For a while during the presidency of Donald Trump, female anger was a big topic of discussion. Women in general and American women in particular had, as the Australians say, had a gutful, and via movements (#MeToo), books (Good and Mad by Rebecca Traister), and the 2017 Women’s March, public expressions of this feeling were prominent. Things have deteriorated since then, thanks in large part to the ultra-conservatives on the supreme court, but five years after about half a million women marched on Washington, at least we have a handy new symbol of female rage: She-Hulk.
You’re familiar, of course, with the original Hulk, a scientist, Dr Banner, who, after “accidental overexposure to gamma radiation”, turned green and threw things every time he got mad. In the late-70s TV show, he was played in his transformed state by the bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno. More recently, Mark Ruffalo and a lot of CGI carried the character in the Avengers franchise. Now Disney+ has updated the idea with a large, green lady monster who works in LA and would rather not be a superhero, given the lack of benefits or career progression. She is the former deputy district attorney Jennifer Walters, or as the show’s title has it, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.
This would be an unremarkable spin-off if the premise didn’t touch on larger anxieties, or the show didn’t seek vaguely to own the political side of its DNA. Tatiana Maslany, who plays both Walters and her alter ego, throws people through walls, smashes furniture and creates a sonic boom that flattens palm trees just by clapping her hands. She also speaks directly to camera, Fleabag-style, to pass commentary on the action and prosecute a studiously ironic tone familiar to fans of all those Chris Hemsworth Avenger movies. (Is it Hemsworth? Or the other one? I can never get my Chrises straight.) Anyway, the effect is to enjoy the drama while opening up space to recognise the evolution of the character and the social and political context she moves in.
And this Hulk is very different from her male forerunners. In the male version, the Hulk bursts out of his shirt and for a solid five minutes grunts, grimaces and lifts cars above his head in an expression of sheer, uncontrollable rage. Walters, by contrast, has total mastery over her Hulk side. She can, while Hulking out, still fulfil her contractual obligations to her corporate law firm, as long as she is wearing enough spandex to accommodate the transformation. She may lose her shoes and one sleeve of her jacket, but she is otherwise broadly presentable. She doesn’t make cavewoman sounds. She speaks in her regular voice. She is sufficiently composed to roll her eyes at the behaviour of those around her.
Jessica Gao, the creator of the show, has done this knowingly. In the pilot, while training to be a more effective Hulk with her Hulk cousin (Ruffalo), Walters gives him a lecture about female rage and the necessity of containment. She is, she explains to him, moved to anger every single day when some guy shouts obscenities at her in the street, or seeks to explain her own expertise back to her. Anger-management is, she says slowly, while he does a series of very slow blinks, a prerequisite for all women, who must maintain a calm exterior even as their ego assumes the shape of a 6 ft 7in monster.
When the public comes up with the name “She-Hulk”, she complains bitterly about the unfairness: “I can’t even exist without being a derivative of the Hulk.” And if there was an option to turn down the job, she would: “I didn’t go to law school and rack up six figures in debt to become a vigilante hired by narcissists and billionaires.” It’s all very jolly and by episode three, when Tim Roth shows up as the reformed villain Abomination, I defy anyone to stop watching.
Still, there is a part of one that longs for something a bit less arch, a bit less Disney and more Marina Abramović. In the late 1970s, the Incredible Hulk ended each week with Dr Banner walking mournfully down a deserted highway, moving on from whatever chaos his Hulk side had caused, a man ennobled and shunned by his suffering. Jennifer Walters ends each episode in perky triumph, leaving one to wonder what it might look like if she really lost it one day, became incandescent with anger and went so far as to do something that fully messed up her hair. (She’d be dismissed as crazy, of course.)
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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