From The Mahabharata to the Marvel MCU: The Sub-Genre Taking Over Hollywood

Back in the early 1990s when I was a poor graduate student, I used to stay home on Saturday nights and watch my little black-and-white TV. I couldn’t afford cable, of course, but thankfully there was always PBS, so I watched a lot of documentaries and episodes of Great Performances. On one such night, I saw a filmed performance of Peter Brook’s stage play The Mahabharata. The play is, of course, a dramatic adaptation of the great Hindu epic, the tale of a feud between two groups of royal cousins, the Pāṇḍava princes and their arch-nemeses, the Kauravas. As epic tales are wont to do, the feud escalates into a civil war so catastrophic that even the gods are pulled into the conflict (in the same way that the Greek gods Mars, Apollo, and Venus involve themselves in the The Illiad).

Being a filmed staged play, Brook’s TV version is low on special effects (this was before CGI) but packed with minimalistic, highly-stylized interpretations of sweeping battles, multi-armed demons, and flying chariots. Somehow, it all works, and I found myself obsessed with both the film and the story. A few years later I would finally read a popular translation of The Bhagavad Gita, which is really just one portion of the much larger Mahabharata.

Part of my obsession stemmed from my prior interest in classic literature as well as mythology, and especially in the intersection between modern pop culture and mythological symbols. I had watched Bill Moyers’s interviews with Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of comparative mythology, whose influence on the Star Wars movie cycle was acknowledged by George Lucas. (The interviews were filmed, significantly, in the library of Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, and a reprint of Campbell’s great work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, was one of the few non-Star Wars publications that Lucas allowed to include a picture of Luke Skywalker on its cover.) Campbell became famous for his concept of the monomyth, which was his term for the archetypal hero tale that gird both epic literature and mythology.

But what really impressed me about The Mahabharata was not just its epic scope—it is, of course, a sprawling monomyth, as old as the Arthurian legends of the Holy Grail—but also its phantasmagoric, almost science-fiction-like quality. Let’s face it–Hindu icons are trippy. (Before I go any further, let me say that I mean no offense to the many followers of Hinduism. It is one of the world’s great religions and I admire both its substance and its spirit.) What other great stories of lore can boast superhuman heroes with flying serpent mounts, blue skin, multiple arms, and death-rays shooting from their eyes? Not to mention giant scorpions, demons, and other assorted monsters?

Perhaps this was the reason the science fiction writer Roger Zelazny incorporated the Hindu pantheon into his classic science fiction novel, Lord of Light.  In this book, Zelazny describes an alien world ruled by living examples of Hindu deities like Vishnu and Shiva, who reign over the hapless peasantry from a literal floating city. The population of the planet is soon revealed to be the descendants of a crashed interstellar starship, The Star of India, with the “deities” descended from the ship’s crew. The fake gods disguise their high technology as divine powers (their “immortality” is based on tech that lets them download their consciousness into new, younger bodies when the old ones wear out).

It’s one of my favorite sci-fi novels, if you can even call it sci-fi. Zelazny was actually revitalizing an older, hybrid sub-genre called science fantasy, which weaves elements of fantasy like flying horses and magic rings over a hidden science fiction armature. It’s no surprise that the genre took off in the 1960s and 70s with the science fiction New Wave. This was, after all, the time when western interest in mythologies of all kinds, and especially Asian mythologies, surged thanks to the counter-culture.

And so, I find it interesting that today, in 2022, science fantasy is the dominant genre in Hollywood—although almost no one knows it. At my library, all the Marvel movies are shelved in the science fiction section, even though they are only sci-fi in the nominal sense. What are the Avengers if not a Hindu-esque pantheon of demi-gods? (Three of them fly. One has a bow. One even has blue skin.)

Nowhere is the connection more obvious than in Marvel’s recent film, The Eternals, which depicts a cadre of ancient alien beings, each with a distinct superpower, who work throughout human history to defeat evil. Sound familiar? It should, because it’s an almost purely religious/mythological construct. The “Eternals” are gods.

To call such films “science fiction” would have appalled the founders of the genre. In sci-fi’s Golden Age of the 1940s and 50s, all the major writers came from hard-science backgrounds. Isaac Asimov was a chemist. Arthur C. Clarke was a mathematician and astronomer. Robert Heinlein was an aeronautical engineer. For these trailblazers, the whole point was to create a genre in which all fantastical elements (space travel, robots, artificial intelligence) were not only scientifically possible but rigorously examined, if only from a theoretical standpoint. But starting in the 1960s with the so-called New Wave, sci-fi writers became more interested in the soft sciences like anthropology and sociology, as well as wholly liberal arts pursuits like ancient literature and theology.

The 1970s marked another seismic shift in popular culture: comic books. Sometime around the close of the hippie era, comic books ceased to be kids’ stuff and became targeted to adults. The content became more mature, in every sense of the word. Sex and violence were depicted. Heroes like Superman became conflicted anti-heroes like Batman. And it is from this shift that we get the Marvel and DC universe films, which have conquered Hollywood. Today, more kids know Iron Man from the movies than from the comics. (I actually grew up reading the Iron Man comics; I remember when Tony Stark had a magnificent 70s mustache.)

Please note that I am not one of those Marvel haters that have gotten so much coverage of late. Personally, I’ve enjoyed all of the Marvel films, and I believe that at least two of them—Iron Man and Captain America: The Winter Soldier—are masterpieces of entertainment, on par with the Errol Flynn movies of the 1940s and the early James Bond films of the 1960s. I am merely observing that the rise of the science fantasy genre in this century must imply something deeper about our culture as a whole. When a quasi-religious science fantasy like The Avengers: Endgame can make a billion dollars at the box office while a “hard” science fiction film like Blade Runner: 2049 flops, what does that say about popular taste?

A cynic would state that, obviously, people want light entertainment with a strong element of escapism. But I’m not so sure. I’m more prone to say that people are in desperate need of a mythology that helps them live their lives—one not solely rooted in the ancient past but connected to the tropes of modern story-telling. I’ll go a step further: this need for a mythological construct is not purely psychological, but spiritual. That is, I really believe that the epic tales of The Mahabharata and Iron Man are reflections of an actual, real story that is playing out on the scale of human history between cosmic forces of good and evil. We all sense the truth of this, I believe, even though we can’t see it or understand it. And, on some level, we all want to figure out what role we have to play in it.

I know, it’s a crazy belief on my part. Does having it make me a Hindu, or a Manichean, or a Catholic? 

I guess it does.

(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.)