Perhaps the most eloquent scene in Thor: Love and Thunder, the fourth adventure of the Marvel Studios superhero played by Chris Hemsworth, is the post-credits scene where Zeus (Russell Crowe) laments that humans are no longer asking gods for help ask in solving their problems, like him, but superhero. The film’s director and screenwriter, Taika Waititi, explains in words what Zack Snyder was able to say with images in his version of The Justice League (2021) and what the comic book has proposed as a format with absolute complacency since its inception. Namely, that the superhero pantheons, through multimedia companies like Marvel and DC, were able to replace the classic myths and their meaning in order to understand the role we humans play in the cosmos.
Now what about the pop mutation from goddesses to superheroes? The recent Thor: Love and Thunder attempts to fill a historical deficit in making sense of the superheroine in popular culture that the many films and series in this genre that have been produced in recent years have failed to remedy. The ongoing disputes in forums, trend media and social networks still revolve around the relevance or non-relevance of other female superheroes in fiction. So they set aside the fact that their presence isn’t that remarkable at this point – something Wonder Woman or Captain Marvel have already achieved – but rather that their adventure requires a real paradigm shift, something that’s yet to be seen on screen.
“Thor: Love and Thunder”. MIRACLE (MIRACLE)
For Western culture, the journey of the hero and his distorted reflections, the anti-hero and the villain, is, at an archetypal level, a succession of events that imply maturing and the discovery of their place in the established order of things. But what possibility of travel does this model of history offer to those who were victims of the ancestors of this order, to those who have always been reduced to the state of Penelope, unconsciously weaving her own shroud? Although there have been other tales of rebellious women like Lilith, Circe, or the Amazons rebelling against a world unjust to them since the dawn of time, tradition has repeatedly diluted its subversive potential.
Popular culture, and particularly the ongoing cycle of superheroic audiovisual media, reiterates this undermining of these feminist archetypes. Without going further, Thor: Love and Thunder is inspired by several comic story arcs released between 2012 and 2019. In them, the writer Jason Aaron understood what the superheroine’s journey means for the (in)stability of the system. Aaron reveals to us that the mythological configuration of Asgard, ruled by Odin, has always been based on the subjugation of primal forces, the legitimate recipient of which is a woman: Dr. Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), traditionally doomed to be Thor’s romantic interest. . .
This leads to a goddess/superheroine rewriting of the archetype reminiscent of the Wonder Woman of origins and Captain Marvel re-imagined by Kelly Sue DeConnick between 2012 and 2015. However, this transformation that took place in the vignettes was repeatedly reduced again and again on the big screen to a feminist simulacrum that neither inside nor outside of fiction threatens the course of five-year plans for superheroes, in which everything changes to keep everything the same remains. This is how Thor: Love and Thunder relegates Jason Aaron’s approaches to the purely anecdotal.
Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman Clay Enos (AP)
Something that can also be said about Wonder Woman, embodied by Gal Gadot, who sweetens the imaginary of radical feminist deities created by William Moulton Marston in 1941, and about Captain Marvel, played today by Brie Larson, a pale reflection of DeConnick’s ideas surrounding the character’s identity and his desire to assert himself in a world determined to clip his wings. In both superheroes’ films, the essentially feminist condition of their comic adventures gives way in favor of vaguely inspirational moments and dramatic issues that reproduce traditional stereotypes about women. In that regard, Marvel Studios have placed another female character, the Scarlet Witch, at the epicenter of their recent productions, but only to bolster her immense powers – theoretically capable of revolutionizing the meaning of our universe(s). limit their sublimation to domestic and maternal frustrations.
In a cultural sphere mediated by the commercial interests of the big entertainment corporations and the more or less rigorous discourses surrounding their products, the feminist rediscovery of original archetypes transformed into superheroines and supervillains must be traced in less noticed titles. Jean Grey, one of the most uncomfortable characters in Marvel Comics’ superhero pantheon, had the opportunity to use her telepathic and telekinetic powers in X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019) to drive mutant patriarchs Charles Xavier and Magneto to the ropes . , in unusual scenes due to their sadism.
Angelina Jolie in “Maleficent” Frank Connor (AP Photo / Disney)
For her part, Angelina Jolie contributed to a traditional fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty, a mythological reinterpretation linked to his villain Maleficent, in the two live-action movies about the character produced by Disney in 2014 and 2019. Jolie embodies the primal forces of nature constrained by what is supposedly civilized, a monarchical and martial order. The second film, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019), upped the ante from Jolie, ultimately symbolizing a sacred connection between human and fairy, a higher state of consciousness.
This transcendent quality, which necessarily carries feminist connotations due to the overcoming of systemic conditions, finds unbeatable expression in Lucy (2014), a thriller by Luc Besson that visionarily connects the journey of the unlikely protagonist superheroine – a student – forced into drug dealing, played by Scarlett Johansson – at the very beginning of the myth of women: Eva, who for the French director represents the origin of a great latent power in all her descendants.
Lucy’s delirious feminist discourse contrasts with another film starring Johansson, Black Widow (2021), which, like Thor: Love and Thunder, clings to the commodity feminism (or commercial feminism) legitimized in the corporate and media sphere today when it comes to the portrayal of female superheroes goes on screen, even if their actual capacity to act is limited. Like almost everything worthwhile, feminism is not something for a delivery man to leave on our doorstep, but a horizon that requires everyone to embark on a (super)heroic journey of challenges and adventures that all around us to overcome changed and changed.
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