A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

The Incredible Hulk, or rather, Bruce Banner and not the Hulk himself, is one of the greatest characters ever created. I can already hear the groans of undead snobs rolling over in their graves and preparing to claw their way up through the dirt and grass (and maybe concrete) just so they can sink their decaying teeth into me and eat my brains for daring to say something so sacrilegious, but bear with me. In his very conception, the Hulk has every bit as much to say about humanity as The Lord of the Flies or any other treasure of literature, because he’s a metaphor for the constant struggle we all face to reconcile our animal natures with the demands of civilization. Everyone has a raging beast of some sort within, whether it has humungous fists and a hard right jab or maybe just a really acid tongue, and everyone has to struggle to restrain that beast in order to get along with other people and fit into society. To borrow a term from Ursula K. Le Guin, the Hulk is just a literalization of the metaphor of that beast, and as such, you can do virtually anything with him. He’s a fantastic tool for writing stories that are not only exciting and larger than life, but also deep, emotional, philosophical, and universal.

The latest attempt at bringing the Hulk to a wide audience, though, The Incredible Hulk (starring the great Edward Norton as Bruce Banner and an unfortunate CGI creation as the Hulk) fails to realize most of that potential, because the creative team behind the film turned the struggle within Bruce Banner from a war between his two natures — and by extension, all our two natures — into a detached clinical problem involving pulse rates and some multicolored goop that can be viewed under a microscope. I’m not saying science fiction (or the trappings thereof) shouldn’t be involved in a Hulk story; that would be silly. But instead of Banner struggling with his own impulses towards anger, his own desire to smash, and his own very obvious need to civilize himself and maintain the restraint of civilization at all times, we just see him watching a heart rate monitor and trying to keep the number from getting too high when he runs. In other words, the writers turned the Hulk from a tragic flaw that arises from Banner’s very nature into an arbitrary problem that could have happened to anyone, and in so doing they stripped the universal, relatable metaphor out of the story and thus deprived the audience of an absolutely essential point of emotional identification — the very thing that makes a story work in the first place.

I imagine they did this to try to make Banner more “likeable”, since that’s one of the big watchwords in the studio system nowadays, and a guy with an anger management problem doesn’t necessarily seem “likeable” on the surface, but that’s what good writing is all about: making a flawed and very human person likeable anyway so that we all care about his struggle.

The movie is actually both more successful and somewhat more sadly flawed than I’ve let on, though, because in other areas, the writers did take some advantage of the metaphor. With the exception of true, dyed-in-the-wool, no-exceptions pacifists, most people probably agree that anger and even violence have their place and are sometimes appropriate. Killing someone in self-defense when he’s trying to cut your heart out with a chainsaw, for example, or defending a child from a marauding priest with a raging hard-on, would probably seem appropriate to most people. The key is deciding where and when violence and anger are appropriate, and using them only in those times and places — and then only in appropriate measures. With Emil Blonsky, the villain of the film (played wonderfully by Tim Roth) we get the perfect foil for the twin characters of Banner and Hulk: someone who wants to be all id all the time and has no use whatsoever for restraint. In fact, in turning himself into the Abomination, he completely and utterly repudiates civilization and thus creates the ultimate justification — indeed demand — for Banner to let the Hulk loose: to defend ordinary civilized people from monsters like Blonsky.

As far as it goes, this is absolutely terrific writing.  Banner and the audience both get to see the consequences of embracing anger (e.g. the Hulk) without any kind of limit, and Banner is also forced to learn that sometimes the Hulk (i.e. anger) is actually a necessary and good thing.  The problem is that Banner’s decision to willingly become the Hulk and fight the Abomination hasn’t been set up as the culmination of a struggle within himself between his desire to be peaceful and his very human urge to lash out. It’s not the resolution of a character arc in which he finally realizes he’s been trying to make a false choice and he suddenly has to look at everything he thinks he knows in a whole new light. It’s not even a particularly meaningful character arc point at all, because Banner has been so sanitized and stripped of depth that the choice doesn’t actually mean very much at all.

Instead, Banner just sits around sulking about how bad it sucks to be him and how he can’t be with the woman he loves and everyone’s chasing him and it’s just not fair, and then some shit happens, the end. There’s some good, fun stuff in the movie, but overall, it’s a big missed opportunity, and the money folks could’ve made a heckuva lot more money off their investment if they’d just paid more attention to the script.  It’s understandable that they didn’t, because they’re money people after all, not script people, and script people need money people just as much as money people need script people, but the problems in communication between the two are a subject for another day.