Perhaps the most eloquent scene of Thor: Love and Thunder, fourth adventure of the Marvel Studios superhero played by Chris Hemsworth, is that post-credits in which Zeus (Russell Crowe) regrets that human beings no longer ask gods like him for help to solve their problems, but rather superheroes. The director and screenwriter of the film, Taika Waititi, explains in words what Zack Snyder had been able to say with images in his version of The Justice League (2021) and what the comic books It has raised since its inception as a format with total naturalness. Namely, that the superheroic pantheons due to multimedia companies such as Marvel and DC have been able to replace the classic myths and their importance to understand what role we human beings play in the cosmos.
Now, what about the pop mutation of goddesses to superheroines? the newly released Thor: Love and Thunder tries to alleviate a historical deficit when it comes to representing the superheroine in a meaningful way in popular culture, which has not been remedied by the many films and series of this genre produced in recent years. The continuous disputes in forums, trend media and social networks still focus today on the relevance or not of more superheroines in fiction. Thus, they leave aside the fact that at this point their presence is not so remarkable —that they have already achieved wonder-woman or Captain Marvel—as if her adventure represents a real paradigm shift, something that has yet to be seen on screen.
For Western culture, the journey of the hero and his distorted reflections, the antihero and the villain, consists at an archetypal level of a succession of incidents that imply a process of maturity and discovery of the place they occupy in the established order of things. But, what possibility of travel does this narrative model offer to those who have been ancestral victims of said order, to those who have always been reduced to the condition of Penelopes who weave their own shroud without being aware of it? Although other narratives have existed since the beginning of time, in which rebellious women such as Lilith, Circe or the Amazons have rebelled against a world that was unfair to them, tradition has again and again diluted their subversive potential.
Popular culture and, in particular, the ongoing cycle of superheroic audiovisuals, repeats this undermining of these feminist archetypes. Without going further, Thor: Love and Thunder draws inspiration from various comic book story arcs published between 2012 and 2019. In them, writer Jason Aaron understood what the superhero’s journey implies for the (in)stability of the system. Aaron reveals to us that the mythological configuration of Asgard, ruled by Odin, has been based since time immemorial on the subjugation of primal forces whose legitimate recipient is a woman: Dr. Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), traditionally condemned to be Thor’s romantic interest. .
This gives rise to a rewriting of the archetype in terms of goddess / superheroine that evokes the Wonder Woman of the origins and Captain Marvel reinvented by Kelly Sue DeConnick between 2012 and 2015. However, this transformation that occurred in the vignettes has been reduced over and over again on the big screen to a feminist simulacrum that does not threaten, neither inside nor outside of fiction, the course of five-year plans for superheroes in which everything changes so that everything remains the same. A) Yes, Thor: Love and Thunder relegates Jason Aaron’s approaches to the merely anecdotal.
Something that can also be said of Wonder Woman embodied by Gal Gadot, who sweetens the imaginary of radically feminist divinities created in 1941 by William Moulton Marston, and of Captain Marvel who is played today by Brie Larson, a pale reflection of DeConnick’s ideas around the identity of the character and his desire to excel in a world determined to clip his wings. In the films of one and another superheroine, the essentially feminist condition of her comic adventures is betrayed in favor of vaguely inspiring moments and dramatic troubles that reproduce traditional stereotypes about what woman. In this regard, Marvel Studios has placed another female character, the Scarlet Witch, at the epicenter of its recent productions, but only to limit her immense powers —theoretically capable of revolutionizing the meaning of our universe(s)— to the sublimation of her domestic and maternal frustrations.
In a cultural sphere mediated by the economic interests of the large entertainment corporations and the discourses associated with greater or lesser rigor to their products, the feminist recovery of primordial archetypes transmuted into superheroines and supervillains must be traced in titles subject to less attention. Jean Grey, one of the most awkward characters in the superheroic pantheon of Marvel comics, had the opportunity to unfold in X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019) his telepathic and telekinetic powers to put the mutant patriarchs Charles Xavier and Magneto on the ropes, in unusual scenes due to their level of sadism.
For her part, Angelina Jolie contributed to a fairy tale forever, Sleeping Beauty, a mythological rereading linked to her villain, Maleficent, in the two live-action films about the character produced by Disney in 2014 and 2019. Jolie’s Maleficent embodies the primal forces of nature constrained by what is supposedly civilizing, a monarchical order and Warrior. the second movie, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019), ups the ante by Jolie ultimately symbolizing a sacred nexus between human and faerie, a higher state of consciousness.
This transcendent quality, which necessarily has feminist connotations due to its overcoming of systemic conditioning factors, finds an unbeatable expression in Lucy (2014), thriller by Luc Besson who, in a visionary way, connects the journey of the unlikely protagonist superheroine — a student forced to deal drugs, played by Scarlett Johansson — to the very beginning of the woman myth: Eva, who represents for the French director the origin of a great latent power in all its descendants.
The delusional feminist discourse of Lucy contrasts with another film starring Johansson, black widow (2021), which adheres as Thor: Love and Thunder to the commodity feminism (or commercial feminism) legitimized today in the corporate and media spheres when it comes to portraying superheroines on screen, even if their real agency is limited. Like almost everything worthwhile, feminism is not something that a delivery man can leave at our door, but rather a horizon that requires everyone to commit to a (super)heroic journey full of challenges and adventures, whose overcoming transforms and transforms everything around us.
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