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because I know you care what I think about Avengers: Endgame

Dare I add my voice to the swirling conversation? I dare. This isn’t a true review, just a list of some of my observations. There may be some spoilers–if you can figure out what I’m talking about.

I liked the movie! I didn’t fall asleep, and that’s no small feat when we’re talking about a three-hour movie that, for me, started at 7:00 pm. Although some of the most scene-stealing characters (Peter Parker, Peter Quill, Peter…no, I think that’s all the Peters) were among the disappeared (N.B. Did this scenario remind anyone else of the TV series The Leftovers?), this allowed some former background characters to step forward, and they carried this responsibility well. I’m thinking in particular of Don Cheadle’s character, whose relationship to Tony Stark I have given up trying to remember, like a lot of things in this cinematic universe. (Sorry, folks. I never claimed to be a true card-carrying Marvel geek.)

I didn’t understand why all the infinity stones came to Ironman in the end. Please do not reply to this post and mansplain it to me. If I really wanted to know, I’m sure I could choose from many different mansplaining websites and YouTube videos. But I don’t really need to know. It’s enough for me that the stones did come to him. It made sense with Tony Stark’s character arc (which was quite moving), and besides, I trust that Dr. Strange knew what was going on. Because of Dumbledore, I have a lot of experience trusting wizards even when I don’t understand their plans.

I want to spend the rest of this post talking about Thor because, as you may know from previous posts, he and his world are the only parts of the MCU that I really get into and buy the Blu-Rays of and write conference papers about. First, let me get my dreamboat Loki out of the way–I was actually pretty happy with the cumulative three minutes or so that he appeared in the movie. It was more than I expected. Thor, on the other hand, was not at all what I expected. I thought it was fascinating that the non-human Avenger was the one who basically dealt with a mental health crisis during this film, though his decline into physical sloth and mental inertia was played mostly for laughs. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing–more than half of good comedy is based on the truism that sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying. Although I want to be clear that there’s absolutely nothing inherently funny about someone turning to alcohol to deal with grief, guilt, and regret, there’s no harm in audiences chuckling at Thor’s Norwegian bachelor pad shared with his interplanetary bros Korg and Meek. And I loved that we got to visit Dark World-era Asgard and witness Thor’s heartfelt (though, even here, rather funny) conversation with his mother, Frigga, who was always one of my favorite characters in this saga. I also appreciated the fact that when Thor reacquired his hammer, he didn’t immediately turn back into the svelte warrior of the previous films, ripped abs and all. (Though he did suddenly get a complicated braid in his beard when he started channeling lightning during the final battle–not sure how that happened.) I’m glad to see that Thor has taken passage on Starlord’s ship; those two characters (because of their fantastic actors) have wonderful comedic chemistry, and I hope we get to see them in another film.

Well, that’s all I’ve got. I almost hesitate to ask, but I will: What did you think of Avengers: Endgame?

 

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I figured out why women (still) love Elvis.

I’ve never given much thought to Elvis Presley. I guess I’ve just pictured him hanging out somewhere near the top of a list of “most overrated musical artists of all time.” But I recently acquired a three-disc record album called Elvis: 50 Years, 50 Hits (I got it for free) and have listened to it twice now, and I’ve come to a better-informed opinion. I still think that for someone called “the king of rock and roll,” he has a pretty poor output of actual rock and roll songs. I’ll give him “Hound Dog.” That’s a rock and roll song, and a good one. And he’s got a few others along the same lines, though not quite as good. But his repertoire largely consists of excruciatingly maudlin ballads and swoony doo-wop numbers. It’s the latter category I want to focus on in this post because in listening to them, I think I’ve discovered why Elvis makes women…well, swoon.

It’s the lyrics, first of all. The aforementioned “Hound Dog” has this wonderfully bitter refrain (“well, they said you was high-class/but that was just a lie”) that puts in it the same category as Bob Dylan’s triumphs of nasty schadenfreude (OMG, I just spelled that word without looking it up–high five to me), “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Idiot Wind.” But that song is an exception in more ways than one. Most of Elvis’s songs have a tone not of ill will but of a plea for good will. He creates this persona of a heart-bruised lover who’s been hurt in the past and who is now turning to the unnamed female addressee of the song (with whom many female listeners identify, not by accident) and asking her to be gentle. You don’t have to go any further than the titles of some of the songs to see this persona: “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Love Me Tender,” “One Broken Heart for Sale,” “I Beg of You.” It’s as if he says to each fan, “I’ve been hurt in the past, honey, but I know you won’t do that to me.” (I’m pretty sure that’s not an actual Elvis lyric, but it could be.)

And there’s something incredibly endearing about that. I won’t make an overgeneralization and say all women, but many women are attracted to a man who is hurt, whether physically or emotionally, and needs our help. The cynical interpretation of this phenomenon would be that we like the power this gives us over a man; the more generous interpretation would be that we (everybody, but especially women) have an innate desire to nurture and care for people. The truth is that it’s probably a combination of the two. I have no idea whether Elvis Presley gave conscious thought to the psychology of all this, but I think he instinctively knew these things.

There’s an implied subtext in most of this songs–occasionally made explicit, as in “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear”–that goes something like this: “If you treat me gentle, baby, I’ll treat you gentle too.” (Shoot, I think I missed my calling as a songwriter.) And this message, I would add, is not only sweet but also essential in a culture like ours in which masculinity is often portrayed as mutually exclusive with kindness and tenderness. If that message is sentimental, maybe we need a little sentimentality.

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more musical observations

My posts have been taking a musical turn of late, not necessarily by design. Here are two more semi-profound musings I had about songs this past weekend.

  1. In a post several years ago, I grouped together three movies that came out in 1999 and summarized them all with the famous line from the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” (1998): “You bleed just to know you’re alive.” I found myself thinking about this lyric again while listening to a song from just two years later, “Pinch Me” by the Barenaked Ladies (2000). I realize now that I’ve typed it out that this is a really unfortunate convergence of song title and band name (well, let’s just say a really unfortunate band name, period), but the title simply refers to the song protagonist’s feeling that he is asleep and needs to be (but is not sure if he wants to be) awakened in order to face the real world. (By the way, you may know this song better as the one with the line, “I could hide out under there/I just made you say ‘underwear.’”) The song could be read as a plea from a depressed person who can’t muster the courage to even go outside his door. I have a feeling that many cultural critics read it, along with “Iris,” as an anthem of the malaise of late Gen X-ers and early Millennials—people my own age, who grew up hearing these songs as background music—and perhaps some of them connect this malaise with the sense of entitlement that they are so fond of attributing to people in that age range. I prefer to think of true interpretation of these songs as somewhere in between: they’re not only about people with diagnosable mental health conditions, but neither should they be dismissed as the whines of bored young people who have to manufacture problems in order to help themselves feel validated. I would submit that the world has gotten more overwhelming and that people my age and younger are less equipped to deal with it than those who came before us, and these songs are just evidence of that. I’ll leave you with that to ponder.
  2. Now, something more uplifting. While running on Saturday, I listened to one of my favorite songs of all time, Queen’s “We Are the Champions,” and maybe it was all the adrenaline or the fact that my institution has graduation in less than two weeks, but in any case, I came up with a brief commencement address on the theme of this song. Here it is: Have you ever wondered why we use the term “commencement” for something that we usually talk about as an ending? Also, have you ever wondered why the song says, “We are the champions,” implying that we’ve already won, but then goes on to say, “We’ll keep on fighting to the end?” The answer to both these questions is the same: it’s that the struggle is never over in this life, is it? You’re celebrating the end of college, and indeed you should. You are a champion. But you still face the fight of career, relationships, and just getting through life. You can “go the distance” like Rocky, but then you still have Rocky II, II, IV, IV, and Rocky Balboa and Creed and Creed II—you see what I mean. The Queen song goes on to include several more of these “already and not yet” constructions (to borrow a term from theology): for example, the speaker of the song talks about taking his bows and his curtain calls, but just a few lines later he uses future tense: “I consider it a challenge before the whole human race/And I ain’t gonna lose.” So remember, the fight goes on. But don’t let that discourage you. [And I teach at a Christian college, so this next part applies to my students and is crucial.] Remember that you serve a God who does have time for losers. He gave his life for losers like us, and he makes us champions. The End.
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“Michigan seems like a dream to me now”

I’ll go ahead and warn you that I’m not totally sure what direction this post is going to take–whether it’s going to turn out profound like last week’s post or be a stream-of-consciousness reflection on how Simon and Garfunkel lyrics have kept coming to my attention over the past week, which is all that I have in mind right now. Just letting you know.

So, yes, last night while I was making a tuna layered salad to chill for tonight’s meeting of my creative writing group, I listened to my Simon and Garfunkel greatest hits record because for days, I had been coming across direct and indirect references to their songs, from a former grad student telling me that “Bridge over Troubled Water” played an instrumental role in the conversion of Christian singer Jason Gray (shout out to you, Kandy, if you’re reading this!), to Max Lucado’s odd but appropriate mention of “The Boxer” in his early book No Wonder They Call Him the Savior, to the Michigan place-name Saginaw, which always makes me think of the song “America” (which, since that’s the most generic song title ever, most people probably think of as “All Gone to Look for America”). (“It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw.”) By the way, I haven’t been to the city of Saginaw, but the reason I fairly often think of the name and hence the song is that there’s a thoroughfare called Saginaw (Street? Avenue? It’s just called Saginaw, apparently. They do that a lot around here) in Lansing where the American Red Cross platelet donation center is. Yes, I do drive an hour to Lansing to donate platelets when I could donate here in Grand Rapids with Michigan Blood Services. I’m loyal to the Red Cross, and I don’t mind making the drive once or twice a month, especially now that I have a new Mazda CX-5 that I really enjoy spending time in.

Okay. Rambling. Focus.

There’s a line in “America”–near the Saginaw line, of course–that I never really paid attention to or possibly even heard until last night. (I recently got a new turntable and speakers, and I’m having all these revelations because I can now hear my records properly for the first time.) It says, “Michigan seems like a dream to me now.” This line brought a bemused smile to my face as I was chopping cucumbers or whatever I was doing at that moment. Michigan does seem like a dream to me now, not because–like the protagonist of that song–I have passed through it quickly and left it behind, but because I am still here after seven months and yet it sometimes doesn’t seem real that I live here. And I don’t mean “dream” in the sense of “beyond my wildest dreams”; after all, if you told me I could live anywhere in the world, no restrictions, I’d probably pick Italy or somewhere else more temperate in climate and with better food than Michigan (no offense intended). But I’m awed, blessed, and kinda proud of myself that I am not only living in a state that a year ago I’d never remotely considered living in, but also working at a university that a year ago I’d never heard of (but only because it’s a hidden gem)–and I own a house in that state and just a few blocks from that university. I even have a Michigan license plate on the four-wheel-drive vehicle I probably would not have bought in Virginia. But it all feels a little surreal, like an unusually long vacation.

That’s all I have to say about that, as Forrest Gump says. I hope it was sufficiently profound for you. Go listen to some Simon and Garfunkel.

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Big Daddy Weave, Christian music, and my judgmental heart

For over a month, I had been going to my chiropractor three times a week and seeing a poster for an upcoming Big Daddy Weave concert every time I hung up my coat. Although I’ve never been a particular fan of BDW, I would sometimes look at the poster and think, “I should go to that.” After all, I’ve been running a streak of attending good concerts ever since last October–basically, since I moved to the Grand Rapids area. Also, the poster said there would be a guest violinist and a guest cellist, and I like classy string music as much as the next person. I have also been slightly intrigued by Big Daddy Weave ever since I read a guest column in the World Vision magazine a few years ago by lead singer Mike Weaver. He wrote about preparing to visit his sponsored child in the boy’s home country and feeling apprehensive about the visit because as an obese person, he thought his presence might be awkward or inappropriate in a severely food-insecure area–and then having his apprehensions made mostly irrelevant when he and his sponsored child immediately connected. I was impressed by the thoughtfulness of this piece and have had it in the back of my mind ever since then.

So I listened to Big Daddy Weave’s top tracks on Pandora and discovered, upon hearing them all at once, that these were some of the most memorable best-written songs I’d heard on Christian radio over the past few years. See, I have this thing about Christian radio–I listen to it while mentally distancing myself from it. After all, life is not always “positive and encouraging,” a favorite slogan of Christian radio stations. But as I studied BDW’s discography (still trying to decide if I should buy a ticket to the concert), I realized that while they do have a number of celebratory anthems about victory in Jesus (“The Lion and the Lamb” is a really good one), they also have a number of songs about shame, discouragement, and other non-positive experiences. Yet they always do point to Jesus somewhere in their songs. I’ve been telling my students that we need more Christian artists who do this, instead of jumping straight to the victory part.

So I decided to buy a ticket. But I felt like I had to deprecate myself about this. “I’m going to see Big Daddy Weave on Friday night,” I said to two of my music-savvy college students. “And you can make fun of me; I know that’s, like, soccer-mom music.” Their response surprised me. “Oh, we love them! So jealous you get to go to that” was essentially what they said. So I felt a little better about myself.

But when I got to the church where the concert was taking place, and I was standing in line waiting to get in, I saw a lot of soccer moms and soccer dads, and I started silently judging everything I told myself I hated about suburban middle-American Christianity. Honestly, I think this was a coping mechanism because I was really feeling lonely and awkward about attending the concert about myself.

I sat near the back of the sanctuary, which allowed me to do some people-watching, and I ended up being surprised by the diversity of the crowd. Throughout the concert, which was really more of a worship service, I sincerely enjoyed watching the people around me respond to the music. In the row in front of me, there was a group of intellectually disabled adults who were really getting into it. In the row in front of them, there was a group of teenagers who I would have guessed would’ve preferred newer and hipper bands, yet seemed to love the music. (Incidentally, there was a lot of hugging going on in both of those rows, especially toward the end of the concert.) In the row in front of them, there was a row of women who did indeed appear to be soccer moms, but one of them was African-American (one of the few non-white people in attendance–okay, so the crowd wasn’t diverse in every respect), and she wasn’t turning up her nose at the whiteboy music either; in fact, she and one of her friends a few seats down were on their feet almost the entire concert.

By the end of the concert, I felt convicted. What’s so bad about soccer moms anyway? Who am I, in my arrogance, to judge my fellow believers for the music they like or the way they dress or the minivans they drive? Or the way they worship? I felt convicted, but not guilty (another favorite song topic of BDW is how we don’t have to bear the guilt of our sin anymore, so that was good to hear)–I felt blessed that these people didn’t have a problem with worshiping next to a lone concert attendee wearing a weird bandanna and, by the end of it all, a goofy smile. (In case you’re wondering, that was me.)

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India in Mira Nair’s Vanity Fair

Over the weekend, I watched Mira Nair’s 2004 adaptation of William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. I had seen it several years before, and even before I rewatched it, I remembered that the movie left me feeling more affectionate toward the characters than the notoriously satirical novel did. I tend to have this experience in general with adaptations–it’s usually easier to like a character I am seeing portrayed by a flesh-and-blood actor as compared to a character described by a (sometimes vicious) narrator and perhaps, in the case of a Victorian novel, illustrated in a cartoonish style. But I think there’s an additional reason why Nair applies a more charitable interpretation to the characters, which is simply that she’s a woman. This is no doubt why main character Becky Sharp, while every bit as strong and smart and (a little bit) ruthless as in the novel, appears less like a shrew and more like a woman who has spent her life striving to overcome the disadvantages of poverty and orphanhood.

I also remembered that India, a distant backdrop for some of the plotlines in the novel, takes a more prominent role under the direction of the Indian-American Nair. But not until this latest viewing did I realize the extent and nuance of India’s presence in the film. Unlike some other movies of the last few decades, such as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel (which I have to admit I really do enjoy), Vanity Fair does not carry the message that if British people (or white people in general; I think this message is also implied in Eat Pray Love) go to India, they will have a magical experience and all their problems will be solved. While Vanity Fair celebrates the music, cuisine, and clothing styles of India, it doesn’t slap a simple, single symbolic meaning on the entire nation or its culture. For example, in one scene, India seems to represent heartwarming family values (when the lonely Dobbin, who has escaped to India to nurse his unrequited love, watches the happy parents and child), but in a later scene, Indian music, dance, and costume are associated with moral degradation in Lord Steyne’s creepy-sexy “ballet.”

The connection with India is, I think, the reason for Nair’s significantly more positive portrayal of Jos Sedley, a British colonial bureaucrat home on leave from India and also the first man who makes a bit of a fool of himself over Becky Sharp. In the novel, Jos is a minor character who is regularly mocked by his fellow characters and the narrator–for being fat, for being nonconfrontational (or cowardly, as Thackeray seems to present him, but I think it’s a good thing to have a peaceful young man in a novel full of hotheads and warriors), and for having, in the eyes of his hidebound friends and family, nearly “gone native” in his affinity for Indian clothing and cooking. Although Jos is part of a colonial machine whose purpose is to impose British rule and culture on India, as an individual he seems to be doing more absorbing than imposing. Whenever he appears in the film, he is portrayed as a respectful and delighted fan of Indian culture, which he (again respectfully) tries to share with the folks back home. Although he remains a minor character in the movie, he does not, as in the novel, finally and ignominiously drop out of the story about halfway through, fleeing from the Battle of Waterloo. Instead [SPOILER], he shows up at the end, after Becky has lost her love and many other things, and we learn that he’s been looking for her and hoping to take her back to India with him. The film ends with the two of them riding an elephant in what surely looks like a wedding procession. And while the scene looks a little bit like an India tourism commercial, I love that Mira Nair found a way to celebrate her family’s ancestral land and set Becky Sharp up with the man who’s loved her all along. Thackeray purists may have a problem with the ending, but I think it’s lovely.

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my first winter in Michigan

Here are some things I learned during my first winter in West Michigan:

  1. Weather-related cancellations are rare. They are more likely to happen due to cold than to snow. I understand this because I know that cold can be dangerous, especially to the very young and the very old, but driving on slippery roads with low visibility is also dangerous–just saying.
  2. Speaking of slippery roads, I learned that I can drive okay in snow but that I will feel much more comfortable in an all-wheel-drive vehicle. I came to this decision when my Mazda 6, which has served me well for nearly 10 years, got stuck in the snow twice in one day in February. I plan to begin shopping for a small SUV soon.
  3. On the other hand, I learned that I probably don’t need a garage or carport. This had been one of my must-have items when I began home shopping, but I ended up buying a garageless house that fit nearly all of my other needs and desires. I talked about installing a carport, but now I don’t think I need it. Defrosting my windshield in the morning is a minor inconvenience, and anyway, I live close enough to my job to walk when I don’t feel like digging out the car.
  4. I also learned that you find out who your friendly neighbors are in the winter. During the late January polar vortex, one neighbor whom I hadn’t met saw me struggling to shovel out my driveway and came over with his snowblower. It was too cold to exchange pleasantries, so I still don’t know his name, but I’m grateful to him. Other neighbors helped me push and shovel on that day in February when my car got stuck twice.
  5. And finally, I learned that I can handle a Michigan winter. So to those of you who were hoping to gloat when I came crying back to Virginia–sorry, you don’t get that satisfaction. Heh, heh.
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exploring my characters’ pasts

This is going to be an arcane and self-indulgent post that probably only one or two people who read my blog will actually care about. There, you’ve been warned. I may share this in my writing group, though, since some of them might care about it. I have decided to use this post to explore an idea I had the other day regarding my fictional work in progress, “Sam’s Town”–the zombie apocalypse story I have mentioned a number of times on my blog. Originally, Sam was going to be this lonely soul who never got a girlfriend and died at the end of the story. Now, not only does Sam survive, but there’s also Ramona, this “brilliant and startling” (his words) woman who is into him, which he doesn’t understand because he thinks he’s an affable sidekick at best. And now, after this thing I’m about to share, it seems that he may have a history of seemingly out-of-his-league women falling in love with him. It sounds wildly improbable, and it also sounds like a cliche. But as I’m finding that people who read about Sam usually come to love him, it makes sense to me that he would also be lovable (and not just to his parents and friends) within the world of the story.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Here’s what happened: In one of the Facebook writing groups I’m in, an administrator shared a picture of a pretty young woman with stylish hair and clothes, sitting in front of wallpaper with a tortuous yellow pattern on it (this so distracted me with thoughts of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s haunting short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” that for a while I couldn’t think of anything original to write), and lobbed some character development questions at us. This is what I finally wrote in response:

You guys are all so good at politically complex fantasy, dystopian, and historical stories. I’m going with plain old contemporary realism.

This is Charlotte (a nod to the author of “The Yellow Wallpaper” 😁). She is the most popular girl in school, but not a mean queen bee—everyone likes her, even teachers. She is smart, poised, and articulate, and she knows what she wants out of life. Well, that last part isn’t true. She has no idea what she wants—only what others expect of her.

She is hiding the fact that she really hates herself most of the time. She hates that she always has to perform. She hates her body, and she is bulimic. This is an open secret among her group of friends—most of them are bulimic too—but she’s hiding the fact that she doesn’t want to do that to herself anymore. (So are all of her friends, actually.)

She is also hiding the fact that she likes the boy who sits in front of her in English. He is quiet and terribly awkward, and his goal in life seems to be to disappear. But Charlotte sees him. She hasn’t told her friends because they wouldn’t understand. They call him Ghost Boy. (And no, he’s not an actual ghost—contemporary realism, you guys. His real name is Peter, by the way.) And she can’t tell him because he would think she was just making fun of him. So she just keeps playing her role. THE END (for now)

Almost immediately after I wrote that–actually, maybe while I was still writing it–it occurred to me that this Peter fellow sounds an awful lot like my character Sam (now in his early 30s) as he describes his teenage self. The disappointing interpretation of this is that I only know how to write one male character, over and over, with slight variations. The more cheerful interpretation is that this is Sam and I need to incorporate this into his backstory. I had already come up with a vaguely outlined character named Becky Olson, whom Sam had liked in high school and who might show up again (not as a zombie) in my vaguely planned sequel, but this so-called Charlotte is quite a bit different from Becky, who was supposed to be sweet and quiet and sort of a background type like Sam.

It would be interesting and perhaps vindicating for my Sam fans if the adult Charlotte (also not a zombie) confessed her teenage feelings for Sam, but would it be realistic? Even if she did like Sam back then, would she remember all these years later? Is it a bit corny and idealistic for all these attractive, put-together women to be falling in love with shlubby, semi-reclusive Sam? I think the answers to those questions are probably no, no, and yes, and yet–I can’t help imagining a flashback scene in which Charlotte goes (with her parents, or some friends, or a date) to Clemenza’s, the restaurant where Sam works, and they strike up this awkward, “oh, you’re in my English class” conversation (even though each knows perfectly well who the other is), and even though Sam is just a busboy, he gets her some cannoli in a takeout box, and he rambles on to her about all the ingredients and how good the cannoli is at Clemenza’s and how he’s been practicing at home and he can almost make it like the chefs here do. And she still remembers all these years later.

I’m almost equally torn between gushing and gagging at what I just wrote. If you’ve read this far, let me know what you think.

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Loki the attention-seeking son, part 2

As promised, here are some thoughts I added to my conference paper, after doing some significant cutting of rabbit trails on interesting but unnecessary topics from Othello to The Dark Knight. Read the backstory here.

At the end of Thor: The Dark World, like another famous trickster, Tom Sawyer, Loki essentially attends his own funeral and enjoys hearing the eulogy that Thor believes he is delivering to their father.  Even more stunningly, Loki, in the form of Odin, speaks in praise of himself. The praise is restrained, necessarily so as not to destroy the illusion that Odin is speaking, but in essence, Loki uses Odin’s mouth to speak the affirmation he has always wanted to hear from Odin.

[I called this next section of my paper “The Little Blue Frost-Giant Baby Finally Chills Out.”]

In Thor: Ragnarok (2017), directed by Taika Waititi, one of the best-reviewed and certainly the funniest Marvel film to date, Loki’s character undergoes yet another transformation. Although he persists in his deceptive and treacherous ways, he no longer seems to crave a throne. When we first meet him in this film, he is still impersonating Odin and enjoying a stint as Asgard’s ruler, but this scene is played for laughs, and when Thor brings this travesty of a reign to an end, Loki doesn’t put up much of a fight.

Later, during the bizarre interlude on the waste planet of Sakaar, Loki seems content to stay in this galactic backwater and wield such influence as he can as a right-hand man to the Grand Master. He no longer desires the throne of Asgard. There are many possible reasons for his resignation—one is that Asgard is being taken over by the seemingly unstoppable villain Hela—but I believe the real key to Loki’s significantly more relaxed behavior in this film is the early scene in which Odin, who has been living in retirement on Earth, passes out of this world. Flanked once again by his two sons, Odin speaks words of equal love for Thor and Loki, and this time, they are words of simple acceptance, with no talk of thrones or inheritance. Perhaps Loki has come full circle and really believes, once again, that his father loves and accepts him.

There is also an interesting scene immediately after this, in which Thor and Loki meet their evil half-sister Hela. She says to Thor, “You don’t look like Odin,” and then to Loki, who is attempting to negotiate with her, “You sound like him.” This apparent throw-away comment by Hela may confirm to Loki that he is truly Odin’s son—perhaps even more so than Thor.

At the end of Thor: Ragnarok comes probably the biggest departure these films have made from Norse mythology. Traditionally, Loki fights with Asgard’s enemies in the apocalyptic battle of Ragnarok. But in the film, Loki fights alongside the gods of Asgard. Although Infinity War calls Loki’s motives into question once again, his choice to fight on the Aesir’s side is significant—and may have happened simply because he finally got his father to look at him.

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Loki as an attention-seeking son

A lot of people seem to have Marvel movie fatigue right now; I know I do. (The exception, of course, is the freshness of the recent Oscar nominations and wins of Black Panther.  Let me just go on a rabbit trail for a second and say that as a movie music geek, I was excited to see the baby-faced 34-year-old Ludwig Goransson accept the Best Original Score award for that film. We need some fresh blood in that category, and Goransson’s musically eclectic and emotionally on-point score deserved the win.) Anyway, although many of us are getting tired of keeping track of who has what stone and why, I’ve noticed that my students’ eyes still light up when I mention my favorite Marvel character, Loki (and I mention him more often than is strictly necessary in any college English class). So I trust I will not try your patience if I use this post to test out some ideas on a paper about Loki that I am editing for presentation at a conference this Friday. I originally wrote the paper a few years ago as a chapter, which was ultimately not selected, for an edited collection. It’s 15 pages long, and I need to cut it to almost half that length–while also including some observations on Thor: Ragnarok, which hadn’t been released when I wrote the chapter. So in the next few paragraphs, I’m going to see if I can sketch out my main points briefly and interestingly. Any feedback would be appreciated.

My primary premise is that Loki, as he appears in the Marvel movies (not in traditional Norse myths, where he is quite a different character), is motivated primarily by his desire for respect–or, at bare minimum, attention–from Odin, the adoptive father whom he claims to hate but whose opinion he clearly cares about. My secondary premise is that Loki’s craving for attention manifests itself in his performative behavior. This is where the Marvel character does align with the Norse sort-of-deity: Loki is a shape-shifter, and in the movies, his shape-shifting demonstrates that he will try anything in order to gain an audience. (And although Odin is his primary desired audience, any audience can fulfill his need to some extent.)

This relational dynamic is established in the first film Loki appears in, Thor, which draws from the quasi-Shakespearean world of the classic The Mighty Thor comics and plays to the strengths of director Kenneth Branagh. In its storytelling and staging, this film establishes what I call a Shakespearean inheritance triangle, in which Thor–even during his period of exile on Earth–is consistently portrayed as the biological, legitimate, and/or older son, to whom the kingship legally belongs, while Loki is consistently portrayed as the adopted, illegitimate, and/or younger son. Literally, in terms of the story, it’s unclear which brother is older, and Loki isn’t actually illegitimate, but all of these tropes come into play in the character’s portrayal. With his sardonic humor, intellectual arrogance, and dread of humiliation, Loki fits perfectly within the tradition of the Shakespearean bastard. At the end of this movie, the “triangle” is broken when Loki lets go of Thor’s hand and falls into the abyss, and from this point on, he is “out” as an antagonist.

And he plays this antagonist role with great relish in his next film, The Avengers, in which director Joss Whedon clearly sets up Loki in the role of the supervillain even as he blurs the line between good guys and bad guys. This is the film in which Tony Stark refers to Loki as “a full-tilt diva,” and if I had time I could offer a detailed analysis of the ways in which Loki uses New York City and even the world as his stage (hey! another Shakespeare reference).

I’m going to stop here because this post is getting really long. I may do a Part 2 later this week. I just this moment had a great thought about the scene at the end of Thor: The Dark World in which Loki takes on the form of Odin. And I have some thoughts about the poignant scene in Thor: Ragnarok in which Odin passes from this world with equally loving words for both of his sons. But more on that later. Tell me your thoughts so I can steal your ideas! (just kidding about the stealing)