Our family are unabashed Marvel fans whose history can be categorized in three phases: The Early Narnia Age, The Great Harry Potter Decade, and The Modern Marvel Moment. The family room in which I write is decorated by a bizarre mix of wands, owls, quill pens, Hogwarts crests, arc reactors, and infinity stone gauntlets. Within our current Marvel phase, we began with a shameless love for Tony Stark. He is the perfect post-modern American hero —the egotistical, womanizing mogul who, through several classic trips round the archetypal hero’s journey, learns to sacrifice himself for a higher purpose. Thanks to Robert Downy Jr.’s charisma and talent, it’s hard to imagine a better hero to kick off the third millennium.
However, the theme of our Marvel phase shifted a few months ago when, one night over dinner, we were discussing Scarlett Johansson and her character Black Widow. Obnoxious realist that I am, I was questioning how believable she was as an Avenger; we are supposed to believe that a woman with no superpower can take on space aliens next to Captain America, Thor, and Hulk? After the usual retort, “Right, that matters because everything else in the movie is so realistic,” we dug into the real issue. Of course none of this is realistic in one sense, but on a symbolic level, our myths (and Marvel is nothing if not a central part of our contemporary American mythos) are telling us about who we are and how we should live. So I changed my approach and asked my daughter if she thought she could move buildings like Wanda does with her mind-stone powers. She suspiciously replied, “No.” Then I asked if she thought she could beat up a boy her age the way Black Widow beats up soldiers. She actually surprised me with the immediate response, “Of course.” And so began our female warrior phase as we began to think deeply about how this new field of superhero myths was shaping our understanding of what it means to be a woman.
We intuitively know how to decode the symbolic messaging of our myths. My daughter knows Marvel isn’t telling her that someday she will absorb power from an infinity stone and be able to take on whole alien armies single-handedly: she knows how to interpret the supernatural as a symbol for the spiritual power of courage, friendship, faith, and love. But she also knows how to read the cultural subtext of her stories: Black Widow and other combat-trained female SHIELD agents are telling us that women are just as physically strong as men, or in other words, that women and men are not different in any essential way nor do they have different roles but are in fact perfectly interchangeable.
But this isn’t the truth. Men and women are different, and my daughter needs cultural myths that will both inspire her as a woman and tell her the truth. To help her and other young Christian women decode the cultural messages that our favorite superhero films are communicating, I’m working on a new article for An Unexpected Journal. Coming soon to a feed near you.