Thoughts on Doctor Strange 1: A Not-So-Secret Identity

Dr Strange:          You said that losing my hands didn’t have to be the end.

Christine:             Yep. Because there are other ways to save lives.

Doctor Strange (2016)

 

Doctor Strange, of course, unlike many Marvel heroes, has no secret identity. One probably feels less need for one when one has a name like Doctor Strange.

So last weekend, I finally got round to seeing the latest addition to the ever-ballooning Marvel Cinematic Universe, Doctor Strange (just in case you hadn’t already twigged that that’s what this post was about).¹ Honestly, when the elaborate new Marvel Studios sequence initially splashed itself across the screen, all I could think about was how dully disappointing it was that the film I was about to view was something other than Spider-man: Homecoming,² but that feeling was quickly dispelled by my interest in the story, and I started thinking about a few other things – like how utterly odd Benedict Cumberbatch sounds with an American accent, and how good computerised special effects have got, and how Marvel might be diversifying its secondary cast a bit, but has yet to release a film whose protagonist isn’t a white, American man.³ Hmm. In any case, the story and script also lent itself extraordinarily well to the kinds of spiritual analogies I like to explore on this blog, so well, in fact, that the concepts for five separate posts presented themselves even while I sat in the cinema. Seriously, these analogies are really quite excessively obvious: I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re all over the Internet already, particularly since I was so late to the party in terms of actually seeing the film. Nevertheless, I’m afraid, O Unfortunate Reader, that I have a desire to write them down properly, and so they’re what I’m going to be subjecting you to for the next five weeks. Terribly sorry. Couldn’t resist.

We’ll follow the plotline from start to finish. There will be many, many spoilers. Let’s go.

So when we first meet our hero, Dr Stephen Strange (because a good half of the population of the Marvel universe seems to have an alliterative forename and surname⁴), he is having a simply lovely time being a top neurosurgeon, and when I say top, I mean top. The guy has never lost a single patient; he’s constantly being invited to give speeches at posh events; he even has an entire display cabinet in his stupendously classy apartment devoted to all the prestigious awards he’s won for being so darn good at his job. Then he decides, on the way to speak at one of those posh events I mentioned, that it would be a sensible idea to use his smartphone while driving at high speed,⁵ and the resultant crash leaves his hands – his oh-so-special, superiorly-steady, trained-to-perfection, neurosurgeon’s hands – in a very sorry state indeed. Momentous nerve damage has been dealt with by the implantation of numerous metal pins; the precious hands are left feeble and clumsy and beset by uncontrollable shaking. Stephen is beyond distraught; he is destroyed. His job was what made him who he was; excelling at it was the purpose that consumed his whole life, the sole source of his sense of his own value. And he will never be able to excel at it again.

His colleague and ex-girlfriend Christine is eager to reassure him that life can go on, that there are other ways to save lives, other things that can give life meaning. “Like you?” he spits poisonously when she raises this last suggestion, clearly not thinking too highly of that option. Stephen tries treatment after treatment, not caring how expensive or experimental they are, because he simply refuses to entertain the possibility of giving up, of accepting that his hands will never be restored to their former glory. He ends up spending every penny he has left on travelling to Kathmandu and trekking about trying to track down a place of healing that a former paralytic tipped him off about – and even when he finds it and stuff gets a little more multiversey and fantastical, regaining the use of his hands remains his overwhelming aspiration for the majority of the film.

Stephen’s situation may have played out in particularly dramatic fashion, but his ultimate problem was one common to the whole of fallen humanity: he was grounding his identity in something finite, fragile, and fallible. In his case, it was how good he was at his job. And in actual fact, even before the fateful car crash, hints that this wasn’t exactly the solidest ground he could stand on were bleeding through the apparent perfection of his shinily prestigious life. For instance, someone suggests a patient that might interest him, and he scoffs at the offer on the grounds that it might ruin his flawless record. He says it with arrogance, and yet there lies beneath that an awareness that he has to be careful about what he agrees to take on if he is to maintain the shiny, prestigious perfection he so enjoys.⁶ He essentially decides whom to help based on what will enhance his professional reputation – because that’s where his identity is.

When I ground my identity in something, every decision I make is consequently, subtly or less subtly, geared towards maintaining that something, whatever else I have to compromise to make that happen, because if that something falls apart, so will my whole self, insofar as I understand myself to exist. The trouble is, all earthly things are hopelessly bound to fall apart sooner or later – so whichever one of them I choose as the basis for my identity, it is going to require some very concerted maintenance, and even then there’s nothing to stop it collapsing at a moment’s notice should there occur the merest alteration of circumstance.

The alternative, of course, is to ground my identity in something that isn’t earthly, that isn’t finite or fragile or fallible. Now, where could I possibly find such a thing?⁷

“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” – Hebrews 13:8

“And it is God who established us with you in Christ, and has anointed us.” – 2 Corinthians 1:21

If, by the grace of God, I am established in Christ, if he is where I am rooting my identity, then I am rooting it in something that is the same yesterday, today, and forever, something that will not, that cannot ever change. I know exactly who I am, and there is no threat, not even the remotest possibility that that can be taken away from me. Suddenly I’m free from the need to endlessly prop up some earthly thing in order to preserve the identity I have built for myself. Suddenly it doesn’t matter what circumstances I find myself in on this earth, because who I am is anchored in something that is resolutely unchanging in any and every circumstance.

If Stephen Strange had known this, it wouldn’t have destroyed him to lose the use of his hands. Granted, he would have been upset, as would anyone, but he would have understood that his excellence in his field – like all finite, fragile, fallible things – was not the keystone of who he was. He would consequently never have gone to Kathmandu, and it would probably have been a far less entertaining film. Pros and cons, eh?

Footnotes

¹ It was well good. I highly recommend it. Trailer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSzx-zryEgM

² I am so excited for this film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wNgphPi5VM.

³ There are a couple in the pipeline, but they won’t be released for a while: according to Den of Geek, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wNgphPi5VM, Black Panther is coming in February 2018 and Captain Marvel in March 2019.

⁴ Raj from The Big Bang Theory has a few examples to offer. Fast-forward this video to 1:52: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXDdv-fehmk.

⁵ Did anyone else notice the little disclaimer at the end of the credits warning against the dangers of driving while distracted? And if you didn’t stay until the end of the credits, you clearly aren’t familiar with the way Marvel films work, you poor soul. Let OnlyLeigh at HISHE give you the lowdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvjMJEqkDqA.

⁶ Arrogance is necessarily insecure; I had a muse about that in ‘Please Don’t Feed the Ego’, under ‘2015’ then ‘September’ in the box on the right. Dear oh dear, I suppose I’m only going to end up pretentiously referencing myself more and more often as I write more and more posts.

⁷ I decided to put the footnote with the links to the whole-chapter contexts of the verses I pulled out there because putting it straight after the references might have caused some numerical confusion; I understand that superscript is an alternative way of indicating verse numbers. So here’s the Hebrews, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews+13&version=ESVUK, and the 2 Corinthians, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Corinthians+1&version=ESVUK.