Thoughts on Doctor Strange 3: Sometimes the Bad Guys Are Right

“Humanity longs for the eternal.”

Doctor Strange (2016)

Things bad guys are typically after: number one, power; number two, revenge; or number three, immortality.

 

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.

Thoughts on Doctor Strange 2: The World Through a Keyhole

The Ancient One:     You’re a man looking at the world through a keyhole, and you’ve spent your whole life trying to widen that keyhole, to see more, to know more, and now, on hearing that it can be widened, in ways you can’t imagine, you reject the possibility.

Dr Strange:                No, I reject it because I do not believe in fairy tales about chakras or energy or the power of belief. There is no such thing as spirit. We are made of matter and nothing more. We’re just another tiny, momentary speck within an indifferent universe.

Doctor Strange (2016)

 

Not an awful lot visible through this keyhole, is there?

Let’s play a game. You have, I’m assuming, a rough idea of the way my blog tends to work. I’ve given you an opening quotation. Now you try to guess where I’m going with the rest of this post. I’m not trying to catch you out; mainly I’m curious as to the extent to which your brain works the way mine does.

To pick up the story from where we left it last post, Dr Stephen Strange’s desperate quest to reverse the damage to his hands ends up with him spending his last dollar on a one-way ticket to Kathmandu, and eventually tracking down the place of healing he was tipped off about. There he meets a woman known as the Ancient One, who offers him a cup of tea and an insight into the way she thinks the world works. The lines quoted above constitute part of that encounter,¹ and I have to admit that when I heard them, they did a very effective job of pushing certain buttons in my brain. Stephen’s materialism, his refusal to acknowledge the possibility of anything existing beyond the physical, scientifically-demonstrable realm, his insistence that the universe must operate according to blind, purposeless happenstance – these ideas are familiar territory for anyone who’s ever entertained even a mild interest in Christian apologetics. Even the use of the term ‘fairy tales’ felt reminiscent of the kinds of accusations that seem to be often levelled at a Christian worldview: replace the subject-matter of such fairy tales as Dr Strange gives it with something a bit more Jesus-y, and this chunk of scripting wouldn’t sound out of place in, I don’t know, God’s Not Dead or something.² You see the buttons, right?

And then the Ancient One shoves Stephen’s ‘astral form’ out of his ‘physical form’, and introduces him to mirror realities and a vast compendium of mind-boggling alternative universes, and altogether indisputably proves to him that there really is far more out there than an indifferent material realm. And of course I’m there internally cheering something along the lines of, “That showed him!” Dr Strange denied the existence of a spiritual reality, and his presumptions were shattered to dust before his eyes. He was arrogant enough to limit his understanding of the cosmos merely to things he was personally able to grasp, and he was soundly taken down a peg. He thought he was so clever, and he was wrong. Yes, it’s only a story, and yes, the spiritual reality I believe in doesn’t much resemble the mystical multiverse of the MCU, but I still felt pleasingly vindicated. You were wrong, Stephen Strange. Your worldview has joined battle and been thoroughly trounced. So there.

Clearly, the Christian thing to do in these kinds of situations is to sit there feeling smug for having been clever enough to figure out that there really is a supernatural reality beyond the material realm – unlike narrow-minded, scientistic, arrogant morons like Dr Strange. Right, guys? Right?

Ahem. Or, um, maybe not.

For one thing, avoiding the trap of believing that an indifferent, material universe is all there is has nothing to do with being clever, or insightful, or virtuous, or superior to one’s fellow humans in any other manner one cares to name. Regardless of the sort of people we are, we all of us stumble along our own dark little paths, groping for understanding, trying to widen the keyhole, but we are spiritually blind and spiritually deaf and the truth, should we encounter it, comes across to us exactly as ridiculous as the Ancient One’s words did to Dr Strange. Like him, we need something on a different level; we need to actually encounter the super-material for us to acknowledge its existence. Now, I don’t mean by that that everyone has to have some kind of seismic, miraculous, road-to-Damascus experience³ in order to be truly counted a believer – I never had one – but I do mean that nobody ever comes to believe in Jesus unless God is already working in that person by his Spirit.⁴

Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. – 1 Corinthians 2: 12-14

None of us figures out the truth of the gospel. To us as we naturally are, it sounds ludicrous. We need to be transformed from natural people to spiritual people – the process known as ‘being born again’⁵  – if spiritual truths are to make any sense to us. So there is no occasion to pat ourselves on the back for being cleverer than Dr Strange. Left to our own devices, we settle ourselves in our own erroneous worldviews exactly as resolutely as he settled himself in his, until supernatural reality comes and gives us a shake round the shoulders. We look at the world through a keyhole until the Spirit comes and opens the door.

And on top of that, I think we’re awfully prone to responding to the door having been opened by building another door, setting it up not ten yards beyond the first, outfitting it with a slightly larger keyhole, and settling back down in the same position we’re used to in order to look through it – by which I mean that we fail to behave like spiritual people when it comes to discerning spiritual things. We look at scripture and assess it according to a slight variation on the same worldview we had when we were looking through the first keyhole. A particular passage comes across as a bit harsh, a bit discriminatory, a bit unlikely, a bit reminiscent of this or that denomination or tradition, a bit naïve, a bit unachievable, a bit petty, a bit weird. We are seeing with the spiritually-blind eyes and hearing with the spiritually-deaf ears of our old, natural selves, exalting human wisdom, instead of relying on the Spirit who teaches us interpretation of spiritual truths.

On this front, we have something to learn from Dr Strange. Once his experience of the multiverse has been concluded, his response is to beg the Ancient One, “Teach me!” He sees now the folly that was everything he thought he knew; he throws it aside and pleads to be taught about the way things really are. He is so determined in this that even when she denies his request and throws him out of the building, he refuses to leave until he is let back in again. His understanding of life, the universe, and everything has been so thoroughly revolutionised that his only conceivable option is to press the one who so revolutionised it to enlighten him further; to go back to the way he used to think is, well, unthinkable.

Should the same not be true of us who have been enlightened of real spiritual realities? Should we not be ready to fling aside our old preconceptions and embrace the teaching of the Spirit – who both inspired the writing of God’s word and enables us to interpret it? And yet how often do I allow my natural, unspiritual understanding to cloud my ability to discern spiritual truths?

And so it turns out Dr Strange might be rather cleverer than me in the application of his worldview after all…

Footnotes

¹ If you’d like a clip of the scene, some kind human has uploaded one to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgM4JE7agIs.

² Don’t watch the film; watch SayGoodnightKevn’s review of it: https://vimeo.com/139840667.

³ The allusion is to the conversion of Saul/Paul, in case you didn’t know: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+9&version=ESVUK.

⁴ Do get some context on this one: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians+2&version=ESVUK.

⁵ Jesus explains this jazz in John 3: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+3&version=ESVUK.

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.