The Gospel According to Thunderbolts: When Nonviolence Wins
*Note: The following article contains spoilers for the Marvel movie Thunderbolts*
For basically my entire adult life, I have been regaled with stories from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. These stories, the comics they are based on, and the genre of superhero fiction as a whole comprise our modern mythologies. Gods and heroes battle demons and villains in an epic struggle for dominance. And while Marvel fatigue is a real thing and the direction of the MCU has felt rather directionless, I nonetheless treated myself to an afternoon showing of Thunderbolts*.
There are a lot of reasons why this is the best film that Marvel has made in some time. Florence Pugh is an incredible actor who brings depth to the character of Yelena. The Marvel quippiness is there, but not quite so over-the-top. Loose threads from previous movies get picked up and continued satisfactorily. The serious and dark themes of dealing with brokenness, depression, and trauma—wrestling with the internal self—is handled in a deep and nuanced way. But the thing that made Thunderbolts* for me was the one decidedly anti-superhero thing that happened in the film.
In the film’s climax, viewers are taken into the mind of Bob, a man who has been experimented upon and been turned into a godlike power called Sentry. But with greater power comes…no, that’s a different superhero. With the power of Sentry comes the equally destabilizing power of the Void. The Void has taken over New York, and here inside Bob’s mind, Bob faces off against the darkness of his self. He seems to get the upper hand and has straddled the Void, raining down punches from above. As he does so, the look in his eyes becomes victorious. He feels powerful. He is winning. He will finally defeat the evil within him. The camera pans back and we see that Bob is being consumed by the darkness. He is becoming part of the Void.
In superhero movies, the problem is nearly always solved by violence. The heroes and gods of our modern mythologies win through the shedding of blood. They win because they are or they become the most powerful, they inflict the most damage, they repay violence for violence. That violence is justified because it stops violence. The message becomes clear that violence is not immoral but amoral—what matters is who is doing the violence to whom and for why. It can make for the best and worst of cinema. And because these gods are gods made in our image, it reflects the best and worst of us as well.
These gods and heroes solve their problems as we would. We are all Bob, lashing out against violence with violence, fighting back against the world’s (and our own) brokenness in ways that make us feel powerful and strong. This, we find, is what consumes us. In decidedly anti-superhero fashion, in Thunderbolts* violence is not what wins the battle.
In their book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Non-Violent Conflict, Erica Chenoweth and her colleague Maria Stephan painstakingly collected data on 323 violent and nonviolent political revolutions in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They counted a campaign as successful if the goal of the resistance had been achieved within one year of the resistance’s peak. What they found was completely antithetical to our natural inclinations: Non-violent campaigns were successful or partially successful 80% of the time. Violent campaigns were successful or partially successful 33% of the time. Chenoweth and Stephan write that “Nonviolent resistance campaigns are more effective in getting results and, once they have succeeded, more likely to establish democratic regimes with a lower probability of a relapse into civil war.” (1)
Resorting to violence usually leads to more violence which usually leads to failure. When Jesus suggests in the Sermon on the Mount that his followers engage in creative acts of protest—turning the other cheek, giving the outer cloak, going the second mile—instead of crass acts of violence, he isn’t only saying this because nonviolence is the way of the kin-dom of God. He says this because the ways of God work.
In the film Thunderbolts*, the rest of the superheroes watching all this take place notice that Bob’s violent reaction to his brokenness is causing him to be consumed by the Void. They break free from the bonds the Void has placed them in and, together as a team pull Bob away from his dark self, ending the violence and ultimately leading them to victory and restoration of everything the Void had destroyed. A key element of the film up to this point had been each character being loner misfits, unable to work with anyone else, every one of them broken in their own ways. They have been a dysfunctional, difficult, and reluctant group of people thrown together against their will. But when they accept that they are a community, when they accept that they are all in this together, when they lay down their weapons and stop the violence—that’s when victory happens.
Chenoweth and Stephan surmise that it is this sense of community—that nonviolent resistance requires a greater number of people working together—that makes nonviolence effective. It’s not the nonviolent protest of an individual that necessarily topples an empire. (Though it can certainly be a beginning, just look toward the Cross to see that.) It’s the presence and engagement of a nonviolent community that lives and breathes a new way of being into the world in the face of violence.
Jesus actually takes the principles of nonviolence one step further and says that not only should we be nonviolent, we must also actively create peace. Nonviolence brings us to neutrality and Jesus was far from neutral. Instead, he calls upon his followers to be peacemakers and actively pursue beauty and blessedness and flourishing of God in this world. Notice that Jesus says “peacemakers.” Peace is something that is made. It is birthed out of nonviolence from a community committed to the simple way of Jesus. You cannot just wish or hope or love or talk about peace. Peacemaking is an active and communal work.
In the active and communal work of the Thunderbolts, the darkness retreats. Evil is rolled back. Everything that had consumed New York City is undone. Peace is restored. The film slows down a bit, allows our heroes to catch their breath and take in their victory. Then, in the film’s denouement, they turn toward the final villain remaining—Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, head of the CIA and a woman desperate to maintain American dominance and power. That desperation is what led her to authorize the experimentation that created Sentry and the Void in the first place.
For years, throughout Marvel movies and TV shows, we’ve seen her behind the scenes consolidating power and creating a nationalistic and self-serving agenda. In Thunderbolts*, she is being threatened with impeachment as CIA Director for her actions. Her only hope to retain power is to present something or someone as a big enough threat to justify her violence. She thought she had created a savior in Sentry, only for him to turn into the Void. But in nonviolently defeating the Void, the Thunderbolts now hold her power. They chase her through a curtain and appear on the other side into a press conference where, as they stand shocked and bewildered, de Fontaine gives them a new name—The New Avengers.
It’s an ingenious twist that furthers Marvel’s purposes, but there is some irony here: a group of hitmen and assassins who have not found fulfillment in that life finally find meaning when—through community and nonviolence—they save the world only to then be given the label Avenger. It kneecaps the movie’s messaging and undercuts the entire thematic premise of the film. They take on that moniker. They accept Valentina’s proposition. The heroes of our own mythologies are, after all, made in our image. In the worlds of superheroes, nonviolence doesn’t last very long except as a plot device. But, if only for a brief moment, Thunderbolts* does pull back the veil and imagine a reality where the simple way of Jesus, the path of nonviolent resistance, is the one practiced by those capable of our greatest violence.
(1) Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Resistance (Columbia University Press, 2011).
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