Looking to movie stars and the parts they play for moral or behavioural instruction is like gazing at a shattered mirror for help applying your eyeliner. In fact, the traffic between mainstream entertainment and its audience usually travels in the opposite direction: films take so long to get made that what reaches the screen crystallises trends and ideas that are already prevalent in the culture. By that reckoning, two new releases – Thor: Love and Thunder and the Russo brothers’ shoot-’em-up thriller The Gray Man – represent precisely the sort of action movie that the early 2020s deserves. What is celebratory to some, however, will resemble a crisis to others.
In his fourth solo outing, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is now sharing his name, and even his defining weapon, with Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), who styles herself as the Mighty Thor. “Um, that’s my hammer,” he says sheepishly. “And my look.” One theory for the etymology of the hammer’s name, Mjolnir, is that it comes from the Norse word meaning “to grind” or “grinder”. Which is simultaneously too much, and yet entirely in keeping with a film in which gay male rock creatures procreate by holding hands.
