Movie Doubles - 'Agora' & 'Thor'

Reassessing Faith

It's a weird day when you watch 2 films back to back and you catch a theme that leaves you wondering. Today's theme by accident is paganism and faith. On the surface, you have to say paganism is a lot more tolerant than monotheism in practice. This is because paganism is inbuilt with the tacit understanding that other gods might be around too, while monotheism kicks off with deny the other gods. It's a weird thing from an outsider's eye whether Yahweh of the Old Testament is one god amongst many who is denying the other gods access to human faith, or whether He really thinks he is only one and wants you to believe it too.It's also unclear as to whether Allah, and God and Yahweh of the three Levantine religion who are the same deity actually enjoys the havoc that these religions unleash upon the world.

'Agora' deals with the rise of Coptic Christians in ancient Egypt who essentially displace Paganism first and the the Jews. 'Thor' of course is the Norse god of thunder, reincarnated so to speak as a Marvel comic book hero. What's really weird is that in depicting ancient Egypt, there is a prosaic realism that eschews any kind of mysticism in 'Agora', and shows a world that is actually empty of any kind of divine act. 'Thor' on the other hand is set in the present day of some kind but a Norse God manifests itself in the story like some fish out of water and without really turning in to comedy proceeds to plug the audience right back into the Pagan belief system with gusto. The irony of this is hard to escape, for if Paganism is a kind of out-dated system of understanding in the ancient world, why are we suddenly inundated with the heavily meaning-laden pagan god Thor today? It is as if we haven't moved an inch from the ancient world.

The Merits Of Religion

'Agora' is deeply concerned with the why of religion as much as the untenable nature of the social order in the ancient world. Rampant slavery makes any discussion of freedoms and rights and equality virtually impossible. Part of what perpetuates this social system we find is indeed religion, whether it be paganism or Christianity, and so the elite are happy with the pagan faith because it bolsters their social claim. the Christians swell in numbers because it spread through the lower classes of society where there are greater numbers.

Paganism seems to bolster kings greatly because most pantheons preset themselves as courts. This dynamic is  adopted so seamlessly in 'Thor' that we simply accept the royal ruler of Asgard, Odin, and all the claims of kingship. This is in contrast to 'Agora' where the Roman empire is clearly crumbling and the political system can no longer control security in Alexandria. In Asgard, what we see is a kind of Shakespearean intrigue of kith and kin. What is odd about 'Thor' is that these gods of Asgard are so human that we never come to terms with what their divinity means - but it is implicit in the text because, well, this really is meant to be Thor.

Perhaps the even weirder thing is that hyper-Israeli Natalie Portman is playing the romantic love interest for the Norse God. I mean, where's the plausibility there? Or is Yahweh just another god? how does this all work? Okay, so that is a little too extra-textual, but one is forced to wonder even a little bit.

The Fable of Religion

At the core of the issue in Agora is the sense that morality emanates from God so what the religious patriarch says should be enough to bring to heel a political head. Prior to the notion of separation of church and state, a political leader had no way of combating the errant whims of a religious leader; the matter is made all the more complicated because there is no distinction between morality and law and ethics. This confusion - and it is really important to point out that it is confusion - abets the cause of religion and un-reason and general unreasonableness. Thus, we see today that Fred Nile essentially wants to confuse the water as much as possible between religion and state, morality, law and ethics, in order to find an ascendancy for his bogus claims for righteousness.

Even worse, the calls to fundamentalism in all faiths is essentially a desire to do away with careful distinctions between state and clergy, laws, morals and ethics in one retrograde swoop.

Counter to this is the largely post-modern fabulism of 'Thor'. Thor posits the Asimov notion that any technology sufficiently advanced from another culture will appear like magic.  In 'Thor', we ca see that the mighty Thor might not be the kind of god we envisage but the beneficiary of a great technological edge. That he's a kind of iron Man from another dimenstion. he merely appears to be godlike because we do not understand th technology he comes from.

Thus, in the 'Thor' text we see a subtle deconstruction of religion's role in our society. As much as 'Agora' argues against fundamentalism, 'Thor' posits a possibility that religion is a great misunderstanding of natural, explicable phenomena. 'Thor' is just as eqally a text that is post-modern and sceptical as to religion's claim.

Tolerance As Construct

On the face of it, paganism would be more tolerant than monotheism simply because in polytheism one is confronted by the possibility of a god for anything and everything. Just as there are gods for wisdom and war, it is conceivable under that schema that there is a god for stubbed toes and munps. Indeed, St. Paul sneaks in Yahweh as one of these gods that the polytheists may or may not know. The argument mounted in favour of monotheism essentially rests on the tolerance of polytheism.

Tolerance then is something that we create in order to entertain opposing views. It is then easy to understand why the intolerant rush to religious belief. If you could shut the door on the other, then what more joy could there be for the closed minded? The reason Paganism gives way to Monotheism in Agora is that people lose the capacity to entertain the thoughts of 'the other'.

The Injustice Of Religion

Perhaps it is possible in the Marvel universe that 'Thor' exists, that Yahweh exists as a kind of yet-another-god who walks around telling other gods that he is the only god. This is all very Philip K. Dick. it is this quality that makes the universe of 'Thor' so odd. In 'Agora', there is an absence of god in any of the action on screen. people lay claim to gods and God, but everything that happens on screen is prosaic and human-induced. The absence of justice as practiced by any pagan god or single God leaves the audience as to no doubt that religion is a fantasy. 'Agora' offers up a world of devastation wrought by the stupidity of humanity, wanting to believe.

'Thor' on the other hand is a depiction of a god doing mighty things, but at the same time posits that there is no god at all - merely technologically superior beings. 'Thor' is fantastical, but it does posit an explanation for the stranger phenomena in the world. Or ore pointedly, we humans created our gods to satisfy our own idiotic needs for entertainment.

The beauty of watching these films back to back is that you get to watch two dialectically opposite films about how we come to be believers, in spite of the obvious injustices of the world.