Of Screens and Sanctuaries: Thor, Girard, and Americanized-Christianity
I begin with an old joke…
One concerned partner calls the other and says, “Dear, be careful driving home. I just heard there’s a maniac who’s been spotted going full speed the wrong way up the freeway!”
“I can’t talk right now! There isn’t just one maniac going the wrong way,” he responds in between exclamations of amazement “there are hundreds of them!”
The punchline, of course, is that the partner driving home cannot imagine he’s the maniac going the wrong way.
With that in mind, I plan to say three things in this post:
Americanized-Christianity might be in a similar boat (car). Despite concerned phone calls, it has little imagination to entertain the possibility that it is the one going the wrong way.
Rene Girard provides fundamental insight into the ways our desires are formed through relationship and the way we are formed through desire.
Thor: Love and Thunder, for all its quirkiness, might be calling out Americanized-Christianity while leveraging Girardian insight to reveal new pathways for all of us.
I should define what I mean by the hyphenated behemoth of a phrase, American-Christianity. I’m using it to signify something ideological rather than something religious. Ideology is that set of beliefs we turn, and return to, to help us cope when something ruptures our expectations. (Not to say that coping is wrong. Sometimes, that’s about all we can do, so if you’re comfortable with the way your outlook helps you cope, then more power to you. But, if you’re looking for something more robust, flexible, and applicable to your current life then it’s possible that you are mired in ideology. If the shoe fits, wear it, if not, no problem.)
Back to ideology… for example, most Americanized-Christianity has indoctrinated itself into the idea that when a tragic event occurs God is both unsurprised and capable of single-handedly fixing the problem. Rather than allowing the event to breach our imaginary world, we suppress and pave over such thoughts with yet another layer of ideology, that is, another layer of God-talk that leads us to believe God is C-Controlling, will vanquish all foes, and prove anyone who doubts otherwise wrong. The administrators of ideology have conditioned us to ignore breaches for so long that we can’t even imagine something important is trying to help us talk about the abusive side of C-Control, the violence involved with vanquishing foes, and the absurdity of trying to live life without doubt. The reasons we do this are numerous, but generally, I would say to consider something different than a controlling and all-powerful God is to enter a vulnerable space. And vulnerability is not something the system welcomes.
To be clear, I don't think all individual Christians in America fall into this broad category. You, for example, might be a Christian in America. And you may or may not be involved with Americanized-Christianity. I'm using "Americanized" as an adjective to describe the dominant type of Christianity we've had and continue to have in our country. The type that does not welcome vulnerability.
I think about these kinds of things all the time. I suppose this is to be expected, given the wrecks I’ve seen, the trauma I’ve attempted to help people overcome, not to mention my own pain involving Christian America’s resistance to vulnerability.
At the movies
So, there I was at the theatre recently after taking out a small loan to pay for tickets, popcorn, and sodas, when I realized that Taika Waititi, director of Thor: Love and Thunder has been thinking about these kinds of things as well. One can’t watch this movie without admitting that something is being communicated about God, power, control, our choices, and a way forward.
You might be saying well, who cares? Who is Taika Waititi to speak into such things? Why listen to this guy? What does it matter what he thinks? Perhaps it doesn’t matter, though this guy is endorsed (so to speak) by Hollywood, which is endorsed by all of us (so to speak) to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The most recent Thor movie grossed almost a billion dollars. These are not insignificant amounts of money, representing not insignificant amounts of attention we give to these films. So, we can downplay Mr. Waititi or Hollywood, but I think a better route is to admit something’s going on here.
Despite Love and Thunder being a little nonsensical, it has some very interesting content. All of it, (well, not all of it, because again some of it is just nonsensical!) is setup by the very first scene. As we wander into spoiler alert territory, I’ll just say that it involves the film’s antagonist, Gorr, violently confronting a god after a personal and traumatic event. In confronting his god, I couldn't help but think that he was giving viewers permission to confront their gods. He says, in effect, “You have the power to help but you don’t, and even if you did, you can’t really fix it, can you?”
Bam, right off the bat. I had barely sat down before I was hit over the head with some of the most challenging if not disturbing questions humanity has ever voiced. But that’s not even saying it strong enough when you consider that everyone in the theatre was paying to have such questions raised. I slow down to make the point… people are offering real money… and investing real portions of their life… to have such doubts inserted into their head. Amazing! Try doing that at church.
I glanced around the theatre and shook my head at the strangeness of people casually chomping on milk duds with some of the most difficult questions humanity has ever raised, underscored by Guns N’ Roses, playing out in surround sound all around them. That’s when I thought of the little joke I started this post with, and then another thought…
Wow, this movie is calling people out who worship false, impotent, controlling gods, because it believes false-god-worship is putting innocent people at risk.
Admittedly, this is my interpretation. I am, of course, superimposing my own biases and experiences over the top of the movie (or superimposing the movie over my own biases and experiences), but nevertheless, I think it’s a reasonable interpretation.
Okay, let’s imagine I’m correct. (Something I ask people to do often.) So what? What if Hollywood is asking Christianity to come up with a more imaginative theology. What ideas do they have? What kind of God is Taika Waititi imagining? This is where, for me, it gets interesting. To set it up, let me try and bring you up to speed on how desire plays out within the mimetic theory of Rene Girard.
Interconnected Desires
For Girard, the attention we give to the other not only affects our desire, it becomes our desire. Our awareness grows so intense that we make them our model. Even more, as we imitate our model, it raises awareness in the model such that they began to imitate us. So, the subject imitates the model, only to have the model imitate the subject. It’s a never-ending process of noticing the other, imitating the other, differentiating from the other, being jealous of the other, having conflict with the other. On and on. And things only get more complicated, for as the model imitates the subject, they are really imitating their own desires through the subject. “Thus,” as Girard says in Things HIdden Since the Foundaiton of the World, “the subject becomes model to his own model, and the model, reciprocally, becomes a follower of his own model!” It’s the mirroring of desires that binds subject and model together. If all this is confusing, let me just sum it up with two simple Girardian points:
We are formed in our endless imitation of the other.
It’s not our differences that drive us; it’s our sameness.
Consider Thor. When the bad guy strikes, what does he do? He imitates and strikes back. What else could you call this? This is imitation of desire at its purest. Thor desires what Gorr desires. Gorr desires to defeat him, so this is what Thor desires. Gorr is the model, but in his response, he becomes the subject who finds in Thor, his model. And so it goes. Around and around. Over and over.
Each is desiring the desire of the other. Each is imitating the actions of the other. The violence grows until the entire universe is at the brink of destruction. But it’s there at the brink where something extraordinary happens: Thor realizes he cannot win. Given his general dim-wittedness, it’s hard to imagine how he comes to this conclusion, but he does. Somehow, he recognizes that the mimetic vortex of violence he’s caught up within is just too much. He cannot win by imitating his opponent. He needs a different approach. He needs to be a different god.
A Different Approach
Rather than continuing to fight, he stops, though, and I think this point is crucial, it's different than just quitting or simply giving up. He stops fighting to engage with something more meaningful. In this case, it's love. Without giving too much away, he chooses in the last moments before the universe descends into chaos to reinvest his time with the one he loves.
Well, this is interesting… the god of thunder and lightning, choosing to follow his heart rather than his fist into the apocalypse.
I imagine a segment of the theatre audience thought this was cheesy, naïve, or just weak. Hmm… maybe so. Maybe whenever anyone chooses love over violence, a segment of the population thinks it weak. Nevertheless, Thor's actions yield a positive if not unexpected result, for, without someone to fight, the antagonist has nowhere to direct his anger. Consequently, the violence begins to dissipate. Even more impressive, Thor, sensing love's persuasive power, makes a genuine appeal to his opponent. He asks him to pursue love rather than violence. Notice the sequence: The desire for peace causes him to choose vulnerable love that catalyzes his invitation for his enemy to imitate his desire for peace. That’s the sequence that unlocks the way forward. Gorr no longer imitates Thor's rivalry; instead, he imitates Thor's love.
What I think the filmmakers are doing here is calling and explicitly telling us that as we worship controlling gods…
we're giving ourselves a reason not to do anything. If your god controls, what's the point of even trying?
personal autonomy is stripped. If your god controls, he doesn't care about freedom or agency.
we might assume we're supposed to be controlling people. It follows that those who follow controlling gods will tend to think they should control others or, at the very least, strongly desire others to adhere to their one true religion. And if your desire is that others adhere to your beliefs, what do you think their desire will be?
And bonus point. Intentionally or unintentionally, I think they are also asking us to see in Thor's response the way a real god might act. A real god wouldn't need to be in rivalry with others. A real god wouldn't control others. Everyone knows peace is more challenging than violence, and consent more difficult than force. A real god would be a god who engages with love.
I hope you are beginning to see the way forward (I hope I am seeing it too). The way forward isn't blindly driving the same way we've always driven. It's slowing down, pulling off the road, listening, thinking, re-thinking and then choosing to drive in a different direction. This is an invitation to…
align ourselves with a God who doesn’t control, but who is still very much interested in partnering with us to make things better.
genuinely desire our enemy to be free, which allows them to emulate our desire, which might allow us to emulate their emulation!
allow antagonism to breach rather than bolster our ideology.
Imagine that... the message on our screens giving us something more compelling than the message in our sanctuaries.
