Thunderbolts* – Things heroes do to avoid going to therapy

#movie #fiction #superheroes

Every now and then a movie surprises you. That’s not unusual, but I hadn’t expected that movie to be Marvel’s Thunderbolts*. I too am no stranger to ‘Marvel Fatigue’ and have not really been invested in anything after Endgame with the exception of Loki and WandaVision*. When enjoying a movie requires an advanced degree in Marvelology you have lost me. Thunderbolts* only got its viewing as a sort of last hurrah before our Disney+ subscription goes the way of the OG Avengers. So it was a pleasant surprise when it wasn’t just a half-decent superhero movie, but offered an radically interesting perspective on mental health and redemption.

Warning, contains spoilers

Several elements make Thunderbolts* stand out from the recent Marvel fare. For one, it manages to take itself lightly without getting zany. While in the opening scenes we see Yelena Belova (Black Widow’s adopted sister, played by Florence Pugh) at work ‘cleaning up’ some off-the-books lab run by the movies baddie, we simultaneously hear her narrating how even her work cannot fill the emptiness she feels inside. The contrast is poignant, but ends in a lighthearted flourish when visuals and narration synchronize to show us Belova has been talking to a tied-up goon all this time. A goon who clearly has more important things on his mind than an assassin’s existential angst.

The self-aware humour remains present throughout the movie. It knows that it is working with the B-team, it knows that its protagonists (who are neither ‘super’ nor ‘heroes’) know, and it knows the audience knows. Early on in the movie, an exasperated Belova literally complains that it would be nice if someone in their reluctant team had a marginally useful superpower, beyond simply being able to shoot things. Luckily for our nascent heroes, neither superpowers nor marksmanship are required to defeat this movie’s villain.

Thunderbolts* offers us with two villains. There is the unavoidably nefarious CIA director. And there is her pet new ersatz Avenger, known as ‘The Sentry’. The Sentry easily ranks as one of the most implausible heroes/villains, because not only did someone think it was a great idea to inject some superserum into a test subject with extremely poor mental health only to then misplace them in a warehouse and forget about them, but the superserum now grants flight, telekinesis, superstrength and a bunch of other powers. I’m old enough to remember the 1930s when all it did was make Captain America a bit stronger, but clearly in the 21st century some advanced biochemistry can give you powers that previously you had to eat an Infinity Stone for.

Inevitably, the latent bipolar disorder of The Sentry’s past self (Bob) results in a Jekyll and Hyde situation where the would-be saviour of humanity flips into his severely depressed counterpart: The Void. Unfortunately for New York, The Void quickly extends a depressive cloud around him that displaces anyone it envelops into a pocket dimension where they are forced to forever relive their most shameful or traumatic memory. (Incidentally, why anyone in the MCU would still choose to live in New York is beyond me, given the frequency with which it is ground zero for supernatural disasters).

This is where Thunderbolts* makes its most interesting move. Because you cannot actually fight depression. You cannot shoot it. You cannot punch it. You cannot pummel it into submission, or blast it out of yourself. Violence is not the road to catharsis. Our heroes cannot defeat The Void by fighting it, nor by attacking it from the inside, having been absorbed to try, locate and extract good old Bob.

What overcomes depression is empathy and compassion. It is connection with other people and their ability to understand, forgive, and comfort. The radical idea at the heart of Thunderbolts* is that healing is a social process. You cannot CBT yourself out of your depression in isolation. This is not a new insight, but it is profoundly at odds with our pervasive culture that posits mental health as an extremely individualised responsibility, requiring constant ‘investment’ by way of mindfulness, exercise, and other forms of ‘self-care’ in order to attain happiness. Or if not happiness, at least the ability to perform effectively as a worker. In short, I had not expected echoes of Mark Fisher’s critique of neoliberalism in a Marvel movie.

All this is represented in a pivotal and excellent scene during Thunderbolts* finale where after Bob has been ineffectually battering away at The Void, it is the compassion and affirmation of our group of misfit heroes that allows him to overcome it. As Laozi says in Chapter 48 of the Tao Te Ching**:

Compassion wins the battle

and holds the fort

it is the bulwark set

around those heaven helps.

In doing so, Thunderbolts* avoids the obvious pitfall of suggesting that a hug can cure depression, by showing that Bob is not healed, but healing. As in Burnout, healing is portrayed as a process rather than a state, a journey rather than a destination.

The other theme woven through Thunderbolts* is redemption, playing the minor key to compassion’s major one. Each of our heroes has done wrongs in the past, but avoid being defined by these by redeeming themselves through their actions. As a form of social rather than individual forgiveness, redemption is a natural companion to the movie’s use of compassion. Yet the almost unconditional way in which it is deployed is possibly so far removed from daily reality as to test our willing suspension of disbelief. At a time when anyone can be dogpiled for a social media post from decades past, deported or arrested for protesting genocide, or imprisoned for possessing minor narcotics, the suggestion that we would be allowed to move beyond a past with as many actual skeletons as some of our heroes’ seems more fanciful than spacetime bending powers from a bottle. Nonetheless, proclaiming that redemption is possible remains worthwhile.

Whether Thunderbolts* can redeem the MCU remains to be seen, but as a surprising combination of carefully choreographed action spectacle and meditation on trauma and mental health, it is certainly worth watching.

Notes & Suggestions