Along side the live-action (largely CG-fueled) films of the last few years, Marvel has been licensing animated rights to its characters in the form of direct-to-DVD films. So far, we've had two Ultimate Avengers films and one Iron Man. The Ultimate Avengers betrays its origins in its name. It's based almost entirely on of the updated visuals and surprisingly self-conscious politics of The Ultimates, but unfortunately the film totally lacks that self-consciousness, producing instead a rather flat, boring version of characters who are interesting because they are so very problematic. The most recent addition to the animated films is an old favourite of mine, Doctor Strange.
As a kid, at some point, in and among the comics we had lying around the house was a pocket-sized compilation of Doctor Strange comics. It contained the origin story, with the Ancient, Mordo, and Wong, and Stephen Strange's injury, and the bizarre, nearly unpronounceable gods that Stan Lee invented for the series. To be honest, it didn't really grab me, at first. At that age, I was more interested in true-blue heroes like Superman or the squeaky-clean version of Batman that I still perceived in the Batman! TV show (which has, mercifully, been scrubbed from popular culture). Since then, though, Doctor Strange has become very interesting to me. It's yet another variation on the idea of a society of magicians who protect the mundane world from threats they don't even know exist, and there may very well be a Cold-War or pro-espionage subtext there. That implication is certainly at the surface of Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch, which has almost that exact same premise.
But the implication that this recent animated version of the character brought to mind for me was Orientalism, the exoticization of all things Eastern. Following the trends of the last few years, this Doctor Strange incorporates a great deal of wuxia and anime imagery. The sorcerers are dressed like the motley bands of wise-cracking warriors who populate Japanese and Hong-Kong films, both live-action and animated, and a lot of this film consists of vaguely HK-style fighting, which has not been a major element of any other version of Doctor Strange that I've ever seen. He doesn't hold a sword or deliver butterfly kicks. He instead holds his hands aloft in bizarre gestures and projects crackling magic energy. In this film, however, we are treated to the inevitable scenes of he and his teacher doing katas in the setting Sun, atop a Tibetan monastery.
What strikes me about this updating of the style of the character is that, from one point of view, it's no different from the Orientalism of the original, or for that matter the Shadow, the Flame, or dozens of other comics in which white men travel to the Far East and return with fantastic powers. Once again, whitey picks up the ancient wisdom of the East in a matter of only a few months and then re-enters Western society as the ultimate hybrid, superior to provincial Westerner, but also inherently superior to the Orientals who now crowd around him, a hierarchy made painfully clear by the fact that in the comics, Wong becomes practically his butler, even though he's Strange's senior in training and experience.
This new film alters the situation greatly. Wong is Strange's mentor, along with the Ancient, and the implication at the end is partnership, not servitude. The fantasy battle imagery of the film isn't invented by Westerners and projected onto the East, but instead taken from Eastern sources and reflected back at them. If we find the imagery of this Doctor Strange silly or insulting to Asian culture, then we should place the blame for it at least partially on current, Asian-based genres and styles (wuxia film, anime, manga, etc.).
I don't want to absolve the film of its orientalist roots because of a superficial make-over. There are still problems, here. The film still exoticizes. But much as I believe it's okay to sexualize sometimes (because sex is fun, damnit!), maybe it's okay to go off on flights of fancy using another culture's signifiers of mysticism and magic? At what point is it no longer white people appropriating Japanese and Chinese imagery, and just storytellers riffing on each other's work? Surely, it's possible to respectfully employ other culture's styles, to just have fun?
Posted by orion at August 18, 2007 2:41 PM