Comics, Magic, and the Bard: Shifting Genres in Kenneth Branagh’s Thor Andrew James Aulner College

At once a superhero action film, a fantasy, and a Shakespearean family drama, 2011’s Thor (dir. Kenneth Branagh) explores the malleability of film genre. While the film’s archetypal narrative, a tale of a young man who must learn to grow up in order to embrace his destiny as a hero, is conveyed to the audience through a variety of genre signifiers, it is nevertheless internally consistent throughout the film.

Film scholar Harry Benshoff describes “genre” as, in simplest terms, a “type (or kind, or classification, or category” (83); more specifically, he defines it as “a type of fictional film produced within an industrial context” that can, at least to some degree, be identified by specific signifiers, such as the “horses, cowboys, Indians, tumbleweeds, and six-shooters” of classic Hollywood westerns (85), as well as the deeper meaning which the genre may attempt to convey. In the case of the western, for example, this “deep structure…has often been linked to manifest destiny” (86). Thus, genre theory is a useful tool that can allow scholars to critique films through a lens that captures both the superficial signs and the hidden narratives of a given film.

However, genre theory is limited due to the fact that many films refuse...