Yes and no.
The Famous Tom Thumb’s Story Book is the first publication of the rhyme and does simply say “Went to market” so I’ll self correct on that one. I still think it sounds ridiculous in context. Other interpretations go hog wild (tip your waitress) with things like “The one pig had no roast beef because it was being starved so it would eat human corpses!”
I think Flannery O’connor had the last word on the idea that you can give any interpretation you like to the work and that the author’s intention can be ignored. “The Misfit’s Black Hat” became a catchphrase in one of my graduate English classes to keep us from constructing fanciful interpretation.
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> Quotes > Quotable Quote
“Week before last I went to Wesleyan and read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” After it I went to one of the classes where I was asked questions. There were a couple of young teachers there and one of them, an earnest type, started asking the questions. “Miss O’Connor,” he said, “why was the Misfit’s hat black?” I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked pretty disappointed. Then he said, “Miss O’Connor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?” “He does not,” I said. He looked crushed. “Well, Miss O’Connor,” he said, “what is the significance of the Misfit’s hat?” I said it was to cover his head; and after that he left me alone. Anyway, that’s what’s happening to the teaching of literature.”
I couldn’t find O’connor’s quote about one particular interpretation of the story that it was a wish fulfillment fantasy of the husband in the story. It was scathing.
What if the (unreliable)narrator of the movie is the writer in the movie? Who we know is prone to exaggeration and poetic license. He started with The Duck of Death and ended with The Man With No Name.
Oh no, a pig will happily scarf roast beef. or raw beef. Or …
I tried to look into the “Went to market” thing but there’s not a ton to go on. I did find a number of books and, as early as the mid-nineteenth century, every illustration clearly showed Pig No. 1 heading to market to engage in commerce; either going shopping or selling their farm produce. I’m guessing people in 1865 still understood that “went to market” could mean “for slaughter” but chose this interpretation instead.
Regardless of the origin of the phrase, I’d say that the modern pop culture understanding of the rhyme as “shopping” is correct based on the past 150+ years of usage.
(None of this is meant to disparage Anny_m 's thread contribution. I’d heard the same thing offered before and just got into a bit of a rabbit hole of “Let me try to get to the bottom of this…”)
I have no dog (or pig) in this fight, but I’d like to note that the grammatical form here is not especially dispositive: When one gets in trouble with the law, we commonly say that the person “goes” or “went” to jail, but we hardly mean to imply that this journey was made willingly.
It could also be a difference between British and American usage (e.g. “go to hospital” vs “go to the hospital”).
But how much of a villain? compared to Munny? compared to English Bob?
He keeps the town running and deals out “justice” in a fashion. He goes a long way to try and keep violence and undesireables out of the town and be the noble leader. But of course he is a sadist really. Just like Bob is a cockney barrow-boy who shoots chinamen for fun not an aristocrat, Like Munny is a violent assassin not an honest farmer.
People trying to be what they are not is a theme, Munny’s sidekicks try to be killers, they aren’t.
One great aspect of the film (and I truly believe it is a masterpiece) is its moral ambiguity and nihilism, No absolute heroes, no absolute villains. Everyone compromised, everyone trying to escape their nature and failing.
Bleak and beautiful.
I put it in the category of “Let the past die, kill it if you have to.” Which, in keeping with this thread’s title, may be wrongly attributed as “the message” of The Last Jedi. Wrongly because, again, Kylo is kind of the villain in that movie (much as Eastwood’s character in Unforgiven is kind of a villain, who might be said to stand more for the proposition that man’s propensity to do violence and to glorify the same is at best an amoral force of nature, too often indiscriminate, and by no means a proper measure of virtue, either for the man dispensing it or for the man on the receiving end).
…but then (here again referring to the line from TLJ) it may also be an example of “death of the author” in action. That is, the author may or may not have intended for that to be the message (hence the reason for making it a line from the villain), but then the whole rest of the film sure does seem to want to smother the past. Really hard to analyze that movie (TLJ) in the context of this thread, actually. Because in order to misunderstand a pop culture phenomenon, it would have to be something we could understand in the first place, right? Not an incoherent mess…
Put another way: in order to properly “misunderstand” a work, the work must first be capable of being understood. I think Unforgiven easily passes that mark, whereas The Last Jedi… not so much.
And most recently Black Adam changed his name to SHAZADAM, which is terrible.
CC Beck’s company stopped publishing less than three years before Thor hit the stands for the first time.
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I think I’m just going to pretend you never told me that.
No he (or rather, DC) didn’t-it was just a joke:
I don’t think that’s right. Fawcett shut down its comics division in 1953 (according to Wikipedia, the last Fawcett comic was released in January 1954). Thor didn’t appear until 1962.
I’m also not quite sure what that has to do with whether Thor is an homage to Captain Marvel.
Both @CalMeacham and I have acknowledged there are definite parallels and probably some influence. I don’t want to speak for CalMeacham, but I just don’t think the similarities and parallels are quite as marked as you do. As CalMeacham points out, a number of the elements you cite as taken from Captain Marvel were either there in the original Norse myths or didn’t appear in Thor’s comics until years after his debut.
And, again, I don’t think a lot of those similarities are actually very similar.
Take Sif, which you cite as a parallel for Mary Marvel. Sif is actually there in the original Norse myths, Sif and Mary Marvel have different abilities and very different appearances, they have different relationships to Thor and Captain Marvel, respectively, and as CalMeacham points out, Sif wasn’t even in the early Thor stories, and didn’t appear until years into the run. The only thing I can see that they have in common is that they’re both strong (but all Asgardians are strong) and they’re both female supporting characters.
Or take the Warriors Three, which you cite as a parallel to the Lieutenants Marvel. The Lieutenants Marvel are pretty much explicitly just copies of Captain Marvel - three other kids named Billy that transform into a Marvel form and each gain 1/3 of Captain Marvel’s power. The Warriors Three, other than having super-strength, which again all Asgardians have, have no particular abilities in common with Thor, have no particular relationship with his origins other than they’re all Asgardians, and don’t have mortal forms. They’re pretty clearly the Three Musketeers, filtered through a Kirby Space Viking lens, combined with some other very definitely non-CC Beck characters. Volstagg is pretty much Shakespeare’s Falstaff as Space Viking Porthos. Fandral is pretty much Errol Flynn as Space Viking Aramis. And Hogun the Grim is, for some reason, Charles Bronson as a Space Viking/Mongol Athos. Other than the fact that there are three guys in a supporting role, I don’t think there’s any parallel.
That’s just ridiculous. You don’t need to starve a pig to get it to eat human corpses; they do it naturally. The hard thing is getting them not to.
I spend a lot of time on https://digitalcomicmuseum.com/. Every similarity you might find between Fawcett’s Captain Marvel and Marvel’s Thor can be found in a hundred or more titles in the 30s and 40s. Superheroes as embodiments of gods and mythology were a dime a dozen (well, a dime an issue). The weakling becoming a superhero is one of the oldest superhero tropes of all. If Kirby was cribbing Beck, he’d already done it two decades before Thor, with puny Steve Rogers becoming Captain America.
Apropos of nothing, I remember being in a movie theater and there were three African-American girls behind me. One of them said “Girl, you ever see Godzilla vs Bambi?” Another said “Girl, you lyin’!” They got into a squabble over it and I was trying my best not to burst out into laughter.
Extremely relevant article. How many people have missed the ultimate meaning of this time - honored tale?
Here the spider begins its task, with the water spout clearly taking the place of Sisyphus’ rock. As is often the case, what is left unsaid is as important as what is explicitly given to us. In particular, there is no indication that the spider must go up the water spout, nor is there any reason that the spider should want to go up the water spout. Sisyphus (as we may as well call the spider since the allusion is so glaring) is no longer bound to his thankless test by some long-forgotten sin, but by a poorly-thought-out choice.
I don’t think I would characterize any of The Boss’s lyrics as anti-US. They aren’t jingoist either. I would say they are a complex tribute to the American working class and idealized American values while trying to reconcile the realities of the darker aspects of American life.