kasihya | AVENGERS AND LOKI FEELINGS (Reply)

I finally went to see the Avengers yesterday. I had ridiculously high expectations and they were actually met, which was fantastic! They were met in unexpected ways, which was even better! And then the ending few scenes broke my brain, so instead of a massive long post about all of the feelings that the movie gave me, have a massive long essay about mythological Loki vs. movie Loki and queer theory. (Spoilers ahoy, especially for the ending)

*I’m only casually interested the first two, and interested in the third only because I can’t avoid it, so if I got something terribly wrong, my bad.

**“Queer” here means “not normative”, not necessarily “LGBTQ+”. I’ve been told that that’s the academic definition?

Okay, so! The thing about the last scene that really struck me: Loki has spent the whole movie being a gigantic mess of a villain, but he seems totally cool with being defeated. He spends the whole time as a bundle of snarky rage and self-pity, and then the instant he’s defeated, what does he do? He turns into Tom Hiddlestonsmiles, like “oops, you caught me … we can be friends now, right?” Which startled me, but I thought I was just imagining things, until the ending sequence. THE END. YOU KNOW, the part with the metal gag where he looks to be the most relaxed and at peace he’s been throughout the entire movie? Where he and Thor are moving in tandem to use the Tesseract to get home, and he’s calm about it? I mean, he seems pretty okay with being sent to face Asgardian justice, which doesn’t seem to be the most forgiving system ever.

It’s just a weird way to portray him, isn’t it? And I mean that in the best possible way, I thought it was neat. This is the way I initially interpreted it: he fights and he is committed to fighting, because it’s the only honorable option even if he does want to get along, but is too proud to ever back down, so it is only through defeat that he can allow himself to stop fighting. And he can’t just let himself be defeated, because that would also be dishonorable; he has to give it his all, and try his hardest to win, so that when he is defeated, he can justify it by saying that he didn’t want that, he did his absolute best, so it’s not his fault.

Except that as elegant as that sounds to me, I don’t think that covers it; it makes him sound too nice, and he is not nice. He’s a trickster god, so that factors in, too. So instead of “not wanting to fight and wanting to get along instead”, it’s more like … he wants to fight, but he wants to also get along? Which I can sort of understand. It’s like the war between Heaven and Hell, or like Greasy Johnson vs the Them, in Good Omens. People identify themselves by what they are, but more importantly for the purposes of this train of thought, they identify themselves by what they are not. Heaven is the antithesis of Hell, the Them are the antithesis of the Johnsonites; you can’t really win against the other, not permanently, because otherwise, you have nothing to define yourself against. I feel like that’s what Loki is really after, even if he claims to want world domination and unparalleled power; he would rather have a ‘defining against’ type of relationship with his brother where they fought, over and over and over again, and sometimes one would win and sometimes the other would win, rather than one big fight to end them all. Even if that’s what his plan is basically in the Avengers…

So, I am going to go back to the beginning where I should have started, with the fact that Loki and Thor are Norse gods in a universe constructed by modern Americans. Norse cultural values? Very different from ours. This bugged me about Thor when I went to go see it, because Thor’s character reminded me a lot of Beowulf, and (for the most part, the pride thing was still an issue there) in the movie, that was seen as a bad thing, and he needed to learn American values of peaceful conflict resolution in order to be a good king and harness the power of Mjölnir.

The same sort of values distortion happens to Loki in Thor and the Avengers, which is where the queer-theory thing comes in. Norse mythology, from my limited understanding, has a lot more grey areas and moral ambiguity than the Judeo-Christian strictly good-vs-evil mythology. Mythological Loki is an ambiguous character: sometimes he helps the gods solve problems, sometimes he’s the cause of the problems, sometimes they don’t know who caused the problems so they blame him even if he wasn’t responsible. Ultimately he is supposed to take the side of the Jotunn, from what I understand? But still, he flip-flops a lot. So, take a trickster god like that, and place him into a world of black-and-white morality. What happens? Well, obviously good characters do not cause chaos, so he must be an evil character. He’s never allowed the possibility of being in an alternate third category, so he gets put into one of the available categories; in Thor, he tries to fight this to a certain extent, but by the time the Avengers comes around, he seems to have decided to throw himself into embracing the archetypal role for the “villain” label: that is, world domination, even though it doesn’t really suit him.

This presents problems because he’s the only queer character in the movieverse, so his attempts to create an identity are misinterpreted because everyone else is looking at them through the same black-and-white lens. This helps to explain his behaviors: he wants a relationship with Thor, but one based on confrontation and chaos rather than actually getting along, but with the understanding that this is a relationship. Even if that’s not sane, or rational; the argument is not that Loki is just a misunderstood queer person, it’s that he’s all kinds of messed up and that his messed-up-ness can be understood by looking at him as someone out of joint with the morality of the rest of the world.

If he were in another world where he wasn’t queer, where the superhero/villain divide didn’t exist, then he could be happy, because he wouldn’t have grown up being pushed into (and eventually embracing) the villain box; he could have been both a chaotic god and have a weird, violent relationship with Thor. But because he exists in the Marvel black-and-white universe, those two ideas are incompatible, and he winds up choosing the trickster god side, ignoring/suppressing/getting pissed at the brother side. And so the movie ending is kind of, if not happy, definitely not happy, but it’s not a total failure. Yeah, he’s failed to reach any of his villain goals, but he gets both of those ideas: he gets to cause a whole lot of destruction and chaos, and he gets to go back to Asgard with Thor.

Final thought on that is that maybe now it’s okay for him to go back to Asgard and be seen as a villain, because now he has proved to himself that yes, heisa monster, hedoesfit that box after all, so it’s okay that they see him as one now? But that’s even more speculative than the rest of this load of nonsense.

THE END. I’m going to go find more Hawkeye gifs now and go back to being a flaily human being.

In other news! I have been spending most of my recent time wandering around in a haze of Supernatural-induced feelings that have brought on a sudden need to consume blues and garage rock. Why? I don't even know. I was happily listening to nothing but Fun. and Scissor Sisters up until two weeks ago, when my brain abruptly switched gears and decided that the Black Keys and the Dead Weather were the new most exciting thing.