'Thunderbolts'
A Movie We Probably All Need Right Now
My Grandpa used to do a magic trick with his dog, Halley. He’d tell gullible audiences (usually us kids) that Halley knew how to count. Then he’d hold out a milkbone and tell Halley, “count to eight.” Halley barked at the milkbone exactly eight times—then my Grandpa would gave the dog the bone. She stopped counting at eight… magic.
I enjoyed this trick several (ok, many) times before I realized that the dog would have kept on barking to infinity. It was my Grandpa’s act of giving Halley the bone that got her to stop barking at the right time. In other words, the dog wasn’t counting to eight. My Grandpa was.
Large language models are a little like Halley, the dog. They are exceptional mimics of language use. And we are exceptional users of language. When Halley did something somewhat similar to counting, it gave us kids the impression that the dog was far more capable than she really was. Likewise, when the LLM throws our human languages around like it’s nothing at all, it gives us the impression that it’s far more human than it is.
There was a devastating story in the news last week. A young man was deeply troubled, and instead of taking those troubles to another person, he brought them to a large language model. I know there are some kids who read or listen to these posts (my own included), so I’m going to abstract from the details. You’re welcome to read the terrifying story if you like. Suffice it to say that the model failed to provide the young man the help he needed and the story ends as tragically as you can imagine.
Sometimes, what we need is another human. No matter how convincing it might have looked, my Grandpa’s dog didn’t know how to count. No matter how convincing LLMs might seem, they can’t provide us with human connection. And human connection is something we all need. Sometimes desperately.
I watched Marvel’s Thunderbolts with my family this week. (I don’t think I’m going to get through this without at least some degree of spoiler, so if you’re a Marvel movie purist, you’d better stop reading here).
The movie starts as a comedy. We’re introduced to a kind of Avenger B-Team. Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) who, one gets the sense from several films, is kind of like her sister, Black Widow, but maybe a bit less put-together. We meet John Walker (Wyatt Russell) from Falcon and The Winter Soldier, who has Captain America’s super soldier powers, but not his character. Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kaman) can move through the quantum realm like Ant Man, but unlike that hero, she has remained an outlaw. And Alexi Shostakov (David Harbour), Yelena’s father, was like a Captain America during the Cold War, but for the Soviet Union, not the United States. The team bands together under the leadership of Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) to fight against the latest super-powered threat to peace and security.
The first half of the film yields the obvious humor we look for in parody. The anti-heroes keep finding challenges poorly suited to their powers. Like marshmallows over a fire, they roast one another, but skewer each other first. Even when they are able to work as a team, the teamwork is self-conscious and stilted.
The humor is epitomized in Yelena’s reunion with her father, Alexi. The team, such as it is, is literally wandering through the desert when Alexi arrives with his 1980s-era Soviet-red limousine to rescue them.
Yelena is the first to see the limo approaching on the endless dirt road. “Ohhhhh, no,” she says. “It’s no one,” she insists. “It’s nothing.”
Then, like an over-excited dad doing school pickup for the first time, Alexi leaps from the 80’s-era limo and screams at the top of his lungs, “Yelenaaaa!! It’s your daaaad!!!!”
But the comedy is shortlived.
About half way through, the film takes a dark turn—literally and figuratively. The villain in this film—as in so many in the Marvel franchise—is a person of questionable judgment who has been given all at once immense physical power. In other films, such villains are defeated in the physical universe: Red Skull, Zemo, Galactus, Killmonger, Klaue, and that’s not even to mention the Spiderman baddies.
This movie is different though. What is at stake is power that borders on god-like in the hands of man called Bob. Bob’s whole life has been characterized by, as he puts it, “a high, then there’s a big low.”
Yelena, who is dealing with her own emotional low, says to Bob, “Loneliness? I get that. I get it. And that darkness is pretty enticing. And then it starts to feel a bit like, um…”
“A void?” Bob finishes her sentence.
“Yep,” Yelena admits.
This exchange takes place in the first half of the movie—during the comedy. Yelena tells Bob, laughing all the while, that the best thing to do with those emotions is to shove them down, just as deep as you can.
The first half of the movie, the comedy, is the high. It is followed by “a big low.”
Bob’s power, combined with his emotional low sends the whole city into a devastating (and deadly) depression that, we can only assume, will eventually consume the whole world. (I’m trying very hard not to give away details here, you really should watch for yourself).
Then the dramatic shift: Our anti-heroes don’t try to defeat the bad guy in physical space, as The Avengers might have done. No. Yelena dives headlong into the void not knowing whether it will kill her. She does so, not because she wants to meet death, but because she wants to save Bob and to save everyone else.
“Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.”
The rest of the anti-Team trusts Yelena and follows suit. They dive headlong into the void. Each of them has suffered. Each of them understands—at least to some degree—what Bob’s “low” must be like. And each is willing to descend into that darkness, they hope, not to live there forever. They descend into the darkness in the hope that they might grab hold of Bob and pull him back into the light.
And what, you might ask, are the means by which they achieve their victory? Is it an infinity stone from another world? Is it a top-secret serum; or a radioactive spider; an alien race; or space radiation; a biomechanical suit of armor? No. The B-team anti-heroes save the day, not with Asgardian hammers nor with genetically modified Hulks—but with a hug.
They literally hug Bob back from the depths into which he had fallen.
I don’t know why that part of the movie hit me so hard, but it did. It hit me hard enough that I thought I should tell you about it.
Ours is the generation of bowling alone. Our children’s is the generation of media that is anything but social. In our time—and more importantly, in our children’s—mobs are easier to find than friendships. We’ve created systems that make it very easy to hurt each other and very hard to hug each other.
By the end of the movie, Yelena tells Bob, “what I said to you before was wrong, Bob. You can’t stuff it down. You can’t hold it in all alone. No one can. We have to let it out. We have to spend time together. And even if it doesn’t make the emptiness go away, I promise you it will feel lighter, because it already has for me.”
I don’t know your situation or the situation of the people around you. But given the current state of affairs, I can predict with near statistical certainty that someone in your life needs a hug. Don’t make it weird, but do think about it. And in the meantime, watch Thunderbolts. Behind the Marvel jokes and superhero costumes, there is a real kind of truth.
Credit where it’s due
Views Expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any part of the US Government.