walls and ceilings, and then they use special rings to "wake up" and transport back to their home dimension (or elsewhere). I am not the only critic to notice Doctor Strange's highly derivative visuals.
That said, I appreciate that Doctor Strange keeps the number of principal characters low so we are able to (at least minimally) care about each the participants. Mads Mikkelsen's Kaecilius is a bit boilerplate, and his followers just anonymous goons without personalities, but the main "good guys" are fairly distinct and generally likeable. And it is fun to see effects like these and characters like these in a Marvel film, making jokes and having a good time (not usually Nolan's strong suit).
Sadly, Rachel McAdams' Christine is hardly worth mentioning because she is given so little to do in the movie. As Stephen Strange's medical colleague and ambiguously not-quite-love interest, Christine's main job is to stand around gawking amazedly once the titular doctor starts manifesting his magical powers. She performs one crucial surgery, but even then she is being directed by Strange himself. Like Natalie Portman in Thor, she is essentially a "babe scientist" who cannot influence events in the movie since
The extermination of the threat depends not upon scientific knowledge, which the babe scientist has in spades, but rather on brute physical force -- quick reflexes, and combat skills, characteristics only male protagonists possess.†McAdams' Christine represents a variation on this formula since her medical prowess is found wanting next to Stephen Strange's magical powers rather than his raw brawn -- though magic in this universe seems to be used mainly for manipulating physical reality and for sorcerers to blast and stab each other with. That is, it could aptly be called "brute magical force" and substituted into the above quotation. Thus, Christine is yet another example of a female sidekick character who starts out seeming narratively significant but who is shoved into the background by the film's last act.
Christine sez: "Don't mind me, I'm just here to make you look more awesome."
There are no other significant female characters in Doctor Strange besides the gender-ambiguous Ancient One played by Tilda Swinton.
David Palmer's well-written Doctor Strange review convincingly exposes several plot and character-development problems that ruin the film for him. I didn't mind these problems so much because I wasn't that deeply invested in the film or its characters to begin with. My expectations for Marvel Studios films aren't high these days so this was a low-stakes game for me and I got my entertainment dollar's worth out of Doctor Strange.
Palmer writes near the end of the review that his distaste for Doctor Strange aligns with his preference for what he terms Marvel's more "ambitious" films, by which he means Captain America: Winter Soldier and Age of Ultron. Curious though I am about James Spader as the (voice of the) villain, I am not interested in the superhero movie-as-baroque clusterfuck that Ultron is rumored to be.
So I guess I don't really like the "ambitious" Marvel movies, but then again I don't see Winter Soldier as being very ambitious, just well-scripted and well-made. It's like the first Bourne movie: it strikes a very good downbeat tone and introduces a lived-in, contemporary-feeling world in which "the Captain's very goodness has given him the edge of an antihero," as Owen Gleiberman puts it. I agree with Gleiberman's and Peter Debruge's comments on their Variety ranking of the first fourteen Marvel Cinematic Universe movies (including Doctor Strange), for while I haven't seen enough MCU films to weigh in on their whole list, I surely agree with their top five picks: Avengers, Iron Man, Captain America: Winter Soldier, Doctor Strange, and Guardians of the Galaxy.
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* Whiteys still get all the plum roles in Hollywood because the domestic U.S. market is still quite crucial, especially in creating an initial perception of (the economic viability of) the film. White stars and actors also benefit (relative to, say, Asian ones) from the global economic and cultural dominance of Hollywood since the early twentieth century -- due to Hollywood's economic leverage, and through sheer momentum, whiteness continues to sell well worldwide.
** Of course, Inception itself borrows most of its visual ideas from the superior anime film Paprika (2006), which I highly recommend.
† Holly Hassel, "The 'Babe Scientist' Phenomenon" in Chick Flicks (Ed. Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, Routledge 2008) p. 196.
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