The comedian Simon Munnery suggests all autobiographies should be sub-titled “Failure Justified”. It’s funny because it’s true. All autobiographies are the acrid after-burps of dying mortals pleading for forgiveness.

That said, in his new autobiography, See A Little Light, the American punk icon Bob Mould seems delighted with his downward spiral from front-man of the hardcore pioneers Hüsker Dü, via a stint as a World Wrestling Federation script consultant, to hosting a disco night for middle aged ‘bears’. Called Bob Mould’s Blow Off, linguistic differences mean the event is unlikely to enjoy transatlantic success. “From here on out, life might get even better.”, Mould concludes, with unintended accuracy, and his autobiography ends, not with a bang, but with a blow off.

Last week I read the new memoir of TV’s idiotically be-quiffed film critic, Mark Kermode. Kermode’s position as TV’s top cine-pundit is secure. Once we had Joan Bakewell, the thinking man’s crumpet. Today we have Film 2011’s Claudia Winkleman, the crumpet man’s thinker.

Kermode’s The Good, The Bad And The Multiplex What’s Wrong With Modern Movies deals with Hollywood’s quality collapse. The title contains three, or possibly even four, punctuation errors. It should be The Good, The Bad, And The Multiplex; What’s Wrong With Mark Kermode?

Upon its release in May, Kermode reviewed Kenneth Branagh’s Thor for BBC radio. Stan Lee’s Sixties Thor comics channelled Shakespeare’s Henry V, Falstaff becoming Volkstagg for example, making luvvie Ken the film version’s ideal director. But critics didn’t look at the source material, as that would have been work, preferring instead to sneer in ignorance at the fact that high-falutin’ Ken’s career was so dead he was directing a dumb-ass comic book caper.

Well, wake up and smell Bob Mould’s Blow Off, daddio! Comics have grown up! I know because every two years a broadsheet runs a feature strap-lined ‘Biff! Bang! Pow! Comics Have Grown Up! Where once Batman battled the Joker now Marjane Satrapi battles sexism in Iran”.

“Have comics grown up?”, I asked the comics writer Alan Moore, last week. “No,” he replied, as moths flew out of his beard, “they have merely encountered mainstream culture on its way down.”

In Branagh’s Thor, Thor’s father Odin seals his son’s magic hammer in a rock, and banishes him to Earth for disloyalty. Only when Thor redeems himself will he retrieve Mjolnir. Sounds familiar? Of course it does. It’s a myth, and deals in eternally relevant cross-cultural archetypes found in all fables and belief systems. Or clichés, as critics call them.

Indeed, last Thursday I made a journey, along the Medway river near Tonbridge, in a giant swan shaped pedallo, which was similarly mythic. Alan Moore and I were amongst a number of guest pedalers, invited by the artist Andrew Kötting and the writer Ian Sinclair, to approach East London from the sea on the pedallo. Progress can be monitored at www.swandown.info.

Sinclair is the author of may hugely significant books, and an important champion of forgotten writers, but is best know for hating the Olympics, and is banned from speaking in many public places in Hackney as a result. (Spare a thought here for those who would love to be banned from speaking in public places in Hackney, but are instead duty bound to do so.)

The purpose of the swan pedallo ride was not explained. Kötting has a fondness for taking large structures to improbable places, having already carried a seventy foot inflatable model of his late father all over Europe, but the Greek God Zeus once manifested himself as a swan in order to impregnate Leda, and I suspected Sinclair was riding a God of Olympus towards the Olympic site as part of his crazed vendetta against all sport.

Gods impregnating women, usually violently, and while in some other form, is a sadly common feature of all myths and religions, though in Christianity it has been cleaned up and rebranded as Christmas. And in Kenneth Branagh’s Hollywood Thor film, instead of sexually assaulting female giants as he does in the Norse myths, Anthony Hopkins’ Odin adopts an abandoned baby, as if subjugating his inner Berserker to his inner Dr Bernardo.

When the film came out, Kermode described Branagh’s Thor as “Xanadu meets Transformers”, “utterly ridiculous” and “ludicrous”. But when this reasonable film was released on DVD last month, Kermode’s gel-addled head had recalibrated its thoughts slightly. This “comic-book adaptation (had) brought Branagh first ridicule and then plaudits… it transpired that (he) had deftly conjured a silk purse from a sow’s ear, creating a thoroughly enjoyable and deceptively witty mainstream blockbuster from a problematic source.”

To be fair to Kermode, Hollywood films are getting worse at such a rate, that the fact that Thor is six months old makes it, by default, much better than anything that’s around now. But the real reason for Kermode’s change of heart is simpler. Since he first reviewed Thor last May, Kermode has published his aforesaid book, Mark Kermode’s Blow Off. In its key chapter, Why Blockbusters Should Be Better, Kermode cites Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbour as a tipping point in the sheer awfulness of Hollywood cinema. Its true worthlessness went unnoticed by critics because their expectations were so low, like battered partners in an abusive relationship grateful for a Penguin biscuit rather than a punch in the face. Kermode now regrets the leniency of his own review, describing it as “a shameful misjudgement, which I will carry with me to my grave.”

But Hollywood’s descent hasn’t happened alone. Critics didn’t stop it. All that was required for Michael Bay to triumph was for Mark Kermode to do nothing. Kermode’s inconclusive Pearl Harbour review is his rock-fast hammer. And until Kermode can redeem himself, Mjolnir remains immobilised. Kermode likes Branagh’s Thor film now, because he sees himself, the Hollywood apologist, in the exiled boy-God, who must atone for his sins. “Chris Hemsworth is …. Thor!” No. Mark Kermode is Thor. And he knows it.

Touring an Oxford college in the late Eighties, Margaret Thatcher described the study of old Norse as a ‘luxury’. It was the first chisel blow in her political inheritors’ eventual reduction of further education to a drive-in window transaction devoid of meaning or nuance. But understanding the old tales is hugely useful, and has already helped us to mock Mark Kermode, for example. A culture that does not know its history is condemned, not to repeat it, but to enjoy Michael Bay’s version of it. Perhaps Kermode’s autobiographically skewed film book misses the bigger picture. Societies get the cinema they deserve. Hollywood is simply meeting us on the way down.