This post has spoilers. So if you want Thunderbolts* to surprise you, stop reading.
I will say this: Thunderbolts* is one of my top 3 Marvel movies of all time. The other two are Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor Ragnarok. Let those two help you guage my taste in Marvel movies. (Namely, rejects and exiles coming together to save the universe.)
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I did something for myself today. Something just for me. And on a whim! I can’t remember doing something for myself on a whim in probably 13 years.
I went to see a movie in the theatres by myself in the middle of the day during a weekday. My choice? Thunderbolts*. That little asterix is part of the official title, not an endnote symbol.
Thunderbolts* is Marvel’s newest cinematic offering and only available in theatre currently. I went just to see Florence Pugh playing Yelena Belova, Black Widows younger sister.
In my opinion, Pugh is one of the most talented young actors on screen today. Have you seen The Wonder? A harrowing story of a young girl purposly starved to death and surreptiously fed by her religious fanatic mother becuase, well, the mother is psychotic, functioning with undiagnozed narcissistic personality disorder, seasoned liberally with crazy making religious beliefs.
Pugh’s performance in The Wonder was stunning. Totally worth a screening just to see her act. Also I loved her in the Black Widow movie. I didn’t love the movie, but I loved watching her playing Yelena. She’s funny as fuck, gorgeous, vulnerable, and deadly.
Pugh also has this incredible voice. It may be her biggest asset as an acress. Her pitch is low, almost masculine. But if you ever get around to hear her sing in the movie A Good Person, she has a great singing voice. It has intensity, that is, it has a fullness with no nasally breathiness or vocal fry, both of which I find utterly annoying, male or female. Basically her timbre is utterly unique especially for a female.
Add to that, Pugh’s studied Russian accent as Yelena. She is mesmerizing to listen to. If I were blind, I would listen to Florence Pugh play Yelena.
And she wears turqoise eyeliner in Thunderbolts*. Who wears turqois eyeliner except Boy George from Culture Club? And actually I just Googled him and he doesn’t even wear turqois eyeliner. Eye shadow, yes, but not eyeliner. With every closeup of her face and that glorious makeup choice, I wondered why I had never once worn colored eyeliner. I am nearly 50 years old and I have only used shades of fatigue like black, dark brown, and dark grey when it comes to eyeliners. Like I’m living in the time of sepia colors photographs. What have I been doing with my life for nearly half a century without ever having tried colored eyeliner? What am I waiting for? Who’s fucking color scheme am I continuing to live by when it comes to personal decoration?
It’s like she was telling me: “Go get that turqoise eyeliner, girl! And get more piercingings! And why haven’t you gotten a tattoo yet?”
***
Thunderbolts* feels like it was written by a psychology major who became a screenwriter. It prominantly features Jungian analysis, Kleinian object relations and defenses, Winnicott’s holding environment, and Bowlby’s attachement theory. I will get to all these in turn but they’re fresh in my mind because I just wrote a final exam that required me to know most of these ideas.
Thunderbolts* features a new character named Bob. I think Bob is meant to be the personification of every American white male mental health case. He’s the amalgam of all the guys that stormed the capital, the young men in this country that so many podcasts keep worrying about.
We learn quite early that Bob gets really low sometimes. Then he will have these moments when he feels like he could rule the world. The origin of his troubles, we learn later, is childhood trauma, namely, a physically and verbally abusive father. By the time we meet Bob, we discover that he was wandering around Malaysia, this white heterosexual male junkie, looking for drugs, and being manic depressive. He was so miserable in this role, that Bob finally submitted himself some shady, unresearched, and lethal scientific experimentation with nothing more than some vague promises of making him better.
When Yelena learnes a bit about Bob and his mental health issues, he asks her what he should do to deal with all his feelings. Yelena, who herself is not in a good head space tells Bob to “Push it all down. ” We know that Bob does this well. So well that he survived his childhood, for instance. His father would have proabaly killed Bob had Bob not “pushed them down,” them being feelings of rage against his dad for being a piece of shit and hurting him and the family, disgust that a grown ass man could be such a sadistic man-child, sadness for himself and his mom for having to live in fear, and fear. Of course, once he was no longer under existential threat from his father, he’d gotten so used to shoving feelings down, he couldn’t stop.
Shoving the bad feelings down meant that Bob had to continue for years and years to repress his emotions. Many ways to do this include: deny them, push them down or repress them, dissassociate so it feels like it’s no even happening.
It’s no wonder that after years of depressing his emotions that Bob suffers from depression.
The flip side of depression for Bob is to get really worked up about his good parts. This is just another defense mechanism. It’s like deploying your own personal cheerleading team in a deperate but ultimately fruitless effort to get him to forget about being depressed, probably so he doesn’t end up killing himself. Go big or go home, says Bob’s brain. So Bob becomes grandiose.
It’s no wonder Bob gets manic with delusions of grandeur sometimes.
Now comes me with my first year of a masters in social servicese under my belt and an A+ grade in by Assessement and Pychopathology class on the books.
Bob finds himself existing at the border between neurotic and psychotic, where he’s got a hold on reality most of the time but sometimes he can lose touch with it. He’s right there at the border. And were Bob a patient of mine, I would diagnose him as having a borderline personality disorder or BPD. I would also write in his chart that Bob experiences severe mood swings, going from really low to really high, i.e., bipolar disorder.
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Bob’s cyclical sense of grandiosity plays an important role in his psychic defense against feelings of worthlessness and shame. Getting yelled at and beat by your dad, the very person who is supposed to be the sentry (wink) against such abuses, on a regular basis as a child will make almost every child believe deep down into their core that they are bad and worthless and that’s why dad is treating me like this. The child becomes filled with shame. Shame feels so bad that some people will reject that sense of worthlessness and badness that comes with feelings of fear, anger, disgust, sadness and disavowed those part of himself and become allergic to those feelings. And all of this happens unconciously.
“The void” that Bob talks about to Yelena is the emptiness left behind by the space that those feelings should occupy in Bob’s consciousness. Instead he’s banished them from himself. His own feelings have been forced by his childhood traumas into exile and the town square of his psyche is deserted, empty, void.
That’s understandably depressing. So sometimes he’ll throw a party for himself with a lot of ballons. He becomes manic, fills those balloons with gas called greatness. But they always pop, becuase his fantasies are based on nothing real. These manic states of grandiosity end up leaving Bob feeling more alone and more depressed than ever.
When Bob discovers that he has superpowers, though, his sense of grandiosity suddenly has a hook to hang on. His pathetic overestimation of his grandeur no longer seems like an overestimation. He allows himself to be seduced by Valentina. He agrees to dye his hair blond and put on a golden spandex suit with a cape and a giant WWF sized belt with S for Senry emblazoned on the front. Like he’s superman or something. It’s ridiculous and embarassing. And very very predictably.
When power is just handed over to someone who has no sense of responsibility that accompanies that power since he didn’t do anything to earn it, when a person with a tenuous sense of self, unable to carry the burden of morals and ethics, when that person has the emotional maturity of a toddler, that person will go on a power trip. Bob goes on a power trip. He beats up Yelena, Ava Starr, Red Guardian, Bucky, and the John Walker. Does it without without breaking a sweat. Even rips off Bucky’s arm.
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If I had to choose, I would say that Sentry, aka Bob, is closest in the heirarchy of superpowers to Captain Marvel. Or Superman, if you want to cross over into the DC universe. But Bob is even more powerful than either of them. On top of everything they can do, Bob can do some that Scarlet Witch stuff, like empathic manipulation. Oh and he can do telekinesis.
What happens when a guy with this much power goes from manic to depressive? From kicking the butt off the ragtag team of Thunderbolts and his head ballooning to the size of Valentina’s limitless hunger for power, to feeling betrayed by the ad hoc mother figure of Valentina, who set herself up as the attuned caregiver to the nascently emerging ego of the Sentry, trying to murder him?
Just as quickly as Bob was on his grandiose, manic ride, he plummets into a massive depressive jag and literally becomes his Shadow self. The Shadow self is a Jungian archetype.
Bob literally becomes a photon sucking black hole. He’s so matte in his blackness he looks 2-dimensional. The only light coming from him are two pinpricks in the vicinity of his eyeballs. It is a literal and comic book representation of the “Shadow”–flat, 2-dimensional, reflecting nothing becuase he is totally self-absorbed.
I was into it. I am not expecting poetic, complex, naunced, multipfaceted metaphors from a Marvel movie. I was surprised the screenwriters knew Jung at all and then worked in his psychoanalytic theories with such earnest enthusiam into a superhero movie. (That was my thinking in the theatres. I have since learned that the original comic book creators of Sentry were the Jungian enthusiasts.)
The “Shadow” self according Jung described an unconsious part of our “Self” that is our dark side, the side that has traits that we don’t like about ourselves, that we feel are contradictory to who we think is our “Self”. It’s the disavowed parts of us.
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Who decides what traits are not to be liked and rejected by us? Most often our parents.
Did you parents every tell you stop crying when you were a little kid? Well, then you may have unconsciously decided that whatever emotion brought on those tears, like feeling sad or scared or angry, were feelings you needed to hide by repressing them or denying them or dissociating from them. If you’re told enough times to suck it up and stop that annoying weeping whenever you felt your feelings, you get practiced at repressing, denying, dissociating.
Eventually, even when no one is there to tell you stop, even when someone tells you it’s okay to cry, you can’t cry. Not for your feelings, not for yourself, not anymore. Oh those tears are there just like all those feelings are there somewhere in your body and your brain, but the only times you can get that release valve on the tear pressure to release a little is by watching movies, IG reels, or commercials.
Bob’s dad definitely told little Bob to stop crying that sounded like shut the fuck up. His “Shadow” grew and drew during his childhood filling up a little or a lot every day with all the despair, disgust, rage, hate that he wasn’t able to express. He became repressor number one of feelings.
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One might argue with a high falutin contemptuous scoff that the imagry of the Sentry’s Shadow in the film is so literal an interpretation of Jung, that it’s . . . stupid.
But I didn’t think so! Knowing about Jung’s archetype took nothing away from how affectively disturbing Bob’s Shadow was when personified on the big screen. The total lack of light reflection, those pinprick eyes, which both look so much worse than it sounds, was seriously creepy as fuck.
And then when his first victim is a little white girl (!) who the Shadow turns into a nuclear blast shadow from Hiroshima on the pavement of New York City, I literally gasped. It was so disturbing. The Shadow personified and his first victim being a child.
But of course it is! Bob learned to have a Shadow side when he was a child. And if you have become so self-absorbed in your repression and depression since you were a kid, you can do that to a another kid. From that first viction, it’s a emotional small step to turning the entire city of New York and all of its inhabitants into shadows just like you. The whole world seems like nothing but a light suck black hole to you and nothing feels for reassuring and self-validating than to have you fragile, fragemented ego perfectly mirrored by the external world. Ego syntonic, baby.
This is what the filmmakers thought the world of a depressed person with BPD having a psychotic break might look like. And they were spot on.
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The solution to Bob destroying the greatest city on Earth is provided by John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott. These two British psychoanalysts believed that early relationships, espeically with the primary caregiver, was critical to shaping a person’s personality, sense of self, and how a person relates to others throughout life.
Bowlby went further still: he insisted that the most powerful human drive was the need for love. Connection, secure attachement, love.
So here we have Bob as Sentry. Sentry can’t be beaten up and physically restrained by anyone on Earth. Force isn’t going to work. The Thunderbolts need a carrot, a really really good carrot. John Bowlby and Winnicott says, a love carrot.
Florence Pugh’s character, Yelena, with her emotional intelligence and empathy, intuits that she must become the object or the primary caregiver that Bob needed but never had. He must be persuaded that she can not only handle his rage and depression, but that she accepts him just as he is.
But first Yelena and the rest of the Thunderbolts getting pinned against the wall with large pieces of metal while large and small debrise whip around them hazardously around the room. This choas represents Bob’s fear of his rage annilating others. Now here comes the love carrot. Not only does Yelena negotiate the tornado of metal and glass whipping around her, she approaches Bob through that choas rather than withdraw from him. Once she reaches him she puts her arms around his raging body sitting atop his Shadow, whom he is beating the shit out of. That’s his shame attacking all those disavowed feelings personified by his Shadow. In the midst of all this rage and despair and destruction she quietly tells him, “I’m here. I’m here.”
Yelena regulates Bob’s emotions with her regulated emotions, her empathy. She calms him down.
Bob stops beating up his Shadow self. As Bob begins to calm down, so does this his terror of destroying others. His rage diminishes with the diminishment of his fear. This phenomenon is represented by the other Thunderbolts able to unpin themselves from the wall. Bob’s need to keep them away from his Shadow fades.
Now at this point, I expected film to show Jung’s process of Shadow integration. I expected the Shadow to turn from a flat black into Bob’s mirror image. Then Bob would merge with Shadow Bob and literally become integrated. Jung believed that integration of the Shahow self with the ego Self was curcial for psychological wholeness and individuation.
But that never happens. I can only assume that the writers of the script, knowledgable about Jungian psychoanalysis, felt that Bob’s integration of his shadow needed to be a process lasting longer than a day or two. No instant gratification for me, sadly.
Yes, the screenwriters seemed to say, Bob has found a caregiver who will provide a holding environment. Yelena provides the attuned care and proximity, his source of secure attachment. She and the Thunderbolts will become his internalized objects for healthy object relations by becoming his adopted family in the old Avengers headquarters. One big happy found family.
Yes, he understands now that he engages in defensive splitting and projective identification. But he still has Jungian analytical work to do in order to face his Shadow self, integrate it with his ego, and become a whole and healed human being. Looking forward to that in a follow up film.
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While all of the theorietical underpinnings around Bob were fun to engage with as a student of therapy, emotionally I related most to Yelena’s character. She’s lonely and depressed. That’s me. I am so fucking lonely so much of the time. Desperately lonely. So are all the other characters in the film. Each one wants connection as badly as they need it.
At the core of John Bowlby’s attachement theory is the human drive for connection. He says we are born with this drive and die with with this drive. It is a biologically rooted need for closeness and security with others.
Yelena’s loneliness is a symptom of her need for connection. I share this need, as we all do. In the moments when Yelena expresses her lonliness in behavior or words is when I cried in the theatre because I could relate so hard.
Thunderbolts* is one of the best Marvel movies I’ve ever seen. It is heavily invested in character development, this is, the characters’ psychological change. Each character, without exception, is conflicted: on one hand is the force and habit of their personality that has been trying to defend itself against their deep need for connection by living as if they need noone, and on the other hand is the present demands of their present situation that requires and offers them an opportunity to connect with others. These two opposing forces come into direct conflict in the film. The pleasure of the film is watching each character struggle with this conflict and choose connection.
The film is earnest in its open, unselfconsious acknowledgement and appreciation for the human need for connection. It’s sincerity and honesty was compelling viewing. It’s been over a week since I watched it and I’m still thinking about it.