Theologising with a Hammer: Deicide, the (W)hole of Creation, and Judeo-Christian a-theism in Thor: Love and Thunder

The most recent outing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Thor series, Thor: Love and Thunder, takes a surprising, indeed astonishing, ‘spiritualising’ turn, at once philosophical and theological. With the death-dealing character of Gorr, the film reprises the old Nietzschean chestnut that ‘God is dead’—or will be soon enough, as one clapped-out deity after another is gruesomely dispatched, emptying the universe of their so-called ‘enchantment’. That is, a twilight of the idols– but with feet of clay, each instantiating the worst excesses of what Walter Benjamin might call ‘mythic violence’. By way of contrast, Gorr exemplifies, at least initially, a kind of Benjaminian ‘divine violence’, his deicidal rampage not only disrupting creation itself, but disclosing a hole in the fabric of the universe. In this sublime encounter with ‘the Real’, Thor: Love and Thunder offers us something more than just a choice between being and nothingness; indeed, it proffers the radical possibility of a being predicated on nothingness: in short, a w/hole that is barred, castrated, even crucified. In so doing, this supposedly ‘escapist’ movie may suggest not only how to philosophise with Thor’s hammer, but to theologise with it as well: that is, as a transvalued (Judeo-Christian?) a-theism which sublates faith and doubt, belief and nihilism, being and nothingness in its embrace of a law spiritualised by love’s sacrifice.