You know, it wasn’t until I was talking to someone in person about Thor: Ragnarok that I realized how pissed I am that Taika Waititi clearly does not like Loki. This is evident to me in all his interviews about the movie, as well as in his approach to Loki in the film. (He also seems not to appreciate Tom Hiddleston’s acting ability, but that’s another story. At least Jeff Goldblum knows where the real talent in the cast is.) I don’t know what it is – maybe he’s one of those people who’s just incapable of sympathizing with (sometime) villains. In any case, he seems to have misinterpreted Loki’s character and simplified him into a cartoon version of himself: self-absorbed and narcissistic, with nothing but “poor me, I’m misunderstood,” “rich kid” problems that he just needs to “grow up” and get over.
I might be wrong, but I get the sense that people of many different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds find Loki compelling and sympathetic. Maybe Taika is just too mentally healthy? Most of the Loki fans on here seem to have some mental illness or another. I’m reminded of when my former roommate started reading Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, on my recommendation, and said she couldn’t sympathize with the protagonist, Quentin, because he just couldn’t appreciate all the good things he had and was always whining about still being unhappy. And I’m like, yeah, that’s called depression. Everything in your life can be going great on the surface and you’re still miserable for no apparent reason. So yeah, Loki’s reactions to the (legitimately shitty) things that happen to him are irrational. Because he’s pretty clearly mentally unwell. I mean, he canonically – onscreen, FFS – attempts suicide. “Rich kid problems,” huh?
Or maybe the deflation of Loki’s character was deliberate. Taika kept saying in interviews that he wanted to make sure Thor was the best, most interesting character in his own movie. The implication, of course, is that in previous movies he wasn’t – which means that someone else was, and the obvious candidate is Loki (Jane Foster may have been a more interesting character than Thor in the first movie, but they gave her basically nothing to do for most of the second one). The difficult thing to do would be to make Thor at least as interesting as Loki. The easy thing to do is to portray Loki as less interesting than he is/was/could be so that Thor can outshine him.
If you need to talk about this in detail with someone, I’m your woman.
For me personally, one standout moment comes right at the beginning, when we see the statue and the play. I’ve seen the meta that connects Loki’s mental health with his contributions to Asgard’s art and culture, and I like the interpretation that these are methods for Loki to help himself heal. I don’t believe it was what we were intended to take from that scene, however. I think we’re just supposed to say, “Oh that Loki! Of course the silly rich boy would make a golden statue of himself and write a play glorifying his life and death. He’s such a narcissist.” Right… did you miss the part where he’s dealing with internalized racism against his own kind? That was a pretty big part of the first Thor movie’s plot and conflict. Oh right, we’re disregarding those.
It also annoys me that Thor treats fucking Hela’s grievances with Odin with more sympathy than Loki’s. Loki says something along the lines of “It hurts being lied to,” (for I a second I thought we might actually get to talk about one of the big issues) and Thor just does not give a shit. It’s all on Loki. Meanwhile, Thor relates to Hela during their conversation. Odin told them both they were worthy and then cast them out the instant they did something he found objectionable, despite the fact that he’d done the very same shit. Am I honestly supposed to feel more sympathy for Hela?
Oh goodness, I’m ranting now…
I completely agree with you about the play and the statue. I felt called out, and honestly kind of offended, by the way they were making a mockery of what was actually a very moving scene in Thor: The Dark World. Yeah, OK, Loki didn’t die, but it’s not totally clear whether or not he thought he was going to die at the time; and there was a moment of genuine affection and honesty between him and Thor. They even made fun of the emotional background music by having that little angelic choir sing it. Yeah, thanks, I knew it was calculated to tug at my heart. Guess what? It worked. So fuck you very much.
Right… did you miss the part where he’s dealing with internalized racism against his own kind? That was a pretty big part of the first Thor movie’s plot and conflict. Oh right, we’re disregarding those.
^ This is the part of your comment that really stood out to me. We see, briefly, in the play that Loki-as-Odin has revealed his Jotun origin to all of Asgard. That’s a HUGE DEAL. I had imagined that Loki would keep trying to hide it forever – unless real-Odin had already made it public either after Loki’s fall (unlikely) or after his return and imprisonment (more likely; an excellent way to “explain” why he went bad and distance the rest of the royal family from the “bad apple”). But it’s slipped in there not only with no follow-up, but without seriousness. “A little blue baby icicle who melted this foolish old man’s heart”? Hahaha, WTF Loki just outed himself as a Jotun adoptee.
[This got really long so I’m putting the rest under a cut. Warning: it’s about race.]
I’ve been reading all this stuff about the distinctively Maori/indigenous perspective that Taika Waititi brought to Ragnarok, and of course the glaring allegory about imperialism and its fruits. If TW is approaching the issue of race and oppression from a distinctively Maori/indigenous standpoint, then he’s also looking at it from the standpoint of a group whose subjugation has typically taken the form of conquest from outside and relegation to the outskirts of society – but usually maintaining a distinct group identity. There are, of course, exceptions: attempts at forced assimilation of Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians, e.g., by taking children away from their parents and placing them in boarding schools or white families where they would be indoctrinated with English/European culture and religion and forbidden to speak the language or engage in the cultural practices of their community of origin. But the stereotypical experience of indigenous people (those that have survived), especially under British/American colonialism, is the reservation: theft of land and resources, then semi-isolated existence in enforced poverty with traditional language and culture slowly bleeding away due to outside influence and economic pressure. We are invited to infer from Thor: Ragnarok that the fate of the other Realms that Asgard brought under its sway was much like this.
Loki’s experience and the story of internalized racism being told in Thor is somewhat different. One could draw a comparison with the forcible adoption of indigenous children by white families: Loki, too, grows up in complete ignorance of the culture of his blood kin, indoctrinated with Asgard’s imperialist ideology and contemptuous attitudes toward the “backward” races of other Realms. But his is also, importantly, a story about “passing” – a phenomenon connected either with racial/ethnic groups that live in the midst of the dominant group (for part of the time, anyway; they might be relegated to ghettos at night), or with stigmatized sexual or gender identities (which crop up in the midst of the dominant group all the time). Why do I bring up sexual orientations and gender identities in a discussion of internalized racism, you ask? Loki’s canonical queerness (now in the MCU as well as the comics!) is one reason; another is the well-documented fact that some of the most vicious homophobes are gay people in deep, deep denial. And, of course, the fact that gay and trans folks can often “pass” as straight or as the gender assigned at birth, and often must, either in a hostile community or (more relevantly here) before they realize and/or acknowledge the meaning of feelings and experiences that they didn’t know how or weren’t willing to interpret.
The most obvious examples of the first kind of case – racial passing – are Black Americans and Jews (naturally, because it’s me talking; and consult this post for more on the Jewish coding, whether intentional or un-, of MCU/Marvel Loki). As I have discussed before (in the linked post), Loki’s story is very similar to that of Moses in The Prince of Egypt: the offspring of a conquered people adopted and raised by the conquerors in ignorance of his heritage, until it is abruptly and traumatically revealed to him by someone other than his adoptive family, who then confirm it. But it’s also a scenario you could imagine happening in 19th- or 20th-century America or Europe: a white-/gentile-passing orphan adopted out to a white family, either out of ignorance or in order to improve the child’s prospects, who grows up surrounded by racist ideas and, understandably, absorbs them. Then he finds out his true origin, perhaps when identified by someone who is especially sensitive to distinguishing physical characteristics (and let me tell you, it is creepy af when you’re blonde and mostly shiksa-looking and a random goy in a bar or a public bathroom asks you if you’re Jewish), or when he has a kid who doesn’t pass (and maternal infidelity can be ruled out). Or maybe he’s from a family of Sephardi conversos who still light candles in the basement every Friday night but have no idea why, just that they’re not supposed to tell anyone. This is actually a thing in Spain and Portugal and their former colonies; there are people who have found out only in the last few decades that their ancestors were Jewish. And many of them, I’m sure, have some of the same casually antisemitic attitudes that are still common in Europe and Latin America. (A Spanish village called Castrillo Matajudios, which means “Camp Kill Jews,” only just changed its name in 2015.)
Loki’s story could have been used to flesh out the narrative about colonialism. Recall Hela’s dismissive remark about bogus “peace treaties” commemorated on the redecorated walls of the throne room: that might have been an allusion to the one-sided “treaties” that Britain and the U.S. signed with American Indian nations and then trampled all over. Loki could have been one of those stolen indigenous children raised among the colonists and taught to scorn the people to whom he was born. But for some reason Waititi and the writers didn’t make the connection, or didn’t want to tie Loki in to that aspect of the story. Maybe it was because of the element of passing, which doesn’t quite fit the narrative and opens up other associations, as I’ve sketched above. Or maybe it was just because Loki has been a villain and they didn’t want to draw a connection between a (part-time) villain – or anyway, a character they just don’t like – and the oppressed of colonialism (though making him queer is OK, I guess). For whatever reason, they wanted to keep Loki firmly coded as White (which makes him easier to ridicule!) and gloss over the part where he’s only white-passing (literally; he’s actually blue).
It feels obnoxious even to me to make this all about social justice issues… but much of the adulation of Ragnarok HAS made it all about social justice issues, so I sort of feel like the only way to make criticism stick is to show its limitations in the same domain. It’s not, despite the way people have been talking about it, the first Thor movie to address issues of race and oppression; and it doesn’t get to insist on its own radicalism by sweeping the issues raised by its predecessor under the rug.
Loki is the Philosopher King 