I indulged myself slightly this weekend, taking in two films alongside the usual two performances: four hours in the big cinema watching CGI graphics and working class Londoners fight each other. I have always been reluctant to critique cinema- partially because there are so many critics out there, but also to have a single art-form that I could watch for pure pleasure.
Half-way through Hulk, I realised that the only pleasure that I was likely to get from this movie was to apply some perversely pseudo-intellectual aesthetics to the stop-start action. Few people realise that Hulk is one of Marvel’s weaker properties. Unlike Iron man or Captain America (but like the original incarnation of the X-Men), Hulk did not start his comics career with a bang. He was cancelled after five or so issues. Given that he was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, this makes him a misfire.
Stan the Man and Jack the King persevered with Hulk, shoe-horning him into the Avengers and playing on the obvious and exciting tension between the usual super-men (flawed but noble) and this awkward combination of Frankenstein, Golem, Jekyll and Hyde. They rightly realised that as an iconic figure, Hulk had legs. But at the same time, they were encountering the limitations of his character. The past forty years of Hulk comics have been, more or less, variations on the plot of The Fugitive.
A few writers did manage to give Hulk some depth: Peter David’s extended run invented a new Hulk personality, fleshing out the trauma that led to Banner’s habitual suppression of rage- which fuelled Hulk’s smashing. Ironically, for such an obvious loner, Hulk has been a brilliant team character. The early Avengers stories revolve around their attempts to get Hulk to play nice, and a minor team, The Defenders, was held together by the constant challenge of keeping Hulk under control.
The film, however, doesn’t grapple with any of this- although the late appearance of Iron Man does hint at a future Avengers movies. It just has the usual Swiss clock rotation of scientific Banner, trying to chill, and angry Hulk, trying to get his words out. The relationships between Hulk, Banner, his girlfriend Betty and her dad- and Hulk’s nemesis- Thunderbolt Ross are reduced to filler until Hulk can get his rampage on.
And while the last film was not seen as a success- hence the new actors and director- it shared this problem.
And that is because it is Hulk’s problem. Hulk is a superb idea- a fine example of Kirby and Lee’s ability, unknowingly, to dredge up an image that is the perfect expression of an idea. In Hulk and Banner, they tapped into the same angst as the Marxist philosophers, Adorno and Habermas. To oversimplify them terribly, they noted that the advances of science and humanism seemed to correlate with sudden outbursts of violent irrationalism. Bruce Banner, the compassionate scientist, the man of reason, gives way to Hulk, the big smashing monster. Whether he is a symbol of nuclear power, genetic tampering or Nazism, Hulk represents the uncomfortable split between reason and violence.
Symbols are great, but they are hard things to include within a narrative. It is especially hard within a medium like cinema, which has increasingly embraced a literalist realism. Allegory, as an aesthetic genre, has fallen out of fashion and ‘poetic licence’ is a mere defence than an underlying principle.
Hulk- like most superheroes- is ripe for allegory. Deepening the character is a process to deepen the allegory. The film, sadly, went the other way. It attempted to imagine the Hulk in a real universe. Since Hulk’s very physicality breaks several laws of physics, this is a doomed effort.
But there, hush. Hulk has transformed back and is punching buildings again. I am happy with that.