“Humanity
longs for the eternal.”
Doctor Strange (2016)
Things
bad guys are typically after: number one, power; number two, revenge; or number
three, immortality.
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| The sand only ever runs down... |
Bad
guys are obsessed with living forever. They’re always chasing after mystical
relics or dabbling in forbidden branches of magic or doing dodgy deals with
otherworldly powers in order that they might do so. As soon as anyone in
fiction expresses a desire to live forever, I the reader or viewer immediately
have my guard up: craving immortality is a key symptom of villainhood. The type
is manifest in Voldemort and in Mother Gothel from Tangled and in the
creepy old people from the Declaration trilogy1 and in Blackbeard
from Pan and in Queen Ravenna from Snow White and the Huntsman and
in Lord Cob from Studio Ghibli’s Tales from Earthsea and in a whole
Pandorica-party of Doctor Who villains (John Lumic, Richard Lazarus, the
Family of Blood)2 – and Kaecilius,3 the major antagonist
of Doctor Strange, is another shining example.
The
scheme for obtaining immortality that Kaecilius has devised consists of allowing
a monstrous supernatural entity called Dormammu, who exists outside time in a
chunk of multiverse known as the Dark Dimension, to absorb the world into his
timeless self, hence granting all humanity a perpetual existence unhindered by
the onward march of days and years towards inevitable death. Considering that
Dormammu is an amoral being of limitless power and with an appetite for
destruction that can never be satisfied, inviting him (or ‘it’?) to a let’s-destroy-the-world
party isn’t exactly the best plan ever, and so our hero Doctor Stephen Strange,
by now reasonably well practised in drawing on the power of the multiverse to
bend reality, teleport, and hit people really hard, sets out to stop him from
fulfilling it. Amidst the ensuing epic and amusing fight scenes, Kaecilius at
one point, in good old-fashioned villain style, embarks upon a monologue about
his motivations and plan with a view to persuading Stephen to join his side:
You
are a doctor. A scientist. You understand the laws of nature. All things age.
All things die. In the end, our sun burns out, our universe grows cold and
perishes. But the Dark Dimension, it’s a place beyond time … This world doesn’t
have to die, Doctor. This world can take its rightful place among so many
others, as part of the One. The great and beautiful One. And we can all live
forever … Life. Eternal life. People think in terms of good and evil, but
really, time is the true enemy of us all. Time kills everything. [The people I
killed were] tiny, momentary specks within an indifferent universe … you see
what we’re doing? The world is not what it ought to be. Humanity longs for
the eternal, for a world beyond time, because time is what enslaves us.
Time is an insult. Death is an insult. Doctor, we don’t seek to rule this
world. We seek to save it.4
All
right, I know he’s the bad guy and all, but isn’t there something in what
Kaecilius is saying here? It’s a simple matter of ever-increasing entropy, a
product of sheer irresistible weight of probability, that, in the world as we
know it, everything decays and dies. Order gives way to chaos and the
relentless march of time does away with everything in the end. And we don’t
like it. We can pour our every effort into postponing the inescapable end
of the things we hold dear for as long as possible, and we can put on a brave
face and make noble speeches about the virtue in graciously accepting the inevitable
and the value of remembering the lost, and we can even go so far as to claim
that good things would be unappreciable and meaningless if they never ended,
but we still don’t like it. The comforts with which we shield ourselves from
the horror of the all-consuming abyss that is eternity are very small comforts
indeed.
Dark
sentiments, I know, but I don’t think they’re untrue. All good things must come
to an end, as the saying goes, and it hurts, and it’s deeply saddening,
and it’s extremely scary. It’s really no wonder that someone dissatisfied with
the meagre relief offered by limp platitudes should alight on a solution as
eminently ill-judged as Kaecilius’.
But
fictional immortality always comes at a cost. Extra life has to be pilfered
from other sources. Innocents – tiny, momentary specks in an indifferent
universe – have to die. The life of the villain is rendered prolonged,
certainly, but also fragile, inhuman, not really even life at all. So Voldemort
had to commit a murder for every horcrux and essentially destroyed his own
humanity in the process; Queen Ravenna relied on a constant supply of
attractive young women whom she could magically age to renew her own youthh;
Lord Cob’s striving to open the door between life and death upset the entire balance
of the natural universe; and likewise, in Kaecilius’ case, he eventually got
everything he ever wanted – eternal life as part of the One – but, as Dr
Strange put it, he wasn’t going to like it. Less eternal life, more unending
destruction. More eternal death, really.
It’s
the cost that makes the seeking of everlasting life so villainous an
endeavour, not the longing that prompts its being paid. It’s not just villains
that crave immortality: we all hate death and the inevitable ending of
everything; we all long for the eternal. What if we could access a sustainable
source?
Truly,
truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has
eternal life. He does not come into judgement, but has passed from death to
life. Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the
dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For
as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life
in himself.5
– John 5:24-26
When
Jesus promises eternal life to those who believe in him, he is not promising
the kind of eternal life that all those fictional villains were chasing. There
is no trade-off here, no cost, no illegitimate siphoning off of life from other
sources or reducing it to an insipid existence that hardly even qualifies as genuine
life. Jesus has life in himself, just as his Father has. His life isn’t
dependent on anyone or anything else; it has its origins in his own self. His
very nature begets it. He is the sustainable source of life that we need – and
he gives eternal life freely to whomever hears what he says and believes it.
It
wasn’t because Kaecilius wanted to live forever that he was the bad guy; it was
because he was prepared to trample on other people as if they were mere specks,
to abandon any notion of good or evil, in order to do so. He might have thought
he was seeking to save the world, but he would have ended up destroying it if Dr
Strange hadn’t stopped him.
Guess
who it is that really saved the world?
Kaecilius
was right: the world is not what it ought to be. Humanity longs for the
eternal. But he was looking for it in the wrong place. Longing for the eternal
is not a villainous tendency to be determinedly suppressed: it is a symptom of
the fact that we were made for the eternal – and in Jesus, we can find
it. Jesus has life in himself; if we are in him, we share in that life; and in
the world to come, all things will be good, and none of them will age, or end,
or die, ever again. Eternal life.
Footnotes
1
I talked about The Declaration in ‘Principles of Immortality’, under ‘2016’,
then ‘March’ in the box on the right.
2
That lot was pretty much off the top of my head; some kind human has compiled a
list of many, many more villains who fit the profile: http://villains.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Immortality_Seeker?page=32.
3
The name makes me laugh because it’s basically that of Caecilius, the main
character in the first book of the Cambridge Latin Course. The following
basically illustrates the way I initially learned Latin at school, except that
our set was only a classroom, and we wore the costumes over our school uniform,
and we definitely didn’t learn our lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfxmE8nEyaU.
4
Many thanks to whichever thoughtful individual uploaded a transcript of the
whole film’s dialogue to the following web address: http://transcripts.wikia.com/wiki/Doctor_Strange.
5
Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+5&version=ESVUK.
Lots of cool stuff going on here. And a good place to point people who suggest
that Jesus never actually claimed to be God.
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