Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The camera runs the corridor before she does. Low, fast, a few feet off the floor, tearing through rubble toward the men who are about to die. It is not Wanda's point of view. It is not anyone's. Sam Raimi built that shot in 1981 for The Evil Dead, where it was the unseen thing in the woods, and he has never given it up. Here it arrives ahead of a grieving mother in a Marvel movie and works exactly as well. Start there and the whole film opens.

The unowned first person is Raimi's contribution to the grammar. Most horror hands you a killer's eyes. Raimi hands you an appetite with no eyes behind it, a hunger that has learned to move like a camera. He proved it could survive inside a studio superhero picture in Spider-Man 2, in the hospital, where the Doc Ock massacre is a full Evil Dead set piece wearing a Marvel budget. Multiverse of Madness scales that proof to feature length: canted angles, push-ins that lunge, Bob Murawski cutting on the shock instead of the beat. John Mathieson lights it out of Caligari, high contrast and unstable geometry, the expressionist conviction that objects hold a life of their own that isn't organic. Which is why a corpse gets up here wearing the souls of the damned like a cloak, and it plays gorgeous rather than cheap.

But the thing that camera is chasing is stranger than a monster. Gilles Deleuze split cinema in two. In the movement-image, someone perceives a situation and acts, the action settles it, and the cuts serve that chain. In the time-image, action stops settling anything and you feel time directly, as a shape rather than a measure of movement. Blockbusters are the last great fortress of the movement-image, and this one is built as a chase: a protector, a hunted girl who can punch holes between worlds, an implacable pursuer.

And then the premise eats the structure. The multiverse is not an action idea. It is a time idea, and Deleuze named it decades ago: peaks of present. Not flashback, which puts the past safely in its place. Several presents at once, mutually contradictory, none of them a memory and none of them the draft the others revise. Deleuze found it in Robbe-Grillet, in films almost nobody saw. Marvel found it in a release schedule. Cumberbatch plays it straight down the middle, modulating between an arrogant Strange, a corrupted one, a reflective one, with no original among them.

This is the lens worth arguing for, because it turns the film's most-mocked quality into its most interesting one. The usual charge is clutter, too many worlds too cheaply earned. That is a plot complaint, and plot is the wrong instrument. The large-form action-image needs one thing above all: a situation that presses until a single decisive act transforms it. This film keeps the shape and quietly removes the guarantee. If your choice is being made differently somewhere else, right now, forever, the decisive act loses its monopoly on mattering. Watch what happens to Strange's arc under that pressure. It stops being about winning and becomes a question about whether he can be happy, and whether the need for control that made him useful has been the cost all along.

Deleuze called this whole family the powers of the false, and it has a hero: the forger. Not a liar. Someone who exists as a series, each version making a truth rather than finding one. Strange arrives as a series. The reanimated corpse of one. The corrupted one. The one who agrees to what he refused an hour ago. The late duel fought with musical notation is the joke made literal, two versions of the same man attacking each other with competing scores for the same scene, image and cut and music locked together. Mutually exclusive versions, all presented as true, none demoted to hypothesis.

There is one passage where the film says all of this without dialogue. Strange and America are hurled through realities, and one of them flattens them into paint. Not characters in a world. Pigment, smeared. Deleuze's term for a space that stops functioning as a setting for action and becomes a pure affective fragment is any-space-whatever, and the transit montage is a string of them, each universe held a second, none of them habitable. It is the most abstract thing in any Marvel film and it lasts about as long as a sneeze.

Wanda runs on the oldest circuit in Deleuze's system, the impulse-image. Not psychology. Appetite. A world where drives erupt through the social surface and drag everything down a slope that does not run back up. The Darkhold is the perfect object for it, a fetish in the strict sense, a thing charged with compulsive force that does the wanting on her behalf, whispering and crunching under the sound design. Every impulse-image is a descent, and Olsen plays the descent rather than the villainy: a woman walking through rubble toward children she imagined. The engine of the film is that you can still hear the love running underneath the hunger.

Then the dreamwalk. Deleuze's crystal-image is his loveliest idea and the hardest to state plainly, so let the film do it: a crystal is an image where the thing and its reflection trade places fast enough that you can no longer say which is real. The mirror dimension is training wheels. Possession across worlds is the real article. She takes another body and wears it toward a life some version of her is already living, and the film declines to tell you which one is the image. Recent scholars, not Deleuze, call this kind of digital cinema the neuro-image, a film that moves through a mind and assembles itself from recombinable parts. Dreamwalking is that idea given a body to hurt.

The Illuminati sequence is where the film does something to narrative worth naming. Deleuze's relation-image is meaning that lives in the audience rather than the frame; you supply the connection and the film counts on it. The cameos are pure relation-image, and the dossier is blunt about it: the shock comes from casting as much as from writing. Nothing onscreen explains why those faces should land. Marvel had spent fourteen years building the habit Deleuze calls the mark, see this and expect that. The multiverse is the demark, the anomaly that snaps the chain and forces interpretation. The franchise found out that its continuity had never been a plot structure. It was a time structure.

The debts are specific and worth knowing. Darkman in 1990 was Raimi's first comic-book property shot as gothic horror, with Elfman's operatic scoring pushed forward the way it is again here. Evil Dead II supplies the register nobody else in the MCU can play, the ghoul gag that frightens and delights on the same frame. Drag Me to Hell supplies the PG-13 method, grotesque bodily assault staged by implication. What the film did to the art is modest but real: it showed that the most industrially controlled format in cinema can carry a director's grammar intact, organizing the images rather than decorating them, and it walked a time-image concept into the most action-bound genre we have, where it refused to sit still.

Watch it again for the camera. Not the plot, which you know, and not the cameos, which were spoiled years ago. Watch for the shots that belong to nobody, the ones that arrive before the character and get too low, too close. Ask each time whose eyes those are. The film keeps answering that they are not eyes. They belong to something that wants, and in a story where every version of you is out there wanting something slightly different, that may be the only point of view with a claim on all of them.