Myth & Meaning
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness & Everything Everywhere All at Once
I. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
In a 2018 opinion piece for The New York Times entitled, “The Fourth Great Awakening,” columnist David Brooks contrasts the “competitive virtues” of myths with the “cooperative virtues” of parables. The former, he argues, derive from Athens and celebrate strength, righteous indignation, and “the capacity to smite your foes and win eternal fame.” The latter, stemming from Jerusalem, emphasize humility, love, and forgiveness. Myths usually take place in some kind of perilous realm with a special set of rules and superpowers bequeathed to the various characters. They channel our heroic impulse, the desire to undertake a quest and destroy evil on the field of battle. Think Gilgamesh, Thor, and The Lord of the Rings.
Parables, on the other hand, dwell in the everyday world and deal with inner states of being—not external strife. They capture the moral dilemma of human existence, and present their characters with opportunities to act with charity, mercy, and self-sacrifice. Parables employ irony in order to upend the listeners’ conventional way of seeing things. In the Good Samaritan story, none of the Israelite characters help the assaulted man—only their sworn enemy. “The first shall be last,” Jesus says in another parable, “and the last shall be first.”
Though he doesn’t mention Joseph Campbell, Brooks is drawing from the insights of the late professor’s work on mythology—specifically the pedagogical function of myths. Brooks argues that the mythic ethos has saturated contemporary culture, to the exclusion of the parabular one. Between video games, sporting events, and superhero movies, he says, competitive virtues now crowd out cooperative ones in the minds of millions. This development bodes ill for our politics, he argues:
Myths see life as an eternal competition between warring tribes. They tend to see the line between good and evil as running between groups, not, as in parable, down the middle of every human heart.
He’s on to something real—certainly since the advent of the Star Wars franchise, American movies have been dominated by blockbusters and commercial pop. Nowhere is this development more evident than in the dizzying iterations of the Marvel Universe, with its endless sequels, spin-offs, and crossover films. This comic book engine began in earnest with director Sam Raimi’s 2002 Spider-Man, starring Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst. Over the last twenty years, that picture spawned a veritable cottage industry of superhero films, with DC and Marvel trading blows with icons like the former’s X-Men and Avengers, and the latter’s Batman and Superman. I don’t know about you, but I lost the plot long ago.
But Brooks’s thesis breaks down when you realize that the line between myth and parable often blurs. (You’ll find a more substantial taxonomy of heroes in literary critic Northrop Frye’s 1957 masterpiece Anatomy of Criticism.) The two genres bleed into each other in the Western imagination more than he admits. Moses and Jesus, for example, are parabular figures but both have mythic traits: a prophetic birth, a wilderness period, a triumphant return to face down evil. Harry Potter, on the other hand, is a hero out of myth, yet his tales involve the misuse of his gifts and learning the cooperative virtues: ultimately, self-sacrifice. In other words, the most resonant stories in our culture combine the traits of both myth and parable. We respond more readily to the flawed hero, the chastened hero, the hero whose journey to mastery involves the very kind of humbling that Brooks thinks absent in society. In our ideal world, we want leaders who embody both sets of virtues: strength and charity, justice and mercy, battling external foes and inner demons.
It’s this precious alchemy that made 2016’s Doctor Strange memorable. In Scott Derrickson’s picture of Steve Ditko and Stan Lee’s character, Dr. Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) begins as an arrogant, hot-shot neurosurgeon who suffers into wisdom after a car crash destroys his hands. When his obsessive attempts to repair his appendages fail, he becomes a neophyte under the tutelage of the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton), a sorcerer who (in an echo of Buddhist initiation) puts him through various trials to reveal that his problem is really his outsized ego—not his hands. She confronts him with a choice right out of a parable: regain use of his appendages and go back to his old life, or never fully heal but join her company in their defense of the cosmic order.
Just as he wrestles with this decision, the machinations of the treacherous Kaecilius (Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen) intervene. A former protege of the Ancient One, Kaecilius wishes to give Earth over to the power of Dormammu—a primordial entity who seeks to absorb all other universes into his Dark Dimension. As Strange confronts these villains, he combines his smarts, his powers, and his new-found selflessness to save the planet. He wins by being defeated. He becomes not just a great hero, but a good man, worthy of Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams), his surgical colleague and love interest.
You’d think that Raimi, who directs the new sequel Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, would want to build on this firm foundation. After all, he did so to wondrous effect with Spider-Man 2 (2004), which transfigured his hero into a kind of Christ figure. When Peter Parker saves a runaway subway car by lashing himself to its exterior, he gives his body for the sake of the passengers. They respond in kind and succor his broken frame, lifting him up and passing him among them in a wordless, empathic crowd-surfing. The pathos of the scene elevates the film beyond its genre—pop gives way to art. Instead, Raimi and his team ruin the latest Strange installment on the shoals of a conceptual maze. The picture opens with a young woman named America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) and a version of Strange being chased by a demon (similar to the Balrog from Peter Jackson’s 2002 film, The Fellowship of the Ring) through multiple universes. When Strange realizes he can survive only by harnessing Chavez’s power to jump universes, he begins to suck out her essence. But the demon destroys him, and Chavez opens a portal to our universe, taking Strange’s corpse with her.
Once in our universe, Chavez meets the version of Strange from the first film after he saves New York (in a sequence evoking King Kong) from a giant octopus. He’s just decamped from Christine’s wedding to another man, and you think the story might be one of how he goes on a quest to a different universe to win her back and—in the process—come to accept losing her. Instead, the creators shoehorn a completely different narrative into the story: that of Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), a witch who combines telekinesis and “chaos magic” (the ability to alter reality). (Here viewers will benefit from having watched the Avengers movies, as well as WandaVision [2021] on Disney+.) Long story short, Maximoff had to kill the love of her life, Vision, and later constructed an alternate reality in which the two of them rear a pair of boys in a suburban home. After that fantasy falls apart, Wanda sees in a dream that her children really do exist—albeit in another universe. Determined to reach them, she hunts Chavez in order to take the power to jump universes for herself.
What follows is a plotless potpourri of nonsense in which Strange and Chavez leap from one alternate reality to the next to elude Maximoff. The filmmakers regurgitate every magic trope available, and you lose track of the many convoluted, contrived plot twists around the same time you stop caring. The hard-boiled yet tender Strange from the first film is reduced to offering mind-numbing exposition and dumb one-liners. “This time it’s going to take more than killing me to kill me,” he intones at one point. Chavez has no character at all, and Gomez is rather colorless in the part. Chiwetel Ejiofor, with his soulful countenance and classical bearing, returns as Karl Mordo, an ally of Strange in our dimension but his opponent in others. Like every performer in the film, he’s wasted here. The same with McAdams (still a leading screen ingenue) who’s asked to do some truly mindless things and is evacuated of all personality.
Michael Waldron wrote the witless script and he throws a melange of sci-fi dreck at you. Lacking interesting ideas, he even tosses in Dr. Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and various heroes from other tales. This only leads to more idiotic battles in which the chief pleasure is seeing John Krasinski (as Mister Fantastic) liquidated, which relieves you of burden of believing he’s “the most intelligent man” alive. The creators cobble together theories of the multiverse, but nothing’s grounded in a core conflict that matters. Along the way, you’re treated to such clever lines as “Go back to hell;” “Get the hell out of my universe;” and “You’re going to kick that witch’s ass.”
If you can endure two hours of this inanity, you get a perverse payoff. In the last twenty minutes, Raimi leans in hard to the camp style of his horror films. Suddenly, you’re treated to skeletal demons, body-snatching, and a zombie Dr. Strange. With its Grand Guignol effects, the sequence takes on an outrageous quality so bad that it reduces you to drunken giggles. That may not be enough to redeem the film—and I’m not sure it makes up for sabotaging Strange’s character arc, one of the more interesting in the Marvel legion—but at least it yields a catharsis of a kind. There aren’t any virtues to draw from this latest Marvel movie, either of parable or myth, except an appreciation for the virtue of taste.
II. Everything Everywhere All at Once
Theories of the multiverse go as far back as ancient Greek philosophy, though we associate them today with the hard sciences. Part of the discussion, historically, involves speculation about whether our world is the best of all possible worlds. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (one of the most important early modern philosophers) made this idea the cornerstone of his work The Monadology. There, the German polymath addresses theodicy, or the problem of evil. He speculates that the world we inhabit must be the best of all possible worlds, since God—who is good and who could’ve chosen to make any world he wished—made this one. The presence of evil, then, must have some mysterious, salutary effect—perhaps contrasting goodness for us, so we appreciate it all the more. In a world without evil, he surmises, we wouldn’t be able to recognize goodness, since it would just be the banal, uniform state of affairs. A fish doesn’t notice water unless it’s thrown on land.
Leibniz’s reasoning was subjected to many critiques in his own time and after, and at some level it fails to satisfy you. Thousands die in an earthquake so I can appreciate reinforced concrete? Yet his overall point is one shared by the Bible: we don’t need another, better world. The reality we have, the existence we’ve been given, is beautiful enough. We just need to see it with the right perception. The problem is not the world—it’s our relationship to it. “Stay awake,” Jesus implores his disciples, which calls to mind the insights of Buddhism about mindfulness. Enlightenment isn’t about becoming God or fleeing to another dimension. It’s about an inner change in which we regard life with gratitude and move through it with generosity. The greatest works of art bring us to this emotional conversion. When we have those moments in which everything seems wondrous, we want to live in them forever.
Everything Everywhere All at Once, from writer-directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, is not a great work. But it’s a warm, exhilarating film in which the creative team succeeds at marrying the multiverse concept with a family drama that conveys Leibniz’s concepts. The clamorous pair of directors are drawn to black comedy and the absurd. Their previous collaboration, Swiss Army Man (2016) was a stoner picture in which Paul Dano plays a marooned young man named Hank who turns a corpse (Daniel Radcliffe) into a kind of magical, grotesque utility belt. You had to be high to get that film, but here the pleasures are all-natural. Michelle Yeoh (who, a quarter-century after being a Bond girl, has lost none of her charms) stars as Evelyn Wang, a Chinese-American woman who runs a laundromat with her meek husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). Evelyn faces multiple crises when we meet her: the IRS has audited her business; Waymond wants to serve her divorce papers; her demanding father, Gong Gong (veteran film actor James Hong) is in town; and her morose daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), seeks the family’s blessing for her and her white girlfriend, Becky (Tallie Medel).
Things become surreal at an appointment with the IRS, when Waymond’s personality suddenly changes during an interrogation by inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdra (a brassy Jamie Lee Curtis). Unbeknownst to Beaubeirdra, he suspends Evelyn’s attention and explains to her that he’s Alpha Waymond, her husband from another dimension in which the people have developed the ability to “verse jump,” or travel through parallel universes, and access the memories, skills, and bodies of their alter egos. He’s come to Evelyn because the multiverse is being threatened by Jobu Tupaki (formerly Alpha Joy) whose mind was split by Evelyn’s corollary, Alpha Evelyn. Jobu now experiences all universes simultaneously and can verse jump and manipulate matter at will. Attaining omnipotent status, she seeks to suck all reality into her bottomless pit of despair, which she manifests as a giant bagel (yes, a bagel). Alpha Waymond believes that Eveylyn can mine her untapped potential to destroy Jobu Tupaki and save all. Soon she harnesses the power to verse jump and begins battling Jobu and her minions.
That sounds trippy, but if you buckle up, Kwan and Scheinert keep things both zany and coherent as they whip you around the multiverse. The film is hyperactive and breathless. The directors deploy multiple comic devices, including verbal and physical slapstick, cultural cross-references, and endless sight gags. The wonder of the film lies in its ability to stack up multiple universes in your mind—each with its own internal dynamics—while staying tethered to the characters and their unique arcs. The cast fires on all cylinders: they get the style of each universe’s genre right; match their costume changes; and retain emotional truth. This is The Matrix without all the self-seriousness and ersatz Gnostic Christianity.
Along the way, you’re treated to some of the most pleasurable martial arts sequences put on screen. With their riotous combat choreography, Kwan and Scheinert send up the karate genre and play off Yeoh’s star turn in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2002). In order to verse jump, the characters must activate a kind of channel, which involve triggers like self-inflicted paper cuts or, most outrageously, turning office supplies into butt plugs. Once they do, they can download wild physical powers. Waymond thrashes a bevy of security guards with a fanny pack-turned-nunchaku. A nemesis wields her tiny dog as a weapon. At one point, Evelyn bests her foes by obtaining knowledge of kung-fu pinky—you read that right. Watching the directors ratchet up the comic stakes with each frame thrills you—you have no idea what’s coming next.
The core of the story involves Eveyln trying to reach Joy, with the interdimensional battle serving as a metaphor for the Freudian mother-daughter relationship. Along the way, Eveyln catches glimpses of her life in other universes. In one, people have floppy hot dogs for fingers and she and Beaubeirdra are lovers (Curtis’s ubiquitous appearances are a running joke, akin to Alec Guiness’s multiple deaths in 1949’s Kind Hearts and Coronets). In another, she’s a chef at a hibachi grill where her colleague’s controlled by “Raccoon Ratatouille” (I’m not making this shit up). Alpha Waymond tells her she’s the most failed version of Evelyn there is, and she believes it. She’s sick of her husband, and she sees how much better her life could be if she’d never married him. In her favorite alternate universe, she’s a glamorous film star, with Waymond a dashing fellow actor.
But it’s this very self-pity that Jobu wants everyone to feel—the whiny, wallowing black hole that implodes on itself. As Evelyn gives into this perspective, the multiverse goes to hell. Her journey becomes one of self-transformation, in which she realizes that the point of life is to generate creative energy through love—energy that ripples outward and reconstitutes reality. That sounds trite, but the film acts a bit like a psychedelic trip, in which the most basic insight—love is the center of the universe—takes on a felt impact through the noetic quality of the audio-visual spectacle.
The movie makes Evelyn’s acceptance of Joy’s same-sex attraction the crux of the matter, which actually cheapens the insight. Do we really need, in 2022, yet another film about a parent learning to love her gay child? At this point, that theme’s been done to death. And the movie’s too long by about fifteen minutes—even with all the visual kinetics, Kwan and Scheinert push the envelope.
Nevertheless, Everything Everywhere All at Once succeeds at something clever: it turns the multiverse experiment on its head. No matter where Eveyln goes, she finds herself with the same family, the same people, the same problems. In this way, the movie captures the sense that our relationships define our reality. Every person you pass on the street lives in her own universe, with a unique matrix of experiences, people, ideas, horizons, meanings, tools, etc.—what the phenomenologist philosophers call the ‘life-world.’ To enter into someone else’s life-world would be as disorienting and fantastical as to jump to another universe.
Which means the reverse holds true: our individual, hum-drum existence is extraordinary. Sometimes you look at your child or spouse or even yourself and you think, “Who is this person? How did we get here?” When that happens, the mystery of being stands before you, even on an ordinary Tuesday at the office. As Evelyn comes to this insight, she changes her orientation to life. Suddenly, the most failed version of her existence stands forth as suffused with plenitude. We’ll never know if we live in the best of all possible worlds. But when we see it right, it’s all we want.