The multiverse, in astrophysics, is a theory deduced from several major discoveries of 20th century science, firstly that of quantum mechanics, which exposes the absolute unpredictability of the behavior of particles at the heart of matter. The multiverse, in entertainment, is the large object at the heart of the fourth phase of Disney’s Marvel Extended Universe (MCU), a host of slightly varying worlds, rolling out on both platform and big screen, and a boon for the new era of the franchise blockbuster that he inducted, which allows creators, studios and financiers alike to infinitely expand films and stories, to connect them, disconnect them, undo them, start them over… But also to resuscitate characters and films of the past, directors, actresses and actors, with the logical – and terrifying – horizon of the cancellation of death, aging, the past and the assimilation of commercial cinema in its totality. All this without ever losing sight of the haunting metaphor of the process, that this new Doctor Strangeclever, does not fail to spray us in the face, in all self-reflexivity: the multiverse is the next level capitalist fiction, which definitively integrates the imaginary and the dreams into the franchise under copyright and seals everything in its own closed circuit.
So what did Sam Raimi, inventor of the modern superhero film, do with his three Spider-Man (slaved in second hand in the box Spider-Man : No Way Home of this year) but also super-author of horror cinema, in this metastasis that domesticates filmmakers? Work, first, which should no longer be obvious at this time in his career and in Hollywood, where it has become almost impossible to tell his own stories. Then assimilate his cinema, recognizable among a thousand to certain excesses – always operative – of his realization, a certain taste for gigantism and synthetic baroque (the famous subjective shots on the side of the monsters), some gimmicks (self-amputation) but also a string of self-quotes delivered to aging viewers, from the traditional cameo of Bruce Campbell, clownish hero of the series Evil Deadto the zombification of several key characters in the MCU, the Doctor himself or the Scarlet Witch, who almost make it seem, in the last third of the film, that assimilation ends up working in the opposite direction – a “samraimization” of Marvel, an unexpected turn of events.
Except that: the party never really takes, and we keep in mind until the last image this interpretation of dreams as windows to other worlds, canceling in a snap of the fingers everything that psychoanalysis let glimpse on our unconscious, unleashed ocean of impulses that says so much about the human, the imaginary, the fantastic, even horror and superheroes. But there is no place for the unconscious, even less the impulses in the MCU of Disney, everything must obey the finger and the eye – magician way – to the trending topics and at the market. Who can believe that quantum chaos, the Strange, the human and Sam Raimi have a place there? Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is pleasant enough, but of a terrible vanity.