(light upbeat music)
- What's up, guys?
Michael here in an undisclosed location
to talk about the movie that dared to ask,
"What if you met another version of yourself,
"and they were kinda a dick?"
Obviously, we're talking about
"Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness."
Despite a long history of trying and failing
to put the surgeon-turned-Wizard
on the big screen,
Dr. Strange has been a Marvel favorite
since Benedict Cumberbatch
brought him to life in 2016.
Since, he's climbed the ranks of the Avengers
and sorta saved the world.
And the new film did not disappoint.
It's packed with trippy visuals,
exciting wizard fights,
and genuinely moving emotional arcs.
But is something deeper going on
when Strange and newcomer America Chavez
traverse the multiverse?
Can Wanda's completely bonkers plan
to recreate her perfect family
actually teach us something fundamental
about the human experience?
Let's explore in this Wisecrack Quicktake,
The Philosophy of Dr. Strange.
And, you know, spoilers ahead.
The core of this multiversal madness
revolves around the competing supernatural forces
of Dr. Strange and Wanda,
who has fully embraced
her Scarlet Witch identity.
The two have opposite motivations.
Wanda wants to steal America's
multiverse-traveling powers,
thus killing her.
Strange wants to save
his new friend at all costs
and stop Wanda's violent, witchy rampage.
See, Wanda is haunted by dreams
of the children she created
back in Westview.
And because dreams are actually
the experiences of other "you's" in the multiverse,
which means a multiverse version of me
regularly pees his pants,
she's tormented by the fact
that every other Wanda
seems to have a picture-perfect life as a mom.
So she hatches a plan
to steal America's powers
to travel to a multiverse
where she has kids.
This also means she'd have
to kill another version of herself,
but she seems to have not
totally thought that part through.
What's more, having America's ability
to go to every iteration of the universe
means that if her kids get sick
or, say, have trouble getting
into a top-tier college,
she can travel around the multiverse
and find novel medicines
or a really great SAT tutor.
And again, kill a version of herself.
She tries to persuade Strange
to go along with her plan,
but he refuses
and rallies all of Kamar-Taj
to protect America.
Wanda, it seems,
can outpower just about any living being,
but she can't magic her way into motherhood.
And then there's Dr. Strange,
who after arguably saving the world,
still has to sit by
and watch the love of his life, Christine,
marry some other guy.
She even reminds him that,
"You always have to be the one holding the knife."
That is to say,
he is a total control freak.
The film opens with an alternate
Strange and America
running from a demon.
Having lost their lead,
Strange steals America's powers,
which he knows will kill her,
rather than yielding them
to a monstrous force.
He's down to take control of the situation,
even if it means doing a murder.
Though luckily the demon murks him
before he murks America.
And throughout the film,
Strange tries to control everything.
He desperately tries
to stop Wanda's antics,
acts as America's caretaker,
acquires the Book of Vishanti,
and so on.
Like Wanda, he even tries out
the dangerous new sport
of dreamwalking to control,
of all things,
his very own decaying corpse.
We've got zombies in the MCU, folks!
But after a magic-induced massacre,
Strange is faced with the frightening reality
that he might not be able
to control Wanda's fury,
or save America.
So here we have an interesting mirroring effect,
where our protagonist and antagonist
actually have the exact same problem.
And in case you missed it,
it's neatly summed up in the trailer
by Sorcerer Supreme Wong.
- You cannot control everything, Strange.
- In contrast, we have America,
who maintains that she cannot control
her power to travel the multiverse.
It only manifests when she's scared.
Unlike Strange and Wanda,
she's keenly aware that many things
are out of her control.
So, how can we make sense
of Strange and Wanda's
shared desire for total control?
Well, with the help of our favorite Danish
walking enthusiast, Soren Kierkegaard.
And, guys, I get it,
I talk about him all the time,
but I went into an unpayable
amount of grad school debt
to learn about him
so I need to milk it
for all it's worth.
In Kierkegaard's book "Repetition,"
he tells a comedic tale of a young man
who is trying to recreate, or repeat,
a nice trip he took to Berlin.
Because it made him so happy at the time,
he goes back and stays at the same place,
visits the same theater,
and hangs at the same coffee shop.
Still, the initial magic is gone,
and none of these experiences
are as meaningful
as they were the first time.
And this isn't too dissimilar
from Wanda's desire to recreate, or repeat,
the experience she had as a mother.
Though, in fairness,
Kierkegaard's character
wasn't trying to kill
a hip teen with superpowers.
One of the ways that Wanda attempts
to do this is to use dreamwalking
to literally occupy the body
of another Wanda in the multiverse,
one who is calmly enjoying
her suburban life
with her two boys.
But during this experience,
our Wanda seems oddly out of sync,
and unable to connect
with this other version of herself,
and for that matter,
with the children she seemingly loves so much.
Kierkegaard describes something
similar in "Repetition."
Eventually, after doing everything possible
to repeat his beloved trip,
the young man in Berlin realizes
that there really isn't such a thing
as literal repetition.
And in attempting to repeat the experience,
a contradiction arises.
The conflict between his ideal
for how the trip would feel
and what it actually feels
like in reality.
The attempt at repetition left him
with this feeling
of contradiction and/or impossibility.
And we see this when Scarlet Witch Wanda
literally comes face-to-face
with suburban mom Wanda and her kids.
Everything she's done has been motivated
by wanting to once again experience
the love she had for her boys.
But when she finally sees them again,
they are absolutely (beep) terrified of her.
In this moment,
she experiences a shattering disconnect
between the ideal of once again
being a mother
and the reality of these kids
thinking she's super scary.
And that's the comic
and, in this case,
tragic irony of repetition for Kierkegaard.
In trying to repeat experiences,
we ultimately confront
the absolute impossibility of repetition.
Put differently, in trying to control our future,
we realize that total control is impossible.
Kierkegaard wrote in his journals that,
"Life can only be understood backwards,
"but it must be lived forward,"
meaning that we should learn
from our past experiences
instead of trying to uncritically repeat them.
Ultimately, Wanda stops trying
to control the world around her,
and instead destroys the Darkhold,
so that nobody might ever
be tempted by its evils again.
Our guy Dr. Strange
has a similar realization in the film,
though he's not trying
to recreate anything, per se.
He still wants things to go his way.
This has been his move throughout
his appearances in the MCU,
he's kinda a cocky prick.
And he's not the only one.
Throughout the film, he encounters
other Stranges from across the multiverse
whose same hubristic desire for control
led to their downfall.
What eventually sets 616 Strange
apart is that he is able
to sacrifice this desire for control,
namely over whether his lived experience
matches up with his ideal vision for things.
It might also help that
616 Strange and 818 Christine
got flirty as hell.
He's eventually able
to cede control to America
when he realizes he can't defeat Wanda,
and for once, he needs to give
the proverbial knife to someone else.
Meanwhile, America has the opposite experience.
Initially, she feels like
she has no control over
her powers, her reality,
and even whether
she'll ever see her moms again.
By the end, she realizes that even
if she can't control
what's happening around her,
she can learn to control
herself and her powers.
This is pretty meaningful.
Existentialists believe that,
while we have no control over the conditions
in which we exist,
we do have responsibility for ourselves
and our own actions,
for better or worse.
This is why for Jean-Paul Sartre,
responsibility is a direct effect
of our existential freedom.
This tension, between control
and lack thereof,
between wanting to live in the ideal world
and accepting that we live
in the real, messy, complex world
is nothing new.
It's been essential to western philosophy
ever since some Greeks
in ancient Birkenstocks invented it.
Descartes thought that math,
with a side of God, made existence
into a nice rational structure,
where everything makes sense
and you know you exist because
you're thinking about existing.
This made reality something
that was understandable
with a level of mathematical certainty.
David Hume, on the other hand,
thought this was dumb
and all of our knowledge
is based on lived experience.
What we see is more important
than what we think.
Kant sort of mixed these two together
to argue that reality
does have a formal structure,
and while we can't see
the causes for everything,
we can know some limited stuff
about how the world works.
For example, we can know some
of the fundamental principles of things
like morality and truth
without seeing inside the mind of God.
But my debt-lord Kierkegaard,
on the other hand,
was interested in how all these attempts
at knowledge affect us
at the individual level
in our actual existence.
And as he saw it,
this fundamental tension
between the ideal world
and the real world,
or ideality and actuality,
can lead to despair.
Like the young man in Berlin,
or the Scarlet Witch
who wants to be a mom,
we all have experienced
a contradiction between
how we want our world to be
and how our world actually is.
And as Strange, Wanda and America learn,
Kierkegaard thinks the way out
of this despair is making decisions.
And these decisions always
involve an element of risk, or faith,
because there is no way of being certain
that your idea is going to be actualized.
Dr. Strange must decide
to give control to America
and not insist on holding the knife,
or the spooky book of evil spells.
Wanda needs to decide
that her plan is evil,
and that to start righting her wrongs,
she needs to destroy the Darkhold
and, seemingly, herself.
Meanwhile, America decides that
she's capable of controlling her power.
And this decision is accompanied
by the faith that
she'll be able to do so.
It should also be no surprise
that Kierkegaard famously emphasized
the importance of the "leap of faith."
The paradox of all of this
is that there is power
in giving up control,
and that the most heroic acts in this film
are precisely those decisions
to cede power,
for the sake of doing what's right.
We can't force our lives
to look like the past,
but we can decide to live
differently in the future.
The drive for repetition and control
can be a prison.
And the way out is deciding
to give up control
and have faith that the future
can still work out,
even if you can't be certain about it.
But what do you guys think?
Can "Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness"
teach us a thing or two
about accepting that we're not
in control of everything?
Or should we all search
for a secret book of evil magic
so we can make our crush like us?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
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As always, thanks for watching, later.
(light upbeat music)