Doctor Strange's Frustrating Asian Representation
Doctor Strange's Frustrating Asian Representation
How ‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ Continues to Reinforce Asian Stereotypes and Misrepresent BIPOC
Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the sequel to the 2016 film Doctor Strange, will release in theaters in just a few days, and the hype is all over social media. The character Doctor Stephen Strange, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, has only grown in popularity among fans due to his appearances in the Avengers and Spider-Man films in recent years. The film will also feature fan-favorite character Scarlet Witch and introduce America Chavez, which is anticipated to draw even more viewers in.
Though I’m a big fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), I’m not particularly looking forward to this installment. Doctor Strange, as both a film and comic franchise, has a history of appropriating and misrepresenting Asian cultures, places, and people. In Marvel Studios’ misguided attempts to resolve issues from the original comics as they adapted the story for film, they created more issues that made the cinematic Doctor Strange world problematic in new ways. This new film will likely perpetuate the same issues, in addition to other problems in the casting of the other characters.
The History of Doctor Strange
Doctor Stephen Strange, created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, made his first comics appearance in Strange Tales #110 in 1963. He was not explicitly stated to be white (or any race) until a few issues in, but his original appearance is made to look like a caricature of an Asian man.
Strange’s mentor, the Ancient One, portrayed by the white actress Tilda Swinton in the first Doctor Strange film (more on that in a bit), did not look much better.
As shown in the first film, white American surgeon Stephen Strange travels to Asia in search of a miracle after experiencing a career-ending physical injury to his hands. He eventually reaches Kamar-Taj, where the Ancient One agrees to train him in magic that appears to be strongly based on an amalgamation of different Asian folklore. Strange conducts a variety of activities drawing from various Asian cultures and religions: he learns about acupuncture points and chakras from the Ancient One, practices martial arts, reads books written in Sanskrit, and so on. Soon enough, Strange becomes one of the strongest sorcerers, as he saves all his fellow sorcerers from the all-powerful villain Dormammu, who wants to absorb the world into the Dark Dimension.
There are all kinds of issues to unpack in this premise, but most of them stem from one root problem: a distinct lack of Asian representation.
Orientalism
Strange’s story is yet another example of orientalism, which, in media, refers to using features of Asian cultures in a story as an aesthetic or backdrop, usually for non-Asian characters; this is especially prominent in stories where a white protagonist enters a “foreign” world and rises to become the strongest person in it before saving the people native to that world, thus erasing their agency.
Doctor Strange suggests that the very Asians who first mastered this sorcery, grounded in their own cultural and religious traditions, need white outsiders to come use this sorcery to save them. Considering the real, historical context of predominantly white countries entering Asian countries and causing irreversible harm through colonialism, this narrative is ignorant at best, and outright perpetuating and trying to justify centuries of violence at worst.
Orientalism also further promotes the stereotype of Asian countries, cultures, and peoples being “exotic” and perpetually foreign to people from Western countries. This is especially apparent in Doctor Strange, when you compare his origin story and supernatural powers to other famous Marvel heroes, argues Indian Canadian writer Sonya Lalli:
Captain America has superhuman strength. Thor’s powers are otherworldly in origin, and Iron Man’s come from a tech-forward fusion arc reactor. Doctor Strange and his new cohorts, however, are sorcerers – and their fantastical powers are rooted in the western world’s cherry-picked perception of eastern spirituality…So the question is: Did Strange really have to go all the way to Nepal to realize that he was an egoist? No.
Could Kamar-Taj not have been a nondescript temple somewhere in the United States, and the sorcery books written in English, or perhaps a fictional ancient language? Yes.
Could their magical powers not have come from non-denominational spirituality or mindfulness? Yes.
These issues are exacerbated by the fact that there is a noticeable lack of Asian representation in the cast, especially South Asians, despite the story taking place in Nepal. This completely disconnects the practices Strange engages in from the Asian people who originally created them. The only Asian character present is Wong, who is East Asian (despite the South Asian setting) and portrayed by Benedict Wong; Wong is repeatedly portrayed as weaker than Strange throughout their appearances in the MCU. Besides Wong and the antagonist Mordo, who is portrayed by Chiwetel Ejiofor, the rest of the main cast is white.
As mentioned earlier, in the comics, the Ancient One was originally a Tibetan man. Director Scott Derrickson and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige both believed that casting Tilda Swinton and creating a whitewashed, “Celtic” Ancient One was the only way to avoid perpetuating the stereotypes the original Ancient One embodied: he was the sage, old Asian man mentoring and supporting the protagonist, possessing mystic Fu-Manchu-like abilities.
However, the film’s screenwriter C. Robert Cargill also attributed their decision to the political relationship between Tibet and China: “The Ancient One was a racist stereotype who comes from a region of the world that is in a very weird political place. He originates from Tibet, so if you acknowledge that Tibet is a place and that he’s Tibetan, you risk alienating one billion people [because the Chinese government would consider the film too political].”
That same reasoning is likely why another major aspect of Doctor Strange’s origin was changed in the film: the location of Kamar-Taj, where Strange trains under the Ancient One, was changed from Tibet to Nepal. Between the location change and whitewashing the Ancient One, the film completely erased Tibet from Strange’s story, which several Tibetans protested.
In 2021, Feige admitted that casting a white person for the role was a mistake while doing press for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, a film praised for its Asian representation: “It was a wake up call to say, ‘Well, wait a minute, is there any other way to figure it out? Is there any other way to both not fall into the cliché and cast an Asian actor?’ And the answer to that, of course, is yes.” Marvel Studios “heard the criticisms” and “processed the feedback as a major lesson,” according to the 2021 book The Story of Marvel Studios.
However, the damage inflicted by these decisions has continued to impact MCU projects since 2016; for example, Swinton reprised her role in Avengers: Endgame in 2019. Though Feige and the studio claim to have learned “a major lesson” about casting BIPOC, the Multiverse of Madness castings say otherwise.
The Multiverse of Whitewashing and “Lightwashing”
Though Multiverse of Madness is far from Scarlet Witch’s first on-screen appearance, the gradual shift of further centering a white, Christian Wanda Maximoff, played by Elizabeth Olsen, in the MCU has exacerbated the issues with this casting and adaptation of her character that began with Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015.
In Marvel comics canon, Wanda Maximoff and her twin brother Pietro Maximoff—who appeared in both Age of Ultron and the show WandaVision, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Evan Peters—are both Roma and Jewish. The Maximoff twins’ parentage has a complex history, but they were originally the children of the iconic X-Men villain Magneto, who is Jewish and a Holocaust survivor. They were raised in the Romani community by their mother’s family. The Roma are a historically nomadic people who originated in northern India.
Olsen is neither Jewish nor Roma, and Marvel Studios further committed to their insensitive portrayal of an iconic Jewish and Roma character with their new backstory for Wanda: she voluntarily worked for the infamous Nazi organization Hydra. (Olsen has also used the “g-slur,” a pejorative that specifically refers to the Romani, when talking about Wanda’s wardrobe.) Her bedroom in Captain America: Civil War originally had crucifixes on her wall, a traditional symbol of Catholicism and Christianity depicting Jesus Christ on the cross, though they aren’t visible in the film.
As Wanda continues to appear in film and TV projects, she moves further away from her canon heritage in the comics, often in a way that instead misrepresents and harms both Roma and Jewish people—and Multiverse of Madness will likely perpetuate this issue by continuing Wanda’s story. For example, though last year’s WandaVision came out six years after Age of Ultron, it added new information to and even changed certain elements of Wanda’s MCU backstory in ways that only compounded the original problems, such as including scenes introducing Wanda’s white parents and showing her working for Hydra. Because Multiverse of Madness is directly continuing Wanda’s story from WandaVision, it feels likely that more and similar problems will arise.
America Chavez, a popular character from the comics, will be making her cinematic debut in the film, but her casting has a glaring issue as well: America Chavez is Afro-Latina, specifically Puerto Rican, and Xochitl Gomez, who will be portraying her, is Mexican and has a lighter complexion than America typically has in her comic appearances.
America’s Blackness is an integral part of her character, and many BIPOC, especially Afro-Latine people, feel represented by her. By bringing her to the big screen in this way, Marvel is alienating the very audience she’s always represented.
“As happy as I am to see someone of Mexican indigenous descent getting a spotlight, it shouldn’t have come at the cost of the representation of darker skin Latinos and Afro-Latinos,” T. Lopez wrote in The Oarsman. “Representation matters, but that doesn’t mean Latinos are interchangeable. American media always portrays Latinos as just one shade of light tan, Mexican, and as something bad. Even though America is a superhero, it feels like her on-screen portrayal is falling back into old tropes.”
Though we aren’t sure what the future for America is in the MCU yet, it will forever be affected by this initial casting decision. Even if Feige turns around in five years and admits that this casting was a mistake, just as he did with the Ancient One over five years after it happened, it won’t change the fact that America was lightwashed in this film and will still be lightwashed in every future project she appears in.
Representation Behind the Scenes
Though so much of the Doctor Strange franchise takes from Asian cultures, there are no Asians involved in the highest levels of production for the films: the writers, directors, and producers of both films are all white. As important as having Asian and BIPOC representation on-screen is, it’s just as important to have that same representation behind the screen, creating the story, characters, and world.
For example, if Marvel Studios was so concerned about preventing the Ancient One from being an Asian stereotype, then why did they not turn to Asian writers and directors for this task? Who better to take a character with a racist origin and transform them into a new hero people can root for, than the very people this character’s original story misrepresented?
Take Shang-Chi for example: Asian creatives were at the helm of this film, such as Destin Daniel Cretton, who directed and co-wrote the film. The original Shang-Chi comics featured racist and stereotypical portrayals of Asians, but the film’s Asian creative team completely transformed the story into an iconic movie with intentional and thoughtful Asian representation. Why wasn’t the same effort put into transforming Doctor Strange?
Multiverse of Madness is a disappointing step back for the MCU following the amazing Asian representation we saw in their most recent films, such as Ned and his Lola in Spider-Man: No Way Home and Gemma Chan, Kumail Nanjiani, and Don Lee’s leading roles in Eternals.
Though a lot of the issues in the Doctor Strange franchise originate from the early 2010s (before Marvel Studios seemed to care about BIPOC representation), Multiverse of Madness is, quite literally, about different versions of characters from different universes. If they wanted to, they actually could solve all their casting issues here by the film’s own in-universe rules, such as introducing properly cast versions of these characters to replace the inaccurate ones—but we know they won’t.
Do you think Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness will try to address or resolve any of these issues? How do you think Marvel Studios could’ve “fixed” Doctor Strange? We’d love to hear what you think! Thanks for reading!
To learn more about the diverse and complex histories of the characters discussed:
The Atlantic | The Problem With 'The Avengers' Casting Scarlet Witch as a Blonde
Twitter | A look back at Doctor Strange's incredibly racist origin story
Time | How Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings Reimagines Its Characters' Racist Comic-Book Origins
The Oarsman | The Problem with America Chavez’s Casting
Medium | Doctor Orientalism: Marvel’s History of Anti-Asian Narratives
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A South Asian person deserves to be Doctor Strange not East Asian. I’m really sick and tired of East Asians constantly erasing and taking credit for our cultures and getting away with it because they are more digestible. It has been way too many times. Tibetans are always seen as better.