Stray Thoughts: Thunderbolts* and Depression

⛈️ Are You Telling This Story or Am I...

[SPOILER ALERT]

Over the holiday weekend we took the kids to see Thunderbolts* at the theater. It was my second time seeing it, and I have to say that it really resonated with me. I'm still enjoying the MCU, even if the bloom has come off the rose in the public perception. And I freely admit that a lot of the recent content has been not great (Eternals) and occasionally quite bad (Secret Invasion). At the end of the day, I'm fine with sitting through a so-so movie if I get to spend it hanging out with characters I like. But Thunderbolts* is actually pretty good, and it manages to tell a compelling story about something that you don't see represented well in mainstream blockbuster action flicks.

Thunderbolts* is a movie about depression. Which is something I've struggled with off-and-on for my entire life. Let's take a step back, shall we?

One of the things that I love about speculative fiction is the way it externalizes theme. I love thematic storytelling, and I especially love when the themes are written into the literal world of the story, and spec fic is ideal for this. The Golden Age of Science Fiction saw Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov playing with big ideas and building stories around them, and it continues to this day. Because it turns out the ability to break the rules of reality becomes a powerful tool in the thematic storyteller's arsenal.

Consider: Denis Villeneuve's Arrival is a movie in which aliens arrive on Earth and Amy Adams has to learn to communicate with them, and in doing so she gains the ability to see the future. But that's not what it's about about. Thematically, it's about nations needing to cooperate with each other in order to save the future of humanity. It's about the need to see past the "alienness" of a foreigner and learn to communicate with them, and it questions whether the military should be the primary way we interact with outsiders. The movie just uses literal aliens in order to tell that story.

Superhero stories are unique in that the nature of having super-powers means that characters become defined by the one thing that sets them apart from other humans. In this way, they become an embodiment of a certain idea, and the fact that super-powered individuals literally fight each other means that we have a canvas for metaphorical ideas to fight each other. The rivalry between Professor X and Magneto is just a metaphorical proxy fight between the power of empathy and the usefulness technology. These powers are also quite malleable. The Flash is a speedster, which means he is defined by doing everything fast, and "fast" is an idea that can translate into a number of themes. It could mean running away from your problems, or it could mean dealing with anxiety, or it could mean just not being able to stop and smell the roses; it all depends on what story you're trying to tell.

Bringing things back to Thunderbolts*, let's look at Captain America, who is a literal embodiment of the American ideal. When written well, stories about Captain America are about maintaining those ideals in increasingly trying circumstances, and finding a way to reconcile your identity as a patriot when the country doesn't live up to its own promises. When Steve Rogers was replaced by John Walker (a.k.a. US Agent), we got to see what America looks like without its optimism and idealism: an ends-justify-the-means approach to foreign policy that ultimately tarnishes America's image. John Walker (Wyatt Russell in the film) is an excellent soldier, but he's also a jingoist, a military imperialist, and a man devoid of empathy.

So let's talk about the movie. How does it address depression?

There's a couple different angles it uses. First, there's Yelena's internal conflict. Yelena (Florence Pugh) is, for all intents and purposes, our main character. And she is rudderless. She's still hurting from the death of her sister, and has hired herself out as a merc to Valentina "Val" Allegra de Fontaine (a sublime Julia Louis-Dreyfuss having entirely too much fun chewing the scenery). Cleaning up Val's dirty work is a steady paycheck, but she's mostly just going through the motions.

Let's be clear here: we are meant to understand that she is depressed. The opening shot of the movie is Yelena sitting listlessly on the edge of a skyscraper rooftop that she then proceeds to walk off of. We know she's not committing suicide—we know how movies work—but the not-so-subtle cue has been planted. Her internal monologue describes how isolated and disengaged she is with her life, which she caps off with "Or maybe I'm just bored." And I love this, because this is what depression feels like. It's not always sadness. Sometimes it's just numbness, and it often can feel like boredom because you are under-stimulated and nothing you do seems to engage you.

So Yelena's depressed, but she's coping. She's compartmentalized her life enough that she can function, but she's extremely unsatisfied and it's starting to eat away at her. She reconnects with her adoptive father Alexi (David Habour having possibly even more fun that Julia Louis-Dreyfuss), a washed up Soviet-era super soldier known as Red Guardian. And this kicks off her internal arc. She's unsatisfied with her life and decides—with Alexi's misguidance—that the way to improve it is to try to be more like her sister in order to get other people to see her as a hero. It won't actually solve her problems because, again, we know how movies work, but it's what sets the story in motion. Her plan to overcome her depression is to seek out external validation. That is her want. What she needs though, is to connect with people.

The culmination of that arc is when she admits to Alexi that she needed help all along but didn't know how to ask for it. She describes her life (paraphrasing because I don't have the exact quote handy) as "every day I sit and look at my phone and think about the terrible things I've done, then I go to work and I drink and I think about the the terrible things I've done." And I feel this hard. This was me during COVID lockdown, honestly. It's so easy to get caught up in regrets and then just hyper-fixate on them. Even regrets over petty things can drive you mad if all you do is relive them over and over. Therapists will call it "intrusive thoughts" but my preferred term is "doom-spiraling," and in the years during/following COVID, I coped with the spiral by consuming lots and lots and lots of alcohol. This was not a healthy coping strategy, just so we're clear.

Ultimately Yelena's depression is rooted in trauma. Trauma over the loss of her sister, but also trauma of being raised to be an assassin. A memory that the movie comes back to repeatedly is Yelena as a small girl luring another young girl into the woods where she will be murdered. This is Yelena's first test in her assassin training, and it is portrayed as her deepest shame, and ultimately her need to confront it is the culmination of her external arc. So let's talk about that, shall we?

There are two antagonists in the film. The first is Val. She's manipulating things behind the scenes and servicing the plot and just being generally slimy, but her thematic contribution is that she is the one outwardly saying what all of our "heroes" are thinking. The Avengers are gone. There is no hope. The most anyone can aspire to is being a less awful person than someone else. And, oh yeah, Yelena and her cohort are worthless pieces of garbage.

The second antagonist is Bob (Lewis Pullman). Bob is a drug addict with severe bipolar disorder (and no shortage of his own trauma) who inadvertently gains god-like superpowers. When he is manic, he is The Sentry, but when he goes into a depressive state, he becomes The Void, a figure of emptiness who consumes everyone around him and forces them to relive their deepest shame over and over and over.

You know. Doom-spiraling.

Yelena and the rest of the Thunderbolts save the day by entering Bob's psyche, making him confront The Void and ultimately beating it by just hugging it out with Bob. Now, on the one hand, as metaphors for therapy go, this is pretty clumsy. For something as severe as Bob's level of bipolarity, there needs to be a therapeutic intervention—pharmacological or otherwise. Friends are great and they definitely help. In fact, friends and family are an important support structure for people who struggle with depression. But friends are not a substitute for actually seeking treatment for your mental illness.

All that said, I do appreciate the things the movie gets right. Namely, I like that in the logic of the film, The Void isn't defeated so much as it's escaped from. This is because depression is not something that can be cured; it can only be managed. Trauma doesn't go away, but it gets easier to live with. Yelena never overcomes her shame, but she does manage to walk away from it. Bob can't beat depression by fighting it. Instead, he needs friends to help pull him out of it.

Since Bob is the antagonist, at least nominally, he is meant as a darker, more extreme version of Yelena. His entire "Sentry" persona is built on the validation he gets from Val, and it falls apart as soon as he realizes that she's just trying to control him. If Yelena continued down the path that she'd started on—looking for external validation rather than human connection—she would become just like Bob: the kind of person who wallows in their depression and forces it on everyone else. You've met this person before. We've all met this person. This person sucks. And it's who Yelena will become if she doesn't complete her arc and undergo some personal growth.

And, for what it's worthy, Bob isn't treated as an antagonist. Instead, Yelena immediately recognizes him as a fellow sufferer and takes pity on him. The movie's opening shot is extremely un-subtle, as I've described above. The scene that it leads into is not any subtler. Yelena has infiltrated a lab in Malaysia—we will later learn that it's the same lab where Bob was experimented on in order to become The Sentry. While she's there, she find a guinea pig trapped in a maze (yes, it is that on the nose). She commiserates with it briefly, asks if it can help her (it very obviously can't), acknowledges that it must have its own problems, and ultimately she adopts it rather than leaving it to be destroyed with the rest of the lab.

And that's pretty much how she regards Bob throughout the film. Is he a surrogate sibling to fill the void left behind by Natasha? Or maybe a chance to be an older sister to someone else? Or maybe just a pet to take care of? He's clearly not a romantic interest. Whatever, it doesn't matter. The actual shape of the relationship is irrelevant to whether or not it will be good for them both. What's important is that they're not alone. Whatever darkness they face will be easier if they can go through it together.

Because ultimately, the movie tells the story of a team of villains who turn into heroes by rising to the occasion and making the choice to help others. Yelena's not the only one seeking validation here; John Walker is defined by it. His deepest shame is his fall from grace after his brief stint as Captain America, and how his inability to move on from that cost him his family. He wanted people to love him so badly that he became unloveable. Alexi is in basically the same boat. Bucky is trying to be a public servant and just sucking at it. Hell, Ghost is literally incorporeal. (The only one who doesn't really fit is Taskmaster, which... well, if you've seen the movie you know how they dealt with that.)

But when they stopped seeking their own glory and just attempt to save lives, they get the validation they were looking for as a byproduct of actually making things better. In a way, Val was right. They don't have to be good. They just have to be better. When you're depressed, leaning on your support structure is important, but so is being the support structure. Sometimes you help yourself by helping others.

Let me reiterate that this is still not a substitute for therapy, though.

That's what I think anyway,

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