Unasked Questions: The issue of Loki's body in TDW
Yesterday I properly clued into something that’s been bothering me subconsciously since I first saw TDW.
Thor didn’t go back for Loki’s body.
He didn’t give Loki’s remains any consideration at all in fact, despite the fact that the guy (he thought) died saving his life and that he seemed pretty broken up at the fact of Loki’s death itself (at least for ten minutes). I don’t just mean him not taking Loki’s body with when they were going after Malekith, which I can understand (it would have been cumbersome and they had like an hour to save the nine realms), but the complete lack of any thought about the matter whatsoever, ever.
In Svartalfheim itself, he could have covered Loki with his cape, or we could have had a shot of him closing Loki’s eyes, or any gesture like that really would have done. Hell, part of the reason for going to the cave when they thought they were trapped in Svartalfheim could have been Thor wanting to lay his brother’s body out of the wind - it would have been a wonderful touching moment of characterization for Thor, even a moment full of potential for him to reflect on what Loki just did and for the filmmakers to hammer in that redemption arc they were supposedly trying to slot Loki into. But no. He just walks off after this enormously emotional parting.
But ok, let’s lay that aside - grief and shock and stress make people do strange things in the moment, and Thor’s not the most freely emotional person to begin with (I sense repression like woah, thank you Odin). So ignore the lack of a gesture in Svartalfheim.
What really troubles me is the complete lack of any gesture or thought afterward, when the realms are safe and Thor has had time to reflect on the loss and has that lovely talk with ‘Odin’ in which he explicitly acknowledges Loki’s honorable death (er, ‘death’). Does Thor, newly forgiven for his treason and explaining his choices and values and defending Loki in his own misaimed but supposedly sincere way, mention even once that he’d like to acknowledge Loki’s sacrifice by treating his remains with honor? Does he ask to go retrieve them so that he might send Loki off to join his mother in Valhalla properly? Does he even have an argument with ‘Odin’ in which 'Odin’ (completely in character with both Odin and Loki) forbids him to go and Thor expresses a sliver of regret that then his brother must lie dishonored in an empty field?
No. The subject is never raised at all. Loki’s death apparently exists only in an abstract way, as something that happened but which calls for no further activity or reflection. It existed at the moment Thor apparently grieved him, it exists as a past circumstance for Thor to use in his speech, and for the audience it exists as a trick Loki has played and is playing, but it never exists for the characters within the world of the story in any way that would require them to make a material effort to (re)integrate him and his absence into social, familial, emotional reality in the way that a funeral does. Thor never has to confront, not even Loki’s body or the curious absence of one, but just so much as the fact that there IS (or should be) a body with which he has to deal. Or any lingering trace of Loki’s past existence, for those thousand years they shared together, as an independent being, as anything other than a catalyst for events in Thor’s life. Frigga is real to him, and to everyone, and so receives acknowledgement when she passes away. Loki is not, and so does not. In their minds.
And thus 'Odin’ does not even have to be shown forbidding Thor from returning for Loki’s body, or Jane asking what happened to it, or anything. It was never really a question to Thor, or Odin, or anyone, what should happen with the body, because Loki was just an abstraction or a tool to them, either unreal on a fundamental level or else not worthy of the regard.
And Loki apparently knew this. Or at least, was utterly unsurprised at Thor’s failure to mention the issue. To ask the question.
Because really, the issue of Loki’s treatment in TDW is bookended by two fundamental questions that literally every single person around him failed to ever ask:
- What happened then? (Why did you do those things? What has happened to you? Is something wrong? What ails thee - the question Parzival lost the Grail for failing to ask.)
- What happens now? (What do we do with your remains? How do we integrate you into our histories? How do we deal with the unanswered questions you pose us?)
Past. Future. Loki has neither, his having-been exists in neither, for our heroes. He exists, and the fact that he ever was exists, only in the present moment for them. When they need him, or his having-been, to. And never at any other moment.
Because then he would pose questions to them. Questions they do not want to answer.
