The Age of Fantasy: Competing Visions, Colliding Worlds

Back in July, noted English literature professor Karen Swallow Prior responded to a Politico article examining V.P. nominee JD Vance’s naming of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) as a leading influence on his political views. She declared the news indicative of “the rise of the Fantasy generation,” thanks to Vance’s status as a millennial—someone who came of age during the rise of Peter Jackson’s blockbuster film trilogy based on Tolkien’s books.

In her article, Dr. Prior gently called out the way reading Tolkien’s work with a binary good vs. evil framing, and mapping it to the MAGA sloganeering representative of the Trump campaign, is a misappropriation of Tolkien’s work that he himself would have rejected. She asserted that to love a book well, you must interpret its message accurately, and that the interpretive keys to doing so are time and experience. She implied that Vance’s reading of Tolkien’s work could benefit from more of both.

At which point, this GenX reader let out a deep, rueful sigh. 

Loving Fantasy literature may be a hallmark of membership in the millennial generation, but a hallmark of membership in GenX is having our experiences overlooked. My own life experiences have an unusual number of similarities to Vance’s—a childhood shaped by abuse, deep familial dysfunction, and a path into a more economically and circumstantially stable life paved by academic scholarships and a Silicon Valley career. And I too have found my personal and political views heavily informed by Fantasy literature via a very different body of work—one with a much longer history, and a multimedia franchise whose pop culture and economic impact exceeds even that of the LOTR film series by an order of magnitude. And yet, in deference to Dr. Prior, the genre on which it’s based is not one with which she’s likely to have spent much time.

It’s the comic book.

Comic books first rose to popularity prior to the Second World War, well before The Lord of the Rings’ publication in 1954. The short, serialized stories centered on “superheroes” from other worlds, told through dynamic artwork, speech bubbles, and action sequences peppered with onomatopoeic commentary. Comic books have long been recognized as a more accessible (and more popular) form of storytelling for younger or struggling readers, and thus a target of skepticism by parents and teachers as to their true literary worth.

My personal introduction to the world of comic book characters came through its oldest and most beloved hero: Superman. Born on the planet Krypton and sent to Earth by his parents to escape his planet’s destruction, Superman grew into a man in possession of superhuman abilities (powered by earth’s yellow sun) like flight, and superhuman levels of virtue, all disguised behind a pair of glasses and a desk job at a local newspaper. I first came to know, then love, Superman through TV reruns of the black and white TV series from the 1950s, and then by comic book anthologies I found at the library. Then came the Super Friends, the Saturday morning cartoon series which introduced me to Superman’s allies in the pursuit of truth, justice, and the American Way—characters like Wonder Woman, the Wonder Twins, and AquaMan. 

Had I been old enough to watch the first iteration of the Superman movies when they came out in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, I wouldn’t have been allowed; theater-going was forbidden in my home. But that prohibition backfired in a big way when I watched them on VHS during a junior high sleepover some years later. My adolescent girl self didn’t so much observe the palpable chemistry between Christopher Reeve’s Superman and Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane as absorb it directly through my teenaged pores.  

The degree to which my upbringing in Christian fundamentalism was so interwoven with my experiences of childhood trauma and neglect should have served to spiritually inoculate me against faith of any kind. And yet, thanks to what can only be described as a series of divinely-directed circumstantial disruptions my freshman year of college, I became a Christian a few months before my 19th birthday.

It was Tolkien’s friend and contemporary C.S. Lewis who coined the phrase “true myth” to describe the story of Jesus, because it possesses all of the characteristics that make fantasy fantastical—the existence of a realm beyond what we can we see, power beyond what we inherently possess, a cosmic battle between good and evil, a heroic rescuer who saves us and calls us into victorious battle alongside him. Its one additional and essential characteristic is that, for Lewis as for me, it’s all gloriously true. 

As I moved through college and into adulthood, the more my story became interwoven with the true mythic story of the Gospel, the more I learned to appreciate other mythologies that echoed it.

And so it was when I first watched The Lord of the Rings trilogy. 

I was newly 30, married, and the mother of two young daughters, starting the second decade of my spiritual journey as a Christian. I was not unfamiliar with the book on which the films were based—I had picked it up, then laid it down, more than once during my high school and college years. Watching the films stirred all of the inclinations in me to try to read the book again. All of the themes were there: the call to something beyond yourself, the reality of evil and the determination for good to win, the need for a sacrificial savior, etc. Peter Jackson captured Tolkien’s vision and characters to a remarkable degree, and had the box office receipts to prove it. And yet, even my third attempt at reading the book after watching the movies failed. There was something about Tolken’s world that felt too far removed from my own to fully draw me in.

And then came the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Having grown up with Superman and the characters of the DC universe, I was initially unfamiliar with the characters of the competing Marvel Comics world. My enjoyment of the first two films—Iron Man and its first sequel—had as much to do with the redemptive story arc of the actor who played him, as with the story itself. I skipped the subsequent story of Thor. I was skeptical and confused about the connections to a character and plot that seemed like a Norse mythology knockoff.

But then came Captain America, as platonically perfect a reinterpretation of the true myth of Jesus as I’d ever seen, about a man born in weakness and granted supernatural power to save others, who sacrifices his own life so the world can be saved. And then came the Avengers—the first film in which the stories of Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and a host of other characters converged into one, each bringing their backstories and their abilities together into one collective quest to defeat the forces of evil, once and for all (or, until the infamous extra scene after the credits which hinted that another development was around the corner). And I was hooked.

For the next 15 years, the complex timeline of 34 films and 24 streaming series of the MCU threaded themselves through the timeline and milestones of my life. And it’s only now, as I enter my fifties, that I’m able to look back and understand why the fantasy world imagined by Stan Lee offered a more compelling mythological lens through which to interpret my own, than the world imagined by Tolkien did.

While Tolkien’s story plays out in imaginary Middle Earth, the stories of the Marvel Cinematic Universe keep one costumed foot of their characters firmly on the ground, among the real places (New York, Oakland, the New Jersey suburbs) and real events of Earth, with the other in imaginary realms. 

In the imaginary world of LOTR, power is a possession, and not all have the same capacity to wield it, let alone contain it. In the MCU, power is inherent to existence, and all living things possess it in some measure. Our capacities for power can change in an instant—not just externally by the procurement of a collection of magic stones, or by the wielding of a magic hammer, but internally as well, thanks to the explosion of a lethal weapon built by your own company, the electronic infusion of a vita ray, or the bite of an experimentally-altered spider. It’s our internal motivations and choices about what we do with the power we hold—individually and collectively—that determines the kind of person we become, and the impact we have on the world, whether we’re human or superhuman, animal or android, male or female. 

In the real world, we are all born powerless, and not all of us are helped to navigate the difficult path to adulthood in the ways we need. For those of us born into the dark fellowship of childhood trauma and neglect, like JD Vance and I were, Fantasy literature offers a window into a world that names the darkness of the past and present, but also invites us to believe that a better future is possible, and we can have a role to play in realizing it. That invitation is especially enticing when we can see ourselves in the characters making that future a reality.

It’s easy to see how a teenaged JD would have seen himself in the main characters of The Fellowship of the Ring—as the young man he was, and the grown man he aspired to be. With the smoldering fires of the toppled Twin Towers of the World Trade Center still days away from being quenched when the first film was released, it’s easy to imagine how the world he was moving into felt terrifying and vast. As the third film was released, months after he enlisted in the Marines, it’s easy to see how the role he envisioned for himself in battling the forces of darkness might have grown.

But my vantage point was different. As a 30-year-old mother, there were no direct entry points into Tolkien’s story for me, or for my daughters—literally no membership in the Fellowship. What few female characters there were, while invariably beautiful and noble, played only a supporting role, never a main one.

Not so with the MCU. From Black Widow and Captain Marvel, to Laura Barton and Peggy Carter, from the Dora Milaje of Wakanda to Wanda Maximova, the numerous heroines of the MCU are both active participants in collective quests and battles, as well as featuring in entire stories of their own. Equally significant, their characters wrestle regularly with the moral calculus associated with the intersection of their power and their responsibilities, in the same way their male superhero peers do. And some of the most compelling and popular storylines have been ones like WandaVision, ones that explore characters’ sorrows and defeats, and not just their victories.

That the democratic vision of the MCU extends to its resistance against archetypes and its intentional incorporation of moral complexity into its stories and its characters is why I believe, as a collection of Fantasy stories, it gets closer to approximating the complexities of real people and real situations playing out in our real, 21st century world, as Dr. Prior calls out.

Nevertheless, the political battle that is the 2024 election season continues to unfold. The greater question than how JD Vance may have seen himself in the story of LOTR as a younger man, is how he might see himself in the story now, newly turned 40, a husband and a father, just 270 electoral college votes from the second highest office in the land. The Politico article portrays him as a very young Gandalf. Perhaps he sees himself as Faramir, with Usha as his Eowyn, given her resignation from her prestigious law firm to join him on the campaign trail. 

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her Vice Presidential nominee. With several decades of both age and political and military experience over Vance, I couldn’t help thinking of Dr. Prior’s perspective, and wondering what Walz’s take on Tolkien might be. Then again, with his Middle American Dad demeanor dominating the social media vibe-geist, maybe we’ll find out he’s more of a comic book guy.

Time will tell.