Why ‘The Hulk’ is a Broken Character, and How I’d Fix It

photo credit: Paulo Gabriel

It would seem that all power has gone out of the Hulk metaphor. Recent films show him to be thoughtful and moral. My son has a board book that reads, “When little Bruce gets really excited, he becomes a big green playing machine!” Something is off–the Hulk is a concept that, if given proper treatment, should terrify and enlighten us the way similar transformation myths affected past generations.

Before I read the first installment of The Ultimates, a comic written by Mark Millar, I had never considered the character seriously. In this version, however, Banner exists with a sense of hopeless desperation, because his actions have consequences. Banner transforms and tears through Manhattan, killing 300 people and destroying several buildings.

That treatment, while rare, is a more accurate depiction of uncontrollable rage and why it’s something to be feared. Having a baby, as I do, makes one more acutely attuned to the dynamics of anger and consequence, and that is why I find myself wanting this modern myth to accurately reflect what I now know–that at 4AM, under the influence of 3 hours of loud screaming and many days of fatigue, anyone’s eyes may turn green, and it is at that moment that the Hulk story has meaning.

At that moment, life and circumstance become impalpable villains, and to lash out in anger is to become temporarily insane, to attack 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, wives are beaten and people are murdered.

I think the idea of the Hulk should terrify us. Banner is an interesting and compelling character exactly because the consequences of his anger are so enormous. As long as the enemy is his anger, the premise has meaning, but as soon as the villain is another, and all that anger is responsibly and predictably channeled, the premise changes entirely. Rage is replaced by strength, and we’re 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 a compelling and dangerous internal struggle.

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

Original stock photo: Darkmaiden

The Hulk

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, yet he lives in fear; he wonders why only he was spared in the tragedy. He is mentally damaged and people generally avoid him.

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.

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 many ways, but while I 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. After this point, Bruce would become the wandering, self-aware danger.

I would end the first part there, with a second being the frustrated wandering of a presumed dead, well-intentioned scientist trying unsuccessfully to avoid being a walking disaster, borrowing a few poignant emotions from Trigun. This second part could end with tragedy and failure, or self-mastery and a cure.

I would choose a cure, and use the third part as the tragic reversal. Millar put this idea of the cure to excellent use. I don’t know if he said why Betty left him, but I would have her do the same, and it would be because the cured Banner was no longer the dangerous type to which she was attracted. Then, as in Millar, when Banner purposefully turns himself again, blind with longing for Betty, he would truly become a villain worth writing (there are so few): in this case, a purposeful, pathetic, raging, dangerous maniac who cares only for deadening his own pain with blind, destructive noise.

And that’s a Hulk story worth telling.