Thor Ragnarok: Or, It’s Déjà vu All Over Again

jack_solomon · ‎11-30-2017

So Thor is back, hammering his way to another blockbusting run at the box office. But this time, it's almost as if the producers of Thor: Ragnarok read an analysis I posted to this blog on November 11, 2013, when Thor: The Dark World appeared, because some interesting things have happened to the franchise this time around that seem to be in reaction to what I argued back then. So let's have a look first at what I said in 2013, before turning to the present. Here's what I said then:

Well, the dude with the big hammer just pulled off the biggest box office debut for quite some time, and such a commercial success calls for some semiotic attention.

There is an obvious system within which to situate Thor: The Dark World and thus begin our analysis. This, of course, is the realm of the cinematic superhero, a genre that has absolutely dominated Hollywood film making for quite some time now. Whether featuring such traditional superheroes as Batman, Spider Man, and Superman, or such emergent heavies as Iron Man and even (gulp!) Kick-Ass, the superhero movie is a widely recognized signifier of Hollywood’s timid focus on tried-and-true formulae that offer a high probability of box office success due to their pre-existing audiences of avid adolescent males. Add to this the increasingly observed cultural phenomenon that adulthood is the new childhood (or thirty is the new fourteen), and you have a pretty clear notion of at least a prominent part of the cultural significance of Thor’s recent coup.

But I want to look at a somewhat different angle on this particular superhero’s current dominance that I haven’t seen explored elsewhere. This is the fact that, unlike all other superheroes, Thor comes from an actual religion (I recognize that this bothered Captain America’s Christian sensibilities in The Avengers, but a god is a god). And while the exploitation of their ancestors’ pagan beliefs is hardly likely to disturb any modern Scandinavians, this cartoonish revision of an extinct cultural mythology is still just a little peculiar. I mean, why Thor and not, say, Apollo, or even Dionysus?

I think the explanation is two-fold here, and culturally significant in both parts. The first is that the Nordic gods were, after all, part of a pantheon of warriors, complete with a kind of locker/war room (Valhalla) and a persistent enemy (the Jotuns, et al) whose goal was indeed to destroy the world. [ That the enemies of the Nordic gods were destined to win a climactic battle over Thor and company (the Ragnarok, or Wagnerian Gotterdammerung), is an interesting feature of the mythology that may or may not occur in a future installment of the movie franchise.] But the point is that Norse mythology offers a ready-made superhero saga to a market hungering for clear-cut conflicts between absolute bad guys whose goal is to destroy the world and well-muscled good guys who oppose them: a simple heroes vs. villains tale.

You don’t find this in Greek mythology, which is always quite complicated and rather more profound in its probing of the complexities and contradictions of human life and character.

But I suspect that there is something more at work here. I mean, Wagner, the Third Reich’s signature composer, didn’t choose Norse mythology as the framework for his most famous opera by accident. And the fact is that you just don’t get any more Aryan than blonde Thor is (isn’t it interesting that the troublesome Loki, though part of the Norse pantheon too, somehow doesn’t have blonde hair? Note also in this regard how the evil Wormtongue in Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings also seems to be the only non-blonde among the blonde Rohirrim). The Greeks, for their part, weren’t blondes. So is the current popularity of this particular Norse god a reflection of a coded nostalgia for a whiter world? In this era of increasing racial insecurity as America’s demographic identity shifts, I can’t help but think so.

OK, so that was then, what about now? Let's just say that the "white nationalist" march at Charlottesville has clearly brought out into the open what was still lurking on the margins in 2013, and I would hazard to guess that a good number of the khaki-clad crew with their tiki torches and lightning bolt banners were (and are) Thor fans. So I'll stand by my 2013 interpretation. And as for the most recent installment in the Thor saga, well, I can almost see the producers of Thor: Ragnarok having the following pre-production conversation:

Producer 1: The semioticians are on to us.