There is a moment in Doctor Strange when Benedict Cumberbatch despondently leans, arms outstretched, against a rain-beaten penthouse window. He has his back to us, and hangs his head. For a second he appears headless, and we watch his hands as if they are all that matter.
The film quickly trains us to follow his hands, for Stephen Strange can perform the most technical of surgeries with his fingers. His snarky ego revolves around his professional success. When Strange’s Lamborghini accidentally crashes and destroys the nerves in his fingers, it wasn’t because he was drunk, but because he was distracted by potential research. Now, when he does not plaster them against a window, his hands quiver. Science fails him, and on hearing about a mystical place of healing in Kathmandu, he quickly abandons his biological worldview and journeys.
Much like Christian Bale in Batman Begins, Cumberbatch trains in hilly Buddhist-ish environs. Instead of Liam Neeson, he gets the radiant Tilda Swinton – the Ancient One who teaches him to have out-of-body experiences and invoke spells to combat his own demons and those that reside in the Dark Dimension. All of this is in line with the comic books. Except the stunning Swinton. She’s not Asian, but glows with the humbleness and beauty that all enlightened Asian people are supposed to possess. When you see Swinton’s nimble arms choreograph magical fire chakras and physically deliver them to large villains, you feel an adrenalin rush. You look at her hands and then up to her quiet determined face. This is how it should be.
Despite being similar to the comic books, the film is remarkably different in one practical aspect: it’s a hit. The strips created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko were not. The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Spider-man and Captain America were all tremendous successes on paper. Not so for Doctor Strange. There was no biff, pow, bang. When the Hulk assumes his manic form, he smashes, and just in case we don’t follow what he’s doing, he likes to say “Hulk Smash.” Iron Man shoots fire out of his palms – he has literal handguns. What makes Thor a God is his hammer. Spider-man shoots webs out of his hands, draws villains near and beats them quickly. Captain America uses even his shield to hit.
The therapeutic pleasure of easy-to-depict hand-induced violence is central to the superhero canon. The anthropologist David Graeber cheekily wonders why superheroes are so unimaginative. His answer is that slightly rebellious adolescent white boys must channel their violence to simple expressions of authority, and against an overflow of imagination and rebellion. It is indeed strange that Superman doesn’t consider solving problems of world hunger and waste management, but prefers instead to punch and burn.
My point is not that there is an intimate relationship between power, physical violence and identity, but that it is easy to depict and relate to a hero who can punch. Thus, when the Dr Strange comic books experimented with hallucinatory artwork (a couple of people in the audience chuckled with achievement when they recognised Stan Lee in the film reading Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception), it was difficult to relate to a sorcerer-hero who invoked Agamoto and abstractly manipulated demons. Admittedly, the heroism was depicted by drawing halos around the doctor’s hands, but it somehow did not feel real. With the artwork and the narrative seeking to divert our attention to the mysteries of space and time, where was the light temporary excitement of a punch, and the fantasy that a punch can work wonders?
In other words, the good doctor did not seem therapeutic. The shift from the comic book to the graphic novel, however, has been kind to Strange. In one not-so-subtle Oedipal tale from 1989, Strange helps the villainous Doom rescue his mother’s soul from Mephistopheles. More recently, in the 2016 Way of the Weird, Strange (who looks more like Shia LaBeouf than Cumberbatch) finds his job of curing people of intergalactic bacteria both strenuous and pleasurable. He explicitly makes his story about madness and therapy: “Next time you’re walking to work and see some weird guy on the curb, staring off into space, mumbling into space…maybe throw him a couple of bucks, you never know he could be a powerful wizard. He could be saving your life.”
Thus, the guy who loses his ability to work after an accident and retreats into the sanctum sanctorum and talks about Vishanti and Oshtur may well have gone mad. He may also just be a hero. In a stroke of brilliance, a waving of fingers in a sidewalk is likened to throwing an intergalactic punch.
A film, however, is not a novel. Can Strange be a hero in a film if his hands don’t punch?
Most reviews praise the stunning visuals of the film, likening them to The Matrix and Inception. This gives us the impression that technology is advanced enough to make a good Strange film, and that’s enough. What such reviews fail to point out is that The Matrix and Inception had earthy fights. In fact, the slow-motion punches, swordplay, martial arts and gunfights are integral to The Matrix. It’s all very well to say mystical things like “There is no spoon,” but that must be followed by excellent kung-fu in a battle between humans and computers.
Strange engages in several physical activities in the film. He trains in martial arts, he physically fights with a magic chain, he runs a lot (despite wearing a cloak of levitation). In a clever battle,Strange manipulates time. But when he does so, there are cool concentric laser-beamish circles around his hands. The strength of the film is that it seems to say: even if you can’t use your hands, it’s okay. Technology is not an abstraction, it’s very much about the hands.
The moment that really stayed with me in the film is the mere possibility of Cumberbatch and Swinton tenderly holding hands on a balcony. Not violently or sexually, but the event of touch is itself the intimacy. When the film moves away from hand-held therapy to light and sound, it becomes another silly Marvel film. Interestingly, when hands are only meant for hitting, then – unlike a comic book or the novelty of punch-therapy in the earlier Marvel films – the hands become a part of computer-generated light and sound. They don’t seem like the truth of Mao Zedong’s calligraphy – replicated in countless violently mystical martial arts films – where power, physical violence and identity go hand-in-hand.
The psychoanalyst Darian Leader ends his recent book on Hands: What we do with them and why with a wonderful anecdote. He mentions that if you phone Apple customer service, an automated voice responds to your call and asks you automated questions. But in the pauses, you hear a computer-generated sound of manual typing, thus revealing once again that Apple knows us better than anyone else. Leader mentions that Adam and Eve were cursed to work with their hands after sampling the forbidden fruit, and it may seem that constant Tinder swipes and rapid typing of banal messages are alienating us from the rootedness of working with our hands. On the contrary, the centrality of our hands reveals that our cursed exploitation may well be the only thing we enjoy.