How cinema transformed mythological goddesses into superheroines

Perhaps the most eloquent scene in

, the fourth adventure of the Marvel Studios superhero played by Chris Hemsworth, is the post-credits scene in which Zeus (Russell Crowe) laments that human beings no longer ask the gods for help in solving their problems. like him, but superheroes.

The director and screenwriter of the film, Taika Waititi, explains in words what Zack Snyder had been able to say with images in his version of

(2021) and what the

It has raised since its inception as a format with total naturalness.

Namely, that the superheroic pantheons due to multimedia companies such as Marvel and DC have been able to replace the classic myths and their importance to understand what role we human beings play in the cosmos.

Now, what about the pop mutation of goddesses to superheroines?

The recently released

tries to alleviate a historical deficit when it comes to representing the superheroine in a meaningful way in popular culture, which the many films and series of this genre produced in recent years have not remedied.

The continuous disputes in forums, trend media and social networks still focus today on the relevance or not of more superheroines in fiction.

They thus leave aside the fact that at this point their presence is not so remarkable -which

or Captain Marvel have already achieved- as that their adventure supposes a true paradigm shift, something that has yet to be seen on the screen.

'Thor: Love and Thunder'.

MARVEL (MARVEL)

For Western culture, the journey of the hero and his distorted reflections, the antihero and the villain, consists at an archetypal level of a succession of incidents that imply a process of maturity and discovery of the place they occupy in the established order of things.

But, what possibility of travel does this narrative model offer to those who have been ancestral victims of said order, to those who have always been reduced to the condition of Penelopes who weave their own shroud without being aware of it?

Although other narratives have existed since the beginning of time, in which rebellious women such as Lilith, Circe or the Amazons have rebelled against a world that was unfair to them, tradition has again and again diluted their subversive potential.

Popular culture and, in particular, the ongoing cycle of superheroic audiovisuals, repeats this undermining of these feminist archetypes.

Without going any further,

is inspired by several comic book story arcs published between 2012 and 2019. In them, the writer Jason Aaron understood what the superheroine's journey implies for the (in)stability of the system.

Aaron reveals to us that the mythological configuration of Asgard, ruled by Odin, has been based since time immemorial on the subjugation of primal forces whose legitimate recipient is a woman: Dr. Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), traditionally condemned to be Thor's romantic interest. .

This gives rise to a rewriting of the archetype in terms of goddess / superheroine that evokes the Wonder Woman of the origins and Captain Marvel reinvented by Kelly Sue DeConnick between 2012 and 2015. However, this transformation that occurred in the vignettes has been reduced over and over again on the big screen to a feminist simulacrum that does not threaten, neither inside nor outside of fiction, the course of five-year plans for superheroes in which everything changes so that everything remains the same.

Thus,

relegates Jason Aaron's approaches to the merely anecdotal.

Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman. Clay Enos (AP)

Something that can also be said of Wonder Woman embodied by Gal Gadot, who sweetens the imaginary of radically feminist divinities created in 1941 by William Moulton Marston, and of Captain Marvel who is played today by Brie Larson, a pale reflection of DeConnick's ideas around the identity of the character and his desire to excel in a world determined to clip his wings.

In the films of both superheroines, the essentially feminist condition of her comic adventures is betrayed in favor of vaguely inspiring moments and dramatic troubles that reproduce traditional stereotypes about

.

In this regard, Marvel Studios has placed another female character, the Scarlet Witch, at the epicenter of its recent productions, but only to limit her immense powers —theoretically capable of revolutionizing the meaning of our universe(s)— to the sublimation of her domestic and maternal frustrations.

In a cultural sphere mediated by the economic interests of the large entertainment corporations and the discourses associated with greater or lesser rigor to their products, the feminist recovery of primordial archetypes transmuted into superheroines and supervillains must be traced in titles subject to less attention.

Jean Grey, one of the most uncomfortable characters in the superheroic pantheon of Marvel comics, had the opportunity to deploy

her telepathic and telekinetic powers in

(2019) to put the mutant patriarchs Charles Xavier and Magneto on the ropes. , in unusual scenes due to their level of sadism.

Angelina Jolie in 'Maleficent'. Frank Connor (AP Photo / Disney)

For her part, Angelina Jolie contributed to a traditional fairy tale,

, a mythological rereading linked to her villain, Maleficent, in the two live-action films about the character produced by Disney in 2014 and 2019. Jolie embodies the primeval forces of nature constrained by what is supposedly civilizing, a monarchical and warrior order.

The second film,

(2019), ups the ante by Jolie ultimately symbolizing a sacred nexus between human and faerie, a higher state of consciousness.

This transcendent quality, which necessarily has feminist connotations due to its overcoming of systemic conditions, finds an unbeatable expression in

(2014),

by Luc Besson that, in a visionary way, connects the journey of the unlikely protagonist superheroine —a student forced to dealing drugs, played by Scarlett Johansson—at the very beginning of the woman myth: Eva, who represents for the French director the origin of a great latent power in all her descendants.

's delirious feminist discourse

contrasts with another film starring Johansson,

(2021), which sticks, like

, to the

(or commercial feminism) legitimized today in the corporate and media spheres when it comes to portraying superheroines on screen, even if their real agency is limited.

Like almost everything worthwhile, feminism is not something that a delivery man can leave at our door, but rather a horizon that requires everyone to commit to a (super)heroic journey full of challenges and adventures, whose overcoming transforms and transforms everything around us.

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