Doctor Strange and the Misogyny of Madness

“You break the rules and become the hero. I do it, I become the enemy. That doesn’t seem fair.”

Scarlet Witch, played by Elizabeth Olsen in Marvel’s most recent release, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, delivers this line in a whisper, with a calculated tilt of her head and the slightest tremble in her voice. She is talking to our titular hero, Dr. Stephen Strange, but it feels as if she is addressing a wider audience, like she is speaking to us in the theater seats, to everyone who has seen this same story play out countless times.

Woman gets power, is, of course, driven mad by said power, and must be killed. Because gods forbid a woman get a chance to redeem herself. Nope, she’s gotta die.

In one simple line Scarlet Witch lays out how it is, how it’s been, and how it’s going to be: Women with power are villainized and punished for their transgressions in ways that their male counterparts are not. Her self-aware soundbite invokes the likes of Jean Grey and Daenerys Targaryen, other heroines who grasped power and were violently and permanently put back in their place. Meanwhile, male villains like rakish mass-murder Loki Laufeyson scamper off to their sequels.

When this scene first saw light a few months ago in the trailer, it gave me hope that director Sam Raimi and writer Michael Waldron were going to finally address this tired trope, and do something different. Instead, on opening night as the credits rolled and Bruce Campbell’s hotdog-salesman cameo pulled one last laugh from the audience, I was left disappointed, though not really surprised.

They’d done it again. They’d taken a rich complicated character and reduced her to another Mad Queen, a Wicked Witch who, SPOILER ALERT, ends the film crushed under a mountain that she brings down on herself. I’m almost surprised a pair of ruby red slippers weren’t sticking out the bottom.

My disappointment isn’t that Scarlet Witch (known in her civilian clothes as Wanda Maximoff) is a villain. I love a good female antagonist, believe you me. It’s just that Both as a hero and as a villain, she is treated differently by creators than the superpowered men around her. Popular Narrative seems to always judge women, real and fictional alike, just that much harsher. No last shot at redemption. Female villains are just not afforded the same complexity and nuance as male villains.

Now back to the Madness. In the film, renowned wizard, Doctor Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), crosses paths with teenager and human-MacGuffin America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), who has the unique ability to jump between alternate universes at will (sort of). Poor America is being pursued by terrifying monsters for reasons unknown. To find out why, Doctor Strange turns to fellow magic user, Scarlet Witch for help, only to discover that it’s Wanda herself who is sending these demonic creatures to capture the young reality jumper. Wanda calmly explains that she just wants to access a reality where her sons are alive so she can be with them again. A reasonable desire — if not for the fact that Wanda is willing to kill as many people as it takes, America and her own alternate universe self included, to do so. And Oh Boy, does she kill a lot of people.

If this seems a little out of character to fans, that’s because it is. Didn’t we JUST watch Wanda spend all of last year’s incredibly successful WandaVision on Disney+ dealing with and processing her pain? During her 9-episode arc, she fights her way through all the stages of grief, from Denial to at last Acceptance. In the series finale, she finally finds the strength to make the right choice, and sacrifices the thing she wants most in the world, a life with her family, for the sake of helping others. This is a character who has put in the work to move forward, who has given up everything to be a better person, only for Marvel Studios to roll that back in the span of a five minute conversation.

Wanda isn’t the only Avenger to deal with grief on screen, though. Hunky action hero Thor Odinson also suffered tremendous losses in his own storyline, including losing his father, his mother, his brother, and his entire kingdom. In Avengers: Endgame, the god of thunder was shown drinking and gaming his way through his grief, but not once does he stray onto morally dubious ground.

Thor is set to bounce back from his trials in another colorful comedic action romp, Thor: Love and Thunder (coming this summer to a theater near you!), while Scarlet Witch is doomed to succumb to her trauma and an untimely end.

The reason given for Wanda’s sudden insatiable bloodlust? In her maternal desperation to see her children again, the Scarlet Witch begins using the Darkhold, a dangerous ancient text full of cursed magic, that “exacts a terrible price” on the user. Its evil power corrupts her and makes her forfeit her reason. And that’s ultimately the explanation: She’s gone mad with power. Because let’s be honest, the level of violence Wanda uses in the movie is an absolutely insane solution to a problem that could easily be solved by just…befriending America Chavez.

And here’s the sticking point: Doctor Strange also uses the Darkhold. Despite multiple warnings that he himself could be corrupted, Stephen casts a spell from the book of dark magic, reanimates a corpse in another universe, and conjures himself a cloak of dark spirits to ultimately defeat Scarlet Witch and Save the Multiverse. Yipee!

It’s exactly as Wanda described. For the very same crime that made her the enemy, he is made the hero. He might even get a cool (lame?) third eye out of the whole hypocritical ordeal.

It’s as simple as this: He is a Wizard, and she is a Witch.

The movie makes a point in distinguishing “Witchcraft” from the magic wielded by wizards. However, the only major discernable difference that I can see is that Wizards are (primarily) men, and Witches are (primarily) women. Sure, there are a few female Wizards running around in Strange’s universe. We can see them doing such varied activities such as standing behind the protagonists, not speaking, and crumbling to ash.

The truth is Scarlet Witch and Stephen Strange are locked in a conflict of archetypes that goes back hundreds of years. From Greek Myth to Arthurian Legend, Wizards are scholarly old men working in service of good and Witches are deceitful seductresses who turn men into pigs for their own enjoyment.

But this isn’t about magic. It’s about power. Power and the deeply culturally ingrained idea that women are not capable of wielding it.

In literature and legend, movies and TV, men wield power with reason, while women can only wield power with Madness. That’s just how the story goes…apparently.

Let’s go back to the start of the superhero blockbuster genre, where just a couple of realities over, we would find some of Wanda’s relatives: The X-Men movies.

Specifically, X-Men: The Last Stand. In this film, we see Jean Grey, a previously mild-mannered heroine, transformed into “Phoenix,” a hurricane of raw power who disintegrates friend and foe alike with merely a look. Here, the exchange is explicit. By the very act of accessing her power, this woman loses her sanity. She is a villain, but without any agency or agenda, spewing destruction blindly, even against those she loves. At the end of the film, there is no other choice but for romantic lead and hero-with-an-attitude, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, to kill her by sinking his claws into her stomach.

Compare this to the recurring antagonist of the series, Magneto, a man whose mind and motives are always clear. When our favorite terrorist with a twinkle in his eye, Eric Lensherr, fully intentionally endangers the lives of millions in the first X-Men, he is merely imprisoned for his crimes, just so that he can escape spectacularly and do it all again (He’s like a homicidal Santa that emerges once a year to kill non-mutants). And the audience loves him for it. I love him for it.

In Last Stand, Magneto allies himself with “Phoenix” in order to use her for his own ends, because a female villain needs male guidance apparently. Despite pulling the strings, Magneto still survives the movie. Instead of being put down to avoid the inevitable further chaos he will cause, he is only neutralized, his powers taken away. One of the last scenes of the film finds him playing chess, a token of his formidable intellect, and as a chess piece wobbles seemingly by a return of his psycho-magnetic power, we close on the suggestion that he will be back at it again.

Another of my favorite examples of this particular misogynistic manifestation is HBO’s 2019 series Watchmen, a sort of sequel to the 1980’s comic book series of the same name. Overall, it’s a beautiful piece of media and one of the most surprising and well-crafted examples of original caped-crusader storytelling in recent years. Among the many characters that the story follows is Adrian Veidt or “Ozymandias”, former millionaire, vigilante, and the “smartest man in the world”. He spends the first part of the show imprisoned on Europa for crimes he committed prior to the series start. These include fixing an election, creating an enormous Alien Monster, and subsequently killing countless innocent people, all in the name of world peace, and, well, his vanity too. Veidt spends his initial episodes seemingly atoning for his sins in a virtual purgatory, before he ingeniously escapes and helps to save the day. Hooray!

Now let’s look at the supervillain of this series, a Vietnamese billionaire named Lady Trieu. Her evil plan includes wiping the memories of everyone on the planet so that we can start fresh in her new peaceful society, oh, and maybe killing some white supremacists while she’s at it. A very wealthy super intelligent individual with an ends-justify-the-means plan that serves both world peace and their own vanity. Sounds familiar, right? Yup. Well, you would think that they would suffer the same consequences for their actions, right? Nope. In the finale, Lady Trieu must, unfortunately, explode for justice to be met. Nevermind the fact that we’ve just spent an entire series showing that a white man in her shoes is capable of reform and ultimately being useful to society again. No, she was clearly too far gone to ever be reasoned with. She couldn’t be allowed to live. It looks like for a woman of color with power, the consequence of her wrongdoings is death. For a white man, the consequence is a second chance.

Game of Thrones, which ran from 2011 to 2019 on HBO, is a series all about power, about who deserves it and who ultimately gets it. The series finale, “The Iron Throne” was highly controversial for, among many many other reasons, killing off the widely adored Daenerys Targaryen, “The mother of Dragons,” who as it turns out was the surprise villain at the end of it all. Daenerys starts off as a highly idealistic character who in her quest for justice, begins justifying increasingly ruthless methods. Some might just call this strong leadership. However, just as she is poised to cross the finish line and finally take the universally coveted “Throne,” she goes mad. In the final episodes, she makes uncharacteristic and needlessly bloody choices, taking lives where there is no strategic benefit, until at last her madness cannot be denied, and wouldn’t you know it, her lover is forced to kill her with a knife in the back. What especially stings about this is that the Men of Westeros get away with this and much more. Case and point: Tyrion Lannister, a notably clever character, who in a previous season used unprecedented chemical warfare to kill hundreds of people and later actually strangled his lover to death, is rewarded at the end of the series with being Hand of the King.

One more man praised for seemingly acting in service of logic, while a woman succumbs to the frailty of her emotions.

I understand that there are countless in-universe reasons for why Daenerys went mad, and why Tyrion was able to learn from his mistakes, but the question remains: Why are we still telling this same story?

Again and again, we are told that when a woman gains enough power, she goes mad and must be put down, while a man in a similar situation retains his reason and is allowed to live. He might even be rewarded for the tough decisions he’s had to make.

Last June, the Loki series finale on Disney+ beat out WandaVision, with 1.9 million viewers to the former’s 1.4 million. Loki Laufeyson, everyone’s favorite trickster god and Thor’s brother, has explicitly played a villain in no less than three Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, including The Avengers, in which he unleashed an alien army on New York, and “Killed 80 People in Two days.” (He’s Adopted). Loki is another master of the escape act, and despite more than a few fake outs, he has survived again and again, and one more time after that. In his titular series, Loki is granted the chance to reckon with his actions and the space and screen time to become a better person.

I wish that Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, had been given the same. I wish she had been given something deserving of the complicated character she is, and of the life that actress Elizabeth Olsen has breathed into her.

Olsen recently said in an interview on Good Morning America, that there is “no plan,” for any solo movie and she has no knowledge of a potential future for her character.

But who knows, maybe this is a fake out too, maybe she still has time.

Let me be clear, I love female villains. Given the ocean of media in which women handle hardship with quiet suffering and compassion, it’s incredibly satisfying to watch a woman just go absolutely feral with rage. (Go Wanda! Shred John Krasinki, ahem, Mr. Fantastic, to pieces!)

I love slow burn villains, villains that used to be heroes. I love complex villains, villains you can empathize with, villains that make you question whose side you should be on.

So let fictional women be villains, let them make mistakes, but let them do it with nuance, with their faculties intact, and sometimes with just a little bit of room to bounce back.