In one of the recent MCU installments Wanda Maximoff dreams of her children. In this story dreams are our windows into the Multiverse (for real homies). The thing is, Wanda gets the calculus wrong. She is about to kidnap America Chavez, a unique young woman who has the power to travel across the Multiverse. Dr Strange tries to reason with Wanda claiming the children she seeks “Do not exist.” Wanda replies, “Oh, but they do, in every other universe.”
Wanda Maximoff simulates a subset of the Multiverse in Hex spell form, apparently in all other multiversi her children exist.
This essay is a tip for aspiring scifi and fantasy writers on how to not betray your hard core fans, by “keepin’ it real” so-to-speak. The Principle of good scifi writing is that you only invoke the miracle exemption when necessary. The MEP = Miracle Exemption Principle.
In the MCU the miracle exceptions are over-used, but often for comedic purposes, and the fact Marvel Comics have always taken the piss like this is well known to their readers. (Perhaps not so well known to the typical movie goer, but they are surely catching on!) So yeah, it is unfair to criticize the MCU for over-doing the miracles, they are a superhero universe after all, so not hard scifi. Having said that, MCU and DC writers would do well to heed the MEP, why? It is for the same reason Martin Scorsese noted: for drama and tension, the need to generate risk in a film. Risk in the mind of the audience (are we going to survive watching this with our guts intact and tear glands dry?). In this respect Scorsese regards the MCU as not film, but more like Disney mass entertainment (which he thinks is a valuable form of art in itself, but is not film). When was the last time you cried at the end of an MCU film? Or felt the need to head over to a forum to emotionally debate and discuss (I confess I did this once, only with The Matrix, 1999)?
Here we are using the word “film” to mean something special, not just motion pictures, but a sub-category of motion picture that builds tension and drama like classic literature, a distinctive art form to escapist comics. Let me take Scorsese seriously then, but admit that drama and risk can be inserted into the MCU. How? By using the MEP selectively for comedy, but relegating the MEP when drama is needed. The death of Natasha Romanoff was a good suspension of the MEP.
To get the nerd stuff over with, the MCU writers abuse their audience by conceiving Wanda’s children as being real in all other multiversi (uni-verses). America Chavez’s powers essentially make the entire Multiverse just a weird sort of Universe. So Wanda cannot really go much wrong. The proper quantum physics multiverse (there is no such thing, it assumes one strange interpretation of QM is the only correct one, which is metaphysics, not science) would have vanishingly few universes where Maximoff has children. This is because it is harder to have children than not have children, and harder still to have those particular two boys that Wanda dreams about. Thus in a realistic Multiverse Wanda would find herself searching for an eternity to find those two particular forms of children in her dreams, which we presume Lacan-style is what she desires. Would she be content with a different two brats? The MCU writers do not risk this! And thus disrespect their audience. (But ok, witches have spooky search powers.)
In physics this is related to the Multiverse Measure problem. No one can compute the probability of finding Wanda’s children, it is an uncomputable number (as far as we know), and vanishingly small. Worse than the proverbial needle in a haystack. It is more like trying to isolate one single named electron in an infinite stack of haystacks. (Electrons cannot be named, they are all identical.) Science nerds are encouraged to read more about the Measure Problem, it is an interesting one, because it is a direct shift of the conventional quantum mechanics Measurement Problem into a putative multiverse where there are no measurement problems, a problem however remains, it just is transformed from a collapse of the wave-function problem to a probability measure problem. Unfortunately there are few good popular write-ups that discuss both. (Try here for one entry point: Understanding The Measurement Problem of Quantum Mechanics, but I think you cannot do much worse than read good old Wikipedia: Measurement in Quantum Mechanics.)
Now for the film buff stuff (the real point of this essay). The reason Wanda is not at much risk in Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness is primarily (I think) because she only needs to kidnap Chavez and take her MV hopping powers. Would it not be superior film if the MCU writers had added a new layer into the story of Wanda, and asked her character to find just those two children she dreamt of? Finding out at the end of the film they exist but cannot be found would be awesome pathos. The question then would be how to hint at this ending without giving it away too early. Now that would be genius screenplay writing.
* * *
Postscript: I paused to write this essay 35 minutes in to watching The Multiverse of Madness film/commercial-entertainment on streaming content. And, well… damn if Dr Strange does not inject a small bit of risk: “What if you reach them? What happens to the other you? What happens to their mother?” — a really nice bit of linguistic subject shifting, first refer to the children, then to their mother, then back to the children. To me it was a trifle disappointing, because the whole tension between Dr Strange and Wanda is that Dr Strange made a decision on behalf of the entire universe before, when yielding the Time Stone to Thanos. The movie does not have the cinematic length to go into the ethics of how that was only a univ-verse, and how Dr Strange’s was a sacrifice for the possible good of all others, sacrificing his own life moreover by getting dusted, whereas Wanda’s toying with the entire Multiverse is a purely selfish act, for the good of no one but herself, and probably not even for her own good (a Lacanian might say). So when the script-writers pit Dr Strange’s past moral dilemma up against Wanda’s it is about as false a comparison as comparing, (a) you or me giving up a few dollars to help a homeless tramp, versus (b) Goldman Sachs sacrificing their piousness by asking a poor family to take out mortgage bank credit to help the bank industry profit off the interest.
The next hour of The Multiverse of Madness did not threaten much to increase the risks. And (spoiler) Wanda is not really at dramatic risk because it turned out the Dark Hold Scarlet Witch had possessed her (non-dramatic risk) — but I am not really sure because I was able to not watch the ending, to pause and watch the rest some other time when not in need of a bit of cinematic daring.
I recommend such practices. I have developed a habit of not watching the endings of films that have good stories but which I suspect will have shitty endings, my imagination fills in the endings over several nights of dreaming, and day-dreaming. It is a great way to get more value from a film than watching the writer’s ending, which as David Lynch might say is “TV violence”. The endings of art works are the death of them, and do violence to the human imagination by forbidding the mind an alternative. One must work harder to overcome a given TV/film ending, and the residual bitter taste never goes away (you say, “God, if only I had been able to write The Matrix sequels…” — well sure, but then you would have only perpetrated a new violence upon The Matrix fans.)
One of the enduring legacies of the MCU is that, in a way, they do obey the Lynchian directive of great story telling, because they always do leave an unknown imaginable future ahead, the small narrative arc concludes, but there is always a foreshadowing of the next chapter in the MCU.
* * *
License:
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode)
