I went with a friend to the movie Thor last weekend. Being both students of mythology and psychology, it seemed appropriate.
I wonder how an experience like Thor differs from earlier experiences of the myth. For one thing, it is less interactive. The story can not be in touch with its audience in real time. It also seems less complex. I wonder too about how its emotional content differs. Did earlier people experience a sense of a god needing to earn his godliness? My intuition says no.
David Bohm once expressed that the genius of Isaac Newton was to see that “the moon is falling”. He perceived the order of things in an entirely new way, as a continuum of qualitatively homogenous space and matter, rather than a system of disconnected spheres. In this latter, older system, the heavenly bodies were not made of earthly material, but rather some sort of etherial cosmic stuff that could float above the earth and move in perfect patterns forever.
Thor contemplates the relationship of the human to the divine, and attempts to reintroduce the erotic polarity between human and divine collapsed by Newtonian thinking. As is usually the case in hollywood, eros is quite literal. The active agency of the coupling, however, lies with technocracy and science, symbolized by Portman.
Due to Loki’s instability, Thor is forced to destroy the bridge between the worlds. Loki, the mediator, dies with this symbol of his function. Now stuck in Asgard, Thor pines for Portman, waiting for her to develop the technology that is necessary for humans to enter heaven. This strikes me as an important myth of technology:
Techno-myth: We are estranged from the divine, but the gods wait for us, lovingly, knowing that they are impotent, but that we possess the cleverness to build a bridge to them, a cleverness that manifests as technology
I don’t buy it
I’ve been reading Lewis Hyde’s wonderful book Trickster Makes This World. He tells of Loki’s plot to let the giants into Asgard, as is also depicted in Thor. The result of this is for the immortals to begin to gray, and to age, and to feel the thousand natural shocks. Uproar and outrage ensue, and Loki is imprisoned beneath the earth.
This story came up not just in the movie theater, but also in a discussion about the topic du jour: the death of bin laden. The towers were a symbol of american divinity, invulnerability, and immortality. Their destruction brought a traumatic realization of our vulnerability, as well as a sense that we must close off the borders, that is, banish the porousness of the border that Loki represents. America yearned for some new sense of ‘homeland security’ to repair the trauma. On the flip-side, we projected onto the ‘terrorists’ our own injured sense of invulnerability, as well as many mercurial or loki-esque aspects. The terrorists were untouchable, invulnerable and diffuse. Able to hide anywhere and slip through any crack. They could not be damaged because they had no cohesive structure. This was our nightmare, that a force as invulnerable in reality as we had falsely hoped ourselves to be was now attacking.
The end of Hyde’s story shows Loki in his subterranean prison. His pained writhing causes the earth to shake, and his eventual escape heralds the apocalypse. Watching the triumphant banishment of Loki in Thor, and the triumphant re-repression of our feelings of vulnerability in recent events, I can only wonder what underground tremors and celestial twilights await us.
Image may be NSFW.
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