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I know I'm not the first person to think thoughts about Marvel, but as my partner and I have been rewatching a LOT of Marvel movies, I'm extra excited that I'm teaching Greek myth this fall because Marvel is (cringing preemptively that I'm saying this) so good to think with
In terms of what the function of mythologizing is, the Disney of it all (Marvel, fairy tales, Hamilton) is such a rich source of material for thinking about how myth-making and power work, and how resistant stories also spring up in response
(for context, I'm watching Iron Man now and 2008 Amy was not as well equipped to critically read culture as 2020 Amy is, and I'm seeing a lot that I just didn't see when I watched it then. I don't know how I read this movie, but it wasn't like this)
Which is to say, I think I might have watched this and thought that it was an inspiring redemption story and not a story about how a powerful, wealthy guy didn't realize that weapons could be used for bad things until it impacted HIM. That's not exactly heroic
Maybe Jeff Bridges is evil, but Tony Stark spent the overwhelming majority of his life thinking that, idk, technology can't be bad? He didn't need to look closer at where money came from? And then he gains a minimal fraction of responsibility or empathy and he's now good?
Which isn't to say that I don't still enjoy this movie. I do enjoy it quite a lot, and I'm pretty ok with the stance that a movie can have a bad underlying ideology and also be fun and enjoyable. Cf. almost every sort of art ever produced, to varying degrees
Anyway, I'm pretty excited to talk about this with students because this is so much how things like Greek tragedy work. They're stories that work in relation to and in a context of an imperial power. They can be read resistantly or complicitly and credulously
And where we locate ourselves in those stories really matters a lot. Way more than where Euripides or whoever wants us to locate ourselves or would have located themselves. In 12 years, my relationship to this story has fundamentally changed
I was talking to a student today about classical reception, and I just recently finished @helenlmorales' Antigone Rising, so a lot of these kinds of ideas about what writing and rewriting stories actually *do* for us have been floating around in my head. Aaaaaaand bedtime!
