Emma Peel Sessions 16 – Strange Overtones

Way too fucking long Mighty Boosh review is up in the middle of a massive all-star Television of the Weak, which reads like it was written in fucking e-prime, even though I still use “is” often. It reads like I’m working with a limited vocabulary (and dude I totally wrote the word “ephonious” into a comic script my vocabulary is pretty good) what the fuck is wrong with me?

Dr. Strange unproduced screenplay by Alex Cox (1989) / Dead Man written and directed by Jim Jarmusch (1995) / Walker directed by Alex Cox and written by Rudy Wurlitzer (1987) / … yeah it’s gonna be a long one.

- – -

Co-written with Stan Lee, based on his Marvel Comics character. Doctor Strange was my favourite superhero, and his adversary Dormamu my preferred villain. Stan is a great writing partner. Starts in New York, goes to the Fourth Dimension, and ends on Easter Island, where Stan had always wanted a showdown.Very old-fashioned. It was almost made by an LA company called Regency. But they distributed via Warner Bros, who were in a dispute with Marvel Comics over merchandising, and Warners nixed it. Probably too pagan to be made today.

- Alex Cox, on his website, where you can read this script for free.

So yeah that’s a real thing. It’s not a hoax, not a thing I’m making up to prove a point (uh, at least not again). Alex Cox, the guy who wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and wrote and directed Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, and Walker. He sat down with Stan Lee and hammered out a Dr. Strange story that includes Strange, Wong, Dormammu, Baron Mordo, and the Ancient One – then proceeded to write a script which went as far out as possible without changing or distorting those elements.  Weirdly it presupposes both the Invisibles vol. 2 and the modern superhero film. It’s literally a film that could not be made in the time period it was written in, and the best part is the only thing that stopped it was corporate infighting. It’s really forward looking for what you can do with a superhero film – it’s not an origin story, it’s not about how the hero inspires anyone, or about revenge, or about superpowers even. All the baggage thats accepted in any superhero comic related film in the 30 years between Superman and Iron Man isn’t here. Hell, even Robocop – the best superhero movie ever – is an origin story. Cox dug Robocop quite a lot it seems – or he dug Dark Knight Returns – because there are echoes of it all through this Dr. Strange.

The most amazing thing about Cox is that he has the ability to deliver you a wholly satisfying genre experience while undermining it completely. Verhoeven does the same thing, but he is far more successful at taking these things seriously. Cox, on the other hand likes to cram as much politicized counterthought into the periphery as possible. This movie is green as hell, anti-war, anti-corporate, there’s no ignoring all the points the guy is making. And yeah, there’s shamanic indians (native americans natch), but it was the 80s, and he does it remarkably inoffensively. If Cox were to direct this, it’d be easy to see that getting expanded even further. He was coming off of Walker.

I found this script entirely by accident. I’ve been on a big western kick lately, which I guess started off with me watching The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford two months ago, and I’ve gone through a lot – all of Leone’s mostly and a few others. And after a while I rewatched El Topo for the first time in a decade and began reading about “Acid Westerns“, which is a phrase with way more power than the handful of movies that it describes. Unattributed in the wikipedia article is this great summation -

“In the traditional Western, the journey west is seen as a road to liberation and improvement, but in the Acid Western, it is the reverse, a journey towards death; society becomes nightmarish.”

which is fucking brilliant, even if it doesn’t quite fit the movies it’s talking about. But the only two films that were called “acid westerns”  beyond the 70s were Jim Jarmusch’s elegiac Dead Man and Cox’s mindfuck of an anachronism, Walker.

I had seen Dead Man once when I was in highschool and not gotten into it. A few years later, watching it is kind of revelatory. Ghost Dog is more obvious in  it’s genre mashup charms crammed together with it’s soul searching looseness. Dead Man is more subtle. The lead character’s personality is eroded and he kills without even trying, until he finally becomes one with death. It’s a really beautiful film, philosophically and visually, but its also very funny and visceral in equal measure.

The thing is, as singular as Dead Man is, it’s in the long line of Lone Man films that Jarmusch has made his share of. It’s got enough similarities with Point Blank and the Long Goodbye and Le Samourai and Tokyo Drifter and Blast of Silence and Alphaville and Yojimbo and For a Few Dollars More and Blade Runner and The Limey all down the line. It’s maybe the loosest formula in film history but the singular minded man, usually a foreigner who often has to kill a shitload of people and what it does to him inside and out  — that’s a story that’s easy to make sense of, no matter how far it’s pushed into abstraction. Walker isn’t like that at all. Walker is the cinematic equivalent of getting kicked in the teeth and then having a history lesson beat into you. It’s pretty telling that Cox has become persona non grata in Hollywood following it’s release.

It’s a Monty Python film without the jokes, or a Terry Gilliam film without the unflinching love of the outcast and the insane. It’s a harsh, brutal screed of a movie. The narration is unreliable, the portrayal inaccurate, and story biased. It’s an allegory for something that’s happening right now (or to us, then), using the true story of  William Walker and his invasion/coup of Nicaragua in the 1850s and drawing a parallel to the present day by SHOOTING IN NICARAGUA in 1986/87 and then staying for a year to edit the film. It starts off as the story of a deluded but righteous man convinced to do something insane by the richest man on the planet and by the hour mark it’s about a man’s complete and utter descent into insanity as he gives up everything he professed to believe, alienate the people who trust him, and burns the entire country to the ground. He goes from stealing the presidency to enforcing slavery to cannibalism, and ends with a speech from a pulpit where he says it is the United States’ “destiny to control you people”. If Walker is meant to be America, then we are a hypocritical, bloodthirsty, opportunistic, idiotic, singleminded, impotent fuck who cannot and will not let things go.  You want an Iraq War parallel – that jump isn’t hard to cross. Python-esque anachronisms (WW1 weapons, cars, news magazines, a news crew, Richard Edson playing a drummer \m/ ) continually shove your face into the unreality of the situation. Its an angry film, and Ed Harris plays Walker as a man who’s rage rises from a well deeper than the Marianas trench and barely keeps it under control.  His performance mirrors the film itself, which is so angry that the deus ex machina at the end isn’t for convinence but to tell everyone to go fuck themselves for expecting any kind of resolution. The music is pretty great, all Joe Strummer.

So I watched Walker, then wanted to read as much about it as I could, eventually ending up on Alex Cox’s website, which has a pretty huge script archive. No Walker, but his and Tod Davies brilliant pre-I’m Not There biopic Keith Moon Was Here is there, and Repo Man with the original ending, and there’s a Dr. Strange script just sitting there. I’ve never heard about Cox writing Dr. Strange, and it’s the kind of thing I should have heard of. I knew that Coppola tries to adapt it in the 70s and I knew that before Patton Oswalt brought it up. But this was unheard of. Cox seemed like a strange choice, but after reading the script it’s difficult to think of anyone else directing this script (which could have happened) or to think of someone other than him coming along to do it today (which will NEVER happen). But it’s interesting because it’s one of those things that’s equal parts personal project and wholly respective of Steve Ditko – maybe in a way that Spiderman films are not. It’s forward looking, but it’s also the product of it’s time. It’s written in the same climate as the shitty Tim Burton Batman films, Highlander, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Time Bandits – that’s what this film would look like if it had been made. It’s something to think about when you think of Ditko mindscapes populated with heavy rubber bodies that run on lots of animatronics and matte-painted backgrounds. I’m sure that if Cox had directed he would have made it into something gorgeous along the lines of Gilliam’s then-output, but if he hadn’t this thing would be ugly in an Ice Pirates way. It’s a strange thing to think about, the final product in comparison to the script, and how there’s no way that they were ever going to get the budget for this.

The film is set in the future (for the time, 1989), at the cusp of the millennium. Baron Mordo and his company have ushered in a world of technological marvel – Manhattan has a bullet train to LA. Stephen Strange is a world-famous skeptic author. We first see him as Wong watches his appearance on Oprah. Strange’s crippled-surgeon origin is dealt with entirely through dialog, which is pretty brave considering it’s the best of the 60s Marvel origins. And we’re dropped into a story about Dr. Strange long after he’s become a master of the mystic arts but before he gets the title of Sorcerer Supreme. It’s Strange in a transitional period – the Ancient One is still his boss when we come in. Going in I assumed that we’d be getting some pretty large flashback sequences which never really show up. What do you need to know? Dr. Strange is a magician and he’s trying to stop the bad guys, that’s it.

The best scene is probably Baron Mordo and his four demon accomplices sitting arguing around a boardroom, all of them turning into normal people once the secretary walks in. It’s a simple trick but the description made me think of Gilliam’s Fisher King, and the reality shift is a theme throughout. Gilliam and Cox share a lot of sensibilities, and it makes sense that Gilliam was called into pinch hit for Cox on Fear and Loathing, and this scene is pure Gilliam. Dormammu shows up first here too, depicted as a disembodied voice who affects the world around it (i.e. Mr. Shadow in the 5th Element), eventually frying a laptop.

And of course they give Strange a girlfriend — which had to happen I guess. Her side of the story is essentially Dana Barrett in Ghostbusters, albeit with a much more fantastical third act. She’s really just there to have someone to say “what the fuck” while Strange rattles off Stan Lee-isms and actual occult elements at equal measure, all while being played as a self-involved dick. She’s the most artificial element of the story, the audience identification character. Clearly the only element that’s been brought in to make sense of this world. Which is kind of double-edged because you need it and it sucks. The biggest plus is that they leave Wong alone, and he only speaks in fragmented english and treats everyone as a waste of his time. I prefer this to audience identification Wong, who is boring.

Cox strings the song “Fallin Rain” from Link Wray’s 1971 self-titled album throughout the film, which is inspired – it’s both the kind of song that seems random but takes on this great resonance with Strange and the overall story. Wray’s singing “and there’s no place on this planet where peace can be found”, war and madness. It’s a cool song and it works on the “foreboding” level, but Cox sees another layer, leading into the key scene in the entire script. Dormammu shows Strange a lush and heavily populated paradise and tells him “This is what Earth would be like if there were no people. Think about it.” – the subversive undercurrent in nearly every scene isn’t so much a political statement as it is an accusation of  humanity as inherently destructive. The world is overheating, children are dying, war is constant and people are willing to give into the powers that be for convenience. All of this is told to us through constant Robocop-style media saturation and Baron Mordo’s full autonomy in the world. Sure, it’s the villain saying this and he’s eventually defeated but it’s clear to see that Cox sides with Link Wray and Dormammu.

This works the way that Robocop works – it’s satisfying in a Hollywood Blockbuster way, and it’s got all the elements you need these films to have. Dr. Strange saves the earth from a thousand years of biblical apocalypse, beats the shit out the demons that beseige us, and saves the girl.  But while Cox has us entertained he crams in as much message as he can. He’s smart enough to make sure the bad guys are all corporate stand-ins, Dormammu communicates through technology, work in actual shamanic mysticism, global warming, the political state of China – it’s a delivery system for propaganda without ever stopping to give a bullshit ten minute speech about Alaskan oil derricks (thank you Steven Seagal). That’s whats so great about it – it never craps out and becomes either a message film or a stupid superhero movie. It straddles the line. There’s some really interesting sequences – Strange in his astral form witnessing the Ancient One’s death at the hands of a demonic riot cop in China, a chase scene in the desert, a battle with a swarm of insects over Manhattan, a half mystic/half-punchup with a physically deformed Baron Mordo at the foot of Dormammu’s throne, and a fully realized Ditko Dark Dimension (which is in no way possible to film unless the damn thing is animated), it’s very ambitious and rewarding on an entertainment level.

There’s also the urge while reading this to think “what if” about the film coming out  in 91 – because it skips ahead of the entire superhero boom to actually faithful work made by actual directors. Which we just got in the past few years, really. The idea of a truly auteur-driven superhero film that’s also faithful to the source material wasn’t even conceivable until five minutes ago and I’m not sure we’re 100% there even now.  The budgetary limitations that I’m sure would have massively altered the final product might not have even made it that. But it’s something to think about, for just a little before you watch a movie that actually got made.