By Neil Earle
Hold on to your popcorn! The summer blockbuster season has begun. “Thor” kicked it off with a $66 million take its first weekend. Previews lined up the Green Lantern, the return of the X-Men, the last Harry Potter and even – a real blast from the WW2 past – the debut of Captain America for a new generation.
This recent media incarnation of Thor draws upon the 1960's comic book series even down to the costume and Marvel Comics’ master artist Jack Kirby had been touting the Norse god back when comics cost 12 cents.
What is there about us that is so drawn to superheroes?
Well, first and most simply everyone likes the chance to escape in fantasy once in a while and the super-special “special effects” are getting more and more elaborate. This turns on the Internet generation. Escapism is popular in times when the economy is still headed south. But there are Christian sociologists and media students who study the issue a bit more deeply and come up with some fascinating conclusions. Bernard Scott, a Professor of New Testament, comments in his Hollywood Dreams and Biblical Stories: “Chaos is always a danger so hero myths fortify the group against chaos” (page 4).
That sounds about right except Scott and his fellow film theorist take it even deeper. For myths to work they must embody tried and true values of the group or tribe, they get their energy from a problem or a crisis to be solved or a lesson learned and – most important – they must do their work at a deep subterranean level. No-one wants to be preached at when enjoying an entertaining yarn or story.
Thor, the mythical son of Odin, as he is represented at your local Cineplex this summer, fits this analysis neatly. The values imparted to Thor by his father Odin (played by Anthony Hopkins) are to protect the innocent and support the weak, to maintain order in the cosmos. The crisis to be solved comes in the form of the Frost Beings always trying to invade the home of the gods – Asgard. The lesson to be learned (at least in the movie version) is for the strutting warrior, Thor, to learn humility and true service. When he screws up, Odin banishes him to earth until he learns his lesson. This is the basic theme of Kenneth Branagh’s movie and it works fairly well, with loads of special effects thrown in and a creative series of interplays between Asgard and a small town in New Mexico.
Scott is right when he says that the mythic formula is easy to identify but not easy to put together creatively – one reason movie moguls fear the fate of their celluloid creations. If it was easy, every movie would succeed. They don’t. Scott adds: “One reason a movie does well is that it intersects with basic struggles, conflicts, or tensions within a society in such a way that it provides a temporarily masked resolution to that conflict.”
As the song says, “And then a hero comes along.” He or she resolves anxieties with singular acts of courage, skill and self-sacrifice. And also a cool weapon. Thor has his hammer, Arthur had Excalibur, Wonder Woman her magic lariat and detective Harry Callahan had his Magnum.
So why this Christian concern over ancient myths and Hollywood updates? Fuller Seminary, from its base in Los Angeles, ahs developed a whole department to study and intersect with the story-tellers in Hollywood. Story is just that important to the culture. For another, Odin and Thor are as close to us as Wednesday (Woden’s Day) and Thursday (Thor’s Day). They have hardly passed from the scene.
It is also a notable fact that it was a prolonged fascination with the Odin-Thor myths that first motivated the great Christian writer and professional student of mythology, C.S. Lewis. In studying the Northern myths as a young student Lewis claims he learned the values of awe, adoration and wonder. As Lewis writes of his pre-conversion days: “Pure Northernness engulfed me: a vision of huge clear spaces hanging above the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity…Yet unless I am greatly mistaken there was in it something like adoration, some kind of quite disinterested self-abandonment to an object…Sometimes I can almost think that I was sent back to the false gods there to acquire some capacity for worship against the day when the true God should recall me to Himself” (Surprised by Joy, pages 73-77).
When Lewis’ sense of cosmic awe at the cosmic reach of the old Norse gods and the dramatic snows and frosts of their homeland (a sense refocused by the extravagant sets of the movie “Thor”), was supplemented by the music of Wagner and the stirring “Ride of the Valkyries” – Lewis felt something happen deep inside. It prepared him emotionally and psychologically, he felt, for accepting what was a much more powerful story. That involved, of course, the true God sending his beloved Son to the earth from the heaven of heavens to win back the human race through the much more humble implement of a wooden cross. Lewis explained in later life as both a professor of mythology and a believing Christian that myths with their sense of larger than life stories and the cosmic implications of individual decisions – these help uplift and ennoble slumbering sensibilities to the truth of the ultimate story, the Gospel. As Paul told the brilliant but paganized Athenians: “Whom you ignorantly worship I declare to you” Acts 17:23).
Lewis argued a similar case when he defended some of the violence and conflict in his “Narnia” tales. Children are bound to encounter the terrors of growing up and the cruel defeats of life, said Lewis. He himself had been sent to the Western front in France as a nineteen year old 2nd Lieutenant where life expectancy was six weeks. So then, he argued, let children also learn of heroic knights and virtuous maidens, of self-sacrifice and daring deeds and a vision of becoming much more than they imagine (like the Pevensie children in Narnia). For Lewis, the great myths, the good ones, enshrined solid facts about reality in a creative and imaginative way (The C.S. Lewis Encyclopedia, page 136).
Nor did Lewis see the existence of myths and hero stories and legends scattered all around the world as some kind of wild refutation of Christianity – as some did in his day and still do in ours. No, he said we should expect these things to be there. Myths reflect the sensitive human imagination trying to add meaning to the often random and bitter facts of existence. They tell us what it is like to be human, they symbolize important human yearnings and struggles and this helps explain why they are found all over the world. They are often similar because they underline and point to what humanity truly values in its heart of hearts, even as they oversimplify. The Lone Ranger was a hyped-up symbol of the struggle for law and order in the early West. The myth of Narcissus speaks to the ego-maniac in all of us. The willingness of the elf princess in Lord of the Rings to give up immortality to marry a mortal makes us look upon sacrifice as the true heroism.
We thus get a jolt of recognition from a story or movie or novelistic presentation. Something inside us is stirred. (One reason people tell stories, go to movies or read novels). Lewis probably knew he had to be careful writing this to Christians but there are places in his texts where you can see that he believed the great uplifting myths sprang form the common human nature we all possess. God sent the human race ”good dreams” Lewis wrote, “I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has given new life to men.” These he felt were preparations for the Gospel, preparations for the most improbable event of all – when the true Redeemer Figure appeared in the humblest guise possible, was temporarily defeated and then triumphed over death and took us with him to ascend the highest heavens.
This is what Lewis meant when he wrote that “the heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact…God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in the form of a man” (Mere Christianity, Fount edition, pages 51-53). No wonder Lewis ended up writing three fascinating works of science fiction. He made the imagination safe for Christians!
“We are natural poets” Lewis said and also natural myth-makers. The stories strung around the world from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the more technological Six Million Dollar Man speak to our need for hero figures to arise, a Champion to rise up and to reconcile all the contradictions of the messy world we are in and, perhaps, to show us a better way. The propensity of Hollywood and the movie industry to excavate ancient myths and to dress them up, or to create new ones stands out in our particular era. The times seem to be verging on chaos – tornadoes, floods, radiation leaks, government paralysis. It is not unexpected, then, that in the “waking dream” of the cinema we would be found subconsciously reaching out for some form of deliverance.
“And then a hero comes along…” The movie “Thor” embodies that theme, as did the Superman character a few years back saying to Lois Lane, “The world needs a Messiah.” C.S. Lewis understood and articulated that there is the sense that every true hero, every noble striver, embodies some of the characteristics of humanity’s ultimate hero, the Lion who is also a Lamb. This is Jesus, depicted in Revelation 5 as still bearing the marks of his sacrificial death for us.
The script writer John Truby was adamant that it is the element of sacrifice or of a lesson badly needing to be learned that provides the moral foundation for most of our stories, at least in the Western world. To the extent that the movies keep that aspect of the hero’s task alive it is perhaps not the worst place to spend a couple of hours this summer, sharing in a part of the collective myth-making our culture is willing to embrace. And to help Christians speak more effectively to that culture.