The Americanisation of the God of Thunder: From ‘Boy Emperor’ to the Rightful King of Asgard in Thor
Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world.
– John Burroughs (1913: 184)
In recent years a range of books, like Don LoCicero’s Superheroes and Gods: A Comparative Study from Babylon to Batman (2007), Grant Morrison’s Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero (2012) and Ben Saunders’ Do Gods Wear Capes? Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes (2012), have persuasively argued that superheroes do not only endorse prevailing societal values and behaviours, but also function as godlike figures for the cultures that produce them. Although they are often viewed in this way in the diegetic world of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor, the Asgardian god of Thunder, one of the subjects of this chapter, is the only one of the Avengers Prime to be, quite literally, a god. Martin Arnold’s Thor: Myth to Marvel (2011a) charts the rich history of Thor from his origins in Old Norse and Scandinavian texts like the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda (c.13th century) where he was the god of the air, fertility and the ‘protector of mankind’, through to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when he became a source of inspiration for a variety of Romantic poets and nationalist movements, even into the first half of the twentieth century which saw him appropriated as a nation-state god by Nazi Germany (2011a: 135). Jon Favreau’s Iron Man was a considerable gamble for the newly formed Marvel Studios, but the character of Tony Stark and his metallic alter ego are, as we have seen, somewhat grounded in the quasi-realistic environment of the twenty-first-century United States. The characterisation of Thor, given his roots in Scandinavian mythology, the fact that he possesses supernatural powers and is an actual god brought their own challenges in adapting the character to the cinema screen for the first time in his Marvel history.
The empyreal status of the Asgardians remains somewhat ambiguous throughout the MCU. In The Avengers both Agent Coulson and Nick Fury refer to them as ‘gods’, as does Loki, Thor’s mischievous and malevolent younger brother. Yet in Thor, Fandral, one of the Warriors Three, offers a slight distinction in his remarks to Thor when he observes, ‘the mortals worship you as a god’. In Thor: The Dark World, after the remarkable Battle of New York, the disgraced Loki returns in chains in front of his father Odin where he explains his actions: ‘I went down to earth to rule as a benevolent god, just like you do…’ But Odin disagrees, telling him, ‘We are not gods! We’re born, we live, we die, just as humans do.’ This ambiguity of their celestial nature often becomes a source of humour as in when an inebriated Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård) ends his night of drunken revelry with Thor by telling him, ‘I still don’t think you’re the God of Thunder, but you ought to be!’, or when Captain America denies Thor’s divinity in The Avengers as he leaps from a quinjet informing Black Widow: ‘There’s only one God ma’am, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that…’1
Like Iron Man, Marvel’s Thor was also originally conceived during the Cold War era, first appearing even before Tony Stark in Journey into Mystery #83 (August 1962). Also like his metallic counterpart, and despite his Asgardian other worldly status, Thor was frequently closely associated with American values and foreign policy in this era. Martin Arnold commented that the character was ‘transformed into an articulation both of an anxious male sexuality and of a parallel nervousness regarding American foreign policy’ (2011a, back cover). Throughout his comic book run during the Cold War Thor participated in several real-world conflicts where his political perspectives were decidedly American and even went to Vietnam on more than one occasion. In 1965’s Journey into Mystery #117 he roars at communist commander Hu Sak, ‘To communism, then – may it vanish from the face of the earth and the memory of mankind’.2 The MCU iteration of Thor is similarly a decisive man of action, a hard-bodied hero the likes of which Susan Jeffords considered emblematic of US self-image in Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era, where she wrote, ‘The depiction of the indefatigable, muscular, and invincible masculine body became the lynchpin of the Reagan imaginary; this hardened male form became an emblem not only for the Reagan Presidency but for its ideologies and economies as well’ (1994: 25). But Thor, as a product of the new millennium, is portrayed as something more than this. Like many masculine figures of the era he emerges as a conflation of both hard-bodied and more sensitive new man archetypes which characterised the discourse of the period.
Thor’s godhood must have proved difficult to reconcile with the broader narrative sweep of the MCU in 2011, but it is effectively embraced by director Kenneth Branagh rather than ignored in a film which confronts the confluence between science and fantasy, myth and reality throughout. The film begins with the stentorian tones of Anthony Hopkins’ Odin, Thor’s father, the king of Asgard and the All-Father, in a voice-over which addresses this in its very first moments:
Once, mankind accepted a simple truth: that they were not alone in this universe. Some worlds man believed home to their Gods. Others they knew to fear. From a realm of cold and darkness came the Frost Giants, threatening to plunge the mortal world into a new ice age. But humanity would not face this threat alone. Our armies drove the Frost Giants back into the heart of their own world. The cost was great. In the end, their king fell, and the source of their power was taken from them. With the last great war ended, we withdrew from the other worlds and returned home to the Realm Eternal, Asgard. And here we remain as a beacon of hope, shining out across the stars. And though we have fallen into man’s myths and legends, it was Asgard and its warriors that brought peace to the universe.
The woman that becomes Thor’s lover, the astrophysicist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) (formerly a nurse in the original comics), suggests, by paraphrasing Arthur C. Clarke, that these two areas can be reconciled as ‘magic’s just science we don’t understand yet’ (see Clarke 1973: 21, fn 1). Thor tells her: ‘Your ancestors called it magic and you call it science. Well, I come from a place where they are one and the same thing.’ The film goes to considerable lengths to blend the two with the help of its scientific advisors: Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology and the author of From Eternity to Here (2010), and Kevin Hand, a NASA astrobiologist, who lend a patina of authenticity to the film with its mentions of Einstein-Rosen bridges and subtle aurora (see Kakalios 2010; Hill 2013). Even acclaimed popular scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson took to Twitter to speculate that based on his calculations Thor’s famous hammer Mjölnir, if it is made of neutron-star matter as Odin states in Thor (he says it was ‘forged in the heart of a dying star’), would weigh ‘as much as a herd of 300-billion elephants’ (2013). The film manages to reconcile high fantasy and science fiction in its portrayal of Asgard, a place which is technologically advanced (capable of interplanetary travel and has a fleet of futuristic space jets) but its residents still use swords and shields, dress in medieval garb and speak in Shakespearean-affected tones which Tony Stark will later joke in The Avengers resembles ‘Shakespeare in the Park’ with the aside to Thor, ‘Doth mother know you weareth her drapes?’ At the same time Branagh is able to undercut this melodramatic sweep with a rich vein of humour, as the film is the most broadly comic addition to the MCU until Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man in 2014.3 In the course of the narrative, as well as participating in several spectacular battles, the mighty Thor will be run over twice by Jane Foster and even tasered by her wisecracking assistant Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings).
Instead of the Iraq-set opening of Iron Man, the narrative of Thor begins in Asgard on the bright and sunny day of Thor’s coronation where he is due to ascend to the throne in place of his aging father. The film quickly codes Thor as arrogant and overly confident, with his show-boating for the crowd and self-entitled winking. Asgard, with Thor as its primary representative, is self-consciously constructed as representative of the United States of America and Odin’s description of it as a ‘beacon of hope, shining out across the stars’ is reminiscent of many pronouncements in the last two hundred years concerning America’s self-proclaimed role around the globe, the exact phrase being used by both Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon in their inauguration speeches, and a variation of which could be heard in that of Donald Trump’s contention, in his own, that the American way of life will ‘shine as an example…We will shine for everyone to follow’ (2017). As Edwin J. Feulner and Brian Tracey wrote in The American Spirit: Celebrating the Virtues and Values That Make Us Great, ‘Throughout our history, we [the United States of America] have served as a beacon of hope to oppressed men and women everywhere’ (2012: 53). The residents of Asgard are no longer the blue-eyed blondes of Nordic mythology, but a harmonious multi-racial society with even some of their prominent figures of Asian (Tadanobu Asano as Hogun, later revealed to be of Vanir) or African (Idris Elba as Heimdall) descent. Vincent M. Gaine has stated that, ‘This creates a sense of universalism in Asgard, preventing it from appearing as a Northern European version of the heavenly realm’ (2016: 40). Since 1962 Marvel has participated in the Americanisation of Thor, initially in the comics but even more so in his MCU incarnation. This is visible in the peaceful and utopian multi-racial community of Asgard, but even more so in the characterisation of Thor himself through his embodiment of what Hagley and Harrison described as ‘the American warrior ethos’ (2012) and what many regard as the supposedly quintessential American values of equality, freedom and justice Asgard advocates. This Americanisation had reached such an extent by 2011 that Martin Arnold argued that we had reached ‘the end of the meaningful story of the reception of Thor, as the interest is no longer in the Norse myth or the history of Thor as a God who was once believed in, but rather the exotic Norse trappings that the mass pop industry can endlessly recycle’ (2011a: 65).
Unbeknownst to the peaceful Asgardians enjoying their privileged lives, a small number of their perennial enemies, the Frost Giants, mount a surprise attack on the long thought impenetrable Asgard. While their attempt is quickly repulsed by a large enchanted metallic being called the Destroyer, the arrogant and impulsive Thor is incensed and wants immediate revenge. He demands that the Asgardians should ‘march into Jotunheim [the home world of the Frost Giants] as you [Odin] once did! Teach them a lesson! Break their spirits, so they would never dare try to cross our borders again!’ Thor cannot understand the potential ramifications of his proposed actions or the lives that will be lost on both sides if they restart hostilities, and the wiser Odin urges caution and diplomacy in place of war, remarking that ‘it is the action of but a few, doomed to fail’. Odin has maintained a fragile peace between the two races for many years and states that they cannot begin a conflict, which could lead to the deaths of tens of thousands, just because of the actions of a few who may not represent the whole. The events and exchange between Thor and Odin, with its lines of dialogue like ‘This was an act of war!’ and ‘You know not what your actions would unleash’, were read by some as a veiled commentary on the political landscape of the post-9/11 environment, and Anthony R. Mills was one of many who saw real-world connections in the portrayal of Thor’s pride and hubris, stating: ‘It is difficult not to consider our contemporary political context when observing the stark contrast of Thor’s and Odin’s on the appropriate response to the Frost Giants’ actions’ (2013: 180). Thor’s argument that a pre-emptive strike on the Frost Giants is ‘the only way to ensure the safety of our borders’ and will end the war before it had hardly begun is a striking manifestation of the Bush Doctrine in a film that was described by Peter Labuza, author of Approaching the End: Imagining Apocalypse in American Film (2014), as ‘playing heavily on some George Bush parallels’ (2011) and which prompted a range of reviews with titles like ‘The Summer’s New Hero: Thor-Ge W. Bush’ (Singer 2011) and ‘Blockbuster: Bush v. Thor’ (Stewart 2011).
Convinced that he knows better and after being expertly manipulated by his brother Loki (who later learns to his dismay that he is adopted and of Frost Giant descent), Thor goes against his father’s wishes and leads a raiding party to Jotunheim where he confronts their king, Laufey, who tells him, ‘Your father is a murderer and a thief’, the very same accusation Ivan Vanko had made about Howard Stark in Iron Man 2 released in the previous year.4 Just as Vanko’s assertions about Stark senior were shown to be false, Laufey’s charges are also unfounded as Odin is portrayed as a benevolent and sage monarch who tells his sons, ‘A wise King must never seek out war, but always be ready for it’, and the Frost Giants are little more than crudely barbaric and war-like caricatures. Laufey’s aside to Thor, ‘You long for battle, you crave it. You’re nothing but a boy trying to prove himself a man’, suggests he knows the petulant prince better than Thor knows himself and evokes Chalmers Johnson’s memorable description of George W. Bush as a ‘boy emperor’ (2004: 283). Seeing the gravity of their situation and the fact that they are hopelessly outnumbered, the Warriors Three (Fandral, Lady Sif and Volstagg) plead with Thor to reassess his ill-advised plan and for a moment he seems to reconsider, before Laufey goads him into battle by impugning his masculinity, ‘Run back home, little Princess!’ revealing that, even for gods, the worst insult is to cast doubt on one’s masculinity and be compared to a woman.5
Despite their exceptional fighting prowess, it is clear that the Asgardians are outnumbered and outmatched, but at the moment of defeat Odin appears astride his mythical eight-legged horse Sleipnir. Thor calls to him, ‘Father! We’ll finish them together!’ in a vivid manifestation of how many thought George W. Bush regarded war in Iraq.6 Odin ignores his son and pleads with Laufey, ‘These are the actions of a boy, treat them as such’, the second time in the space of a few minutes that Thor is called a boy. But Laufey refuses and the clash of civilisations between the Asgardians and the Frost Giants has begun again. On their return to Asgard, father and son once more argue as Thor tells Odin, ‘There won’t be a kingdom to protect if you are afraid to act! The Jotuns must learn to fear me.’ Odin is disgusted by Thor’s behaviour and decides to remove all of his powers, his beloved hammer, Mjölnir, and banish him to Earth. What Thor dramatises may not be an accurate relationship of the one between the Bushes, father and son, or the real motivation for the war in Iraq, but it is certainly the way it was perceived by the public at large and it is also the one portrayed in both Oliver Stone’s W. (2008) and Jacob Weisberg’s best-selling The Bush Tragedy (2008).7 Darren Franich commented: ‘The Thunder god invades a land he knows nothing about, a classic war hawk maneuver; chastened by his elders, he has to learn how his actions have consequences’ (2013).8
Fig. 8: Odin’s description of Asgard as ‘a beacon of hope shining across the stars’ is at the centre of Thor (2011); an allegory for America in the first decades of the twenty-first century?
In the post-9/11 period it became fairly common for the Bush administration and frequently George W. Bush himself to be represented in allegory in film and television texts of the era: from the likes of Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi, 2004–9) (see Kaveney and Stoy 2010), through to Oliver Stone’s Alexander (2004) (see Jenkins 2015: 120–1), the Saw franchise (2004–) (see Kellner 2009: 7–9), and even in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse in George Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005) (see McSweeney 2010). In the superhero genre, Justine Toh regarded Batman Begins not just as an allegory for the Bush era, but for George W. Bush himself: ‘In this frame, Batman’s righteous task is to clean up Gotham by removing its corrupt elements, a fictional parallel for the righteousness of the US’s campaign to promote democracy in the Middle East’ (2010: 132).
Exiled to Earth and finding himself in the New Mexico town of Puente Antiguo, Thor has been stripped of his life of privilege in a similar way to what Tony Stark had been in Iron Man and what Bruce Banner experiences in The Incredible Hulk, discussed later in this chapter. It is here that he must learn humility and what it is to be a real hero among humans like the scientists Jane Foster and Erik Selvig who initially, and somewhat understandably, do not believe he is a Norse God. When Thor discovers that Mjölnir is nearby, in scenes which had been teased at the end of Iron Man 2, he is convinced that if reunited with his mythical hammer he will be able to fight his way out of trouble, as he has done all of his life. It is surrounded by S.H.I.E.L.D. security guards led by Agent Phil Coulson (whom Thor calls ‘son of Coul’) and watched over from above by Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), and Thor makes his way towards it accompanied by thunder and lightning, with composer Patrick Doyle’s orchestral score swelling to a triumphant crescendo…only to find that he is unable to pick it up, and that he has yet to understand the lesson his father wished to impart. Seemingly resigned to his fate he allows himself to be caught by S.H.I.E.L.D. and Coulson who immediately presumes him to be American and asks where he received his training: ‘Pakistan, Chechnya, Afghanistan?’ While in captivity his brother Loki, who has now usurped the Asgardian throne, appears and tells Thor that their father is dead and that Thor can never again return to Asgard. Loki explains his father’s decision with the evocative line: ‘Our people need a sense of continuity in order to feel safe in these difficult times.’
Having finally been appropriately humbled, Thor comes to the realisation, with the help of his new romantic interest Jane and friend Erik, that true strength derives from more than physical prowess and when Loki sends the Destroyer to Puento Antiguo to kill him once and for all, the ensuing battle is framed as reminiscent of a western standoff like those in High Noon (1952), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and Chisum (1970), each of which are, not uncoincidentally, also set in New Mexico. Thor, who had earlier been quite content to destroy an entire race, helps evacuate the town of innocents, finally putting the lives of others before his own and pleads with his brother: ‘Whatever I have done to wrong you, whatever I have done to lead you to do this, I am truly sorry, but these people are innocent. Taking their lives will give you nothing. So take mine and end this.’ Thor’s offer to sacrifice himself is, of course, a familiar convention in Western popular culture and will be frequently returned to in the MCU, although it is one that will very rarely result in an actual sacrifice.9 Indeed, the notion of a quasi-christomimetic self-sacrifice recurs so frequently in American cinema that it has become one of its foundational tropes. Yet its valorisation, while the very same sacrifices of those of the Other are declared to be monstrous and inhuman, is problematic. Thor’s ‘death’ at the hands of the Destroyer and his subsequent rebirth, and in particular the way that it is framed, situates him alongside a range of christomimetic figures in contemporary American science fiction and fantasy films like Neo from The Matrix (1999), Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–3), the eponymous E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and James Cole from 12 Monkeys (1995). Adele Reinhartz has written that such is the pervasiveness of this pattern that ‘any film that has redemption as a major theme (and this includes many, if not most, recent Hollywood movies) is liable to use some Jesus symbolism in connection with the redemptive hero figure’ (2003: 189). This is heavily ironised, of course, by the fact that Thor is an actual god and according to Norse mythology predates Jesus (see Lindow 2002: 22) and the fact that the MCU is avowedly secular in its construction, with only fleeting references and allusions to a Judeo-Christian God. Those looking for religious meanings in the franchise have had to primarily rely on allusions and subtext rather than any explicit comments provided by its characters or the text (see McAteer 2016; Saunders 2016). The actor playing Loki, Tom Hiddlestone, felt that this malleability was one of the reasons contemporary superhero films have resonated not just in the United States, where they are conceived and produced, but with cultures all over the globe: ‘Superhero films offer a shared, faithless, modern mythology, through which these truths [about the human condidition] can be explored. In our increasingly secular society, with so many disparate gods and different faiths, superhero films present a unique canvas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apocalyptic nightmares can be projected and played out’ (2012). Odin, sensing his son’s growth all the way from his Odinsleep in Asgard, responds with a single tear and it is this which brings Thor back to life, returning his powers and once again giving him the right to wield Mjölnir.
As previously mentioned, Thor certainly is a hard-bodied hero the likes of which defined the 1980s, according to Jeffords, and perhaps the return of the more traditional type of masculinity that writers like Peggy Noonan and Kim DuToit asked for, but in Chris Hemsworth’s portrayal of the character, this hypermasculine mode is represented as fundamentally flawed, revealing the complicated and frequently paradoxical nature of new millennial masculinity. Thor is a man of action, a warrior and protector, but his initial decisiveness and appetite for violence are explicitly connected to his hubris and lack of self-awareness. It is only after his epiphany (as we have seen with Tony Stark) as he demonstrates compassion and is shown to be able to acknowledge humility and weakness, traits which have been historically coded as feminine and thus traditionally antithetical for action heroes, that the film asks us to recognise that he becomes a true hero. Far from being ‘dumb movies for dumb people’ (Tasker 1993: 6) the action genre, the codes and conventions of which the superhero film is profoundly immersed in, provides us with a striking cultural barometer. As depictions of idealised masculinities were embodied in figures like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris in the 1980s, then shifted to the likes of Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt and Keanu Reeves in the 1990s, the ascendance of stars like Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Chris Pratt and Robert Downey Jr., each of whom starred in an MCU film in this period, offer more complex, but still hegemonical articulations of masculinity in the new millennial decades which this monograph will return frequently to.
The battle between Thor and Loki comes to a climax with Thor’s return to Asgard as a new man. Loki had planned to kill his biological father Laufey and the entire race of Frost Giants in a startling act of genocide of his own people, all in order to prove himself to his step-father Odin as a worthy successor. However, Loki has yet to learn the lesson that Thor has on Earth, that even though they possess immense power and are virtually immortal, Asgardians are not inherently superior to humans or any other species. Loki asks Thor a similar question to that which Rhodes asked Stark after his epiphany in Afghanistan: ‘What is this new-found love for the Frost Giants?’ It is one that will be repeated several times throughout the MCU by those who have not experienced a life-changing traumatic event which enables them to see compassion and empathy not as a weakness but as a strength, while at the same time, it should be observed, dispatching almost countless numbers of simplistically framed enemies. After Loki threatens Jane Foster with implied rape (‘When we are finished here, I will pay her a visit myself!’), Thor overcomes him in a battle which resonates because of their relationship (something the MCU will struggle to match after), and both his method of combat and his perspective are altered, as he is shown to refuse to use his hammer against his brother and acts only in defence. Defeated and silently denied with a dismissive gesture from his ‘father’ Odin, Loki’s last act of defiance is to refuse their offer of help as he lets go of Odin’s spear, falling into the cosmos to an uncertain future.
Like many other superhero films in the era, Thor presents us with a fantastical reimagining of reality: Iron Man rewrites the conflict in Afghanistan as a humanitarian undertaking and Thor shows a vain and impetuous leader recognising the error of his ways (‘I had it all backwards, I had it all wrong’). Thor’s second act of sacrifice is to forfeit his own happiness to save the race of the Frost Giants that he had once shown such scorn for, by destroying the Bifrost Bridge to save them and perhaps never being able to return to Earth and his love Jane Foster again. This act of altruism is central to the understanding of the American monomyth, which has encoded within it the idea that America’s wars and interventions abroad are never undertaken for selfish reasons, but only ever for the good of mankind and that the global superpower carries with it a burden of responsibility that no one can ever truly understand (see Colucci 2008). The lessons Thor has learned throughout the course of the narrative will stand him in good stead for the apocalyptic battle he will face in The Avengers, in which his brother Loki will return to play no small part. But Thor’s emotional growth continues in that film and in his second solo outing, the underwhelming Thor: The Dark World, and his character will not be ‘reset’ as we have seen (and will continue to see) with Tony Stark. While Martin Arnold might have been correct to suggest that by the end of the first decade of the new millennium ‘the reception history of the Thunder God is, in any meaningful sense, at an end’ (2011a: 160), the very same period saw his rebirth as an American icon and a key part of the evolving Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Making a ‘monster into a hero’: The Incredible Hulk
How do you make a monster into a hero and still maintain the monster’s essential element of menace – yet combine that with a personality that audiences would come to love, or at least be fascinated by? And, on top of that, how do you make such a creature a hero?
– Danny Fingeroth (2004: 123)
Despite an inauspicious start in the comics which saw the character cancelled after only six issues published between May 1962 and March 1963, the Incredible Hulk has been one of Marvel’s most popular creations and even one of the rare superheroes to have had a live-action syndicated TV show, with the fondly remembered The Incredible Hulk (CBS, 1978–82). The original comic book incarnation of the Hulk was just as much a creation of the Cold War as the characters of Iron Man and Thor, and given that he was the result of a gamma radiation blast at a nuclear testing facility, he is, like Iron Man, both literally and figuratively a product of the conflict. This has led to the Hulk frequently being read as an articulation of Cold War fears and anxieties concerning the nuclear age in a similar way to how that other iconic cinematic monster, Godzilla, has been (see Inuhiko 2007; Darowski and Darowski 2015). Like the Japanese mega-lizard, part of the Hulk’s enduring appeal is undoubtedly that he has often blurred the line between hero and monster. In Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, Peter Coogan explores how the Hulk’s original 1960s comic narrative was one of the first to actually invert one of the established tropes of the genre and turn ‘superpowers from a blessing to a curse, an innovation of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the Silver Age. Without that heroic sacrifice, the Hulk is just a monster, and so the Hulk film is not a superhero film but a monster movie’ (2006: 11). Indeed, Lee’s inspiration came from two classic Gothic literary texts: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) about which he commented: ‘We would use the concept of the Frankenstein monster but update it. Our hero would be a scientist, transformed into a raging behemoth by a nuclear accident. And – since I was willing to borrow from Frankenstein, I decided I might as well borrow from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well – our protagonist would constantly change from his normal identity to his superhuman alter-ego and back again’ (qtd. in DeFalco 2003: 7). Almost fifty years after his first appearance in the comic much of the drama in Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk, the second film in the MCU, and Hulk’s subsequent appearances in The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron and beyond, stems from this juxtaposition between monstrous and human, control and chaos.
Released in the same summer as Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk appeared only five years after Ang Lee’s divisive Hulk (2003) produced by Universal Pictures with only limited involvement from Marvel, which, although it made $245 million at the global box office, was considered as something of a financial disappointment when it failed to have the commercial or cultural impact of the Batman or Spider-Man films which its producers had undoubtedly hoped for given the high profile nature of the character. Lee’s version seemed to have both delighted and disappointed fans in equal measure on its release: with many admiring its attempt to bring a sense of psychological complexity to an often simplistic genre, while others regarded it as too cerebral and pretentious for a superhero film. Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk is simultaneously a sequel to Lee’s film, a reboot of the Hulk franchise, while at the same time being a continuation of the broader MCU narrative, a process which led to producer Gale Hurd describing the film neologistically as a ‘requel’ (qtd. in Weintraub 2008a). Prior to the turn of the new millennium this reboot process would often take a decade: for example, the eight years between Batman & Robin (1997) and Batman Begins (2005), or the nineteen between Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) and the aptly-named Superman Returns (2006). However, in a film industry increasingly defined by annual additions to franchises (or in the case of Marvel sometimes triannually) the process is much faster than ever before: hence Batman was portrayed by Christian Bale in the conclusion to Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy The Dark Knight Rises and then rebooted only four years later, played by Ben Affleck in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice; Spider-Man was portrayed by Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man 3 (2007) and then by Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) before being played by Tom Holland in Captain America: Civil War (2016), three actors playing the same role in major studio films in less than ten years.
Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk replaces all members of the previous cast, but seems to continue the narrative from Lee’s version (with one or two caveats) incorporating some aspects of Hulk at the same time as eschewing others to enable itself to fit into the then fledgling MCU. In interviews Leterrier, who had been known before The Incredible Hulk for his kinetic and fast-paced action films like The Transporter (2002) and Unleashed (2005), revealed an affection for Lee’s interpretation of the character, but also suggested how his version might differ:
I really do love Ang’s movie because as a director, as all of you guys, you’ve seen the cinema in Ang’s movie. It’s beautiful. It’s a great movie. But if you’re 7 years old, 8 years old, you’re totally lost in Ang’s movie so I wanted to give it like more of like an overall approach. You didn’t have to be a fan knowing the Hulk story to love this movie – hopefully, my movie, or to be 7 and 13 and a boy to like this movie. I wanted to make it like a broader and like a general – more general – kind of a movie. (Qtd. in Weintraub 2008b)
While Leterrier’s remarks imply a film more self-consciously aimed at a younger audience, its star (and uncredited co-writer) Edward Norton saw much more to the project, stating ‘that’s why these things [superhero films] endure, because they’re kind of modern, pop revisitings of that myth of stealing power from the universe. There’s a lot of great stories of people reaching beyond what is permitted – like Icarus or Proteus’ (2007). Norton’s version of the script which is widely available online, dated 13 May 2007, even begins with an epigraph taken from the work of Joseph Campbell, ‘We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an Abomination, we shall find a God…And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world’ (originally, 1949: 18). Norton’s words and his choice of epigraph indicate a desire to make a very different film to that which Leterrier described, not one aimed primarily at seven- to thirteen-year-old boys, but one which resonates with an understanding of the mythic role of contemporary superheroes. This divergence of aims is very palpable in the finished film and might explain Norton’s dissatisfaction with the final result which led to him distancing himself from the project and a very public falling out with Marvel’s president of production Kevin Feige. The film released at the cinemas removes much of the character development and philosophical musings of Norton’s script (the Blu-ray release also contained a remarkable seventy minutes’ worth of deleted scenes) to concentrate more on action and spectacle, often to the film’s detriment, but still finds time to state that the Hulk (and later Abomination’s) is ‘godlike’.
It might be considered fitting, for a variety of reasons, that of all of the Avengers Prime it was the Hulk that came to be played by three different actors in the space of just nine years; certainly because of Bruce Banner’s Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), but also because of the pronounced range of variations the comic book Hulk has gone through since 1962, which led Danny Fingeroth to write that the Hulk ‘probably holds the record of personality changes for one character’ (2004: 126). In different versions throughout his history the Hulk is sometimes able to talk and sometimes not, he is intermittently intelligent but at other times a mindless beast not even conscious of his actions, and his strength seems to vary from incarnation to incarnation. Leterrier’s film is full of many affectionate ‘Easter eggs’ which reference these different versions of the character and it is the CBS television series that receives the most frequent homages: from the sporadic use of Joe Harnell’s iconic ‘Lonely Man’ (which ended every episode of the television show), to having Lou Ferrigno, who played the Hulk in the series, as a security guard (who also voices the only six words the Hulk will speak in the film ‘Leave Me Alone’, ‘Hulk Smash’, and ‘Betty’), and showing an episode of The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (ABC, 1969–72) starring Bill Bixby, the original Banner, on a television screen in Banner’s apartment. This method of including Easter eggs in contemporary popular films has evolved from being a minor diversion to one of the myriad of ways multimedia companies seek to encourage fans to consider themselves as active participants in evolving franchises and, just as importantly, return to the films again and again, a process Henry Jenkins called ‘participatory culture’ which ‘contrasts with older notions of passive media spectatorship’ in his influential volume Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006: 3).
This variability is also apparent in the diversity of readings of the Hulk character which have emerged since the 1960s, which prompted James N. Gilmore and Mattias Stork to suggest that the Hulk is ‘potent with images and iconographies harbouring polysemous meanings’ (2014: 12). Hulk’s condition has been read as connected to the nuclear anxieties during which he was originally created (see Darowski and Darowski 2015), to fears of emasculation and crises of US national identity in the wake of Vietnam and the rise of feminism (see Eaton 2013), as a countercultural icon on American college campuses during the 1960s (see Duncan and Smith 2013), for bipolar disorder (see Power and Dalgleish 2016: 298; Wooton 2012), and even as a metaphor for black rage (see Kleefeld 2014; Burch n.d.). Like many MCU films, and in particular our reading of Thor in this chapter, The Incredible Hulk is what David Holloway categorises as an ‘allegory lite’ in which ‘controversial issues can be safely addressed because they must be ‘read off’ other stories by the viewer; while the ‘allegory’ is sufficiently loose or ‘lite’, and the other attractions on offer are sufficiently compelling or diverse, that viewers can enjoy the film without needing to engage at all with the risky ‘other story’ it tells’ (2008: 83). While it is quite correctly the nuclear age that most commentators have turned to in their interpretation of the roots of the character – as Joseph and John Darowski have observed, ‘Born in the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, the Incredible Hulk may seem like the perfect character to embody the complexities and ambiguities of the atomic age’ (2015: 7) – the Marvel Cinematic Universe version of the Hulk is profoundly immersed in the fractious post-9/11 decade. About this incarnation of the Hulk, Tom Pollard was correct to assert, ‘In times of national trauma, film audiences find superheroes like the Incredible Hulk especially attractive. This character serves as a perfect post 9/11 superhero because his superpowers flow from his anger’ (2011: 82). Fear, anger and trauma are placed at the centre of The Incredible Hulk as they were in many new millennial popular culture texts, an era when the concept of their political role in modern society became widely discussed. Many asserted that America found itself living in a culture of fear which seemed to revolve around the phrase the ‘War on Terror’ itself and a range of studies found that anger rather than terror was the defining emotion many Americans felt after the events of 11 September 2001 (see Kluger 2010). The Hulk is portrayed as a distinctly post-9/11 weapon of mass destruction that the military, personified by the obsessive General Thaddeus Ross (William Hurt), seeks to control. In perhaps the film’s most memorable line of dialogue Ross tells his team of soldiers: ‘That man’s [Bruce Banner] whole body is the property of the US army.’ The Hulk’s body emerges as the site of a battle between Ross and Banner, but even within for Banner himself in his struggle to control his own anger and find his place in the world after his traumatic accident. The cultural battleground of Leterrier’s version are those fears and anxieties uniquely pertinent to the post-9/11 era: the encroaching powers of the Military Industrial Complex, the intrusions of the government into civil liberties, American interventions overseas and the shifting parameters of new millennial masculinity, issues which, though they are rarely addressed by name in the film, linger within the frames of not only The Incredible Hulk but the majority of the MCU.
The relationship between The Incredible Hulk and its predecessor, Ang Lee’s Hulk, is effectively established in Leterrier’s imaginative credits sequence which replays the events of the first film with the new cast and several engaging changes of emphasis. Instead of being accidentally caught in a gamma radiation experiment as he had been in Lee’s version, Banner is now shown deliberately testing the process on himself with a self-assured wink (just like Thor winks at the crowd on his inauguration day) at his scientist girlfriend Betty Ross (Liv Tyler), a far cry from Eric Bana’s portrayal of Banner as a tortured soul even before his life-changing accident. The Hulk has generally been perceived as ‘the personification of intense emotion and unresolved conflicts residing within the troubled psyche of Bruce Banner’ (Patrick and Patrick 2008: 222), but here in the MCU Banner seems compos mentis until the traumatic incident which leads to the creation of his monstrous alter ego. In Lee’s version Banner was working on the regeneration of cells for medical purposes; here Banner believes he is working purely on gamma radiation resistance experiments, but Ross later reveals that the military was duping him into participating in the reproduction of the Super Soldier Serum from World War II which led to the creation of Captain America (discussed in chapter three). The credits sequence shows the experiment going catastrophically wrong causing Banner to transform into the Hulk, initially only shown from the first-person perspective through Hulk’s eyes. Betty is injured as the result of the Hulk’s inability to control himself and this emerges as one of the film’s recurring motifs, the lengths that Banner goes to ensure she (and later other civilians) will not be hurt because of his actions ever again. The credits montage shows the extent of Ross’s global search for Banner/Hulk which becomes progressively more and more unhinged as the film continues: newspaper headlines chart a list of his sightings, mentioning a ‘green monster’, and maps show that the hunt for Banner extends through Asia, Africa and even the Middle East where his status as a weapon of mass destruction would have coincided with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in particular the American search for Saddam Hussein’s supposed stockpile of weapons.
The sequence ends with Banner snapping back to consciousness, revealing the credits to have been a traumatic conflation of memory and dream. Trauma, as it has been in many new millennial superhero films, and particularly so of the MCU, is placed at the centre of The Incredible Hulk and while it is not explored with the psychological complexity of Lee’s version, it emerges as the defining aspect of Edward Norton’s (and later Mark Ruffalo’s) interpretation of the character. In Iron Man, Stark’s traumatic experience in Afghanistan changed his life irrevocably and the same is shown to be true for Banner, yet his is a trauma which repeats every time he is forced to transform into the Hulk. Even when he is not the Hulk, flashes of his Hulk experience (which he seems to not be conscious of at this stage) return to him in a distinctly traumatic form in episodes where he is unable to discern what is real from that which is memory, in what Norton’s script describes in an appropriately Deleuzian fashion as ‘MEMORY IMAGES’. When Betty asks him what it feels like to be the Hulk he, as most versions of the character do, struggles to find words to express it. He says, ‘It’s like someone has poured a litre of acid into my brain’. Banner in Lee’s version had provocatively suggested that it was ‘like a dream about rage, power and freedom’ and later in The Avengers (when Banner is played by Mark Ruffalo) he will describe it as ‘I’m exposed…Like a nerve…It’s a nightmare…’.
One conspicuous difference between Norton’s Hulk (which will repeat in Ruffalo’s portrayal) and previous incarnations of the character is the shift from him being prompted to transform into the Hulk by becoming angry to, in the MCU version, changing into the Hulk due to the elevation of his heart rate.10 In the television series Banner’s transformations were always the result of him becoming angry, which became more outlandish as the series progressed and writers sought for excuses to bring the Hulk onto the screen. As a result Banner ‘Hulks out’ when he does not have the correct change for a phone booth in ‘Never Give a Trucker an Even Break’ (1.09), when he is locked in a steam room by bullies in ‘Killer Instinct’ (2.08), by a loud ringing bell in ‘The Confession’ (2.20) and when he is attacked by bees in ‘Prometheus, Part One’ (4.01). In the MCU it is made very clear that it is not only anger that prompts his transformation, but stress, fear, frustration, exertion and in one scene, which is primarily played for laughs but is inescapably tragic, romantic interplay between Banner and Betty which he has to stop with the line, ‘No. No. I can’t…I can’t get too excited.’ Looking for mechanisms to maintain a measure of control over his mental state, Banner experiments with techniques to control his heart rate throughout, in particular a Brazilian Aikido instructor, who tells him in broken English that ‘Fear no good. Emotion and control’, and the use of a heart-rate monitor on his wrist as a conveniently visual cue for audiences to recognise how close he is to changing.
Having done away with the need to show Hulk’s origin by placing it in the opening credits, The Incredible Hulk is free to pursue what happens to Banner after he goes on the run from the authorities and attempts to live ‘off the grid’. The narrative formally begins in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil with a title informing us that it has been one hundred and fifty-eight days since his last ‘incident’. It is no coincidence that Banner has relocated to the crowded spaces of Rocinha, Rio’s largest favela and Leterrier employs a range of attractively framed helicopter shots to glide over multiple times, revealing the chaotic beauty of its architecture. Banner attempts to blend in with the six million people who live there, learning Portuguese by watching dubbed versions of Sesame Street (1969–) on television. Leterrier was quite clear about why he chose to locate Banner in the favela: ‘We needed a place in the world where Banner could truly disappear…[the favela]…is madness…It is a place that is a little at the margins of the law, with so many people packed in together’ (qtd. in Spanakos 2011: 18). The globe-hopping narratives of the MCU (and the majority of American blockbuster films) rarely pause to offer meaningful engagements with their foreign locations; rather they function as little more than exotic backgrounds for action sequences while at the same time endorsing and legitimising extra-judicial American incursions and perpetuating racial stereotypes (see Heise 2012; Jones 2015).
It is in Rio that Banner experiences, to a certain extent, as Thor and Tony Stark have been shown to, the lives of others. Banner works as a poorly-paid day labourer in a Pingo Doce soda bottling plant (a fictional Marvel-created brand which reappears some years later in Ant-Man), lives in a rundown flat, and later when he is homeless he is forced to beg on the streets for food. Antony Peter Spanakos writes: ‘While in Brazil, Banner displays an orientation towards recognition reflective of a US search for understanding and respect of the other in coming to terms with itself, a self that has become unrecognisable as ethics have not developed as quickly as technology’ (2011: 19). Yet of course, as the film’s virtuous American hero, he can never really be shown to be one of them, as he is distanced from the Other by his narrative centrality, his good looks, humility and his prodigious intellect: he is modestly able to fix the broken factory machines when asked to by the grateful manager, he is able to build complicated scientific machinery in his ramshackle flat with bits and pieces sourced from garbage very much how Tony Stark was able to prove his brilliance in the caves of Afghanistan, and he stands up for his beautiful co-worker, Martina (played by Brazilian model Débora Nascimento), when she is harassed by local thugs.
It is revealed that Banner has relocated to Brazil in order to discover a cure for his condition, hoping to either find a way to control his state or be rid of it by using a rare flower only to be found in the Amazon jungle. Unfortunately for him he accidentally cuts himself while working in the factory, causing his blood to inadvertently drip into a bottle of Pingo Doce soda which later infects a man in the United States with gamma radiation poisoning.11 It is this which allows General Ross to finally locate him and he sends a team of elite soldiers led by the aging British-Russian Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth). Ross is keenly aware that Banner does not belong in the favelas of Rio and offers a very specific order, ‘Get our agency people looking for a white man at that bottling plant!’ The resulting mission itself is clearly immersed in very specific new millennial ‘War on Terror’ discourse when it is described by Ross as a ‘snatch and grab, live capture’ and Banner as ‘a fugitive from the US government who stole military secrets’. Five years after the release of The Incredible Hulk, the 2013 Snowden revelations concerning NSA spying practices revealed that thousands of heads of state had been spied on, including the Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff (2011–16). Glenn Greenwald suggested,
That the US government – in complete secrecy – is constructing a ubiquitous spying apparatus aimed not only at its own citizens, but all of the world’s citizens, has profound consequences. It erodes, if not eliminates, the ability to use the internet with any remnant of privacy or personal security. It vests the US government with boundless power over those to whom it has no accountability. It permits allies of the US – including aggressively oppressive ones – to benefit from indiscriminate spying on their citizens’ communications. It radically alters the balance of power between the US and ordinary citizens of the world. And it sends an unmistakable signal to the world that while the US very minimally values the privacy rights of Americans, it assigns zero value to the privacy of everyone else on the planet. (2013; emphasis in original)
It is clear that Ross and Blonsky, both from within the military industrial complex, are framed as the film’s antagonists: Ross is another one of the MCU’s errant father figures (much like Stane in Iron Man) and Blonsky is a dark mirror the likes of which appear frequently in the genre. This is quite a contrast to the roots of the Hulk character who, in the early years of his existence during the Cold War, primarily fought against Communist villains. These early battles against villainous ‘reds’ portrayed ‘American moral, technological, and scientific superiority at several points, while portraying the Communist enemy as manipulative, cowardly, and inferior’ (Darowski and Darowski 2015: 10). The villains in The Incredible Hulk are all American and all from the Military Industrial Complex as they are in Iron Man and Iron Man 2, but the films are careful to depict those responsible as isolated individuals, rather than the system as a whole being at fault. When placed in the hands of someone more ‘moral’, like Stark or Banner (and as we will see in the next chapter, Steve Rogers), advanced weaponised technology (even Weapons of Mass Destruction) can and even must be used for the greater good. It is important to note that Stark, Banner and Rogers, or more accurately their alter egos Iron Man, Hulk and Captain America, are portrayed as reluctant heroes and defensive weapons, who only use their powers when it is necessary to protect civilians, as opposed to the likes of Ross and Stane who seek to use them to instigate conflicts all over the globe, often for very selfish reasons but almost always under the guise of national security.
Blonsky’s men target Banner in the favela seemingly unconcerned about the presence of civilians and after a chase through crowded streets and across rooftops, they corner him in the bottling factory where he works. It is only then, twenty-six minutes into film, that we see the Hulk for the first time. Having not been told what to expect, Blonsky’s men are unsurprisingly shocked at the appearance of the Hulk and are then quickly overpowered as their conventional weapons are shown to be entirely useless against something so powerful. Evading the military, the Hulk flees only to wake up, transformed back into Banner, no longer in Rio or even Brazil, but thousands of miles away in Guatemala. From there a destitute Banner, stripped of his first-world status (if only for a limited time, like Stark in Afghanistan, Bruce Wayne in China in Batman Begins and Danny Rand in K’un-Lun in Iron Fist), hitchhikes through Mexico where he begs for money on the streets of Chiapas.
The aging military man Blonsky is keenly aware that he is no match for something as incredible as the Hulk, so Ross inducts him into an experimental programme, a discontinued offshoot of the Super Soldier Programme which created Captain America, designed to increase his speed, strength and agility. The ethics of unchecked experimentation become a recurring motif in the MCU and those who seek to use science for their own personal gain (like Samuel Sterns, Blonsky and Ross in The Incredible Hulk, Stane in Iron Man, Hammer and Vanko in Iron Man 2, and many others) are contrasted with those who seek to use it for the greater good (in The Incredible Hulk, Banner but of course Tony Stark and later Hank Pym in Ant-Man). The Incredible Hulk shows that powers obtained from science magnify already present qualities: therefore, Blonsky becomes harder and crueller because he was like that anyway (when asked how he feels by one of his men, he replies ‘like a monster’) but Banner, even in his uncontrolled Hulk guise, is capable of protecting innocents, because he is virtuous in his original unchanged state.
Seeking to retrieve his research, Banner returns to the site of his original trauma, Willowdale in Virginia, the home of Marvel’s fictional Culver University (where we are informed both Erik Selvig and Andrew Garner in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. also taught) having walked all the way from Brazil through Guatemala and Mexico to the United States in seventeen days. Reluctantly reunited with Betty, as he knows the dangers he continues to face and does not want to involve her, he is again confronted by Ross and a newly enhanced Blonsky. After first using a Tony Stark-designed non-lethal long-range acoustic device (LRAD) Blonsky and Hulk engage in hand-to-hand combat. For a while Blonsky is even able to keep up with Hulk, before his hubris gets the better of him and Hulk smashes him into a tree, seemingly leaving him for dead. In these scenes Banner is shown as deeply reluctant to transform both because he loathes the process and also because he fears that he cannot control it. It is here that Ross reveals the extent of his desire to capture Banner and that he will put innocent civilians in danger, even his daughter, when he orders helicopter gunships to target the Hulk. When Betty gets caught in the crossfire and is about to be killed it is only the Hulk that saves her, demonstrating that he is indeed conscious of his actions in some way.
Fig. 9: Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) struggles to control the monster within in The Incredible Hulk (2008)
The figure of the Hulk has often been connected to debates concerning masculinity throughout the history of the reception of the character and The Incredible Hulk presents us with two very distinct types of man in a similar way to that articulated in Thor: the more traditional, macho, hypermasculine model personified by the likes of Blonsky and Ross, which is shown to be fundamentally flawed throughout, and the new millennial sensitive ‘new man’ embodied in Betty’s new boyfriend, the psychiatrist Leonard Samson (Ty Burrell). This paradigm is also shown to have its problems, as despite his earnestness, Samson is framed as rather weak, ineffectual and is entirely ignored by Betty as soon as Banner returns. It is only Banner who is able to reconcile these two seemingly paradoxical strains of masculinity in one person: he is sensitive, intelligent and virtuous, a man unafraid of action even in his unchanged form. But, of course, his transformations into his alter ego enable him to protect Betty and other innocents in ways Banner alone would never be able to do. It is this which makes the character of Banner/Hulk the perfect conduit for what many regard as the wish-fulfilment fantasy appeal of the superhero genre, as it becomes acted out in the film itself. While audiences might aspire to be like Thor, Iron Man or even the Hulk, Banner gets to see this realised within the diegetic frames of the film and is able to become the Hulk in our place. Edward Norton described this process as the ‘great fantasy you have when you don’t feel empowered, that you have this lurking monster within you that’s going to come out to defend you if people hassle you…It’s a fantasy a lot of teenagers can relate to! Not just teenagers…’ (2008). The casting of Edward Norton as Banner might then be seen as either ironic or one of the reasons he was drawn to the material as Norton’s interpretation accentuates the split-personality theme which has come to dominate his career in films like Primal Fear (1996), Fight Club (1999) and Leaves of Grass (2009). Like Tyler Durden in Fight Club, itself a powerful treatise on the crisis of masculinity, the Hulk has been read by many writers as a projection of a rampant and out of control id which is unconstrained by social mores (see Comtois 2009). Kevin Feige stated that this was one of the reasons Marvel wanted Norton for the role, ‘Edward has got that duality down pat – look at Primal Fear or Fight Club. I think that was the big draw to us and to him with the project’ (qtd. in De Semlyen 2008: 66). As already noted, in the creation of the Hulk Stan Lee drew from Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and if it is correct, as Freud surmised, that ‘The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions’ (qtd. in Reef 2001: 106), one might ask what doctors Jekyll and Banner are able to do in the form of their alter egos that their ordinary selves are not? The answer to this in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde seems fairly unambiguous: through the transgressive character of Hyde, Jekyll is able to free himself from the stultifying morality of the Victorian era and indulge in licentious behaviour that he would never be able to participate in or even acknowledge in his respectable daily life (see Rose 1996). In the case of the MCU incarnation of Banner and Hulk, this is complicated somewhat as there is very little sexual dimension to the character, although of course this might be because he is not allowed to express this in a family film (but this certainly makes us see the ‘I can’t…’ scene in a different light). Might Banner’s transformation to the Hulk be more about the power with which it affords him to reject those who would seek to infringe on his rights as a citizen, an issue of particular relevance in the post-9/11 era, when he finds himself targeted, restrained and pursued by a military industrial complex that refuses to recognise his personhood? Like in many MCU films his heroism is a burden, later described as a ‘terrible privilege’ by Tony Stark in conversation with Banner (who is then played by Mark Ruffalo) in The Avengers. Leterrier and Norton, given their angst-ridden interpretation of the character, cannot bring themselves to allow Banner to express that he might actually enjoy the power and liberation of being the Hulk (which does happen in Lee’s version), but the film does provocatively imply that on some levels it might actually be the Hulk who is the real identity and Banner who is the mask. In this understanding, the Hulk allows him to be that which he really wants to be, behave how he truly wishes, unrestrained by contemporary mores and social values. As Michael Brewer wrote of the comic version of the Hulk, but which can just as accurately be applied to the films,
Most terrible of all for Bruce Banner is the dawning realisation that the Hulk isn’t a separate entity at all. The bestial hulk represents the hidden dark side of Banner’s own subconscious mind, the angry and aggressive persona Banner has always feared and repressed. Suddenly the habits and safeguards of a lifetime are inadequate. Morality, cooperation, acceptance, reason, compromise – all the bricks that build a civilised society – are shattered and scattered by the fury of the Hulk. (2004: 28)
This understanding, which Banner only comes to in the final image of the film, reveals that his search for a cure might be ultimately futile, as he cannot erase that which is an integral part of his own identity.
Having been defeated by the Hulk twice, Blonsky overdoses on the serum (which he ingests by drinking samples of Banner’s blood) and transforms into the monstrous Abomination, before going on a rampage through Harlem, New York. Blonsky’s latent irresponsibility and immorality becomes magnified in both his monstrous appearance and behaviour. It is only then that Banner, who until then had seen his condition as something to be eradicated, realises that he might be able to do good as the Hulk. What separates Banner from Blonsky and Ross are his feelings of empathy and his acceptance of responsibility for his actions (‘We made this thing [the Abomination], all of us’). Like Stark and Thor and many (though not all) of the MCU heroes, Banner has undergone a profound change because of his traumatic experiences, which transforms him physically, but just as importantly, emotionally and psychologically.
The film’s conclusion lacks the dramatic impact of the ending of Thor, where audiences had been able to become invested in the emotional triangle between Thor, Loki and Odin. Here Marvel sidelines the charismatic performances of Norton and Roth in favour of two CGI creations fighting on the streets of Harlem, with the scale of the destruction considerably larger than that of the final confrontation between Stane and Iron Man, the start of a process that would continue, for the most part, in Marvel films with every year that passed. Even though the CGI is impressively detailed, it is hard to care about the actions of the two in a sequence which feels more akin to a video game. As one might expect, Hulk finally overcomes Abomination but is prevented from killing him by Betty, who reminds him of his humanity and that to kill him would be reducing himself to his level.
If the early Marvel films are indeed to be seen, as Spanakos suggested, ‘post-September 11 fantasies of self-preservation’ (2011: 15), The Incredible Hulk poses questions about the relationship between superheroes and the state that the MCU will meditate on as the series progresses and which will build to a climax in Captain America: Civil War, a film which will not feature the Hulk, but will see the return of General Ross. Banner is a tortured and traumatised hero, much like Stark, and they are both examples of Pheasant-Kelly’s ‘wounded hero’ the likes of which became so prominent in post-9/11 films, both inside and outside of the superhero genre (2013: 144). While the original Hulk was a Frankenstein’s monster created by the nuclear age, his MCU incarnation is consciously framed as a WMD created by the Military Industrial Complex, the impact of which will continue to be explored in both The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron. Banner is a very human figure, even in his Hulk guise, and after his defeat of Abomination, he again runs, this time to the wilds of Bella Coola in a remote cabin in the wilderness of British Columbia, Canada. As he had tried unsuccessfully to in Rio, he attempts to control his heart rate. As the camera shows it reaching two hundred beats per minute there is a close-up of his face: his eyes turn red and he seems to have a hint of a smile, before the shot abruptly cuts to black. Audiences ask themselves ‘Does this mean he is finally able to control it?’ Norton’s original script explicitly features the question ‘Was that a flash of a smile?’ (2007: 115) and Peter David’s novelisation of the film features the line, ‘His lips twitched with the tiniest hint of a smile’ (2008b: 128). It is a question that is not fully answered until the end of The Avengers four years later and this element of control, or rather lack of it, will be key to the character as he progresses through the MCU films. However, these future appearances of Bruce Banner/the Hulk did not feature Edward Norton playing the character, reportedly due to creative differences between himself and Marvel Studios, and he was replaced by Mark Ruffalo who described the Hulk, with tongue firmly in cheek, as, ‘my generation’s Hamlet’ (qtd. in Jensen 2012).
As only the second film in the MCU proper, the connective tissues which would go on to define the franchise are tentatively and not entirely convincingly in place and the film struggles to find an appropriate tone throughout which is no doubt largely the result of competing visions of what Leterrier, Norton and Feige wanted to see on the screen. Leterrier’s assertion in the director’s commentary that, ‘We all decided together that this was a world without superheroes, this is the first time everybody sees that’ are contradicted by the film’s explicit mentions of the Super Soldier programme and even the appearance of Tony Stark himself in what would be the equivalent of the post-credits stinger in the rest of the MCU, here placed during the body of the film and even before the scene in the wilderness. Stark enters a bar where Ross is drowning his sorrows in the aftermath of the Hulk versus Abomination battle and asks the General, ‘What if I told you we were putting a team together?’ Two years later by the time of the release of Iron Man 2, as we have already seen, it was clear that this was not the direction that Marvel Studios intended to take the overarching narrative of the MCU when it was revealed that Stark is initially rejected from the Avengers Initiative. In 2011 Marvel attempted to ‘retcon’ this in one of the series of short films released by Marvel which were termed One-Shots, The Consultant, which showed that it was all part of a S.H.I.E.L.D. ruse to annoy Ross to make sure he does not release Blonsky, so Stark was sent on purpose to make sure that this did not happen. Louis D’Esposito, the co-president of Marvel Studios, admitted as such with his statement, ‘some things we had to correct’ (qtd. in Surrell 2012: 10). Regardless, the two subjects of this chapter, The Incredible Hulk and Thor, are origin stories and the building blocks upon which the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe was built. After the successful introductions of Iron Man, Hulk and Thor, there remained only one more member of the Avengers Prime to bring to the screen and, despite his iconic status and popularity since his creation in 1941, he proved to be the most challenging of all.
Notes
1 In the pilot episode (1.01) of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Grant Ward observes, ‘I don’t think Thor’s technically a god’ to which Maria Hill replies, ‘Well, you haven’t been near his arms’. In the first fifteen MCU films the closest one gets to a ‘real’ god is Ego, the Celestial and Star-Lord’s father, in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and even he qualifies his status as a god with ‘a small g’.
2 Thor also went to San Diablo, a thinly-veiled substitute for Cuba, during the Cold War and fought against a Castro-like villain called The Executioner in June 1965 Journey into Mystery #117.
3 It has been observed that the interactions between Odin, Loki and Thor in their Marvel iterations have a distinctly Shakespearean dimension to them (see Fingeroth 2004: 37). In fact, many speculated this was precisely the reason that Marvel selected Branagh to direct the film. In interviews Branagh went to significant lengths to downplay the Shakespearean connections, but they do seem quite pronounced. Shakespeare’s Henry V, an adaption of which Branagh directed in 1989 starring himself, is a template for Thor in its portrayal of a young king and his trials and tribulations in a journey towards maturity. Anthony Hopkins concurred in his description of the film as ‘a superhero movie, but with a bit of Shakespeare thrown in’ (qtd. in Carroll 2010).
4 Interestingly, in Norse mythology, Laufey was Loki’s mother and not his father. No doubt this change amused audiences in Iceland where Laufey is still a fairly common female name and the film was one of the most popular of the year.
5 Laufey’s insult is a knowing reference to Þrymskviða, a poem from the Poetic Edda in which Thor is forced to dress up as the goddess Freya to retrieve his hammer Mjölnir from a giant. Thor complains, ‘You’ll all mock me and call me unmanly if I put on a bridal veil’ (Crossley-Holland 1980: 70).
6 In 2002 George W. Bush was said to have remarked of Saddam Hussein, ‘After all, this is the guy who tried to kill my dad’ (qtd. in King 2002).
7 In what might be considered as a strange coincidence and/or evidence of the lack of roles for actors of Middle Eastern descent, Oliver Stone’s W. features Sayed Badreya as Saddam Hussein, the same Egyptian actor who played Abu Bakar in Iron Man.
8 Martin Arnold also commented on Thor directly in an article called ‘Thor the Movie: Politics with a Hammer’ that ‘In this case, the issue is national salvation or, to put it another way, the problems of twenty-first century American foreign policy…And its story of an unmotivated invasion by a son who feels empowered by birthright to conquer the evildoers that embarrassed his father adds a clever subtext about American foreign policy’ (2011b).
9 Some of the rare actual sacrifices in the MCU are Yinsen Ho’s for Tony Stark in Iron Man, Quicksilver in Avengers: Age of Ultron and Yondu Udonta’s for Peter Quill at the climax of Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2.
10 The Banner in the television show was an extremely empathetic incarnation of the character and his origin was very different to the comic and both Lee’s and Leterrier’s films. Bixby’s Banner was researching into the phenomonen of how some people are able to tap into extreme reserves of strength at stressful moments after he was unable to save his wife in a car crash. Discovering that it was gamma radiation which prompted this change in normal individuals Banner blasted himself with excessive doses which led to his unique condition.
11 This is the second of what would become ubiquitous Stan Lee cameos. In Iron Man he played a man mistaken for Hugh Heffner by Tony Stark on the red carpet for the Stark fundraiser. In 2017, responding to a fan theory which had been gaining momentum for some years, Kevin Feige seemed to imply that all his characters might be the same person and that he is a Watcher, an alien race that observes key events throughout the galaxy (see McMillan 2017).