The Incredible Hulk: A Review

By John David Ebert

In a way, Marvel’s new Hulk movie is not so much a sequel to Ang Lee’s earlier (and much better) film about one of their most famous comicbook characters as it is a remake of the first movie, for it tells exactly the same story, and does so with little imagination or attempt at varying the theme. In the new movie, as in the Ang Lee film, the Hulk spends most of the narrative fighting the American military, and then ends up at the climax fighting another bizarre supervillain created as a misbegotten child of a science experiment gone awry. The storyline, then, is formulaic and so one wonders what the motives of the film’s makers could have been in constructing a new movie with different cast members but with exactly the same premiss. The lack of imagination demonstrated here by the filmmakers reminds one of the old Hulk television shows, for television, especially of the 1970s variety, was once virtually synonymous with the phrase ‘lack of imagination.’ Today’s television, however, with shows like HBO’s Deadwood and Rome or Showtime’s Weeds has gone way beyond this old stereotype toward the creation of some really interesting and inventive narratives. Marvel’s new movie, unfortunately, belongs in the dustbin with the old television shows of the 1970s.

That said, it is worth continuing this review in order to remark for a moment upon the cultural significance of the Hulk as a superhero, for he is quite different from most other heroes. The Hulk was one of the first superheroes dreamed up by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby during the period of the early 1960s with their Marvel ‘renaissance’ that reinvented the dying genre of the comicbook. And unlike most of those other superheroes — such as the Fantastic Four, the X-Men or Spiderman — the Hulk is something of an anti-hero. What happens when Bruce Banner transforms into the Hulk is that he turns into a green giant who likes to bust things up, and those ‘things’ usually are machines and engineered objects, such as buildings, bridges, tanks, cars, etc. In other words, the Hulk represents the suppressed rage inside all of us moderns at the confining conditions of the very mechanical civilization with which we have surrounded ourselves. Our technophilic society is a cage which we have built to surround, surmount and suppress the impulses of the ‘natural man’ within us, and the logistics of surviving on a day to day basis inside this type of society is a huge contributor to mass epidemics such as depression, road rage, serial shootings and the like.

Indeed, the Hulk is a veiled metaphor of the being inside us that busts out into the open whenever a Virginia Tech massacre takes place or an incident of road rage or an episode like the one that took place in Japan recently with the man who drove his truck into a crowded shopping area and jumped out and started stabbing people randomly. It is not without significance, either, that the Hulk is green, for his green color relates him to the world of nature, of rocks and trees and grass. In Greek mythology, he would be considered one of the Titans, the serpentine earthborn children of Gaia who are full of rage and hatred at the civilized arrogance of almighty Zeus and his elite pantheon of Olympians. (The fact that he does not fly, as do many superheroes, also suggests his connection with the earth).

The Hulk, then, is the nature principle within each and every one of us, whether we know it or not, that absolutely rebels against the stresses and tensions of living in a technocratic civilization that tries to do all our thinking for us, and indeed, tries so often to replace us as human beings with automation. Let’s face it: the Hulk hates civilization, and he is that part of our collective psyche which takes a certain pleasure in watching it being broken apart. The uncomfortable truth of a Virginia Tech episode is that in fact we are all culpable; we have built the sort of society that so badly meshes with the inner workings of the psyche that it creates and fosters the conditions for these sorts of episodes to take place. That you or I do not explode this way is beside the point; we simply hide our frustrations better than the ones who do go off, but we allow these frustrations to otherwise mangle our lives through such outlets as depression, spousal abuse or alcoholism. Who among us has not exploded at one point or another at a machine? The television that doesn’t work like it’s supposed to, or the computer that gives us such a hard time, or even the airline ticket seller who has meshed so thoroughly with the system that she speaks to us like a robot and inadvertently attracts the ire of frustrated customers?

This is what the Hulk as a comicbook character is all about: he is the personification of our central nervous system’s response to the tensions of trying to live in a hyper-mechanized, profit-driven environment that cares little for the needs of the human soul. In fact, it is a little known secret of comicbook history that most comicbook heroes started out with this same significance: Superman, for instance, born out of the Depression era 1930s, was a figure who was always shown in the first few years of his comicbooks smashing up machines and throwing cars over his head or taking apart bridges or destroying El-trains. Most of the villains that he fought were either scientists or big businessmen, precisely the architects of our modern Megalopolises. It took him awhile to settle down and become domesticable material so that he could fight on behalf of the city rather than against it. Godzilla, too, in the first couple of movies in which he appeared in the early 1950s was a destroyer of the city of Tokyo, but in the later movies he became Tokyo’s primary defender against monsters from outer space, such as Ghidra. There is also something poliphobic about both of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s two great superheroes – arguably  the first superheroes — Tarzan and John Carter, Warlord of Mars, neither of whom felt at home in cities.

The Hulk, then, represents the vestigial survival into the new pantheon of comicbook characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (in the early 1960s) of the originally poliphobic hatred of the superhero for big cities. The superhero, in origin, then, was designed not to save and rescue cities, but to break them apart, for superheroes are folkloric creations by folk who largely disliked living in big cities, especially of the soulless American kind.

There is, then, nothing comforting about the Hulk as a hero. He is there to remind us that there is a part of our psyches which absolutely resists the world of the modern megalopolis that we have built, and would actually, unbeknownst to our conscious, rational selves, rather have done away with altogether. He is an unsettling and unsettled kind of hero, never fully accepted by, or at home with, the other Olympians of the Marvel pantheon. 

He is, then, exactly opposite in sense and significance to a superhero like Spiderman or the Fantastic Four, whose primary task is to act as the immune system of the giant city and defend it from attack by otherworldy beings who are actually the cast off gods of archaic societies returned anew as monsters and demons.

But as the appearance of Robert Downey Jr.’s character Iron Man at the end of the new Hulk movie reminds us, the Hulk did eventually join up with a supergroup called The Avengers, where he was allied to Thor, Antman, Iron Man and Wasp. (In Scandinavian mythology, however, the Hulk would have been precisely the type of giant that Thor specialized in killing, for Thor was primarily a giant-slayer). Antman and Wasp are also obvious children of Gaia, for they, too, are creatures of the earth. Iron Man was born of the smithy, however, and resembles something that would have been banged together by a smith like Volund or the Finnish Ilmarinen in the Kalevala. So Thor and Iron Man represent types of mythic heroes who are normally opposed to Gaian creatures like the Hulk and Antman (for the smith would have invented the hammer which Thor uses to slay his giants and dragons).

Suffice it to say that the Hulk did not remain a member of the Avengers for very long, for after four issues he was replaced by Captain America. The Hulk is not a joiner, but a nomadic loner who wanders the world from city to city leaving a path of twisted metal and smoking debris in his wake.