The Proliferation of Total Mythologies
MCU, Star Wars, Dante, Victoria Goddard, Dungeons & Dragons, the Bible
Today I happened across a short essay celebrating the debut of Adam Warlock in the recently released movie Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. During the pandemic, our family did a massive dive into the Marvel universe, reading many omnibus volumes of Marvel comics checked out from the library.1 A favorite was Adam Warlock. We’re not alone.
We also watched the entire MCU (minus a lot of Spiderman which is owned by Universal, and some Fantastic Four films) in chronological order that summer. All of it was a re-watch. The whole family felt the need for a big grand but familiar narrative. The MCU fit the bill.
There’s also a lot of buzz this spring about what is coming next: there’s Kang who will take a more prominent place in the second season of Loki this fall, and then there are the big announcements of films rolling out through at least 2026. If you want to keep inhabiting the Marvel universe via television and film, you will have lots of options.
Not to mention there’s even more ongoing content coming out weekly in comic book form.
This spring our family also worked hard to keep up on the new things coming out in the Star Wars universe. For a while, Bad Batch and Mandalorian were streaming at the same time, and because the total amount of television we watch as a family is rather limited, sometimes we got behind. But in order to really understand what’s happening with the roll out of Bad Batch and Mandalorian, it helps to be at least somewhat aware of the Star Wars universe as a whole, within which these two television series play just minor moments in much larger movements.
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We live in an extraordinary era. I’m not sure consumers of culture have ever, prior to productions like the Marvel Universe or the Star Wars Universe, had the opportunity to inhabit such grand mythological spaces via so many different media. Both of these universes include not just film, but also novels and comic books, shorts and graphic novels, podcasts and fandom.
And these are just two estates. There are others. Consider the immensity of what J.R.R. Tolkien attempted to accomplish with his history of Middle-Earth. An entire sub-creation that included popular novels, yes, like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but also an entire history of a mythological world, inclusive of multiple synthetic languages, maps, chronologies, and more.
Victoria Goddard, whose Nine Worlds is of this same sort, was with our congregation this past Sunday. In her sermon, she drew a comparison between modern attempts at speculative fiction and the works of Dante and Boethius. By the end of the sermon, she had us profoundly intrigued at the relationship between the creation of such works and the invitation into faith (remember, for example, that although Virgil leads Dante in the Divine Comedy, Virgil is not himself a Christian).
Goddard’s works, much like Tolkien’s, are all exercises in “total” world building. That is to say, if you read one of her novellas, even if it takes place long ago and far away compared to another novel in the series, they are nevertheless part of the same world, and interconnected.
We might ask ourselves, as I do sometimes, what it is about such massive or total world building that is so very appealing.
Consider: there’s a tremendous cost of entry for engaging such total worlds. If you have never read any of Goddard, one question you immediately ask is a practical one: where should I start?
This same question can be asked if you are new to Marvel, or new to Star Wars, or new to Tolkien. It’s hard to know when entering a world at what point you should enter it. You simply can’t take it in whole, that’s not possible, so the question becomes: what is my first step?
And yet… there’s something so tremendously appealing about inhabiting such worlds that they appear to be some of our favorite stories. There is a reason Marvel, Star Wars, Brandon Sanderson, Tolkien, and other creative estates are popular. Those of us who live in them love the pay-off that comes by experiencing the ongoing connections.
I love it that Adam Warlock, who I read about three years ago in a reprint of comics from decades ago, will now appear in a Guardians of the Galaxy movie, the third in a series, with a cast of characters that are also familiar.
I love it when a little novella I read of Goddard’s suddenly intersects, on page 237, with events happening in another of her novels.
I love it that I can read Dante and have him mention Virgil, who I’ve also read.
And so on.
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Perhaps the only problem with our modern moment is the proliferation of such narratives. We might ask ourselves: how many can we know well?
Additionally, through the proliferation of so many “total” mythologies, the mythologies that had previously dominated the scene take, not necessarily a back seat, but a seat alongside and together with all the others.
I think of the Bible here. the Bible is, among other things, a robust media production of complexity and magnitude similar to the MCU. It’s profoundly intertextual, to a degree unique in literature. It spans millennia, contains many genres, has been translated into thousands of tongues.
Although it has pride of place yet today within my religious tradition, it is nevertheless under-rated, or under-noticed, as a total mythology comparable to the others I’ve already named.
Perhaps the Bible has some of the same issues as the Dungeons & Dragons universe. For decades now, the film industry has struggled to produce a movie that adequately represents D&D.2 Mostly, this has been because, to make a D&D movie, it needs to be a great movie (first), also representative of how the game is played (second), and also faithful to the setting (third).
That’s a tall order. But some of the same problems apply to turning the Bible into film. Unlike other adaptations of literature for the big screen, there’s a kind of religious weight to a film based on the Bible that isn’t present when making a movie out of a recent John Grisham. And because of this weight, a movie based on the Bible can be dissatisfying either because it strays too far from the authentic theology and literary splendor of Scripture, or because it is simply too religious in saccharine ways.
The same is true for fictional translations of the Bible, or graphic novels, etc.
But returning to the way in which “total” mythologies now take up a lot of our imaginative space (and are ever present in our consumable media spaces), we might forget that the Bible could/can be such a mythology. It’s simply that, at least as far as I can tell, the average Christian simply has neither the capacity nor a compelling interest in rereading much of Scripture as frequently as they re-watch Harry Potter or Star Wars.
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It is for this reason that I’m a fan of the scripturalization of new mythologies, approaching some texts (and film and so on) as “sacred texts.” I find that certain of these estates serve in this manner better than others, or sometimes groups of readers simply do a better job than other groups of reading such texts in sacred manners.
But I do think an open question remains: how are we as modern people to communicate among one another with sacred texts somewhere at the center of the communities we share when there is no long just the “one” text, just the one canon, but rather many canons, many texts, a back and forth tapestry of sacred engagement?
This is the wonderfully gorgeous problematic we are presented with each time a new Guardians of the Galaxy movie, Star Wars show, Victoria Goddard novel, or translation of Dante emerges. It’s an old/new problem. Old, because even with “one” book like the Bible, you had to ask yourself, “Do I read Genesis, 2 Chronicles, or the Acts of the Apostles tonight?”
Now, we also ask ourselves whether it’s time to re-watch Return of the Jedi or view the new Andor. And we wonder which communities we can join that will be discussing each of these, and what such fan communal conversation might do.
Victoria Goddard’s Discord channel calls themselves a “support group.”
In the proliferation of total mythologies, there’s no longer one place to start, because there never was, and yet once you’re in, you’re in, and there’s nothing quite like it.
We’d receive large bags of books the librarians set out on the brick wall near the curb through an ingenious system they designed for social distanced library use.
The new movie pretty much succeeds.
I’m still trying to digest everything Victoria said in her soliloquy, I didn’t think of it as a sermon, on Sunday and then again in the luncheon/Q &A period. I enjoyed the book Hands of The Emperor and have two more chapters to read, but it took me awhile to get into it. I may try her trilogy of Ozark/Arkansas since my daughter ordered it for me and see if that’s an easier read. Found The Hobbit and The Fellowship of The Rings series easy to read so won’t give up on Victoria’s books yet.