Loki: Hope Is Hard
Although like so many others cinema-goers, we have long been fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the MCU), it was really during the pandemic that our family “committed.” That first summer we decided to watch all the movies in chronological order. We watched most of them streaming on the Disney channel, and the rest (Fantastic Four, some of the Spider-man, etc.) we secured as DVDS, carefully left out in grocery sacks curbside at the library.
The emergence of these big “estates” is something I don’t know I anticipated as a media consumer and movie-goer. I am, like so many others, huge fans both of the MCU and the Star Wars franchise. Both of these are now no longer just a set of films, but rather an entire imaginative universe experienceable through many media.
Graphic novels. Novels. Audio-dramas. Limited series television shows. Movies. Role-playing games. Board games. The list goes on.
The past few weeks our family has been making time to watch season 2 of Loki. It’s not easy anymore for the whole crew to sit down at the same time and watch the same show, we’re all on very different school and work and life schedules.
But all of us love Loki.
Partially it’s because we love Owen Wilson. My spouse and I way back in 1997 had the unique opportunity to meet him on set while filming Behind Enemy Lines. He stepped out of his trailer up in the mountains of Slovakia and although there was not quite all the energy you get from him on the screen, nevertheless it was an iconic moment in our lives that has tied us to his filmography.
His character in the television show, Mobius, is both entirely an Owen Wilson character and yet also wonderfully the kind of non-super-powered complicated hero we’ve come to expect in the franchise. There’s more than a whiff of Phil Coulson there.
The TVA is a very strange place, but one part of it we’ve come to love is the Wes Anderson-like feel of the set. Ostensibly the Time Variance Authority has been functioning always, kind of apart from time, and the age of the facilities shows. An early episode includes Loki and Mobius sitting down for key lime pie in a key-lime pie automat.
The pie motif has inspired fans. You can now download recipes for the pie, or order key lime flavored Loki coffee.
At one point in the most recent episode, Mobius suggests that he, Loki and Sophie all sit down for a piece of pie while they wait for their friends to either save the universe (or not). Sophie gets quite angry at Mobius, but from my perspective, Mobius kind of has a point. There’s not anything directly they can “do” at that moment, so why not, in the face of the imminent destruction of everything, enjoy a last piece of pie?
Later, Sophie and Loki end up back in the automat, purely by “accident,” and Loki delivers an incredibly memorable soliloquy, summarized in the meme I've included at the top of this post.
On the one hand, this is the kind of inspiring moment that gives us reason to watch television. It’s like the gospel all wrapped up in 45 minutes of visual wonderment.
On the other hand, it does cause me to ask two questions. First, who IS this Loki now? If you’ve watched Loki in the many previous movies, from Thor to the Avengers, you know this isn’t the Loki that once was. The TVA has changed him, dramatically. Although it’s to Tom Hiddleston’s credit that the portrayal of Loki is still so eminently Loki that it’s entirely believable.
So on the one hand, there’s this profound thing happening, which you can only know about if you’ve spent time watching the whole of the MCU experience, that a villain might genuinely become a hero.
But also, the whole moment calls into question the dystopian, apocalyptic thematic at the center of (it seems) almost all popular science fiction. This is some epic level post-modernist dialectic going on when the god of mischief, responsible more than anyone for burning things down, to offer a speech on how easy it is to burn things down, and how difficult it is to hope.
But is there anyone better suited then to say precisely this?
Hope IS hard. That’s why so much of our popular literature and cinema doesn’t offer it. Despair, destruction, annihilation, these all seem easy. Much harder, not just in life but also in literature and film, is the creation of an actual hopeful scenario, what Tolkien called a “eucatastrophe.” Even more difficult (when was the last time you saw this in a sci-fi series) is no catastrophe at all, but true, ongoing, abiding hope?
Although some individual films or series in the MCU (and also in Star Wars) have been less than outstanding, overall I’ve been enjoying this ride of doing life alongside massive media estates. I understand many of the criticisms, and sometimes I do wish all our media consumption weren’t so heavily populated by just a couple imaginative universes, but on the other hand, who knew we’d get to see media cathedrals like this in and through which we can walk for days and days and days?
Can’t wait for the last two episodes!