Why ‘The Hulk’ is a Wayward Transformation Myth, and How I’d Retell It

photo credit: Paulo Gabriel

My son has a board book that reads, “When little Bruce gets really excited, he becomes a big green playing machine!” In the 2008 film ver­sion, The Hulk is self aware – even tender, and he throws cars at bad guys when he gets really excited. But it wasn’t until I came across a Mark Millar comic in which little Bruce gets excited and kills 300 people during a Manhattan-destroying ram­page, that I con­sid­ered the the­matic impli­ca­tions of a char­acter with uncon­trol­lable rage.

Having a baby (as I do) is some­thing that makes one more attuned to the dynamics of anger and con­se­quence, and that’s why I want this modern myth to be told well – to accu­rately reflect what I now know – that at 4AM, under the influ­ence of 3 hours of loud screaming and weeks of fatigue, anyone’s eyes may turn green, and it is at that moment that the Hulk story has meaning.

It sud­denly has meaning because in those moments, life and cir­cum­stance become our impal­pable vil­lains, and to lash out in anger is to become tem­porarily insane, to attack the noise – the reality – and embrace the impulse to stop the pain with blind, destruc­tive force. When that hap­pens, the day is never saved. Rela­tion­ships are destroyed, babies are shaken to death, women are beaten and people are mur­dered. That’s why the Hulk-as-a-hero story is always ten­uous to me.

The Hulk should ter­rify us. Banner is an inter­esting and com­pelling char­acter exactly because the con­se­quences of his inherent faults are so enor­mous. As long as the enemy is his anger problem, the premise has meaning, but as soon as the vil­lain is some­thing external, and all that anger is respon­sibly and pre­dictably chan­neled, the premise changes entirely. Rage is replaced by strength, and we’re simply left with He-Man – a nice guy who needs a slap to get his fight on, and a kiss to turn him back. It’s sud­denly about Superman’s glasses instead of the dan­gerous internal struggle. The Hulk isn’t a hero, he is a ter­rific and rel­e­vant villain.

Imagine a were­wolf that pro­tects a vil­lage by night, or Mr. Hyde doing dan­gerous, wartime charity work for Dr. Jekyll’s med­ical foun­da­tion. Those ideas don’t res­onate with our expe­ri­ence, and they wouldn’t make com­pelling, lasting myths. The Hulk story has great poten­tial, but it is impo­tent in its cur­rent, crime-fighting form. I think we can do better. Here’s the origin story as I would retell it, keeping the basic framework:

Orig­inal stock photo: Darkmaiden

The Hulk, as I would frame it

Part 1

The story opens as Bruce Banner wakes up, nude, freezing, lost, and filled with dread. He finds his way back to his house to dis­cover his family’s and friends’ remains dashed over the broken struc­ture. It’s hor­ri­fying and he is filled with sorrow. MPs take him into cus­tody for his own pro­tec­tion. He has no idea what hap­pened and his mere sur­vival isn’t enough to keep him a sus­pect. He is even­tu­ally released from his pro­tected quar­ters on-base, though he is still trau­ma­tized. He moves across town and with­draws deeply into him­self and his work.

His work is not noble. He is an army physi­cist but a paci­fist by nature, and this is another reason for his dis­sat­is­fac­tion and feel­ings of pow­er­less­ness. He is a sym­pa­thetic char­acter on sev­eral levels, if han­dled cor­rectly. Months pass. He tries to forget every­thing, but he lives in fear; he won­ders why only he was spared in the tragedy. He is men­tally dam­aged and people gen­er­ally avoid him.

Part 2

During these months he begins to notice one of his lab assis­tants. Betty is a bad-boy-dating masochist whose inability to keep a job or rela­tion­ship appears to be a pur­poseful strategy to rebel against her father, who is the gen­eral in charge of the base. She finds Bruce’s tragic his­tory a fas­ci­nating nov­elty, and for fun, she tries to get him to talk about it from time to time, but oth­er­wise he bores her; his intro­spec­tive, politely hollow per­son­ality turns her off.

Bruce grows increas­ingly frus­trated with the project and its bureau­cracy, his failure to move on with women, etc., and he starts to stew on his mis­er­able, impo­tent existence.

He attempts to have a rela­tion­ship with a woman who esteems him as little as he does him­self. After a couple weeks, he finds him­self waking up nude and con­fused again. He drags him­self home (although absently in the direc­tion of his first house before real­izing it), where he learns that the girl’s entire street, and another (where her lover lived) were destroyed – with many dead. He doesn’t nec­es­sarily need flash­backs to know that he was involved. He attends all the funerals out of guilt. It is at this point that the news­paper reporter who ulti­mately fol­lows him might take notice of him directly, as he too would attend the funerals, looking for patterns.

At work, Bruce dives into his research and dis­covers the problem. This is where he takes his first stand against it. He decides that it is his respon­si­bility to stop the trans­for­ma­tion — even though he doesn’t know what it looks like. He doesn’t know why it hap­pens — it’s light­ning quick.

It is in the data that he must con­front what he already knows but never wanted to admit – that anger is the trigger. He knows that he’s been actively repressing the memory of a con­ver­sa­tion in which his wife announced to him (during a party at their house — so he would have to remain civil) that she was leaving him. He finally knows what hap­pened that night.

Part 3

Betty becomes his con­fi­dant because she’s in the best posi­tion (and the most willing) to break the rules and help him run counter-experiments on him­self. In this new light, she sees him as a dan­gerous and thrilling dis­aster, and of course, she falls madly in love with him.

Points of ten­sion exist between Banner’s des­perate work to keep calm and make progress toward safety, and Betty’s self-destructive streak, which would always work against him. She could, even uncon­sciously, sab­o­tage his efforts, while he might do the same, des­perate for love and knowing that Betty despised him when he was merely himself.

One could end this part of the story a few ways, but while I would want to shy away from the con­ven­tional answer – to have Bruce destroy the base, turn green, and start throwing things, it is the big reveal that the story has been building toward. I would, how­ever, make him move like a force of nature, without com­pas­sion or prej­u­dice. After this point, Bruce would become the familiar, wan­dering, self-aware danger to everyone.

Sequels

I would end the first story there, with a second being the frus­trated wan­dering of a pre­sumed dead, well-intentioned sci­en­tist trying unsuc­cess­fully to avoid being a walking dis­aster. This would present a script in which to explore the dichotomies we all face, namely, between self mas­tery (intel­lec­tu­alism, sci­ence, charity, peace) and the loss of con­trol (anger, the effects of our bodily chem­istry on mood, our inher­ited propen­si­ties, etc.) I would end it with self-mastery and a cure, but only to set up the reversal.

In the third part, I would largely follow Millar’s lead, inte­grating it with my own sto­ry­line. Betty would lose interest in the safe and cured Bruce, him being no longer the dan­gerous type to which she was attracted. Then, when Banner delib­er­ately turns him­self again, blind with longing for Betty, he would truly become a vil­lain worth writing (there seem to be so few). He would be a pur­poseful, pathetic, raging, dan­gerous maniac who cares only for dead­ening his own unbear­able pain with blind, destruc­tive noise, and as a cau­tionary tale, the story could regain the power it has lost.