Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness

And Representation

It’s amazing that, even during incarceration, I was easily able to keep up with the most popular movie franchise of all time. The MCU was a fixture of my prison time, and I could always turn to FX, and later TNT/TBS, to pick up on the adventures of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The last MCU film to come out when I was in public was “Guardians Of The Galaxy”, which I ended up seeing about two dozen times while in holding with a Starz subscription (county jails are not picky about premium cable). I do remember the weekend of the release of “Avengers: Age Of Ultron” in 2015, when the ads were free to spoil what I had not known – wait, this has Vision in it? A brave new world, these superhero movies.

We had DVD’s at my first federal spot, accessed in the library. In addition to bootlegs, over the years, I made my way through “Age Of Ultron”, “Ant-Man”, “Captain America: Civil War”, “Doctor Strange”, “Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2”, “Spider-Man: Homecoming”, “Thor: Ragnarok”, “Black Panther”, “Avengers: Infinity War”, “Ant-Man And The Wasp”, “Captain Marvel”, “Avengers: Endgame”, “Spider-Man: Far From Home”, 

(deep breath)

…“Black Widow”, “Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings”, “Eternals” and “Spider-Man: No Way Home”. I didn’t realize how many movies that was until I started writing this. I was in prison for seventeen MCU movies! Holy cow.

Eighteen, really, if you count “Doctor Strange And The Multiverse Of Madness”, which arrived in theaters during my last days in the federal system. When I ended up in the halfway house, the first movie I ended up seeing in theaters, after over eight years away from the cinema, was “Thor: Love And Thunder”. I completely understand the negative reviews. But, for me, it was heaven – the projection, the bass, the image, the popcorn. Thor technically popped up in four films while I was incarcerated, so it was nice to see him back on the big screen. I recognized the film’s flaws, but at the time, it was the best cinematic experience of my life. That black and white planet!

I followed the comings and goings of that Marvel world while I was in prison, particularly considering, like those films, I had a release date. Early on, I was overconfident about my case, I told a friend I would be out in time to watch “Black Panther” together. When reality sank in, I let him know we could maybe see “Black Panther 3” instead. For tragic reasons, I guess we avoided that timeline.

That brings us to Sam Raimi’s universe-hopping adventure with the Sorceror Supreme, a lauded return to the genre decades after his peerless “Spider-Man 2”. I was delighted to know Raimi was tackling this project. As a kid, “The Evil Dead” was probably the first movie I ever saw that I thought was “cool”. I had only been watching studio films at that point, mid-budget genre pictures, star vehicles, nothing in a foreign language, as I grew up in a film-agnostic household. “The Evil Dead” was the first film I saw that broke the rules of tempo, tone, vibes, special effects. It didn’t feel like just another movie – it felt like a response to a boring, anodyne world. It changed my life.

Obviously, Raimi’s magic touch wouldn’t last. I remember seeing “Oz The Great And Powerful” on a plane and I almost walked out. And it’s folly to compare something like “For Love Of The Game” (which features some of the greatest baseball scenes in movie history to go along with some perfect casting, but still) to “Evil Dead 2”, which amped everything about its predecessor to another realm. But even with the anonymity of the Great Marvel Machine, I had faith he could add a bit of personality to what would probably be a rote genre exercise.

Yes, maybe I did set that bar low, but in these regards, Raimi delivered. “Multiverse” does what almost all Marvel films really should be doing right now, dispensing with the ludicrous exposition and throwing us right into the narrative with Raimi’s customary zooms and edits and Danny Elfman-punctuated action beats. Here, it’s Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch, fresh off talking junk to Thanos’ face in the “Avengers” movies) and America (Xochitl Gomez) trying to evade a monstrous beast, only for Strange to be killed. America now jumps into what we assume is the MCU world to recruit another Strange, the one we already know, as opposed to the “variant” who just died. Without wasting any time, Sam Raimi has killed his protagonist five minutes into the movie. I love this.

Strange then does what every Marvel hero should do in act one of their own sequel movie – recruit another Avenger. The one he selects, however, is the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), and unfortunately, she’s got some major issues having to do with losing her own kids to some sort of spell apparently on one of the Disney Plus shows which I hadn’t yet seen (I have since seen it, and it makes just a little more emotional sense). So it’s Strange and Wong (Benedict Wong) against Scarlet Witch to protect America, the plot device that will allow Scarlet Witch to kidnap her kids from the multiverse. Skimpy? Yes. But I was a Marvel fan as a kid, and in this movie Rintrah (Doctor Strange #80, 1986) shows up. He is a talking minotaur. Sam Raimi delivers again.

There is some multiverse exploration, and it’s depressingly bland – I guess the executives didn’t want Strange going to some wacky alternate universe that contradicts what they can feature in a movie five years from now. One world has Bruce Campbell as Pizza Poppa, so we do get to find out which Earth is the best Earth within the MCU. And in a distracting digression from the plot, Strange bumps into the Illuminati from another world, a society of superheroes we’ve seen in different forms previously. To the casual fans, it’s very much a “Wow, the multiverse!” kind of thing, but to the hardcores, it’s a corporate acknowledgement that Disney has purchased Fox, bringing the X-Men and Fantastic Four back into the fold. Better than a board meeting, I suppose.

Aside from that Illuminati sequence (allowing Raimi to flex his horror muscles), the plot evolves in a fairly linear, predictable pattern from this point on. The discovery of a multiverse should be some massive development within the lives of these characters, but by the end of the movie, nothing specifically has changed. There’s the implication that the universe has lasting fissures because of this particular adventure, but that seems like an idea meant to be left for an as-yet-unwritten script in Marvel’s future. A post-credits cameo presents yet another in Marvel’s endless new characters played by overqualified Oscar winners, who whisks our hero away to yet another yet-to-be-planned adventure. Because none of these post credits sequences can ever feature a character saying, “I am taking you to this specific place because we need to obtain this specific thing in order to avoid this other precise outcome, and here are the remaining details I may have left out.”

As a Latino, I was glad to see the Mexican actress Ms. Gomez onscreen as America. Because Marvel is still largely the domain of white guys, America Chavez is meant to add some diversity to the Marvel universe despite not having any real character traits or desires, and seemingly serving as a talking MacGuffin for most of this plot. Representation matters. When I got out of prison and arrived on the internet, I was stunned to see so many ignorant fans complaining about all the diversity on display in recent Marvel films. It flew in the face of my memory of the final battle in “Endgame”, which features, theoretically, hundreds of Marvel characters, and not a single one of Latino or Hispanic heritage. Which, frankly, seems statistically unlikely.

These closed-minded fans had their own thinly-veiled justifications as to why it was important Marvel remained primarily Tom-Holland-White. But they were all ignoring the fact that representation is a big deal. These people are usually white men unaccustomed to being in non-white spaces. I suggest they should try prison? I can’t tell you what it was like to be able to experience “Black Panther” with an audience of primarily Black men beaten down and segregated by a racist system. One man had tears his his eyes because of how “Black Panther” felt like the first Hollywood movie they had seen that presented Blackness the way all American movies had historically presented whiteness – an element in a population of people not in opposition to anyone else, simply existing in its purest, dignified state. Despite being filmed in Atlanta and taking place in a fictional country, it was a representation of Africa sans Hollywood’s usual paternalism and condescension. And it was a major blockbuster that made no apology for being primarily cast with Black faces of several varieties. 

I can see that despite the film’s billion dollar gross, some white people felt this was an affront to them in that it marginalized white people and white culture, because every song is about them. It’s important not to neglect what it means to see yourself onscreen, presented heroically, defiantly, with dignity and grace. When someone is not white and they don’t look like you, you need to consider what that means. Particularly in a marginalized community like prison.