Thunderbolts*’ depression story has one painful flaw

The latest Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, Thunderbolts*, is baldly and emphatically about dealing with depression. It opens with state-assassin-turned-mercenary-assassin Yelena​​ Belova (Florence Pugh) in voiceover, musing about the “emptiness” that characterizes her life, how she can’t enjoy or connect to things the way she used to. The story repeatedly touches on different ways people self-medicate to survive the loss of hope, from alcohol and drugs to a variety of forms of emotional suppression. The action climax has the heroes physically battling a powerful, destructive manifestation of one character’s bottomless despair and self-hatred.​​ Trust a superhero movie to find a way to let someone punch depression in the face — a cathartic act for those of us who’ve gone through these particular mental health struggles, though not a practical solution outside of a fantasy setting.

Even in the middle of a long wave of horror movies that turn anxiety and PTSD into literal monsters, though, it’s strange to see Marvel turning mental health crisis management into a punch-’em-up, in a movie that’s as much cinematic therapy (and exploration of complex PTSD, exposure therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy) as it is action-adventure story. And it’s even odder to get to the end of the film and see what’s missing. The Thunderbolts* writers, with director Jake Schreier, get some things right about this kind of mental illness. But having navigated depression myself, I squirmed at parts of the messaging, particularly at the movie’s climax. As much as the filmmakers want to leave viewers with positive, even actionable messages about mental health, parts of those messages land oddly for those of us who’ve been there.

[Ed. note: Major spoilers ahead for Thunderbolts*, including end spoilers.]

For much of the movie, Yelena is the face of depression in the movie’s central metaphor. A lot of her arc throughout this film involves her analyzing and fighting her own hopelessness and weariness, then trying to connect with other people when she recognizes the same emotions in them. At times, she blows up at anyone trying to connect with her in return. One of the movie’s most purposefully painful scenes features her railing at her dad figure Red Guardian (David Harbour) about how guilt, grief, and isolation have taken over her life, and eventually turning on all the other heroes she’s been tentatively connecting with, doing everything she can to tear them down emotionally as well.

But the movie’s real conflict involves Bob (Lewis Pullman), an experimental test subject who Yelena and three other mercenaries — John Walker from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Ghost from Ant Man and The Wasp, and the ill-fated Taskmaster from Black Widow — meet in a bunker where they’ve all been set up to die. As the merc team tries to figure out how to escape the bunker alive, Bob says he has no value to them, and it would be better for everyone if he just remained locked up down below. Yelena immediately recognizes this as a self-destructive impulse akin to her own, and tries to counsel and comfort Bob, and help him see his own worth. In the process, she’s talking herself through her own depression as much as she’s trying to help him fight his.

Later, though, Bob gets a bigger jolt of self esteem from the movie’s villain, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), who tries to set him up as Sentry, a hero completely under her control. That plan falls apart, unleashing the Void, a powerful force that drags everything around it into shadow. It’s about as literal a depiction of depression as you’re likely to see on screen — especially since the whole time the Void is blanketing Manhattan in darkness and blasting its inhabitants into dark smudges, it’s whispering bleak messages about the futility of struggle, the pointlessness of everything, and especially how laughable he considers Bob’s fleeting attempts at self worth.

Anyone who’s fought depression — clinical and ongoing, short-term and conditional, or anything in between — will recognize some of the Void’s toxic messaging, and will see it as a metaphor for that inner voice that whispers, You’ve messed everything up or Your friends don’t really care about you or You have no value or just Give up, there’s no point in trying. It’s easy to sympathize with Bob’s frustration with that voice, and his desire to pound it into submission. Thunderbolts*’ smartest insight is that his rage and frustration aren’t much use in fighting the Void: They give him the nerve and impetus to resist it, but they aren’t a solution on their own. The usual dynamics of superhero films aside,​​ violence isn’t the answer here.

Instead, the answer turns out to be a group hero-hug, a verbal reminder that Bob isn’t alone, and an admission that sometimes, the best we can hope for is company in misery. That can be a powerful idea: One of the worst parts of chronic depression is the feeling of being exiled, distanced from everyone else, locked into a poisonous little world where your thoughts run in circles, and every self-defeating impulse and thought feeds the next one. The group hug breaks the cycle for Bob, and lets him see outside the hallucinatory world he’s built for himself — a place where he both relives and hides from his most traumatizing memories. The Thunderbolts/New Avengers team hauls him back into the real world, where he can start healing.

That’s a solid metaphor, and an effective cinematic way of externalizing a largely internal conflict. (It works similarly well in Laika’s ParaNorman, another movie where a hero has to dive into a villain’s fantasy headspace, navigate their trauma, and break their cycle of misery with a simple “I understand your suffering and you aren’t alone.”) But it misses one big issue with depression, the aspect of the movie that most made me shrink in my seat in the theater: the sense of shame that comes with needing this kind of help, and with putting this much weight and demand on other people.

There’s a comforting fantasy in the idea that even though everyone in Thunderbolts* is navigating major traumas of their own, they’re all capable of temporarily setting their personal issues aside to focus on comforting and supporting Bob. Granted, they don’t have much choice, given that he’s encompassing the world in nightmarish darkness. Still, the film frames that group hug as an act of caring and empathy, not desperation or grudging heroic obligation. His easy ability to absorb that comfort when it comes, though, to take on Yelena’s message of companionship as a real fix for his loneliness, and to do it without embarrassment — to me, that felt harder to believe than MCU multiverses or magic, and almost toxic itself in its lack of weight or complexity.

I’ve been through this kind of crisis myself, facing my own mental health struggles or trying to help friends navigate theirs. And shame is often a major factor, both as an ongoing part of the larger weight of depression and, in moments like these, where long-simmering melancholy reaches a boiling point. It’s hard to accept help. It’s hard to admit to problems. The societal view of depression holds that everyone should be strong, independent, and self-contained, and that it should be embarrassing to demand other people’s time, attention, or love.

More personally, when everyone around you is in crisis, it feels selfish to demand special attention or to compound the demands other people are facing. It makes sense that the Thunderbolts* filmmakers didn’t want to send Bob down a shame spiral when he returns to the real world, complicating the movie’s feel-good beat with a second breakdown. But their solution is to make him cheerfully oblivious about the trials he’s put the rest of the world through. That lack of self-awareness becomes even more awkward and unpleasant when his condition is played for comedy.

By the end of the climactic battle in Thunderbolts*, the Void has been temporarily vanquished, and Bob is back in the real world as a mostly normal human. But he has no memory of anything he just went through, or any of the havoc his friends suffered because of him. Standing in the wreckage of the Manhattan block he destroyed minutes earlier, almost killing dozens of people with falling wreckage before almost obliterating millions with his powers, he’s blithely unaware of the trouble he’s caused. His memory lapse is treated like a gag, but it’s a horrific story beat. He hasn’t learned anything from his experiences. He isn’t capable of gratitude for what his friends just went through to help him. And he isn’t capable of returning their care, or offering support in return.

Some aspects of the final Bob confrontation felt entirely authentic to me — the specific undermining whispers the Void has for him, say, or Bob’s confused veering between anger and despair. There’s certainly wisdom in the admission that while no one can fill the gaping hole inside someone else, we can at least share our experiences, commiserate with other people, and work around that feeling of being alone.

Even so, I was shocked how uncomfortable I felt with the idea of him making his problem into everyone else’s problem, forcing all the other characters to drop everything to take care of him. The problem isn’t just that he needs help, because we all need help from time to time. It’s the way his need eclipses everyone else’s — and then the way that once his needs are met, he’s breezily happy and disengaged from the struggles all his friends are facing. It’s a bizarrely lighthearted transition away from the film’s heavier look at depression. And it’s certainly a harsh way to portray caretaking, as a crucial yet hilariously thankless and kind of unfulfilling job.

The obvious implication here is that Bob might return to being the Void at some point, and that in the meantime, the other members of his team will have to navigate their own crises without any meaningful input from him. They’re learning how to form a community and support each other, but he’s set up as an endless drag on their empathy and energy and resources, with nothing to contribute and no sense of self-awareness about it. For someone who’s had to ask others for help, this version of Bob is humiliating all on its own — a portrayal of depression as a kind of bottomless, oblivious selfishness.

For me, that image is more frightening than the Void itself. Possibly the only good things that come from navigating a mental health crisis are the ability to recognize the symptoms and navigate them more effectively the next time whenever they surface again, and the ability to see the signs in other people and connect with them. Maybe Bob’s value to the group is in serving as an example, training the team to trust each other more, showing them how to selflessly respond to and support each other through their various crises. Maybe it’s fine that he’s the guy who showed up at the potluck with an opened package of napkins, while everyone else spent hours whipping up homemade food, because it’s not his fault he doesn’t know how to feed himself, and there’s still enough food to go around.

Certainly I appreciate that Bob is able to hear and accept the message that he isn’t alone. In the real world, that kind of connection can be difficult to internalize, and difficult to believe or accept as help in the midst of a depressive episode. And I appreciate that the Thunderbolts* writers (original writer Eric Pearson and a rewrite team including Beef writer Lee Sung Jin and The Bear’s showrunner/co-creator Joanna Calo) have the sense to not portray the big hug-it-out moment as a permanent, magical fix to Bob’s problems: At best, it’s an interruption in the pattern, and a suggestion of a path forward for his friends, who are all facing their own mental health battles. It’s a sensible reminder that every depression episode is its own unique challenge, and sometimes just surviving the moment is enough.

But leaving Bob as a permanent broken stair in his friend group, the amiable, adorkable, hapless dude who just might explode at any moment, feels like a horror. Bob isn’t completely oblivious by the end of the movie — presumably his friends have filled him in on what they went through with him. He isn’t fixed, and he knows it. But he’s doing the work: reading a self-help book (Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being), avoiding behavior he knows triggers his depression, expressing his needs to other people. (Not shown: therapy, medication, or learned therapeutic techniques like CBT.) He’s stable, for the moment, and he’s consciously practicing self-care. Certainly that’s more of a kindness than leaving him wallowing in shame and guilt over everything the Void nearly did.

Still, in a movie that’s so much about positive messaging — whispered counterarguments to the Void, parallel messages that say, You aren’t alone in this, other people have been here too and Your friends really do care about you, you just need to let them in — I don’t know what Bob’s shameless, comfortable complacency at the end really gets us, except a sense that it’s kind of funny to be needy, damaged, and destructive. Some of this response, I recognize, is my own Void still whispering back at me, identifying with the villainous parts of Bob instead of the human ones.

But I’ll stand by this as long as I’m fighting my own mental health fight: I’d rather be part of the team, fighting through my own embarrassment and pain to try to hug people and help them, than to be Bob, causing problems I don’t even see, and then walking away smiling afterward. I’ve known a lot of people fighting this kind of inner war, and I’ve fought it myself, for most of my life. None of us are as complacent about it as Bob, or as willing to let other people do all the work on our behalf. And it feels a wee bit cavalier to put him through this titanic battle — to go through the thoughtful work of humanizing mental health struggles and portraying them as a heroic battle against evil — and then robbing Bob of the chance to really process anything he’s experienced, or take a meaningful role in his own recovery.