In 2003, when audiences first sat down in the theater to experience Ang Lee’s latest film Hulk, an expectation already loomed large over the film. Lee, fresh off of the success of his cross-cultural smash Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), was seen as a new Hollywood player — given the keys to a $120 million superhero vehicle at a time when the success or failure of one film could make-or-break a career. This, coupled with an unexpected renaissance of the genre with the successes of 2000’s X-Men and 2002’s Spider-Man, acted as the proverbial albatross around his neck. Lee wasn’t interested in making a film about teenagers in spandex swinging through the sky and saving senators from projectile bombs. Lee’s interests laid firmly in the subconscious or, more specifically, the repression and eventual domination of man’s Id.
It was clear that Lee’s thematic interests didn’t align with those of the film’s target audience. Upon its initial release, the film was seen as a confounding object, dividing critics and befuddling audiences. Those who expected something similar in tone to Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man instead received something whose closest thematic relative was David Cronenberg’s The Fly. Upon seeing the film, one thing was very clear: Lee had used the blank check he’d received from the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to shanghai a studio into making a $120 million psycho-sexual monster movie that shares more DNA with Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex than with anything Stan Lee or Steve Ditko had ever written.
The parallels between Hulk and the Universal Classic Monster canon isn’t merely subtextual, with Lee drawing many visual allusions to the latter within the text of the film. The most explicit of these references happens during Bruce Banner’s (Eric Bana) initial transformation sequence, which borrows many shots from George Waggner’s 1941 film The Wolf Man. Both films use the imagery of the feet and legs changing in the beginning of the transformation — in The Wolf Man, Larry Talbot takes off his shoes and pants to discover that a mountain of hair has grown on him but Lee takes this one step further, showing Bruce’s shoe burst open as his foot begins to swell. Uncoincidentally, both of these transformation scenes are shrouded by heavy fog (or, in the case of Hulk, mist from sprinklers) and are preceded by some sort of traumatic incident, such as getting attacked by a wolf in the case of The Wolf Man or being trapped in a gamma radiation explosion like in Hulk. The similarities to the monster movies of yesteryear are not solely in the film’s aesthetics, however. The trauma experienced by the protagonists of both films not only acts as a catalyst for the physical transformations that they must endure, but also as visual metaphors for the repressed Id that finally comes to the forefront as a result of the destruction of the Ego and Superego.
In his 1923 work The Ego and the Id, psychologist Sigmund Freud proposed that there exists a psychological hierarchy of the unconscious mind. He posits that our desires and actions are mediated by three distinct sections of our subconscious: The Id, the Ego, and the Superego, respectively. The Id is a repository of our most primal desires, most of which seemingly involve some sort of deviant or latent sexuality. The Superego acts as the moralistic center of the subconscious mind, acting as the diametric opposition to the base drive of the Id. The Ego acts as the mediator for these two extremes, retaining some of the base desires of the Id and some of the self-reflexive qualities of the Superego. Lee uses these basic psychoanalytic principles to form the psychology of Bruce Banner, who begins the film less as a fully realized character and more as a representation of a human being existing solely under the influence of their Superego. Bruce exists in the film’s opening sequence as a symbol of pedantic moralism, his opening exchange with Harper (Kevin Rankin) about the importance of always wearing a bike helmet taking this to its most literal extreme. This existence under the reign of the Superego stands in direct opposition to Bruce’s disposition after he’s exposed to gamma radiation, his transformation into the Hulk acting as the destruction of the Superego and the eventual domination of pure Id. This shift in his character’s subconscious state is clearly represented in his actions after he has transformed into the Hulk, doing nothing more than committing acts of wanton destruction and lusting after Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly) — a woman who not only resembles Bruce’s mother, but is possibly the only person who can cause Bruce’s Superego to regain control of his subconscious. Betty’s role as a caregiver is by no coincidence, as Freud states in his book, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, that the Superego supplants the Id as the dominant subconscious force during early childhood, around the time of the development of the Oedipal Complex. Lee observes this relationship not only in the ways in which the characters’ subconscious drives their actions, but in the way their narrative resembles that of a Greek tragedy, or a subversion therein.
Throughout much of Hulk’s runtime, Lee chooses to focus on the relationship and eventual destruction of a father and his son. Integral to the plot is Bruce’s relationship with his father, David (Nick Nolte), a character who’s driven by his desire to destroy his son. Textually, this is due to David’s experimentation on Bruce as a young boy leading to his transformation into the Hulk. Subtextually, however, this yearning for destruction can be read as a response to Bruce’s Oedipal Complex. David’s line to Betty Ross proclaiming “I see what he sees in you” suggests that he is aware of his son’s subconscious lust for his mother. Though the premise acts as a subversion of the structure of a Greek tragedy on its surface, the film ultimately conforms to thematic archetypes of the Greek tragedy in its climax. The transformation of Bruce and David into pure elemental forms and Bruce’s subsequent destruction of his own father resembles that of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, which sees the titular protagonist murdering his father, Laius, by throwing him from a chariot. Lee, using the structure of a Greek tragedy compounded with Bruce being driven by his uncontrollable Id, makes the journey of our protagonist not heroic, but horrific, distinguishing it from much of the superhero cinema coming out at that time. (There’s no greater evidence for this than the dropping of the definite article ‘the’ from the film’s title, the singular Hulk conjuring images of pain and monstrosity rather than pride or heroism.)
Though reviled at the time of its release, Ang Lee’s Hulk has reached a new audience that views the film as a cult object, its many idiosyncrasies revealing thematic sensibilities more aligned with the works of Godard and Cronenberg rather than the works of Raimi or Donner. With its bizarre editing choices and disturbing imagery involving body dysmorphia, the film sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe. Though its objective quality has been contested, one thing is for certain: in the new Hollywood of micromanaged franchises and uninhibited mediocrity, a superhero film with a vision this singular and beguiling will never exist again.
