This is a full spoiler essay for Thunderbolts*, and more important: I’ll be discussing issues of mental health, addiction, and suicide, so please take that into consideration if you’re not in a good place to read it. I’ll also say that my brain and I are in a complicated situationship. Sometimes we’re BFFS, other times I’m in a corner with a chair and a bullwhip, barely keeping the fucker at bay. And given that, Thunderbolts* felt like a warm—if sometimes uncomfortably tight—hug.
Thanos.
Ultron.
Dormammu.
Erik Kilmonger.
The crushing feeling that nothing you do matters, that all life ends in death, that you’ll lose everything you love and there’s no ultimate point to anything you do.
I know who I’m putting as the Best Villain Ever on a ranking list post!
The villain of the latest Marvel movie is depression. (And shame, guilt, trauma, PTSD, the whole merry gang—but mostly depression.) Thunderbolts* wrestles with them in a that feels honest and raw, while also delivering the most fun comic book movie in years—I felt way better after this than after Guardians of the Galaxy 3.
This movie opens with a suicide attempt. Our hero is Yelena Bulova. She tells us in a voiceover that she’s depressed, and feels her work is meaningless. At first, she assumed her disconnection was grief over her sister’s death, but now she thinks it’s more than that—a void that’s inside her all the time. After she tells us this, she closes her eyes, takes a breath, and steps off the edge of the second tallest building in the world. She waits a long time before she opens a parachute and lands gracefully on another level. Long enough to let us know she thought about not opening it at all. (It’s effective enough that the person next to me gasped and covered her face.) As she fights through a research lab, she doesn’t notice the ominous shadows on the wall behind her, she doesn’t listen to the scientist who says that the world is in danger. She’s too lost in her own fog. She goes to her quasi-dad Alexei for advice, then doesn’t listen to him. She walks straight into the Wile E. Coyote-level trap that Valentina Allegra de Fontaine set for her. She fights her way out of Valentina’s underground vault, but has no plan for what to do next, and never seems to care overmuch whether she lives or dies.
We listen to her complain about being in a career rut while she wrestles and shoots her way through an Oldboy-style hallway fight. The fatherly advice she receives about serving her country comes from Captain America’s Communist counterpart, whose beloved Soviet Union threw him in a gulag when he was no longer useful. The boss she negotiates with is a shady CIA director in the middle of an impeachment hearing. There’s a certain irony gap at work here.
But this is also the most relatable a Marvel character has been in… maybe ever?
And it isn’t just her. The matter-of-fact tone of depression is woven into the film, and embraced by every character.
Bob is openly suicidal. He picks a fight with a super soldier. He suggests it’ll be better for everyone if he “stays put” in the vault—i.e. stays behind to either starve to death or burn—because it might be marginally more convenient for the mercs he just met. This isn’t exactly Natasha leaping off a cliff to save the world from Thanos, or Tony Stark snapping his fingers so the other Avengers can live.
Walker responds to everything with barely restrained rage, and almost jumps down an elevator shaft in response to a brief flashback to his failures as a father.
Ava shoots Taskmaster in the face to fulfill her mission, and only slightly regrets it later, as Yelena tells her that Taskmaster was a child soldier just like the rest of them, and that all of them will die violent deaths eventually anyway.
Alexei is clearly in a slump, losing himself in old footage of Red Guardian overseeing Russian military parades while old food and dirty clothes pile up around him. But no one ever treats this slump like it’s a joke, like a “Fat Thor” situation—what the others look askance at is his exuberance and hope for the future.
Ghost is a person who was born of a government experiment, who lived her life in constant chronic pain until Janet Van Dyne was able to (partially) heal her. By then, all she knew was the life of an assassin. John Walker was supposed to be the new Captain America. Instead he killed a man with the shield he was meant to honor. Alexei was supposed to be the glorious symbol of Soviet might, and was every bit as dedicated and patriotic as Steve Roger. And then, like some sort of symbol of how large scale communism rarely works, he was used up and spat out and forced to betray the people he loved, and left as washed up derelict in a prison still singing songs from his glory days, right around the time when America’s symbol, Steve Rogers, had to go rogue to get away from an over-policed surveillance state.
And Bucky’s… Bucky.
Even Valentina is given a moment. In this version of her story, her father was murdered in front of her after she gave their location away to what seems to be a mafiosi, who promises to take care of her after his death. (That can’t have been a good childhood.)
There were many ways they could have dealt with all this trauma. Endless quips, endless scenes of heart-to-heart conversations. Instead, the film shows us how the depression and dissociation shapes everyone’s actions. Valentina exploits a person with mental illness to try to spackle over her own shortcomings. Just as Yelena ignores the scientist’s warnings in the opening scene, Valentina doesn’t listen to the sick person tell her what he needs, she doesn’t listen to people who know him better, she doesn’t listen to her level-headed assistant, and she doesn’t listen to the alarm bells in her own head after he shows her a fraction of his power.
Instead she fills Bob up with the idea that he can be “better”—that if he just does this thing for her, his life will be golden and he’ll finally be important.
All of them take grief and defeat as a baseline—except maybe Alexei, because he knows what it is to feel like a hero.
Marvel movies and TV shows have attempted to deal with mental health issues before. Obviously, between the wars, supervillains, and alien invasions, everyone in these things has PTSD to some degree. The Iron Man Trilogy is explicitly about Tony’s anxiety issues, his attempts to control them with alcohol, and/or putting a suit of armor around the world, and how those issues bleed into the first Avengers film and its sequel. Captain America and Captain Marvel both had childhood marked by abuse. Age of Ultron touched on the abuses of the Red Room, Black Widow fleshed out that story marginally better. Ant-Man and the Wasp in part tried to deal with Ava Starr’s chronic pain, and how that shaped her mental health. WandaVision did a fantastic job exploring grief (until Multiverse of Madness ruined everything), and Moon Knight tackled Dissociative Identity Disorder much better than I expected it to. Therapy has come up in both Moon Knight and in Daredevil: Born Again—although in both cases psychologists weren’t exactly cast in a positive light. Avengers: Endgame, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Brave New World all highlight the importance of support groups for people dealing with trauma.
But have we ever had a film that dealt so honestly with real, deep-rooted trauma? A movie that braided “heroism” and “suicidal depression” so tightly together?
Think of what Thunderbolts* could have been: a quiet scene of Yelena looking at a picture of Natasha, maybe even asking her for help. Walker opening up about his family problems while the others listen sympathetically. Bob apologizing for his addiction. Yelena and Alexei sharing a tearful hug after he tells her how proud he is.
Look what they do instead: Yelena talks about her sister, she does everything in the shadow of her sister, but mostly she’s furious when anyone mentions her—her grief is immediate and raw as hell, not a plot device. The team only learns that Walker is alone because Bucky tells them—he was never going to admit that. Bob is completely frank about his drug use, and none of them are phased by it. Yelena breaks down messily in public, in the street, surrounded by New Yorkers who don’t acknowledge her, and Alexei keeps his distance from her. When he tells her she used to be full of joy she sobs that she doesn’t remember it. When he tells her she wanted to be a goalie so the team could depend on her, she doesn’t remember that, either. The two finally hear each other, yes, but the conversation is punctured by the fact that Yelena doesn’t have any of Alexei’s good memories of her childhood.
Even when Yelena tries to give a “pep talk” to get Bob to leave with them, it’s more the two of them sharing an understanding of darkness than anything else.
Yelena: “…darkness gets pretty enticing, it starts to feel like…”
Bob: “A void.”
Their moment of bonding is over their shared suicidal ideation. When Bob asks her “What do you do about it?” she replies “I shove it… way down” and they both laugh. “That’s really good advice” he says, in a deadpan that sounded all too familiar to me. And then she ends their conversation by telling him that once they’ve gone their separate ways he can pick a fight with a super soldier if he wants to. She never tries to tell him he’s wrong to feel depressed, or that he needs to fight against the sadness, or that he should find a reason to live. On the one hand, this is terrible, and he throws it in her face later on. But it’s also her accepting him where he is—neither demanding he try to be “better”, nor dismissing the reality of his pain.
Later on, Bob riffs on the traditional Marvel “sacrifice play”. But where Steve Rogers throws himself heroically on a grenade without knowing it’s a dud, and Tony Stark flies a nuke through a wormhole even though he thinks it’s a one-way trip, Bob distracts the OXE mercenaries from Yelena, Walker, and Ava by flailing a gun around until they open fire. He doesn’t think he’s going to survive this—he has no idea what his full powers are—so how much of this is a sacrifice for his new friends, and how much is a suicide attempt?
(I really appreciate this movie.)
But obviously if it was just this is wouldn’t work. The film introduces its gauntlet early (but in a mercifully low key way) when Bucky tries to work Valentina’s assistant Mel at a gala, hinting that he can help her if she wants to turn on her boss.
I wasn’t expecting anyone to quote Soren Kierkegaard in a Marvel movie?
The gala is for the “First Responders Family Fund”, a thing Valentina made up to distract everyone from her impeachment hearing. The event treats the artifacts from the Battle for New York as, well, artifacts. Ancient history in glass cases for rich donors to ooh and aah at. And here’s Bucky, himself an ancient artifact, watching everyone gawk at his dead best friend’s lived experience. Mel seems to acknowledge that, in her early-20s wannabe girlboss way. But when she throws out the pithy quote “Life can only be understood backwards” while the two gaze at the “A” from the old Avengers Tower, it’s important to note is that she’s kind of misusing the line.
In the same way that Joan Didion’s “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” is only inspiring if you don’t look at it too close, Kierkegaard’s “It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards” can be read as an acknowledgement of the utter nauseating chaos of life.
We have to live life forwards. It isn’t a choice. None of us asked to be thrown into this thresher. We can’t stop time to look around and weigh our choices, we can never know what’s “right” or “wrong”, or where any of our decision will lead. And if you think about any of that at all, life becomes a waking nightmare.
Bucky seems to have actually read Kierkegaard, because he replies to Mel with the only possible response: the philosopher believed it was up to individuals to create value.
And yeah, he’s trying to entice her away from Valentina, and he’s not very slick about it, but he’s also right. That is all we can do, and this is the underpinning of the movie.
But what about Bob?
The first manifestations of his power are accidental visions of people’s pasts—not just any visions, but a person’s Worst Moment. He holds Yelena’s hand after an explosion, and she witnesses her first horrifying test in The Red Room. Later, when John Walker pulls Bob up from the ventilator shaft, Walker sees a particularly rocky moment of fatherhood, when he was too caught up in a doomscroll to comfort his sobbing baby. Yelena snaps him out of the memory by yelling his name, only for Walker to realize he’s standing on the edge of the shaft again, leaning over, a step away from giving himself to the darkness.
Part of him wanted to die rather than live inside that memory another second.
When we see Bob (knowingly) test his skills for the first time, he’s supposed to move a glass across a table, the exact same telekinetic ability that is demonstrated in Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi classic Stalker—where it’s implied that the telekinesis comes from some form of radiation coming from the Zone, a forbidden site that’s infused with mysterious, possibly alien, possibly mystical, powers. We know Bob has powers from yet another super soldier serum—the only mystery is how he survived when all the other test subjects died. His attempt to slide a glass of water across a table soon mutates into boiling the water, and then shattering the glass. He’s terrified, then exhilarated. (Valentina’s just exhilarated.) Given a chance to control his new abilities, he still can’t do anything as simple as move a glass—he ends up destroying it.
When Bob demonstrates his powers, none of them feel like him. They’re not specific to him—this isn’t Tony Stark or Bruce Banner using their science expertise, Steve Rogers using a shield rather than a gun, Thor using the hammer only he’s worthy to wield. Bob just tosses the Thunderbolts around like ragdolls, and uses a grab bag of powers against them. The only moments that feel like him are his petulant response when Yelena says she knows him, and, at the same time, his refusal to do any lasting damage to them.
Naturally Valentina discards him the second he isn’t useful, and it’s only then, from a place of rejection and abandonment, that his unique power comes to the fore—the power to trap anyone he touches in their worst memories, an endless cycle of shame and self-hatred from which there is, seemingly, no escape.
As he reaches out over Manhattan he “voids” people at random. One moment they’re living breathing people, the next shadows on the pavement. Director Jake Schreier made a point of telling Collider that the shadows are based on the victims of the Hiroshima bombing, a real world, historical reference that underlines the horror of these people being snuffed out by a force they can’t control. If it didn’t work, it would be a terrible thing to reference, but I think it adds to the weight because of the existential dread the film explores.
When we go inside the Void, the promise of those first two “shame rooms” is fulfilled. The Void is a nested nightmare of terrible memories, inescapable, waiting to attack you if you try to fight your way out. Each time you might think you’re free, you find yourself in an even worse room, and there is no counterweight, no balance to remind you of the good days you had, the good things you did. Every atom of your new world tells you that you’re worthless.
Yelena’s first one is the same one we saw before: the first test in the Red Room that determined whether she could kill a friend. She doesn’t have the training to use her hands yet, but does she have the mental fortitude and will to lure a friend to her death? (I wonder if she was docked points for apologizing.) That second room though, when we see young Yelena “win” at assembling a gun—her shame here is that she won. She’s ashamed that her winning led to punishment for the other girls, no matter that at this point her only options are “win the exercise” or “be whipped along with the rest and then have to do the test again anyway.” In her third room, she’s slumped drunk on a bathroom floor, propped up against a clawfoot tub. This one is fascinating to me because the bathroom looks extremely similar to the one where Pugh’s character Jean Tatlock meets her end in Oppenheimer (whether it’s through suicide or murder is left fuzzy, as it was in life) so with the right pair of eyes, this looks more like a botched suicide attempt than just a blackout.
Each time, when she tries to help herself, the past versions attack her, taunt her, or pour vodka down her throat. These things happened. They can’t be undone.
When Yelena finds Bob, he’s hiding in an attic above his dining room. His parents fight, his father hits his mother, Child Bob tries to intervene, his mother tells him he always makes it worse. He claims this is the best of the rooms because at least it’s quiet, but… it isn’t. The fight downstairs echoes up on an endless loop—that this is his best option is heartbreaking. Yelena sits with him and holds his hand, once again being with him rather than trying to “fix” things. She holds his hand even though it was his touch that brought her to her shame room in the first place. And when the rest of the Thunderbolts join them she suggests they go to the “worst” room, intuiting that facing the worst of the darkness might be the way out.
Walker punches Bob’s dad on the way out, an interesting moment of one Bad Dad facing off with another. Bob’s stint as a sign-twirling meth chicken is somewhat treated as a gag—because it’s kind of impossible to treat a sign twirling chicken seriously, meth or no meth. But here’s the thing: the movie never shames Bob for his addiction. Apparently Bob’s medical file elaborates that he got addicted to painkillers as a teen after a car wreck, with prescription opiates providing an on-ramp to illegal stuff just as they have to so many people. But there’s no scene in the film where he tries to justify it, or where anyone blames him, no tearjerking scene of him apologizing for being an addict. His addiction is part of him, just like the Void, just like the part of him that wants to help the team.
I appreciated that while he feels shame over it, the movie doesn’t shame him—addiction is just an illness.
The worst room, where they find Void, is the first place where he voided people. his worst shame isn’t any of the rest of it, it’s that he hurt other ppl, almost certainly accidentally, in a state of shock and terror during a medical experiment.
Even though he doesn’t consciously remember this, part of him feels the worst about this.
And the shame rooms are…. hell. Right? (As Bob says, “There’s no death here, the pain just gets worse.”) Trapped in your worst day, repeating endlessly, and if you do manage to escape, you end up in an even worse situation? At least, this is Hell as defined by Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey—and I’m not convinced a higher theological text exists. Yelena’s even swallowed by a tree in her first room, looking, for a moment, like one of the poor bastards in Dante’s Wood of Suicides.
(Kierkegaard, Tarkovsky, and Dante??? In this economy???)
It’s in my nature and my training to find the Religious Studies angle in everything. If I had to sit at a table with other children and dissect pop culture via religious symbolism, I would absolutely be done first. So it’s not lost on me that the film slaps Kierkegaard down on the table, and then, an hour later, traps us in a popular vision of hell. A nested nightmare of room after room of Worst Moments, with no relief, no escape, no one to tell you it will get better.
As Bob tells Yelena “There’s no death here. The pain just gets worse.”
This isn’t a pocket universe inside the Soul Stone or a realm on an Asgardian map. This is a personal, intimate horror, externalized as a realm that the Void can project, but really, I think, inside each person’s mind.
And how the fuck do you get out of that?
Which brings us to the greatest horror of all: Marvel endings.
Wait, come back, they did it this time! They gave us an ending that felt inevitable! In a good way!
How do you fight yourself?
At first Bob reacts to the Void the same way most Marvel heroes react to their adversaries: PUNCH. PUNCH EVEN MORE. But it’s soon clear that this violence is an extension of his cycle of shame and self-harm. It’s not a solution.
Let me back up a second.
What makes Yelena a great hero, like really a GREAT hero, is that she never says she wants to save the world, or humanity, or New York. She doesn’t want “glory”, or revenge on Valentina. Over and over she says: “We need to save Bob”. She refuses to leave him behind. She stays in front of him in the Vault. During the big fight in the former Avengers Tower, she tries to put herself between him and the other Thunderbolts. She tries to talk him down. When the Void takes over, she’s the one who follows Bob into the dark. Her concern for him keeps her from getting caught in her own shame loop.
She goes in the Void after him pretty much as soon as she clocks what’s happening. She takes a breath to center herself, but there’s no real hesitation. And yet, when the rest of the team come in after her, she’s shocked. She can’t believe that they would all do for her what she did for Bob.
She can’t see herself as worth that—and the thing is, none of them do.
This plays out, and damn near dooms them, when Bob faces the Void.
This is the moment I hoped for from the moment Yelena and Bob had their conversation in the Vault. This was the landing I hoped they’d stick as soon as Kierkegaard entered the chat. If I’m right that Yelena’s shame room contains a glancing nod to Dante.
What Bob is doing is just as self-destructive as a meth habit, or taunting a supersoldier. And what Yelena has to do is decide how to make things right. Not in a giant cosmic jumping-off-a-cliff way, but by dodging all the obstacles the Void throws at her, wrapping her arms around Bob, and saying “I’m here.”
She can’t promise to “fix” him. She can’t tell him they’ll banish the Void forever—who knows?—but she can be there with him. The other Thunderbolts join them, and the villain is finally vanquished—at least for a moment—with love rather than violence.
Thunderbolts* doesn’t claim that everything’s fixed with a magical group hug, but in this case, after so many years of MCU films, even the good ones, resolving in a fight or a CGI sludgefest, this ending feels fucking revolutionary
Even better, Bob explicitly says that he doesn’t know how to be Sentry without the Void also coming out. That darkness is still part of him.
Thunderbolts* works well because it fights the real enemy, and acknowledges, in the end, that you’ll never win that fight.
Here at the end of it I’ll tell you that writing this essay was a struggle. I don’t want to do anything anymore. I want… what do I want? Maybe to curl up under a tree and let myself fall into the earth and let grass grow over me. But I got up and worked on this because I appreciated the work that went into the film, and I wanted to give people a place to think about it. I got up and did this because this movie could have been pure commerce, but instead the filmmakers chose to engage with the reality and emotional carnage of the MCU, and tipped a Marvel movie toward ART. I got up and wrote about it because what we create matters, even now, especially now.
What would Soren Kierkegaard do? Valentina tells Mel that “Righteousness without power is just an opinion… [t]here’s a bad guy, and a worse guy, and nothing else”, but against all odds, the Thunderbolts prove her wrong. There are still good guys, they’re just bruised and depressed.
I got up and wrote about it because I’m glad these characters exist, even if most of them are on the fence about that, and for a couple hours they made me happy to exist with them.