Cultural Learnings from Movie Thor

Thor is a great movie.

Ok, it’s not Quentin Tarantino.  It’s what I like to call ‘biff, boff and eye candy’ – lots of fighting, lots of hunky chest shots, baddies, goodies, and it all works out in the end.

But at a deeper level, Thor has a lot to teach us about us, and it’s kind of nice (unlike, say, Chucky or Hostel, which also have a lot to teach us, but which are NOT nice).  Here it is, in a nutshell.

Whoever put together Thor thinks that people warm to the following concepts:

Love and loyalty.  Ok so she’s only a mortal, she’s going to be dead in two seconds, relatively speaking, but she’s the only girl for Thor.  No matter that he’s the most handsome man in Valhalla and some bronze-nippled immortal is giving him the eye – Jane is the only one for him.  Which is only right, as she too prefers being squashed to death to living without him.

Honour is more important than power.  Kings, like politicians, have to be rotten sometimes (from my reading of the news and historical novels, pretty much all the time).  Thor is a good guy and wants to stay that way.  Ergo, he makes a choice – not to step up to that top job in heaven (and that may be why we have such crappy kings and politicians).

The little people matter.  “Never mind those cretins, let’s just you and me sort things out between ourselves,” says Loki or whoever the arch villain is.  “No,” says Thor, “I stand with the people of Earth against tyranny and nasty shit.”

Well of course the little people matter.  The little people are handing over their money at the box office to watch this stuff.  If politics is porn, this is the money shot – “The only thing I care about is serving YOU the people of America/Australia/Outer Mongolia, the citizens of this Great Nation of Ours!”.  You don’t get Thor sticking up for the cows or the endangered species or anything though – they don’t vote or watch movies.

Anyway I guess you could say that if the producers of Thor are right about the general tastes of their audience, then humanity isn’t as bad as I sometimes think it is.  Which is why I quite like watching movies like Thor, and Batman, and Superman, and so on.  That, and the fact that Thor is simply the crumpetiest piece of crumpet I have seen since I was impressionable teen and fancied some guy in a bushranger serial whose name I now forget.