Thor: Love and Thunder · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

In New Asgard, which is now a tourist town, actors stand on a wooden stage and re-enact events from earlier films for visitors holding souvenirs. The parts are played by famous people doing bits. It lasts a couple of minutes and it is very funny. It also tells you exactly what kind of film you are in: one where the gods have become their own reruns.

Hold that stage in your head. Everything difficult about Thor: Love and Thunder is standing on it.

Deleuze had a name for images like this. He called it the reflection-image, or the Figure: the moment when an action stops being performed and starts being staged. In the ordinary action film someone sees a problem and hits it, and the hitting changes the situation. In the reflection-image the action gets transposed into spectacle, into a discourse about itself. Nobody fights on that New Asgard stage. Somebody performs a fight that already happened, for people eating snacks. Waititi then builds an entire city out of the same move. Omnipotence City is a coliseum of gods with nothing to do but be looked at, presided over by a vain, golden Zeus whose only real weapon is his entrance. Deleuze took the term for the staging-that-figures from Eisenstein's montage of attractions, and the attraction-image is genuinely the unit here: the Guns N' Roses set pieces, the rainbow-goat voyage across a Heavy Metal sky, the recovery montage. These are attractions in the fairground sense. They are presented, not caused.

Why bother with this vocabulary? Because it converts the film's most common complaint into a description of its材 material. Say the tone doesn't hold, that the jokes eat the grief, and you've made a note about execution. Say the film is built out of reflection-images and you've said something about what it is, and the tonal problem stops being an accident.

Thor himself is the inversion-image: Deleuze's name for the sublime hero showing up in his feeble, deflated form. Our god of thunder arrives via a self-improvement montage, jealous of his own axe, doing the work on himself. Zeus is the same gag with the volume up. This is a real invention of Waititi's, refined across Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Ragnarok: deadpan sincerity, improvised out loud, where the joke and the feeling come from the same breath. And it's why Korg narrating the film as a tale already told is not decoration. That's consciousness-of-clichés, the state Deleuze diagnosed in postwar cinema when characters began noticing they were moving through worn-out situations. Note what happens next, though. In Deleuze that consciousness eventually cracked the action-image open and let time itself pour in. Here it doesn't. The circuit stays intact — see problem, punch problem — with irony applied as a finish. That is the film's actual limit, and it's a more interesting thing to say than the jokes were bad.

Gorr belongs to a different family altogether, and the collision is the film. Deleuze's impulse-image describes a character reduced to a single drive, gnawing downward. A devout father loses his daughter, prays, is ignored, and converts entirely into appetite. Bale plays him gaunt. Naturalism in Deleuze always needs two worlds: the derived milieu, the visible social surface, and the originary world it turns out to be a skin over, a savage place where only drives operate. New Asgard's kitsch and Omnipotence City's gold are derived milieux, gaudy and pleased with themselves. Gorr's Shadow Realm is what's underneath. And here the film makes its best decision: it drains the color out. After two hours of primary hues and neon rim light, the climax goes near-monochrome, so that lightning and costume register as isolated splashes on grey. Baz Idoine, who came from the controlled-light world of The Mandalorian, shoots the whole picture as colour-image in Deleuze's sense — hue as feeling rather than description, borrowed from Flash Gordon and airbrushed fantasy illustration. Which is precisely why removing it hurts. The palette makes the argument the screenplay keeps interrupting.

Which brings the real one. Deleuze's discourse-image is an image that poses a problem it cannot resolve, and leaves it lit. Gorr's accusation is that the gods are unworthy of worship: they take devotion and return nothing. The film stages that charge inside a universe where gods are celebrities, merchandised, played by cameo actors on a stage in a gift-shop town. The prosecution's evidence is the production design. Love and Thunder cannot answer the charge, because answering would require it to stop being what it is. Its reply is love — Jane, the title, the ending — which is moving and is not a rebuttal. That gap is the film.

The lineage explains the machine and its stress fracture. Ragnarok built the palette, the improv register, the stage play. Guardians of the Galaxy built the needle-drop architecture, and Guns N' Roses stand in for the Awesome Mix. But Jojo Rabbit is the crucial debt: there Waititi perfected a comedy-tragedy braid, staging a mother's death through whimsical setups, and it held because comedy and horror shared one source, a child's imagination. Bring that machine to a franchise and the source is gone. The comedy now comes from a house style, the grief comes from Jason Aaron's comics, and they have no common root. Same braid, cut cable.

What it did: it is the limit case of the auteur-for-hire experiment Marvel ran in the late 2010s. Ragnarok proved a director could reset a franchise's identity. Love and Thunder tested whether that reset could be ordered again, on schedule, against material about a dead child and a dying woman. You can also see the schedule in the compositing, which is why the film became a reference point in the 2022–23 conversation about what the studio's simultaneous slate was doing to visual-effects labor. That is now part of its meaning.

So watch it again with one instruction: count how often the film stages an action rather than performs one. And watch Bale. The standard note was that his Gorr belongs in a different movie. Try the other reading. He belongs in this one, and he is the only person on screen who has noticed what it's made of.