LOKI S01 - Divinely meta
At the crossroads is Loki, the third Marvel series for Disney+, and its promise of crazy exploration of a universe with potentially infinite variants, like its logo.
Small coincidences sometimes do things well, like the arrival of the MCU to the TV world.
After 10, sorry 11 years of dominating movie theaters, the MCU ended an era, its Phase 3, with Avengers: Endgame. And of course the question arises, what next?
After having conquered Space, Time and cinemas, what remains for the cinematic MCU to keep on growing, to continue to exist? If pursuing its initiated solo sagas (Ant-Man, Doctor Strange or Spider-Man for example) and introducing new characters (Shang Chi or The Eternals, soon Blade or the Fantastic Four) is a solution, it is not an end in itself: Marvel needs to grow and expand to new territories.
Narratively, this will be the concept of Multiverse, and concretely it will be the TV show format through Disney+. At the crossroads is Loki, the third Marvel series for Disney+, and its promise of crazy exploration of a universe with potentially infinite variants, like its logo. If the choice to bring back the public's favorite Tom Hiddleston seems that of security for the House of Ideas, the series will be very adventurous.
Because when Loki tackles on the Multiverse, it is not alternative universes but rather the concept itself as well as its use by the comics (and especially their adaptations on screen) that he confronts, for a divine result.
SPOILERS but you already knew that
HOLY SACRED TIMELINE
The show opens with a return to basics, the nerve center of the MCU as we know it today, the Avengers. Not the group of superheroes, but the super-franchise with its first iteration (Avengers - 2012) and its retelling (Avengers: Endgame - 2019). Remember, Loki derails the temporal heist of the Avengers who will have to fall back on plan B and go back even further in time. The series then begins with a What if?... Loki had escaped, before immediately pulling the rug out from under us with the arrival of the Time Variance Authority, TVA for short.
We then discover behind this new dimension of the Marvel universe the eternal temporal flow: this is the unique Timeline in the universe that the TVA is responsible for protecting in order to prevent the creation of parallel universes which would enter necessarily in conflict with each other. The multiverse therefore exists... to prevent the shaping of a multiverse.... wow, I have the beginning of a migraine. Parallel universes are formed when an event drifts from its initial path and becomes a Nexus event, the mission of the TVA is to neutralize the Variant, an individual having deviated from the eternal flow, and to destroy this seed of an alternative timeline before it becomes its own universe.
And here lies Loki’s first mischief: if the stated goal of the series is to explore the Multiverse, its real purpose is to show us the limits (self)imposed on the richest concept of the comic book universe. The Sacred Timeline here represents the Canon of comics, the way in which a universe and characters are written, thought out and function, a Canon as indisputable as it is arbitrary. In a world with such codified icons, the slightest deviation is closely monitored, contained and ultimately destroyed so as not to harm the Sacred Timeline.
To better understand, let's transpose the situation to THE figure of comic book adaptations to cinema: Batman.
We all know him, the dark and solitary hero of the streets of Gotham: his origin story, his powers (or rather his gadgets), his iconography and above all his code of values. If Batman is one of the most popular heroes with rich adaptations, it is because these remain in the limits of the dogmas imposed consciously and unconsciously by the Canon: the gothic sensibilities of Burton (Batman and Batman Returns), politics of Nolan (the Dark Knight trilogy) or Reeves' grunge (The Batman) do not contradict the common vision of Batman.
But pushing beyond these limits is a real transgression for an audience who does not accept the sometimes uncomfortable exploration of such a familiar figure. Zack Snyder and Ben Affleck had this bitter experience Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Without mentioning the qualities or flaws of the film itself, the public demolished the movie for its murderous and armed-to-the-teeth Batman, despite the fact that the film is part of an arc for the vigilante, that of a redemption brought about by his confrontation with Superman. However, the film is greatly inspired by Dark Knight Returns, which already presented us with an aged, bitter Bruce Wayne capable of the worst, and yet its live-action transposition (as imperfect as it was) was rejected by a good part of the public, while an animated adaptation of the same comic in 2013 did not stir up the audience at the time.
The difference is simple: the original work is a mini-series detached from the Canon, Snyder's film is a work intended for the general public and responsible for initiating the formation of the DCEU’s Justice League. The first is a one-shot story living a peaceful existence far from considerations of extended universes or Canon while the other will define this same Canon for years to come (according to the original plans for the DCEU). This pattern is particularly visible since DC has massively invested in the video market with its animated films: these explore numerous arcs and styles for the DC universe. But the rather confidential DTV market makes it possible to contain its attempts at exploration that are too daring for the public, in unambitious productions which minimize the financial bet and do not risk obscuring the real stories to follow for the general public. This richness that the infinity of universes brings is only exploited to its minimum and its impact is also minimized so as not to disturb the grand designs of the studios who dream of extended universes.
Among the possibilities and variations, only one has the right to her own treatment, Lady Loki a.k.a. Sylvie, also with symptomatic treatment. Like Miles Morales in the Ultimate universe, a new reading of a character must become a whole new one: changing name, appearance (skin color for Miles, gender for Sylvie), powers (invisibility for Miles, enchantment for Sylvie), from origin story. But like Miles, Sylvie remains an exception: a variant rarely manages to impose itself.
The History of the universes and the characters are decided by a tutelary figure, here Kang, who could very well replace a Stan Lee for Marvel or a Geoff John for DC. The characters are deprived of their free will and it is ultimately their demiurges who decide everything: to the eternal question “Who would win in Hero 1 and Hero 2?” Stan Lee replied
“Everyone should know that! The person who would win in a fight is the person the writer wants to win!”
Loki and Sylvie achieve their goals only because Kang accepted it, and especially because he wrote it in his timeline. The consequences of this victory are still uncertain but the explosion of variants on the one hand for Sylvie and the return to a classic TVA for Loki seems to indicate a soft reboot of the Marvel universe like DC is experiencing with its relaunchs and its new realities (Golden Age, Silver Age or New 52 to give a few): for everything to change, nothing must change.
The multiverse is not a richness but a prison which allows the industry to lock up all attempts to deviate from an alternative universe which will in any case be contained, erased and sent back to limbo at the end of time with all the other variants of his own history. A prison with its ready-made guardian: TVA.
MARVEL COGIP UNIVERSE
The greatest force in the universe, capable of traveling through time and space, reducing gods to simple prisoners and using the infinity stones as paperweights, could this force be the COGIP?
This is the gamble taken by Loki who replaces the offices of the infinite kaleidoscope from the comics with a bureaucracy with an old-fashioned and familiar aesthetic, even at times Kafkaesque. The bureaucratic monster has already been represented many times in cinema as a tool of absurd power over individuals, such as Brazil or The Twelve Tasks of Asterix but this change is more ambivalent at Marvel, because the TVA is strangely familiar, dangerously even: the candor of a world of naive and ignorant office workers contrasts quickly with their ease to prune their prisoners, which nevertheless amounts (in their eyes at least) to a death sentence.
And that’s the point: to demonstrate that behind the harmless and almost endearing TVA lies the absolute control and dehumanization of variants, by the VARIANT labeling as a denomination or as a literal label affixed to their backs or by the process of recording of variants before their judgments. If the judgment process is treated with humor to highlight the absurdity of the steps to be taken in the pilot (Episode 1 - Glorious Purpose), the revisitation of this procedure by a child Sylvie (Episode 4 - The Nexus Event) reveals the real violence behind the bureaucratic process.
This is basically the goal of every bureaucracy: to erase individuality for the “collective good”, here the unhindered operation of the machinery responsible for ensuring the flow of time until … well the end of time. Like his agents who only speak to work, like this secretary who only speaks to Loki to provide him with documents (Episode 2 - The Variant), like the Minutemen only designated by numbers, unlike their superiors who still have names. Even the most trivial and seemingly amusing details, like Mobius's peculiar passion for jet skis, this declarations manager working with his cat or this office worker who has never seen a fish in his life, reveal the dehumanizing operation of the VAT, erasing the memory of its employees to make them very docile soldiers.
This confinement of the characters is also reflected visually in the aesthetics deployed to represent the TVA, the series preferring a concrete representation to the more abstract vision of the comics. Hello there, 80s office atmosphere with limited IT, a strong presence of stationery and pagers (sorry, time pads), a golden age before the advent of cubicles, its partitioned offices so often used in cinema to represent the monotony and alienation of working spaces in the 90s (The Matrix, Office Space or Severance more recently). An omnipresent orange-brown palette gives us this retro and falsely warm look for a company which once again serves as a prison rather than fulfilling place.
This monotony from the TVA clashes with the diversity of settings visited in the series: a future supermarket, a Snowpiercer-like apocalypse train on a planet on the verge of destruction (unde purple lighting AGAIN), a medieval fair, the Mongolian desert, the literal end of times or even the baroque and marbled palace of Kang. This contrast is all the more striking since the only exception to the brown atmosphere in the TVA comes from the Time-Keepers room which turns out to be a puppet theater … diversity is an illusion within the TVA.
As illusory as the change introduced at the end of the series: the series suggested a collapse of the TVA with the opening of the multiverse and the light shed on the lies around the agents and their origins… it will not be the case. Like the MCU which remained the same despite the disappearance of Thanos (and ends up treating the Blip as a joke or an anecdote, the TVA will remain the same despite the disappearance of the Time-Keepes, Mobius and the Minutemen having returned to the starting point. And in both cases, the tutelary figure of the universe (Thanos for one, the guardians for the other) is simply replaced by Kang as a new horizon or rather as a new purpose for the MCU. The TVA embodies to the end an MCU under the control of Kevin Feige incapable of changing or evolving, of persuading that the system defended is the best, the most harmonious, and the one which will lead towards an end that no one is likely to see as much that the same demiurges will remain in charge. The same routine, the same methods, but with a new villain, until the next new villain, the cycle seems endless and the challenge of season 2 should be, logically, how to break this cycle?
Car la saison a déjà réussi à briser un cycle, celui de Loki.
LO-QUI ?
Loki était une exception dans le MCU : là où les méchants connaissent pour la plupart un sort funeste, lui pu survivre à sa 1ère confrontation avec son frère, devint LE méchant d’Avengers (afin d’assurer une continuité et une connexion entre les différents vengeurs), et parvint même à suivre les aventures de son frère. Mais cela se fit à un prix, celui d’une transformation : de figure tragique aux accents shakespearienne (Thor), à comic relief et bon faire-valoir de son frère (Thor: Ragnarok). Loki est alors victime de Flanderization, ou comment au fil du temps, les traits principaux d’un personnage sont exagérés au point qu’il devienne une caricature de lui même (Les Simpsons, The Office ou Dragon Ball Super illustrent magnifiquement cette dérive d’écriture). Des discours envolés à la manipulation en passant par son coup de tête en arrière destiné à se recoiffer sans avoir à utiliser ses mains, dur d’exister quand ni les producteurs ni les fans ne vous laisserons mourir ou évoluer …
La série en est bien conscient et va prendre un malin plaisir à appuyer sur ce Loki presque bouffon dans ses 2 premiers épisodes : rien que pour son introduction, Loki à peine écrasé dans le désert de Gobi accourt sur un petit rocher, histoire de se donner un semblant de prestance pour déclamer son classique “I am Loki of Asgard. And I am burden with glorious purpose”.
Cette réplique, ce mantra, reviendra tout au long de la série pour illustrer le parcours du personnage : d’abord obnubilé par sa quête de pouvoir dans laquelle il cherche à renverser les gardien du Temps, il en comprendra ensuite la futilité d’une telle quête avant de trouver un autre but, celui d’aider Sylvie à détruire la TVA sans chercher à en tirer un quelconque bénéfice. Cette maturité de Loki s’illustre également par son passage dans la boucle temporelle de torture dans laquelle il admet sa nature hautement narcissique, renforcée par les sentiments qu’il éprouve pour Sylvie, c’est-à-dire d’une autre version lui même. Enfin, nous passons d’un personnage pourfendeur du libre arbitre “For nearly every living thing, choice breeds shame, and uncertainty, and regret.” à son ultime défenseur dans sa quête pour faire tomber la personne derrière la TVA.
Malheureusement cette quête n’est réservée qu’à un Loki hors de l’espace-temps, car comme le dit si bien Mobius, Loki n’est qu’un faire-valoir pour Thor et les Avengers : toute tentative d’évolution est envoyée au néant. Et les 4 variants qu’y rencontre Loki sont symptomatiques des réticences qu’à Marvel à faire évoluer le personnage jusque là : Lokigator incarne la variation jusqu’à l’absurde (trop folle pour être admise), Classic Loki incarne le Loki sage et muri ayant choisi de vivre en ermite (dont on aurait vu quelques secondes avant sa mort dans Avengers: Infinity War), Kid Loki incarne la victoire sur Thor (impossible car le héros gagne toujours à la fin) et Boastful Loki incarne la diversité que peut prendre la représentation de Loki (ici noir).
Symptomatiques car elles illustrent ce que Loki ne peut être dans sa représentation mainstream : Loki ne peut ni gagner, ni grandir, ni même évoluer. La dernière incarnation revêt d’un sens plus profond qui va bien au delà de Loki lui-même mais de la représentation et de l’incarnation de ses figures à l’écran : un personnage blanc sur papier peut-il devenir noir à l’écran ? La série semble bien pessimiste en disant non, une telle variation du personnage ne saurait être acceptée par le public ou les créateurs de ses univers, renvoyée comme les autres dans le Néant.
Et on peut difficilement lui donner tort : on se souvient de la levée de bouclier déjà provoqué dans Thor avec Heimdall (Idris Elba), l’univers DC avec Starfire (Anna Diop) pour la série Titans ou dans d’autres domaines geek la présence de personnages noirs dans les nouvelles séries The Witcher et Le Seigneur des Anneaux : Les Anneaux de Pouvoir. Dans ces 2 derniers cas, une partie de des fans s’était offusquée de la présence de non-blanc dans des œuvres adaptées de fantaisie médiévale européenne, les plus “ouverts d’esprit” (coucou le JDG) demandant à ce que l’on justifie au sein du scénario la présence de ces ethnies dans ces nouvelles adaptations … Les minorités sont cantonnés à une sous représentation, qui doit constamment se justifier par une excuse scénaristique et/ou un discours politique sur leurs conditions. Un constat bien triste, alors que la culture geek (ou culture pop) n’a jamais été aussi ouverte, elle a encore bien du mal à être proprement inclusive et universelle. Ce qui est d’autant plus important pour Loki qui s’est démarqué comme étant un personnage bisexuel et gender fluid, facette du personnage explorée depuis 2013 dans les comics Loki: Agent of Asgaard mais pour l’instant absente de la série.
La série à ceci de paradoxale qu’elle parvient à faire avancer son personnage tout en illustrant l’impasse dans lequel il se trouve au sein d’un univers prisonnier de ses grands cycles. Un jeu habile qu’elle peut tenir car hors du temps et pour l’instant hors de la narration classique du MCU.
La saison 1 de Loki pourrait très bien rester cela au sein du MCU : une parenthèse enchantée.
Marvel semble en pleine crise d’identité, les films se cherchent et ne se se trouvent rarement si ce n’est dans un fan service de moins en moins tenable, et les rares tentatives de sortir du cadre sont rattrapées par la fameuse “formule” (mention spéciale à l'immense gâchis What If…?). Alors que l’équipe créative en charge de la série, Michael Waldron au scénario et Kate Herron à la réalisation des 6 épisodes, est remplacée pour la saison 2, l’horizon s'obscurcit pour le dieu malicieux. Si la reprise du scénario par Eric Martin, qui a déjà travaillé sur la saison 1, à de quoi rassurer, l’arrivée du duo Justin Benson et Aaron Moorhead à la réalisation est bien plus inquiétante.
Recruter les responsables (pour ne pas dire les coupables) des épisodes 2 et 4 de Moon Knight (respectivement Summon the Suit et The Tomb) n’est certainement pas un gage de qualité pour la suite, mais plutôt de sécurité : à l’heure où Loki sera chargé d’introduire Kang a.k.a. le prochain Thanos, Marvel choisit de se reposer sur le succès tranquille mais l’échec créatif que fut Moon Knight, particulièrement sur ces 2 épisodes …
Mais les espoirs restent permis, et d’ici là rien ne nous empêche de nous replonger dans l’excellente saison 1 de Loki, malicieusement inventive et toujours divinement méta.
