Myles McNutt: A Guy Who's On Tumblr

Earlier this semester, myself and my fellow TAs used this trailer for Thor: The Dark World to raise a point about why the media is the way it is. It was a preview of sorts of the critical questions of culture we’d be pushing them to ask throughout the semester, framed around the gender politics of the trailer. Why is the trailer the way it is? How representative of the film will it be? How are our expectations for its female characters shaped by this trailer, compared to how they’re shaped to production details like Patty Jenkins’ exit from the project in pre-production?

At the time, I remember distinctly telling students that any substantial analysis of these questions had to wait until the film was released, and so this is—in part—me living up to my side of that bargain. Thor: The Dark World is a film I enjoyed a great deal, committing to its science fiction fantasy world while finding the necessary levity to rescue that world from self-seriousness. It’s also a film that…well, it’s a film that never quite knows what to do with Jane Foster.

[SPOILERS for Thor: The Dark World beneath the fold]

I know we’ll never know how different this film would have been with Patty Jenkins at the helm, but I couldn’t help but think about it watching Natalie Portman in this movie. It’s not just that the character opens the film pining for Thor, and then is corrupted by the Aether and must be saved by Thor, and then spends a significant part of the film lying nearly unconscious as the focus shifts to Thor and Loki’s relationship. There was also something about Portman’s performance that crafted a character who is intelligent, yes, but also overpowered by her emotions (in this case manifesting in her love for Thor, absent for two years when the film begins). Although she slaps him upon his return, she is quickly swept away in his love, and scenes like their romantic kiss overlooking Asgard swallow up whatever personality the character once had.

This is not to suggest that Jane’s intelligence doesn’t play a key role in the Greenwich showdown, or that we can’t look at Frigga’s stand against Malekith as an unlocking mechanism for the state of matriarchal power in Asgard (one in which Loki is positioned as the successor to his mother rather than his father), or that we can’t see Darcy’s relationship with Ian as a playful engagement with gender politics in which traditional gender roles are both reinforced (boy saves girl) and then undone (girl dips boy for post-life-saving makeout session). In moments, the film finds its purpose in regards to its female characters, but it struggles to connect the thread of those female characters such that the story ever becomes their own for any particular moment—just look at how Jaimie Alexander’s Sif gets swallowed up by the plot.

It creates a complex set of gender politics. For example, my response to the film’s conclusion—pre-credits—was rife with contradiction: I found myself glad that Jane wasn’t the sole reason Thor was abdicating the throne, resisting framing romantic love as the sole purpose of the character and the narrative, while simultaneously feeling as though she was too incidental to the film’s conclusion. It is not that the film wholly or exclusively undersells its female characters, but rather that there is never that moment when they get to lay claim to narrative in a meaningful way—Frigga comes closest, but her death is easily choreographed the moment Rene Russo is finally given something to do with the role, shifting the meaning away from her character and onto how her death will resonate with Thor and Loki.

Thor: The Dark World makes a meaningful contribution to the expansion of Marvel’s “cinematic universe,” embracing the story’s fantastical and science fiction elements in ways that nonetheless maintained the story’s basic humanity while successfully maintaining and expanding the comic sensibility of that universe. The foregrounding of Thor and Loki’s relationship was smart given Tom Hiddleston’s breakout performance in The Avengers, and the film gave him an arc in the film that rivaled Thor’s and built on both The Avengers and the first Thor in effective ways. The film substituted a villain mythos for an actual villain of any substance, foregrounding plot over character, but the plot worked and the films’ focus on Thor’s inner struggle continues to make his a story that can sustain a more generic threat against the nine worlds. One just wishes this same inner struggle was passed onto Jane, rather than the character being used largely as a vessel for and object within Thor’s struggles.

My one lingering filmmaking question: Was there ever a point in the edit of the film in which they were more subtle in foreshadowing Loki’s survival? As it stood, they clearly—if quickly—show his transformation into the generic soldier in the dark world, making it clear Loki was the one reporting Loki’s death to Odin, and creating the loose end that I knew had to be closed (hence why I presumed all along that Loki was Odin in the final scenes of the film). But what if they had simply left it to the audience to recognize that the soldier was the same one that Loki had transformed into earlier in the film? What if that had come as a legitimate surprise to more audience members? It felt like something that changed after a test screening, but it took what could have felt like a fun reveal and turned it into an inevitability.