No Timeline is Sacred: The Performance of Power and Authority in Loki

Abstract

No Timeline is Sacred: The Performance of Power and Authority in Loki Kevin Drzakowski (bio) We have now entered the multiverse. This fact should be obvious to anyone who has been keeping an eye on recent box office figures. Spider-Man: No Way Home netted Sony Pictures over 600 million dollars in profit (D’Allesandro) while Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness managed to pull in 187.4 million dollars in its opening weekend (“Weekend Box Office”). This is not to say that multiverse storytelling is confined to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (or the Marvel Cinematic Universes, as the case may be). Alternate realities have long been a staple of science fiction storytelling, particularly in time-travel stories, but they have been used to new potential in recent years. The inaugural season of the Disney+ streaming series Loki from 2021 is one of several recent Marvel Studios properties to use the multiverse as a central theme. The show picks up villain-turned-antihero Loki’s story from where the 2019 film Avengers: Endgame left off. The supergroup of superheroes known as the Avengers have traveled back in time to the year 2012 to temporarily steal a valuable artifact, but their plans go awry, and the 2012 version of Loki manages to steal the artifact himself and use it to teleport away from his captors. In so doing, Loki has created a branch timeline—this is an event that was not “supposed” to happen. A cadre of heavily armored and armed quasi-police officers arrest Loki, charging him with “crimes against the Sacred Timeline.” Loki is whisked away to the headquarters of the Time Variance Authority, to be judged and sentenced for his offense of inadvertently creating a new timeline. The Time Variance Authority, or TVA, claims to exist to preserve and protect the one timeline that they deem the so-called Sacred Timeline. This claim raises a series of compelling questions, a repeating theme that can be applied to any time-travel story with multiple realities. Can any single reality or timeline be thought of as having primacy over others? If so, who or what is invested with the authority to rank timelines, and how is that authority created and maintained? Time-travel stories prompt us to think of alternate realities as having varying degrees of conformity to an objective truth. By default, the reality readers or viewers are placed in when first entering the narrative presents itself as the prime timeline, uncorrupted by changes to history. Any additional timelines the audience subsequently encounters are bound to be perceived as deviations from that initial, seemingly proper timeline. [End Page 209] Deeper scrutiny of time-travel stories and of timelines as a logical system, though, challenge the idea of timelines as having a rank order. The origin of time is, by definition, a timeless event. The origin of any timeline, too, is an event without time, for it is only after the origin of a timeline that time comes into being. Even if timelines are conceptualized as branching out from one another, which is exactly the terminology that the Time Variance Authority employs, the decision of how to label the forking timelines—which timeline is a branch, which is the “trunk”—is arbitrary. The TVA exists to legitimize the status of its own branch as the proverbial trunk, as the Sacred Timeline. My interest in this project lies in analyzing the performative techniques and imagery adopted by the TVA to invest itself with the power and the authority to be the arbiter of time. As the critical lens through which I will analyze the TVA’s creation and enactment of power over the multiverse, the theories of Michel Foucault as presented in his seminal 1977 text Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison will be employed. In drawing on Foucault for this analysis, I join a long tradition of using Discipline & Punish to interrogate power structures. In the introduction to a special issue of Foucault Studies commemorating the text on its fortieth anniversary, Frieder Vogelmann and Jörg Bernardy note that Discipline & Punish has been used to diagnose power structures “in accounting, the bodies of women, criminology, Disneyland . . . and the...