Long and Rambling Notes on TDW: Jessica Pontificates

[borderline_mary]

So I'm back from basically nowhere! Mostly for you, Anne. I like you. Also I feel like you might discuss all the below stuff with me, because.

Disclaimer: I liked this movie. The first big chunk of stuff below makes it look like I hated it, but I’m just getting the bad stuff out of the way first.

Comments

[silent_lorelei]

But back to what Frigga is actually doing in this movie, aside from dying to solve some dudes' interpersonal problems.

I was also confused about the whole confrontation/death scene with Malekith... which is probably because Bad Writing more than anything else. If she has all these illusion powers - which apparently she does - why does she get stabbed to death instead of pulling the usual illusion switcheroo that Loki is always pulling? Seriously? She had ample time to plan this scene out, and she created an illusiory version of Jane but didn't bother to make one of herself for safekeeping? For that matter, why didn't she make them just not be there so the elves could march right on by? I get that Malekith has a bloodhound nose for Jane right now, but wouldn't it be smarter to just stay unseen and keep running ring-around-the-rosy until Thor or Odin could come bring some military force to bear here? I love Frigga's badassness in this scene, love it, but I don't love the fact that she apparently has great magical powers but for some reason doesn't know how to use them like an intelligent person.

I think I actually disagree about her "am I not your mother" line; yes, that's got to hurt for Loki, because it can be read as forcing him into a corner of "take your family as a unit or don't take it at all", but it's also Frigga's own feelings coming to the forefront. When your adopted son lashes out against his father, that has to hit home when you inevitably compare it to yourself. Loki doesn't mean to include her in that pained strike out against his relation to a man who has been frankly horrible to him, but it includes her anyway, and she's justified in feeling the sting of it even if that wasn't his intent. She's not his blood, either; hearing him say that that makes a difference has to hurt her, as well. And once she's responded to it, Loki's backed himself into a corner, one in which the only option he has left to stay true to his own feelings is to say, "Yes, you're the same, you're not mine, either and I'm not yours." Which hurts him as much as her, I would think - Frigga represents the parts of Asgard that Loki misses, wants back desperately, and was always miserable that he couldn't live up to. He can push Odin away by saying that that's not really his father and this isn't really his home and he isn't really part of all this horrible Asgardian bullshit... but in doing so he also has to push away Frigga, Thor and the parts of Asgard that really were his home and that really do matter. He's self-reinforcing his status as an outsider again, because he can't reconcile with Odin and his actions.

However... while that's how the scene would read to me if this were actually a conversation between Frigga and Loki, I don't think it really is.

It is totally possible that Frigga is using her powers of illusion to "visit" Loki even though she's not supposed to, but the scene didn't read that way to me at all. Rather, I immediately thought that Frigga was never there at all, not in any dimension; this is an illusion of Frigga created by Loki, not his mother, to give himself someone to talk to (not to mention some conversational catharsis). Her vanishing after he "rejects" her combined with Odin's earlier decree that he would never see her again combine to make me believe that, completely alone and unvisited in his cell, Loki is creating an illusiory version of his mother to both combat and underscore that loneliness. He is calling up the mother he is now completely walled off from; he's talking to himself. We're listening to confession, not conversation.

When Loki "talks to" his mother and lays out all his faults and uglinesses, he's admitting them to no one, telling her all the things he's sure her real counterpart above already knows and hates him for. When he hurts her, it's because he's mirroring all the ways he has hurt her before and continues to hurt her now. He can banish that tearful face when it's something he's made himself, but he can never make the actual injury he's caused to her go away, and he knows it. Calling up a shadow of his mother is both the only comfort he has and an excruciating reminder of everything he's already lost. And it's exactly the kind of self-excoriation Loki is prone to.