Buddha-killing The Avengers: Puny God
Behold, Part 2 of the epic saga ‘Buddha-killing The Avengers’! Today’s dispatch comes to us from KtB contributing editor Eric Scott, who has written lots of great stories about life in contemporary paganism–including two wonderful exegeses on the Marvel careers of Thor and Loki, characters who reside in the Norse-mythological realm of Asgard. His Buddha-killing weapon of choice may be Mjolnir, hammer of Thor! –KtBniks
I spent the entirety of last Thursday in a movie theater in the outer suburbs of St. Louis. That was, of course, the opening night for The Avengers, and the theater was running a marathon of all the preceding films in the series leading up to the midnight show. Counting The Avengers itself, that added up to approximately 15 hours of superheroes. My ass still hurts.
I loved watching the movies in this setting. The theater had an atmosphere of mutual glee, as though we were all children the night before Halloween. For those like the woman sitting next to me, who had never seen the movies, The Avengers was the reward of a long day inhabiting an alternate reality. For those like me, who learned to read from Captain America and Fantastic Four, it was the culmination of decades of love for a marginalized genre.
It’s impossible for me to evaluate the movie in any kind of objective way—too much of my life has been wrapped up in superheroes. For me, it was a synthesis of all I liked about the genre: the bombastic personalities, the iconic designs, the shared world. As a geek, I couldn’t be any happier.
But as a pagan?
There is a scene near the end of the first act where the heroes have captured Loki, God of Mischief and the film’s central antagonist, and are flying him back to base in an airplane. Suddenly, in the film’s most transparently contrived sequence, Thor, carrying Mjolnir and an impressive red cape, arrives and steals Loki away. Captain America, the film’s point-of-view character, prepares to jump after them. As he grabs his parachute, he’s told by the Black Widow, one of the Avengers without her own movie, that Loki and Thor are “basically gods.”
“There’s only one God, Ma’am,” says Cap, “and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.”
The line got a big laugh in our theater—including from me. Cap is from 1940’s Brooklyn, after all. The modern revival of Norse paganism was decades away. The first Norse church, Iceland’s Ásatrúarfélagið, didn’t register until 1973. The character would naturally dismiss the thought of genuine pagan deities.
What is more telling is that the film never really challenges that line. Though there are a few more mentions of the G-word—Iron Man refers to Thor as a “demigod,” for example—the idea of these manifested entities as subjects of worship is never brought up, much less endorsed. They are the most powerful of the superhuman characters, sure, but if they are gods, they are gods without religion. This seems unlikely to me. I expect that if somebody who looked like Thor, acted like Thor, and saved New Mexico from rampaging suits of armor like Thor appeared on the news, Asatru’s stock would rise. But the film never addresses this issue. The one character for whom the religious implications seemed to matter—the Scandinavian scientist, Erik Selvig, who was on the verge of a religious epiphany in the Thor film—has little screen time in The Avengers where he’s not acting as a plot device.
Oddly enough, the Asgardians [characters of Norse mythology] have become both the central force of the Marvel films—the last three movies have all featured Asgardian items as the basis for their plots—but they are also the most aberrant element of the universe. The worldview of these films is grounded in the materialist philosophy embodied in the first one in the series, Iron Man, a world where everything is ultimately attributable to super-science. Even Thor, overtly based in myth, attempts to hand-wave the magic away by invoking Clarke’s Law (namely, that any sufficiently advanced technology will seem like magic to an outsider’s eyes). Finding a way to meld that science-fiction mindset with the fantastic world of myth has caused enough friction for the series; reconciling it with real-life religion may simply have been too much to ask.
In the film’s climactic scene, Loki confronts the Hulk, a hero composed entirely of muscle and id. Loki begins a villainous speech—“I am a god, dull creature!”—but the Hulk grabs him by the legs and begins thrashing him around like a rag doll. At the end, he tosses the broken Loki away and mutters a satisfied one-liner: “Puny god.” I suspect that the Hulk speaks for Marvel’s take on divinity, as well.
May 13th, 2012 at 7:56 pm
Of all of the characters there, I was most impressed with how Agent Coulson was portrayed. They kept him the competent Everyman, smart enough to challenge Loki with an unknown weapon but still willing to give him a chance to surrender. The calm “maybe you’re a god, maybe you aren’t, but either way you’re still wrong” attitude, without bluster, without fear was a sight to behold.
I saw a similar attitude at the end of “Hancock,” where the villain prepares to kill Hancock and is suddenly literally disarmed by an ordinary man. It struck me as the attitude that there were no gods – but there are great people who show the way for us to do similar things and become godlike.
May 14th, 2012 at 4:25 pm
I noticed the four god mentions, too — “basically gods,” “only one god,” a “demigod,” and the loki hulk exchange. Only Loki outright claims to be a god, and Hulk does away with that. Hulk, who, of course, is the most godlike creature — a whirlwind, inexplicable, unkillable, of unlimited power. And Hulk’s a modern god, too, addressing our ideas of mystic psychology in a way that movie-Thor doesn’t. (Movie-thor addresses our ideas of mystic fitness regimes.) My favorite line in the movie (which I also loved, but, like Eric, I knew the codes) is Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner, shuffling toward the big space monster, explaining the secret of of his mild-mannered demeanor, a running question through the film. “Wait!” says some Avenger, “don’t you need to be angry?” (So he can turn into Hulk.) “Thats my secret,” says Ruffalo, a creepily humble smile on his face — “I’m always angry.”
Now, watch me outgeek Eric! That isn’t Marvel theology — it’s Whedon theology. As in Joss Whedon, of Buffy fame, Avengers director. At first I thought all this god-hedging was corporate anxiety about Christian viewers. But I don’t think it is. I think it’s Whedon’s atheistic humanism. Whedon’s a famous atheist, an odd position for a man who has so successfully asserted the easy blending of the supernatural with the natural. But you see the real theology of the film, and of all of Whedon’s work, in the Hulk. Whedon’s heroes always come in packages assumed to be weak — Buffy’s cheerleader blonde, Willow’s computer nerd, Spike, the confused vampire, and now Ruffalo’s nebbishy Banner. And they’re always confronting gods — like Glory in Buffy. And they defeat gods, and they defeat Glory. The film gives us an escalation of godhood, until Hulk, whose divinity is both wonderfully and terribly human — frustrated, his anger rooted in in his inability to limit his limitless power — smashes Loki and the presumptions of the divine. “Puny god.” It’s just like when Buffy kicks Glory’s ass. People win.
Really what we need for Whedon is a movie of Job. In which Job gets to answer God in the whirlwind with a Whedonesque retort.
May 16th, 2012 at 6:03 pm
Jeff is right on the money as far as the Whedon influence on the Avengers’ story. His characters’ humanity always trumps any supernatural entities. You might find this look at all of that of interest: http://furiousnads.com/posts/the-avengers-rebel-spirit
May 20th, 2012 at 9:03 am
Whedon’s a famous atheist, an odd position for a man who has so successfully asserted the easy blending of the supernatural with the natural.
I enjoyed your post, but if I may – you’re slightly wrong.
Whedon fans perceive, largely, that the mark of Joss Whedon in the supernatural horror genre (Buffy/Angel, or the recent Cabin in the Woods) is that his characters, upon the big supernatural “reveal”, quickly accept and adapt that they now inhabit a universe where there are real vampires, real ghosts, and most importantly the risk of real death. Unlike your average horror film, where writers make us sit through excruciating minutes of “I can’t believe this is happening! This is impossible!” denials by the characters, usually led by the “rational” scientist-type who, in an uncharacteristic abdication of empiricism, stubbornly denies the existence of vampires/ghosts/monsters right up to the point where she’s eaten by one.
It’s tiresome and trite, and it’s very much to Whedon’s credit that his characters always seem to deal with that in a timeframe that makes a lot more sense to the audience – “ok, vampires are real, now what do we do about it?” And I see that as directly emerging from Whedon’s personal secular humanism (or whatever.) It’s completely consistent with a perspective that, whatever the “supernatural” might be, it operates according to, if not our laws of physics, some laws or internal logic, and that therefore it’s hardly supernatural at all – just an unknown flavor of natural. Which, is the perspective of The Avengers.
So I find nothing odd about his positions vis-a-vis his work; they’re of a piece.
May 20th, 2012 at 1:55 pm
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September 16th, 2013 at 10:31 am
I thnk what many confuse for divinity is simply spirituality, one can be pagan, and yet divine. One can be Wiccan and spiritual. the gods rest within us our bodies are our temples, and we are gods as far as our individual minds wish to take us.
I can be whatever I choose to be, a soldier, a saint, a poet a scientist, a man…..A god.
It is all a matter of effort and thought, you can be what you want to be, you must only expend the necessary effort to be that which you wish.
to the owner of this blog. Well written while I have not the luck nor gloss of a colledge education、I must say I find interesting….. pagan gods, wiccans, whats next a Hasidic zombie whose blood and flesh we devour?
Cheers 🙂