Nordic Like a Mufu

by Gary Phillips

A friend of mine sent me a piece that the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist organization, are mounting a boycott of the upcoming big budget Thor film from Marvel Studios based on their long-running comic book character of the same name. Certainly the Council must have initially been thrilled to hear about the plans for Thor to be a film, given he’s a fine example of Aryan godhood. Of course they must have gotten a bit nervous when they learned that Kenneth Branagh would be directing this effort. What with him previously directing Lawrence Fishburne in Othello and him being British or something, and acting in and directing them other fruity plays by Shakespeare.

But they got their sheets in a bunch when they learned he cast a fellow Britisher, black actor Idris Elba (who’s done a fine American accent in such fare as the Meyer Lansky-inspired gangster Stringer Bell in The Wire TV series and the object of affection in the film Obsession, where two fine honeys—Beyoncé and Ali Larter—fight over him) as one of the Norse gods, Heimdall, guardian of the Rainbow Bridge that leads from Asgard to Midgard— Earth, that is.

Said Elba, “There has been a big debate about it: can a black man play a Nordic character? Hang about, Thor's mythical, right? Thor has a hammer that flies to him when he clicks his fingers. That's OK, but the colour of my skin is wrong?”

Thor is part of a canon of deities from Norse mythology. In the comics I read as a kid drawn by Jack Kirby and written by Stan Lee, Thor is a long-haired muscular blonde fellow with a red cape and winged helmet who swings this massive mallet of a hammer he calls Mjölnir. Only Thor can lift his mystical hammer and he uses it to not only put the smackdown on varlets such as Galactus or his evil, jealous, always-scheming half-brother Loki (whose familial status has changed over time as he’s sometimes the stepbrother or the adopted brother of our golden tressed hero), but shoot lightning bolts (he is the god of thunder, after all) and the hammer pulls him through the air, allowing him to fly from Earth back to Asgard or wherever. It used to be to if the hammer was out of his hand for more than a minute, Thor would revert to his mortal form of the gimpy legged Don Blake, M.D., but it’s been awhile since I’ve read the comic steadily.

Thor was one of the founders of the team of superheroes, The Avengers, and in the Mighty Marvel Manner, gods and goddesses of Norse mythology became integrated into the Marvel Universe of costumed wonders and masked adventurers. Apparently there’s also been some backlash among the fanboys about Elba’s casting who feel it’s okay for Thor to fly into space to battle aliens, fight alongside the Silver Surfer (a shiny guy on a flying surfboard), and even have Asgard destroyed during Ragnarök, the twilight of the gods, and rebuilt outside Broxton, Oklahoma ... but a black man as Heimdall? That’s carrying this PC crap too damn far.

Now depending on who’s telling the story, two men or maybe it’s three men are the creators of this pop cultural incarnation of Thor. Writer Stanley Lieber, better known as Stan Lee, artist Jack Kirby, born Jacob Kutzberg, and Stan’s brother, the writer Larry Lieber, claim parentage. Who came up with what concerning Thor may be in dispute—not visually as that was all Kirby—but what isn’t is these three cats were Jews—Kirby a tough Lower East Side scrapper. Depression-era kids who grew up on all manner of tales from Greek mythology (Thor often fought with or alongside Hercules in Marvel comics—where were the purists then?), Zorro, Tarzan (the Great White Father as lord of the black African jungle), Jules Verne, Doc Savage to Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. Who then as adults called on those early stories as the basis for the stories they did in that bastard form of literature, comic books. I submit Elba’s casting as Heimdall is in keeping with the polyglot universe Lee and Kirby helmed where gods, ghosts and Nazis like the Red Skull mixed it up—where you could easily suspend disbelief when reading about the machinations of Fing Fang Foom, a power-mad talking dragon.

Surely the Sons of Confederate Veterans hold to the suspension of disbelief. They’ve been in the news lately for their Secession Ball, celebrating the event 150 years ago when South Carolina seceded from the United States. For $100 a ticket, ball attendees dressed in period attire, danced to “Dixie” and saw a play about the signing of South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession that was an opening salvo of events leading to the Civil War.

The home page of the Sons website reads, in part, “The citizen-soldiers who fought for the Confederacy personalized the best qualities of America. The preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South’s decision to fight the Second American Revolution.” There’s no mention of the motivating factor of preserving slavery on their website. That there were plenty who viewed this secession as not a blow against tyranny but a blow to keep fellow human beings in chains and the continued use of them as economic chattel, keeping them ignorant and fearful.

NAACP South Carolina state president Lonnie Randolph stated “[We don’t] mind events observing Civil War anniversaries, but a gala is disrespectful.” The civil rights organization held a candlelight vigil and teach-in in response to the Secessionist Ball. According to a piece by Max Blumenthal, writer of the book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party, on the Daily Beast in September last year, the historical SCV has been taken over by a faction of white supremacists including a strategist named Kirk Lyons. Blumenthal went on to write that Lyon sought a benign front group to advance white Christian ideals.

Lyons is quoted as having told a German neo-Nazi magazine in 1992, “I have great respect for the Klan historically, but, sadly the Klan today is ineffective and sometimes even destructive.” Noteworthy too is that Republican South Carolina representative Joe Wilson, who bleated at President Obama, “You lie,” during his State of the Union address last year, was or still may be a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Back to Asgard ... seemingly going unnoticed by these white citizen watchdogs is the casting of Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano (an enforcer for a gang boss in Ichi the Killer—one of Takashi Miike’s bloody good flicks I’ve enjoyed) as the mace-wielding Hogun the Grim, another Asgardian warrior. So what’s this then? It’s okay for a Pacific Islander to be all Nordic, but not a brother, eh?

Stand fast in thy casting, friend Branagh. For as the god of thunder his damn self might utter, “I say thee nay, villains. Do your worst. For every blow ye do strike, Thor shall return it—doubled and re-doubled in power!”

Yea verily.

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