Dr. Strange Review & Misperceptions of Skepticism · 12:10am Nov 6th, 2016
Spoiler content: None whatsoever until the big red Contains Spoilers warning sign, after it only the vaguest possible spoilers for Doctor Strange which should not be a surprise to you if you know anything at all about the character or the movie and also some sundry spoilers for Avengers (2012).
As a part of my 'more impulsive, shorter and stupider posts[1]' initiative: I've gone and seen Dr. Strange and I have Thoughts, some of which I wish to share with you all. So first, a no-spoilers capsule review: Go see it. It's one of the better Marvel movies though not quite the best. The plot is very basic but hangs together, more or less, but the funny bits are funny, the action-y bits are peerlessly action-y, and the visuals are legitimately awesome. I swear at least some of the visual richness on display was brought to us by the smooth taste of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine. If you are afraid that the movie will be impossible to follow without some sort of commitment to the greater Marvel all-conquering cinematic universe, don't. You can follow along without any homework.
(I'd make a snarky comment re: Cumberbatch's American accent but as anyone who's ever heard me utter a single word will attest I live in a very fragile glass house in that respect.)
[1] Not particularly short, but impulsive and stupid as all hell.
Right. That's that. Now to the point of this blogpost, but first...
SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT
....okay, is that all the lightweights scared away? Good. ;)
So, the plot of Dr. Strange depends on a fictional motif that's, over the years, been worn river rock-smooth by overuse: The Skeptic Learns That There Are More Things In Heaven and Earth Than Are Dreamt Of In Your Philosophy. It's so old and well-worn that, as usual, Shakespeare got there first[1]. I'm convinced you've all seen it enough times to mouth along to the words. Hell, even our own beloved ponies did that episode about Pinkie Sense that danced roughly the same steps. You see this same basic plot everywhere.
I'm sort of sick of it.
In this particular instance, the skepticism of Dr. Strange is hilariously out of place since he lives in New York, you know, the same place where a HOLE IN THE SKY was torn open by an alien god in order to let in an alien invasion only to be stopped by a man with a fusion generator where his heart ought to be, said alien god's brother, a big green man with anger management issues, a defrosted WWII supersoldier, and a pair of superspies, for flavor. This happened in view of Dr. Stephen Strange's Manhattan[2] apartment. He should be utterly inured to weirdness.
Even if we ignore this movie's place in the Marvel universe, Strange goes to see the Ancient One and is explicitly told that this is a incense-chakras-and-prayer-wheels situation by the person who sends him there. For him to be incredulous is just... weird.
No, the movie bent its own continuity and sense into a pretzel because the writer felt the movie would not be complete without a Confronted Skeptic moment, and so made it happen, giving a certain edge to my nausea at its prevalence.
So why am I so tired of this cliche? Well, rather unsurprisingly, I'm of a skeptical bent myself, and what annoys me is that movie skeptics are quite unlike anything I recognize as skepticism[3]. Instead it's this caricatured and ridiculous rigid adherence to the known and the understood: if it isn't in a textbook it doesn't exist, they seem to say. In fact, a number of them do say it, or words to that effect. And while Strange gets over his arbitrary skepticism quite quickly, this same attitude gave us Scully which took something like six years to accept the existence of Weird Stuff™ despite having to scrub its ectoplasmic residue off her things on average once a week.
No skeptic ever seems to say 'show me'[4], which is interesting because most cases it'd end the conversation right quick. "Magic? Seriously? Show me." "*various magic sounds*" "Well would you look at that." No skeptic is ever right, except on an old Scooby Doo cartoon where it really was old man McGreggor all along. And I've noticed that when I argue with people who espouse the sort of woo that actually works in the Marvel universe[5] they tend to argue with the skeptic from the movies, not me.
Except, no, that script doesn't work, because I don't say "That's impossible!" but rather "Show me." Look, I'm gullible. Terribly, terribly, gullible, and I strive to be more gullible all the time. I'll believe anything, anything at all, as long as there is evidence. I'll believe that I'm mostly empty space, and that the sky isn't really blue[6], I'll believe that a man can fly (given sufficient lift), and that the Moon smells like gunpowder. Honestly compared to some of the stuff I cheerfully believe, 'magic' is dead easy.
I'm not sure why the skeptic as a punching bag is such a popular notion among screenwriters but I suspect the explanation might have something to do with a comment I made a great many moons ago. I'll take the gross liberty of quoting myself:
I have a hypothesis about why writers of one stripe or another so frequently excoriate logic by presenting a version of logic which bears no real resemblance to the real thing. Even Aristotle would have been appalled. He'd at least gone to the trouble of getting some endoxa together to start his logicin'. Besides, poor Ari (we're pals, I haunt him and stuff, great fun) gets a bad rap because his fan club got real annoying. There's plenty to be annoyed with him about, of course, but he's not as daft as people think.
Anyway.
My hypothesis is this: rational thought is Cthulhu.
Short and to the point. A bit insane, but what do you expect. I've insomnia and sinusitis of truly epic proportions. Let me try to explain. I've taken all the painkillers[1] so it might get a mite fuzzy around the edges.
Rational thought—defined as broadly as possible—is not only exceptionally effective, it is also all-consuming. There's nothing you can fit under it. Magic? No problem. If it follows any pattern whatsoever it can be categorized, predicted, used, and made a part of the same toolbox calculus is in. Things that can't fit into words? No problem. The basic engine of empiricism and doing what works will grind it all down. The unexpected? You'll be ready for it next time. You've made a note of it. Randomness? There's mathematicians about who make randomness their chief field of study.
And that's rather a problem if you want to write a story about the conflict between someone who uses what I've sloppily defined as 'rational thought' and someone different you end up floundering as the writers have done here. What, precisely, is the method Fluttershy can use that isn't rational thought? Feelings aren't rational? Really? Since when? "Hm. My gut—or rather neural circuitry that's evolved into a freakishly efficient simulator of minds much like my own—is telling me X. Well. That's certainly useful data to consider. Especially if I've been clever about it and have kept track of when my gut steers me wrong." So the only stories you can write—if you want to represent a clash of ideas[2]—are either forced to resort to nigh-on metaphysical entities[3] or decide that 'logic' and 'reason' mean something very daft: mostly just garden variety stupidity done while yelling "REASON! LOGIC!" very loudly indeed. This, incidentally, even applies in the vastly reduced case of applying not to reason, rationality, &c but just to fancy book learnin'. Since you can but damn near everything in a book—certainly any resolution to which your story arrives—the story is reduced to cheating by positing bad books. Ones that either give the wrong advice or fail to say things like "This requires practice." or "Possible problems are:" and things like that. All good books full of that fancy learnin' I've read had those bits in.
My point is, reason is annoying because it wins. It wins everything by eating everything else you can think of. And this annoyance, this slippery hard-to-graspness, is reflected in bad writing. Most hard-to-grasp ideas seem to result in bad writing, really, as people try to grapple with them, fail, and win by reducing them to caricatures. See also nearly any attempt to write political polemic via fiction.
[1] Not in my house. Or in my city. All painkillers. All of them. Check your medicine cabinets. You will find them bereft of analgesia.
[2] You can have a character screw up while trying to be rational because they are imperfect since they are merely human/equine.
[3] This is a living idea. If you understand it, it mutates into a form you don't. Landed in the philosophy department of a University once. No survivors. Mess to clean up.
Much like reasonable people are annoying to write around, proper skeptics completely ruin your magical world: they don't look at all abashed at being wrong and are asking all these questions and, oh look, that one's taking notes!
Still, it's shame it has led to such a common cliche. I wanted to do a story where the normal setup is inverted, but luckily, the fine folks at Airship Entertainment did it for me:
[1] Which is 'the Simpsons did it first' of literary criticism.
[2] Took me two tries not to write 'Manehattan' here.
[3] Which is not much like philosophical skepticism either, but nobody ever talks about that. As it happens I'm one of those, too, but that's entirely unimportant.
[4] Etymology is not argument, but it does come from a root meaning 'to examine, view' and is cognate with the modern 'scope.'
[5] The finest, most exquisite example of it can be found in Spirit Science. And if you do not know the hilarity that is Spirit Science, get two hours free (one hour watching, one hour facepalming first aid) and watch this beauty. I wish I could write things so gloriously silly and wrong.
[6] Rayleigh scattering suggests it ought to be purple and, in a way, it is. It's just that our sensitivity to colors is such that we see it as blue. 'Why is the sky blue?' is, actually, a preposterously complex question to answer.
To be a nattering nabob here, one of Dr. Strange's best qualities is his outright stubbornness. As a doctor, he has been taught exactly how the world has a set number of laws, and these cannot be broken. The only thing Man can do is to use these immutable laws as tools in order to attain their goals. As a doctor, he has used these same tools to great effect, but when they fail to overcome his greatest obstacle, he is left grasping for something else, something beyond his perception.
And without that desire, he never would have become the Sorcerer Supreme. He never would have been able to open his closed mind to things everybody else believes is pure fluff and mirrors. And when you give a stubborn man the ability to change the world into whatever he has the willpower to manage....
(Did I mention I collect Dr. Strange comics? I've got at least a dozen of the originals in my collection downstairs)
4286830
The problem is more that in a world as messily inconstant as the marvel (or DC) universe where on Wednesday the number three becomes green cinnamon because Reed Richards messed up his coffee in the Baxter building green cinnamon blocks over, being a sceptic will be probably a quite different experience than in our reality. And even here I can believe that time is a byproduct of gravity or that there are invisible unicorns moving electron orbitals if you can demonstrate it to me.
4286830
I don't mind stubborn. Hell, if I wrote the movie, I would have had him come in with incorrect ideas of what sort of magic it is and be stubborn about those. But to come to a faith healer and be all sarky about the faith healer being a faith healer is... daft. And the Sorcerer Supreme is many things but daft is not one of them.
4286876
The movie's light on its references on the rest of the Marvel universe (I count three in the whole movie, and one is coy, and another is after the credits), of course, but it still absolutely is in that universe which tries to be like our own and yet cannot be. I didn't harp on the incongruous nature of skepticism in such a universe that as much as I could have since, properly, that's more of a factor of the Marvel universe.
It still doesn't make sense to go to a faith healer not expecting a faith healer, however.
Well, I pretty much just zoned out for that part of the movie for exactly those reasons. Though I did like that even if he didn't go 'show me' that is exactly what happened. He doubted, she showed him, he went "okay!", boom. Done with cliche skeptic bit. Overall not my favorite Marvel movie but I went in with too high expectations given my personal like of the character.
Would have been funny if they went the other way around and made Strange completely open to whatever wacky ideas he might have thought about magic. The 'faith healer but all wrong' angle you mention, but taken all the way. Where the guru has to convince him that magic is actually totally rational and scientific and isn't just 'because magic'. Hmm... Almost tempted to write something like that.
I think my favorite part about the ending was (spoilers):
How they basically just ripped off the end of pony season five with Twilight and Starlight.
and yes I know it wasn't actually a rip-off, but I couldn't help but make the easy comparison.
Hm, now that I think about it the Laundry Files books by Charles Stross handle the whole rational/magic thing pretty well compared to most. Or at least the basic premise does. Basically just understanding and/or calculating certain things makes bad things happen. To the point that one of the secret organization jobs is to find computer programmers who are too smart and stop them from writing computer programs that break reality because advanced forms of math directly affect reality just by the calculations being worked through. So it's not that rational thought doesn't work, it's that replicating certain results is dangerous in itself. So that a lot of times there is only a border of knowledge around the dangerous subject because if you actually work out the details too accurately... Whoops, half the city went insane and the other half exploded. So how do you study something when actually writing down the specific details is what causes bad things? Rationality literally becomes Cthulhu at that point. Pity most of those books didn't do much with the basic premise from what I remember.
So yeah, it's hard to do that sort of thing but the route of bad writing is always easier. Movies mostly go for the easy bad writing sadly.
I feel like I should point out that while the things you say about skepticism certainly apply to you, and I can understand being frustrated that it's so poorly represented [1], I think it's fair for stories to deal with those kinds of skeptics because they do exist in real life. Look at any time there's a major scientific advancement that requires a paradigm shift-- there are always nay-sayers among scientists whose skepticism prevents them from accepting something even when it does have experimental or mathematical evidence staring them in the face. Suggesting that these types of people wouldn't do the same thing with a paradigm shift towards something that they had previously considered the province of "woo" is ignoring how bad some educated, intelligent, science-minded people are at actual science.
[1] Assuming, of course, that it is poorly represented. The fact is that when someone's skepticism is made a big deal of, it's because it's important in some way to the plot. It might be the case that there are a fair number of skeptics of your persuasion, but they go unnoticed because their skepticism is incidental to the overall plot, and/or is quickly and easily overcome and the plot moves on.
Movie anythings are usually quite unlike their real-world counterparts!
I feel like, this treatment of skepticism exists, in part, because there is an expectation that it exists. As though if someone had doubts, and demanded proof, and then accepted it, rather than simply saying, "This cannot be!" that people would not believe he was skeptical. Or at least the writers, or perhaps the producers, would not think the audience would believe it.
See, here's the thing, Ghost. A lot of famous people who present themselves as "sketpics?" They act like that. It's why real skeptics sometimes have some trouble being taken seriously by the mainstream. Because the loud motherfuckers are often smug, preening assholes who act like their shit don't stink.
Of course the subtlety people don't grasp is that those people aren't sketpics. They're just dickheads. But, y'know, that's kinda how every group works. The loud motherfuckers are really just loud motherfuckers, rather than actually being useful examples of what they present themselves to be.
4286924 Having not seen the movie yet (but not minding spoilers because I'm going to see it in the theatre anyway no matter what), I can see why someone would go to a faith healer, even *knowing* the quack was a complete fake. He had exhausted all of the possible options of getting his life back, and all of the improbable ones, then all of the nearly impossible ones, leaving only the depths of despair where at least he can go mock the deception/deceiver which he has been driven to. People who think they're out of options can get *really* passive-aggressive.
He had proof of gods and aliens .
Magic as well would have just been over egging the pudding, really.
South Korea might have been run by the 8 Goddesses but that doesn't mean I wouldn't still callbullshit on a 9/11 "truther".
He went to Tibet to look for a miracle treatment. Spine dude was pretty vague about his miracle after all. Faith healing isn't the avenue Strange expected, and his slepticism lasted for a whole thirty seconds until the ancient one proved her point.
It's a bad trope, but this movie isn't anywhere near he worst offender on execution.
I do so love Heterodyne's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law. I quoted that the other night, actually, while trying to explain why I love fantasy and sci-fi for more-or-less the same reasons[1]. Ended up discovering that They were into sci-fi for an entirely different reason[2].
I may not generally like arguments, but a proper one[3] can be quite educational. Even if the argument was about how an Equestrian Fallout[4] RPG setting without magitek was or was not silly, pointless, and or hard-to-believe.
Glad to hear you enjoyed the film, despite the presence of a pet peeve.
[1] In essence that I'm a huge magic system/applied phlebotinum geek, and love thinking of all the ways a thing or principle can be applied.
[2] In essence because they like to think of the tech in the stories as being things that might possibly be in our future.
[3] As opposed to just plain negation.
[4] Not to be confused with Fallout: Equestria's universe.
It's not entirely clear in the film, but I think it starts before Avengers and the great big hole in the NY sky, which helps explain his skepticism quite a bit.
I think that at least a couple of years pass during the movie, what with Strange's accident, slow recovery, desperate pursuit of a fix, search for Kamar-Taj, and learning to be a sorcerer. (Then again, uncertain and possibly inconsistent timelines are one of my main peeves in fiction; see also the MLP:FiM timeline...)
4287400
That would make sense, but that's not the impression I got. At one point he's convinced it's a cutting edge medical procedure. Done by people in robes, in a dilapidated building in Nepal.
I mean come on.
4287131
Oh, I agree, this movie is far from being the worst offender. I only mention it because in what is otherwise a glorious popcorn-fest it was the one bit of inconvenient gristle which prompted me to talk about my pet peeve.
4287139
Point taken. And I guess Palmer would fit: she certainly didn't seem to believe in magic beforehand, but, hey, magic's right there, isn't it? Better get on with things.
4287352
Who do you have in mind?
4287404
I will grant you that it is a minor blemish on an otherwise excellent movie. Far from being the worst example.
However, I disagree with your argument. Yes, what he had proof of was aliens and gods. Fair enough. But since it is likely that he didn't believe in Thor or aliens (or at least these specific aliens) before, having seen them come out of a hole in the sky may have upset his general sangfroid regarding the limits of the possible.
Further, the leap from gods to magic is not that wide. I mean, Thor flies by swinging his hammer which, incidentally, nobody else can pick up. That looks very... magic-y to me. If that happened in our world I'd be busily reexamining what I think I know about physics and would probably default to a weary extreme empiricism.
4287407
Oh, SF is ever so bad at predicting future tech. And not just because they cannot figure out technical details, either. I mean, yeah, sure there's a lot of misunderstanding of that about, certainly, but the key reason they suck at it is that they fail to think of getting from here to there. It's like the smart house. We have bits of that tech, but nothing like the House of Tomorrow™. In fact the House of Tomorrow™ turned out to be quite a bit like the House of Today. Occasionally it was the House of Today because, of course, a properly built brick house will last for a long time. And even if people could afford to build all of their kit inside the walls, and solve all the problems of cooling, powering, controlling, and so on, how on Earth do you repair and or replace the various bits? With a masonry drill? Ah, but nothing ever gets broken in the Future™.
4287452
Possibly. It happens post Iron Man 2. That much we can be certain of, but not how long past Iron Man 2.
You get extra points simply for the Girl Genius plug. Hopefully you have piqued the interest of someone who has never read that wonderful story.
Oh, and good blog.
Hollywood writers need to have the debunked skeptic in this movie because how else are they supposed to take Strange down a peg? (I mean, besides ruining his hands and taking all his money) Dude's a brilliant surgeon and rich, and Hollywood movies requires any character with a PhD to be put in his or her place and be shown to be arrogant and unfeeling at least once, or the audience can't
feel better thanrelate to him.Hollywood has been pumping our movies and TV shows with a strong dose of anti-establishment populism for decades, and as far as I can tell it has had absolutely no negative side effects on the public, nor will it ever.
That brings to mind something that Dr. Jacob Bronowski once said:
It's said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken."
The argument as to why Strange might be incredulous to what he's being shown while living in the Marvel world is pretty plain, honestly. He might have had alien gods fighting outside his window, hell, he might have operated on one for all we know, but at the end of the day:
1) He is a medical doctor, with all of the knowledge and history of that profession entailed.
2) It's him who needs healing, and he is going to be rather critical about what kind of treatment is offered to him, no matter how desperate he gets, because
3) New Age medicine is, depending on the practice and practicioner, bullshit at least 85% of the time, and sometimes quite dangerous as well. Aliens in New York doesn't change this any more than it disproves the moon landing. If superhumans appeared one day, I wouldn't assume science had stopped existing and jump off a roof in defiance of gravity. Strange is an educated man, and has pretty good incentive not to start believing anything and everything just because some previously held assumptions have been proven false at some point, somewhere.
4) This is really on the Ancient One for wanting to have a giggle at the nonbeliever and not showing him. I mean, she could have just done the sparky thing once as an attention-getter, and instead she opens a very unimpressive book and waits for Strange's reaction. Yes, of course he got riled up. She flat-out provoked him into that gift shop line for dramatic effect. Which, admittedly has been the hallmark of magicians, priests and martial artists since we were hunter-gatherers, but kind of makes her a jerk for deliberately opening with vapid games.
5) Oh yeah, there was the bit where he spent his last dime and broke his last treasured possession getting to Nepal, and searched for weeks until he was destitute and despairing, only to find this.
Now, given the above, would you have bought that line at face value?
4289698
A brilliant sentiment from a brilliant man. I offer as contribution a video clip of the above: it adds a certain something when you hear it said.
4290106
Not at face value, no. But he should have gone through this when he started. It's him believing he's found a cutting edge clinic that gets to me because he was explicitly told this was a mystical thing. By a man who is living proof of someone somewhere healing the unhealable.
And, yeah, the Ancient One did the Arrogant Kung Fu teacher thing which annoys the living crap out of me[1], but that's a different trope.
What I might have said (emotions aside) and what you'd expect a stone cold genius like Dr. Strange to say is "I've looked into acupuncture, and have found it to be uniformly bunk. Are you saying otherwise?"
[1] I teach for a living. I can attest that an attitude like that is the worst possible way of teaching something to someone.
4290300
Whoooo boy, brilliant doesn't even begin to cover it.
I would have liked the story to focus more on Strange's skepticism. Even as a bad/imperfect skeptic he was caricatured. It was brought up and dealt with too quickly. Ah well.
What I find interesting about skepticism is that hardly anybody is ever skeptical of it.
All's I noticed is how the Cloak of Levitation is basically the Chest from Discworld.
Which would make Strange a sort of Rincewind: a flawed and some ways unworthy fellow caught up in titanic events. Fits.
Also, needed more Groundhog Day;
"Dormammu--I've come to bargain..."
"Dormammu--don't drive angry..."
"Dormammu--babe, I got you babe..."
4289698
Ooh, and he was doing so well up to the point where started quoting Cromwell.
4287139
Already happened. The Big Bang Theory. Not the show, the actual theory.
First posited by a Catholic Priest. Everybody else was all LOL XTIAN THIS SOUNDS LIKE STUPID BIBLE STUFF.
Now that it's widely accepted, nobody wants to talk about that. But it happened.
4309111
He explains why he chose that quote in his interview with Michael Parkinson.
The reason being, that it seemed to encapsulate the sentiment he was trying to describe:
"I beseech to you [...] think it possible you may be mistaken."
4309769
No. I mean Parkinson was doing so well until he tried to refute the Nazis by quoting Oliver Cromwell. Who hated Catholics and Irish about as much as Hitler hated Jews and Gypsies.
Then there was Cromwell's whole governnent-by-religious-dictatorship thing...