Last week I wrote a review of Thunderbolts, mostly talking about its confused nationalist politics and why they suck. Some people, though, replied saying they liked the movie not because of its weird post 9/11 imagery/fantasies, but because of its representation of mental illness.
As someone who’s neurodivergent, I’m pretty interested in representations of disability. I didn’t really think about them in Thunderbolts because…well, they just seemed so rote and half-assed. But it seems like it might be worth talking about why I feel they’re rote and half-assed. I also think it’s important to try to look at some better or more thoughtful representation—even if they seem somewhat far afield from superhero movies.
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Thunderbolts…of healing!
So I’ll start by briefly walking through Thunderbolts handles mental illness and trauma. Yelena (Florence Pugh) is (in the tradition of La Femme Nikita) an assassin trained from and traumatized from childhood. At the beginning of the film she is depressed, unhappy with her job as a CIA fixer, and, especially, lonely. Her difficulties are mirrored by Bob (Lewis Pullman), a loser and mentally unstable addict who was granted superpowers through rogue CIA experiments.
Like Yelena, Bob feels isolated and unloved. Like Yelena, too, his loneliness and pain gets translated into violence. When he becomes the superpowered Sentry, he starts blasting buildings and people, and eventually transforms people into black holes—an externalization of his own emptiness. After he zaps Yelena, she finds herself in the inner psychic dreamspace that films love so much. There she faces her own demons (including the murder of her friend as a child) and finds out more about Bob’s childhood abuse. Eventually, she tells Bob he is not alone and hugs him, freeing them both of their isolation. Healed, he stops blowing things up, and the film ends happily, more or less.
Sympathetic depictions of mental illness—even less than explicit depictions, as here—are not all that common in superhero films. So I can see why people find it validating to see Yelena and Bob find each other. Still, I think even in superhero terms, Thunderbolts approach to mental illness is not very convincing or thoughtful.
The main problem is that a nuanced discussion of mental illness just is not on the cards in an MCU franchise vehicle which is also committed to hitting the usual plot beats in two hours. Yelena’s pain is reduced almost entirely to a single scene, which is repeated several times, and to her anger at her father for not reaching out to her over the last year. We learn even less about Bob’s issues.
We’re told that they are both fuck ups, but Yelena seems in practice like a super-efficient assassin, and we never see Bob in a context where it would even make much sense to refer to him as a fuck-up—he’s a civilian in a superhero fight, and then he’s a god. And then finally they are both “cured” by hugging it out. The usual narrative—heroes try, heroes fail, heroes try again and triumph—overwrites any more complicated depiction of the way mental illness is wrapped around people’s life histories in ways that often subvert, overturn, and mess with simple narratives of progress.
In short, Thunderbolts treatment of mental illness and of overcoming mental illness is glib. Even within superhero screen narratives, I think there are better depictions—the first season of Jessica Jones, for example, is an extended story about depression, alcoholism, recurrent trauma, and the long-term, intricate legacies of abuse. But I think there’s value in considering what can be done outside the limits of the genre too…and since I just read Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren, I wanted to discuss its approach for a minute.
No normal
Dhalgren, published in 1975, is a sprawling, 900 page hallucinatory semi-dystopian, semi-utopian, sf lit fic hippie anarchist romp. The main character, Kidd (or the kid) is a bisexual downwardly mobile drifter who travels to Bellona, a city in the American Midwest which has come disconnected from time and reality in obscure ways. In the city, Kidd becomes a member of a (mostly pro-social) street gang called the Scorpions, writes and publishes a book of poetry, and has lots and lots of sweaty, dirty, sticky sex with basically everyone.
One of the reasons that Kidd is downwardly mobile is that he is mentally ill and neurodivergent. He’s dyslexic and has trouble telling right from left, and is also probably schizophrenic. He has frightening hallucinations—the book opens with him watching a woman turn into a tree—and loses days or weeks of time when he isn’t sure where he’s been or what he’s doing. He also can’t remember his own name for most of the book; “Kidd” or “the Kid” is a pseudonym given by a friend early in the narrative.
It’s not always clear whether these breaks in reality are internal to Kidd or whether they’re a function of Bellona’s own weird magic. “Do you think a city can control the way the people live inside it?” Kidd muses. “I mean, just the geography, the way the streets are laid out, the way the buildings are placed?” His is part of the point; Kidd’s mental illness makes it difficult for him to figure out what’s happening inside him and what’s happening outside. The narrative of the book itself loops around, and certain images and phrases and text blocks occur and recur, which could be because Bellona distorts time, or could be because Kidd’s own mind keeps hyper focusing on a scratch on someone’s leg.
The book’s refusal to provide a clear forward progression also resists the kind of easy narrative healing/empowerment arc that is so central to superhero stories, or to any standard big budget Hollywood narrative. Kidd’s mental illness is never cured; it’s not a problem that can be solved. Sometimes hallucinations makes him miserable or terrified; his girlfriend is worried and anxious when he disappears for days because he has lost track of time and of himself.
His alienation from normality, though, also contributes to his ability to function in the very abnormal Bellona, where there is no government and few stable guideposts. The population is composes in large part of marginalized people—poor, Black, queer, mentally ill—who in “normal” times and places would be shunted off out of sight of the respectable, but who in Bellona are all there is.
Kidd, half-Native American, queer, amnesiac, wearing, for some reason, only one shoe, fits in perfectly well. He rescues children from a fire, he ends up leading the Scorpions. In one extended sequence, he works cleaning rooms for a family that is desperately trying to pretend to live a “normal” life, the dad going off to work though there is no work, the mother calling maintenance to fix the door, though there is no maintenance. Refusing to acknowledge that “reality” is falling apart can be its own kind of madness (see Schumer, Chuck.)
Avengers disassemble
In Thunderbolts, the happy ending is that the mentally ill characters end up as part of a normal superteam; they become the substitute Avengers. It’s acknowledged that they’re a poor substitute, though; the best the mentally ill can hope for is to be a kind of parody of the real thing. Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol was about a bunch of damaged mentally ill weirdos who form a group specifically because the “healthy” heroes often are too cognitively limited to handle weirder threats. But the MCU is too square to even tentatively contemplate such narrative curveballs. The Thunderbolts start out as losers and end up as losers with better accreditation.
Kidd, on the other hand, specifically rejects a framework of heroism, or really any framework at all.
It isn’t that the “heroic” incidents about me cullable from the Times are untrue (well…some of them), nor the “villainous” ones on the gossip round that distorted (well…ditto). But the six minutes here, the twenty seconds there, the forty-five minutes how-many-weeks later—the real time it takes to commit the “heroic” or “villainous” act—are such a microscopic percentage of my life. Even what can be synopsized from this journal—snatches gun from looter’s hands! helps save children from flaming death; lead victorious attack (Ha! They were scared crazy!) on armed citadel; hobbles, half-shod, shrieking in the street; rescues Old Faust from collapsing ruin (and once tried to write poems—) are things that have happened to me, not that I have done. What you look like you’re doing and what you feel like you’re doing are disparate enough to mute any mouth that might attempt description!
Delany is anatomizing and mocking adventure/space opera stories in which what the hero or protagonist does becomes who the hero is. He’s also though, I think, anatomizing and mocking the way that mentally ill people (and marginalized people in general) are scrutinized and categorized. Kidd isn’t on a plot arc from damaged to whole, or from bad to good. He’s not interested in accreditation or an Avengers uniform (and yes, Delany did write a superhero comic here and there.) Instead, Dhalgren attempts to capture something of Kidd’s consciousness and his world, which is neither reducible to his mental illness/neurodivergence, nor separable from it.
Obviously, an MCU film was never going to be as challenging or nuanced as a big bizarre avant garde tome by Sam Delany. At the same time, it’s worth I think challenging that “obviously” at least a little. As I’ve pointed out here, there are superhero narratives which have dealt with mental illness in at least somewhat thoughtful and complicated ways. MCU films have particularly restricted formulas—but it’s only when you put them beside something like Dhalgren that you can see just how restricted, and just how those restrictions affect the portrayal of marginalized and mentally ill people.
A world in which billionaire techbros like Tony Stark, eugenically perfect super soldiers like Captain America, and blonde gods like Thor are the standard of heroism is a world that is going to have limited space for mentally ill people to appear in starring roles. A world in which every story has to end with victory and overcoming and a lead in to the next story of victory and overcoming is a world which is going to have trouble representing the life stories of mentally ill and neurodivergent people, with their setbacks and detours, missed developmental landmarks and obsessive recurrences.
If you want to represent different people, you need to imagine different worlds and different stories, not just try to retrofit the usual narrative. Yelena and Bob are supposed to be validated by getting a chance in the MCU. But I can’t help feeling they’d be more at home, and more respected, in Bellona.