Wednesday 31 July 2019

Love and thunder

Whosoever holds this hammer, if *she* be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth

It’s official: in a couple of years’ time there’s going to be a fourth Thor movie in the MCU, and it’s going to be titled Thor: Love and Thunder, and it’s going to feature Natalie Portman as the Mighty Thor and be directed by Taika Waititi. I can’t wait.

There’s a contingent of YouTubers who see it as their bounden duty to pour vitriol on anything with the faintest whiff of “political correctness,” which in practice includes all female-led fantasy, science fiction, and superhero movies. Some disavow any misogyny and I guess quietly hope we won’t go look up what they’ve said about Captain Marvel and Mad Max: Fury Road and Rey in Star Wars and the latest Ghostbusters and the Thirteenth Doctor on Doctor Who. Others are louder and less coherent – “liberals are ruining my childhood, literally no-one asked for this, let’s burn Marvel to the ground!” style of thing.

I mean, one of the complaints is true: Portman isn’t anywhere near as big and muscular as the Mighty Thor. But if that’s your main problem, I have something devastating to tell you about Mark Ruffalo.

If you’re even less familiar with Marvel comics than I am and not clear how Natalie Portman can play Thor, what with him being male, here’s the basics. In the comics, unlike either the Norse myths before them or the movies after them, anyone who can lift Thor’s hammer Mjolnir gains not only his powers but his identity. The usual Thor is a guy called Donald Blake, but there have been several others, including an alien called Beta Ray Bill and a frog and, in a comics run in 2014–2015 titled The Mighty Thor, Blake’s on-again off-again love-interest Jane Foster, i.e. Natalie Portman’s character from the first two Thor movies.

The let’s burn political correctness to the ground! brigade of course hated The Mighty Thor and campaigned for it to be cut short, and some of them claim credit for it ending – which it did with the completion of its story arc, making that claim roughly as plausible as most of the other things these people say. They also say, for instance, that no-one liked Captain Marvel either, a movie which made over a billion dollars at the box-office; and that everyone hated the bit in Avengers: Endgame where all the female heroes band together, a scene which I’ve elsewhere seen criticized only for being too little too late.

So why am I looking forward so eagerly to Thor: Love and Thunder? Most people who write enthusiastically about the MCU seem to have started as comics fans. I suppose I might have been one if things had gone slightly differently, but in fact I never got into any comic as a kid; I was a Tolkien geek instead. And it’s not far to go from Tolkien to Norse mythology. So with most MCU characters the movies are my first sight of them – but not with Thor and his associates.

I did become aware, obviously, that Thor had been reinterpreted as a cartoon character, and I was enough of a purist (you’ll be shocked to hear) that I found this mostly annoying. It didn’t help that the cartoon character was blond, clean-shaven, and a bit of an airhead, where the god is supposed to be ginger-bearded and short-tempered. Worse, not all comics writers have any clue about Shakespearean English, and you’d get sentence constructions like “he didst goeth,” which to me is chalkboard-nails, microphone-feedback, corner-of-tabletop-in-the-elbow-nerve infuriating.

(Not that Thor should technically have been speaking Shakespearean English at all, of course, but even I can forgive comics writers for not filling their dialogue bubbles with Old Norse.)

The first Thor movie was... fine, I guess. I accepted the premise that the gods were extraterrestrial beings who had made contact with Earth in the past, and that the stories about them were mediaeval Earthlings’ limited perspective. There were some things that didn’t quite sit right – how did storytellers know a thousand years before the fact that Loki was going to turn out to be treacherous? – but you expect that with movies.

Thor didn’t really change much from there for a while. I mean, he learned the big lesson about self-sacrifice making you worthy that was obviously supposed to be the moral of the film. But in Joss Whedon’s Avengers titles he was a secondary character, basically there to provide a stylistic counterpoint to all the lasers and spaceships and robots. And in Thor: The Dark World he was static; only Loki got a character arc in that movie. (I’ll come back to Loki.)

The plot of the first Thor movie was Shakespearean in nature, centring on the kingship of Asgard and Thor’s position as Odin’s successor to it. I guess the film-makers wanted to set a suitably operatic tone for these divine characters. But the thing about Odin in the myths is, he’s a god. He’s immortal. He’s not going to die until the end of the world, at which point his kingdom will die with him. He doesn’t need a successor, and Thor isn’t one.

We see Thor in the myths from two sides, broadly speaking. The side that’s drifted out into present-day popular culture, and I guess inspired the Marvel character, is Thor as we see him at Ragnarök: the warrior-god refusing to surrender even when all hope is lost, not because he still believes he can win but because the only way he’ll ever go down is fighting. That’s the side of his personality that the Russo brothers drew out in Avengers: Infinity War.

Of course the outcome is somewhat different. In the myths Thor wins and dies, killing the Midgard-Serpent minutes before succumbing to its venom; in the movies he loses and lives, failing to stop Thanos and being spared to chew on that failure. I guess that’s why in Avengers: Endgame we see the Thor that’s most removed from his mythical roots – a Thor who’s given up and fallen to self-pity. This for me was the darkest cloud on that otherwise excellent movie, but seeing as the whole point of Thor in Infinity War was the tragic failure of his Asgardian honour code, I can’t see what other character arc they could have given him.

Since that’s what we see in the Ragnarök myths, it’s kind of ironic that it’s the other side of the mythical Thor that comes out in the movie Thor: Ragnarok. When he’s not facing the end of the world, Thor is a gruff but jovial adventurer, who rides around the Nine Worlds in a goat-drawn chariot fighting giants and monsters and getting into scrapes that challenge his dignity and/or masculinity. In one story, for instance, he visits a city called Utgard and is bested in a series of rigged challenges posed by its trickster king, a figure not a million miles away in personality from the Grandmaster of Sakaar. In another, Mjöllnir is stolen by a giant who demands the love goddess Freyja’s hand in marriage in exchange for its return; when Freyja rejects the deal (with earth-shaking scorn), Loki and Heimdall between them persuade Thor to marry the giant himself, disguised as the goddess by a veil over his head.

Mind you, the stories we have are late documents from Iceland, on the periphery of the Thor-worshipping world, written by Christian monks trying to preserve a record of their past religion so that future generations would be able to understand references to it in old poems. It’s possible that the people who actually worshipped him would have been a bit more reverent.

Even so, Thor was always a Jovial god, with a capital J. Roman writers trying to explain the Germanic gods in their own terms identified Thor with Hercules, but German and Anglo-Saxon writers trying to explain the Roman gods in their terms identified him with Jove, i.e. Jupiter or Zeus, and the day of the week which the Romance languages call “Jove’s day” (giovedi, jeudi, joi, jueves) is “Thor’s day” – Thursday – in the Germanic ones.

(Unexpectedly, both sides agreed that Odin was the same person as Mercury, or Hermes. There are a number of theories as to why, which I don’t have space to go into.)

Why Jove? Partly because they were both thunder-gods, but also at least partly because of their matching personalities – jolly, boisterous, loud-voiced, and fond of festivity. Scandinavian folklore after Christianization attributes thunderstorms to “the good old fellow”. For this aspect of Thor, no other MCU movie to date can hold a candle to Ragnarok. That’s why I’m excited to see that Taika Waititi is coming back to direct Love and Thunder.

Well, that and because Waititi is my personal favourite film-director. That’s only slightly because he’s a fellow New Zealander; Peter Jackson lost my favour quite a while ago. Waititi’s other works include Hunt for the Wilderpeople, which combines humour and tragedy with a near-unbearable poignancy, and What We Do in the Shadows, which looks wryly in the frustrating face of modern life and slaps it with a glorious custard-pie of a send-up of every vampire movie cliché ever. The pool of people with the rare blend of skills and talents to make such high comic art shrank significantly in March 2015 with the death of Sir Terry Pratchett. If any studio ever obtains the rights to make a Discworld franchise (Sir Terry safeguarded those rights very carefully after getting some monumentally stupid movie proposals in the 1980s), Waititi should be the first director they contact.

We’ll address the elephant in the room in a moment; first, I promised I’d come back to Loki.

Loki is the most dynamic character in the Norse myths. He begins as a loyal subject of Odin and companion of Thor who just likes to play pranks on people from time to time; throughout the course of the stories there’s a cycle where his pranks inspire others to distrust him, in response to which he plays nastier pranks, until eventually he murders Baldr and curses the rest of Asgard and is bound to a rock until Ragnarök, when he will fight alongside the giants and monsters to destroy humanity and the gods.

The MCU has essentially run this character progression in reverse. Loki starts by betraying Asgard to the giants and murdering humans for Thanos, turns tormented antihero in The Dark World, and in Ragnarok he becomes, well, a loyal companion of Thor who likes to play pranks on people from time to time. In Infinity War his redemption arc reaches its fitting culmination, albeit rather earlier in the movie than is entirely satisfying.

Thor needs Loki, whether as a foil or a sidekick, even more in the movies than in the myths. They’re two sides of a coin: brawn and brain, honour and guile. I’m curious to see what the MCU will do with the character thread left hanging by Endgame. Will Loki reset to his pre-Dark World state of development? Will we have to watch him go through the same arc all over again? Will they start the new Loki where the old one had got to by Infinity War, and handwave away what happened in between? None of those feel right, so I’m hoping there’s a further option I haven’t thought of.

There is, obviously, no trace of Jane Foster or a female Thor in the mythology. But I’m not so much of a purist as to place source-faithfulness over all other qualities in an adaptation. It’s more important to make sure that you tie up all your loose story threads. And Jane and Thor’s relationship is a big loose thread in the MCU. Thor’s whole motivation in The Dark World, such as it was, was to save her life and persuade Odin and the Asgardians to accept her as his partner. That movie’s end-credits scene featured their final reunion. And then in Ragnarok, the only reference to Jane is

“Sorry to hear that Jane dumped you.”

Insofar as Ragnarok had a weakness, that was it. At the time Natalie Portman had said no to further MCU movies owing to a dispute with a Marvel executive who has since left the company, and I think Kevin Feige figured that part of The Dark World’s lacklustre box-office was the chemistry or lack thereof between Jane and Thor, so they decided to scrap that story element. If they were hoping the fans would just forget about it, they failed at least in my case; it made me want to know what had happened between them in the meantime. Love and Thunder will finally fill that gap.

(Afterwards I realized there was an answer ready to hand. Between The Dark World and Ragnarok in the MCU chronology comes Avengers: Age of Ultron, in which Thor again does the exact thing that angered Jane in The Dark World – he leaves Earth to go fight monsters without her. But even if that is the answer, it still needs to be made explicit.)

Now in the Mighty Thor comics, Jane is undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. One of the effects of wielding Mjolnir is that it purges your body of toxins and restores it to full vigour... and chemo drugs count as toxins whereas cancer is your own tissues growing over-vigorously, so Jane’s bouts as Mighty Thor basically kill her (temporarily, of course, it’s a comic). I gather she’s since taken on the mantle of Valkyrie. It’s going to be a huge challenge to turn that storyline into a comedy movie, but if anyone can do it, Taika Waititi can.

While he’s doing that, the rest of us have to do something about the culture of rage and entitlement in fandom. I mean, I’ve seen people argue outright that Game of Thrones’ final season would have been better-written if only the fans had got angrier earlier. Sure, that’s how it works – artists intentionally pour years of their life into crappy work but will instantly improve if they’re threatened and insulted enough. (that was sarcasm.) The same happened with Star Wars: The Last Jedi and I think it’s only going to get worse when Episode IX comes out this year, no matter what the movie is like.

I’m not sure what to suggest, except maybe... not threatening artists? Not yelling insults at them? Learning to criticize art and media without demanding perfection as of right? Yeah, that.

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