The Hulk Is a 9: An Enneagram Adventure | Epilogue: “More to You Than You Like to Show”

What follows is an epilogue to a running series on the Enneagram. For previous posts, click here.

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The Hulk, it can at last be acknowledged, does not exist. He was the figment of Stan Lee’s imagination when he was introduced to the world more than fifty years ago. He’s been a comic book character, a television character, a cartoon character, and a movie character. He has never been flesh and blood.

So a series of posts like this is something other than a diagnosis of an actual, lived personality. This series has been, essentially, an extended confession. In labeling the Hulk an enneagram 9, I have been projecting onto this fictional being what I think is true of myself. I suspect any person of any enneagram type could have done something similar, finding quirks of the character that echo back some basic truth about themselves. A friend recommended I assign an Avenger to every type, but I think for me this deep dive with the Hulk has been more intellectually honest. In any event I’ve found it a helpful excuse to try to better understand myself.

At the outset of this series I said I would disregard the two official Hulk movies. They were both released before the Mark Ruffalo version of the character was introduced as part of the fully conceived Marvel universe. I’m still inclined to disregard the Ed Norton film — as good an actor as he is, that film seemed most interested in blowing stuff up. (It was, incidentally, retrofitted as part of the Avengers continuity when a scene featuring Tony Stark was tacked onto the credits. I mention this only to shore up my nerd cred.)

But I recently revisited the Ang Lee-directed film simply titled Hulk. I loved that movie when it was released back in 2003, and while its virtual lack of CGI effects leaves it looking pretty dated today, it still stands as the most thorough exploration of the character.

We first meet not Bruce Banner but his father, David, a scientific genius who becomes obsessed with discovering a cure for a genetic deformity he has accidentally passed to his son. His compulsiveness gets worse as Bruce grows from an infant to a toddler, ultimately getting him fired from his job, bringing calamity to his community, and subjecting his home to tragic violence.

Enneagram scholar Chris Heuertz identifies our parents’ inevitable inability to shield us from the tragedy of the world, and our subsequent efforts as small children to recover some safety and security, as a seminal moment in our formation in enneagram types. We create “programs for happiness” (borrowing from Fr. Thomas Keating) that demonstrate insight into what’s going on around us, but we are simply not mature or sophisticated enough to count the cost of these programs, even as we increasingly rely on them to order our worlds for us.

Young Bruce gets hurt while playing with a friend. He doesn’t cry, even though he’s obviously in pain. A neighbor parent is surprised, but Bruce’s mom is not. “Bruce is like that,” she says, with a sigh of resignation. “He’s just really bottled up.”

Bruce learned this response to trauma. His dad is combustible; it does no good to add to the stress of a moment. Even as his mother screams in terror and his father runs toward him with mania in his eyes and a knife in his hands, Bruce sits still, watching passively. He loses both parents that day, but he fully realizes the persona that will accompany him into adulthood.

Inevitably our programs for happiness betray us. St. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 13 that to mature is to leave childish things behind us, and we might be forgiven for grunting “Duh!” in response. But it turns out that leaving behind these childish things is incredibly difficult. What shapes us in childhood is deeply rooted in us, and we spend decades reinforcing the flawed logic of the meaning we assigned to things when we were little.

By the time we meet the adult Bruce, we realize quickly that he is pretty good at sabotaging himself. The obvious love interest, Betty Ross, is his former girlfriend and current coworker. When Bruce asks her if they can still work well together after having been “close,” she jumps on the point: “We were close?”

Bruce is flummoxed by the question, but his response is reflective of how his programs for happiness have betrayed him: after decades of passive impassiveness—sloth, the besetting sin of the enneagram 9—he is unable to express himself to someone he clearly loves and who clearly loves him: “If I could be more, whatever, you know ...”

Betty demonstrates great compassion and insight in letting him off the hook while also letting him know he hasn’t fooled her: “I figure there’s more to you than you like to show.”

Eventually Bruce is exposed to radiation that will unleash the Hulk inside him. Along the way we learn that his father is alive and keeping tabs on him. His father has not changed; he views the world (and Bruce) in the same way—as inherently adversarial, someone/thing to be exploited and dominated. When he first reveals himself to Bruce, he elicits feelings that Bruce doesn’t know how to manage, and the monster almost emerges. His father’s response is belittling, cynical, lacking in love: “You’re going to have to watch that temper of yours.” Good luck with all that.

Bruce eventually does discover that the Hulk is living inside him. Betty is with him as he processes the experience: “What scares me the most is that when it happens, when it comes over me and I totally lose control, I like it.”

I identify with this fear. I regularly indulge in fantasies of giving vent to my anger. These fantasies are not physically violent, but they are what you might call rhetorically violent. I imagine myself saying things that are biting and penetrating, digging into vulnerabilities and leaving my opponents fully defeated and broken. There is no effective counterargument in these fantasies: I am always right and always fully vindicated. There is always someone permanently impacted by the encounter.

It’s worth quickly noting that I rarely — hardly ever — actually engage in such arguments. When I do, I don’t know how to feel afterward. I recently called our insurance company in a fit of rage over a rise in our rates and an accompanying letter that I very much did not like. When the representative explained the issue and reduced our rates by 60 percent — 60 percent! — I said “Thank you” and “I’m sorry” repeatedly. I didn’t know what to do with so much anger that had yielded such great results, and I felt incredible guilt. But I also felt enormous — like one of my fantasies had become reality, like I had been right about everything for my entire life.

I still don’t totally know how to think about that experience — and I still feel really bad about how I talked to the customer service rep.

Why do people like me treat anger as a disease? Why do we respond to it in extremes — either dissociation or violent expression? Betty offers her diagnosis as a condemnation of Bruce’s father: “All you’ve given Bruce is fear — fear of life.” I think she’s right: if sloth is the perpetual challenge of the nine, I think fear might be the underlying motivation.

But, as St John reminds us, perfect love casts out fear. Hulk movies don’t have happy endings per se — the hero is still a monster at the end of it — but they do have moments of reconciliation. We see Bruce find a place where he can make a meaningful contribution to the world. We see him start to manage and channel his rage in at least slightly more productive ways. But the moment that was most striking to me came before all that. It came when the Hulk comes face to face with Betty and she helps him find his way back to himself.

Bruce: You found me.
Betty: You weren’t that hard to find.
Bruce: Yes I was.

At the end of the film Bruce has become a monster but he has discovered his humanity. The path to that discovery was love. It’s love — the perfect love of God that St John evokes but also the stumbling but significant love of the people around us — that reconciles us to ourselves. It’s love that empowers us to become the best, fullest version of ourselves. It’s love that defeats our demons and helps us live in the truth.

It’s love that every nine needs — and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and every one. “So let us love one another,” writes St John, “for love comes from God.”

That’s it.

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In Praise of Drew Blankman

I first met Drew Blankman when I was interviewing for my first real editing job. Drew was interviewing for the same job. Seriously, our interviewer introduced us to each other. I was wearing a suit; Drew was wearing, as I recall, a Hawaiian shirt. Drew got the job, I didn't.

I got a similar job a couple of weeks later at the same place. Another editor had announced she was leaving, and I had proved that I was a good speller (and a sharp dresser, I might add). So I moved into an office down the hall from Drew, and gradually we became friends.

Drew is a few years older than I am, and he recently texted me to let me know he's retiring this year. It's a big deal to me, because Drew shaped me as an editor probably more than any other person.

Among other things, Drew helped me not to approach an author with starry eyes. It's a big deal to write a book, but to write a book doesn't make a person a big deal. As important as platform (or celebrity, let's be honest) has become in deciding what books to publish, content rightly belongs at the center of any book: attention to craft, credibility in relation to topic, struggle credentials, passion and vision are the true difference makers in a book. Especially for the task of editing, celebrity is a distraction, and the best editors (I learned from Drew) don't allow themselves to be distracted by it.

Drew also helped me to be a believer in what I was editing. If the first lesson was to not drink the Kool-aid, the second lesson was to catch the vision. As my work gradually moved from copyediting (the line-by-line effort to bring a manuscript to internal coherence and stylistic consistency) to acquisitions (the author-by-author effort to bring books into a publishing program that contribute to a coherent publishing identity), a willingness to be moved by a book became incredibly formative not only in my work but in my life. Over the years I've come to greater clarity about my convictions book by book by book, and Drew was a catalyst for me to take the books I edited as seriously as a serious book should be taken.

Drew and I once set out to write a book together. We grabbed lunch on the regular to talk about how such a book might take shape, how we might divide the labor, that sort of thing. I think the working title was The Unsettled Life or somesuch. We never wrote the book together - I think we both realized that we didn't have the platform to pull it off - but if there has been any slowing in my life of the entropy that tends to settle in on us as we move through adulthood, it's probably largely due to those regular conversations with Drew.

Drew and I also wrote an editorial style manual together. For people of our craft, that's roughly equivalent to building your own light saber. I can't tell you how long our style guide guided the style of our publishing house, but I can tell you that it's guided my own thinking about what is (or ought to be) normal in a manuscript ever since. And when I think of that style manual, I think of an old bit by comedian Colin Quinn (at the time the "Weekend Update" anchor on Saturday Night Live) in which he compares Matt Damon to Hitler:

You have the two best friends, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, you know, they wrote the movie together, Good Will Hunting, but you know it was Ben Affleck that did all the typing, you know, while Matt Damon was on the bed doing hammer curls.

In this scenario, Drew was Ben Affleck, and I was Matt Damon. I mean that as a compliment. Put another way, Drew is Batman, and I bought a zoo.

All this to say, I'm glad I got to work with Drew along the way, and I for one am sad for Christian publishing that we are now entering its post-Drew-Blankman era. I hope we all remember and are regularly reminded to never drink the Kool-aid but to always be open to catching the vision, to always resist the temptation to settle into an unexamined life, and to always strive for coherence in our words and our thoughts. I hope we'll work hard and enjoy ourselves, and someday retire with a consciousness that we made a real and concrete contribution to our craft. I hope, in other words, we all get the experience that I had so many years ago: the opportunity to ride in Drew's wake.

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The Hulk Is a 9: An Enneagram Adventure | Part Five: "The Brains and the Brawn Together"

For previous posts in this running series of posts on the enneagram (including the rationale for the series), click here.

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The Avengers: Infinity War begins where Thor: Ragnarok ends. The Hulk has never been beaten before, but we’re not long into the film before Hulk suffers defeat at the hands of Thanos (who may also be a nine, but that’s another story). With nowhere left to hide in the universe, Hulk hides inside Bruce, refusing to emerge even when he is desperately needed. Bruce will have to find another way to be a hero.

Ironically, he puts on the armor of the Hulkbuster first introduced in The Avengers: Age of Ultron. We see Bruce elated — great power with no corresponding loss of control. He gets a taste of a different kind of life, foreshadowing the fulfillment of his arc to come. (Shown here with the film's audio over some random animation.)

The endgame for Bruce is further foreshadowed in his appeal to the Vision — the second, more evolved monster he helped Tony create (after Ultron; see part three of this series) — to lay down something that seems central to his identity but is only the most obvious thing about him: “Your mind is made up of a complex construct of overlays...all of them learning from each other.” We may contain monsters, but we also contain multitudes. Bruce is coming to recognize that a persona is something distinct from a person. In a way, the Vision, like the Hulk, has been imprisoned by what the people around him have understood him to be. As Thomas Merton wrote, "The person must be rescued from the individual" - who we really are must be distinguished from and privileged above what we've made ourselves up to be.

Consider this thought experiment: Thanos’s intent is to eliminate half of all life. The climactic moment in the film is when he snaps his fingers to achieve his vision. Is it possible that only Bruce or the Hulk — not both — will survive? We don’t find out in Infinity War; we have to wait for the endgame.

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The reveal of “Smart Hulk” in The Avengers: Endgame is thrilling to the superfan — this iteration of the Hulk was wildly popular in the comic books — but as much is concealed as revealed. There’s nothing more basic to superhero films than the origin story, and yet we meet Smart Hulk without the benefit of watching him come to be. Set five years after Thanos’s snap, Smart Hulk is firmly established in society: he poses for pictures with adoring children, eats in restaurants, wears cardigans, and is thoroughly comfortable in his own skin. It’s a happy ending — one of the few eucatastrophes we observe in the wake of the Infinity War — and the film is nowhere near over. How did this happen?

“For years,” Smart Hulk explains, ”I’d been treating the Hulk like he’s some kind of disease, something to get rid of.” Again we see the disassociation that enneagram nines resort to in privileging peace over emotional expression. ”I put the brains and the brawn together, now look at me — I’m the best of both worlds.” There is no longer Bruce and “the other guy,” no longer the Hulk and “puny Banner.” He is an integrated self, a person with no persona. He has no secret identity, no mask. He is a fully realized self.

This transformation happens offscreen, as many transformations do. Spiritual growth is soul work, and much of it happens in secret. But even such secret transformations can be epically impactful. It’s the Hulk who speaks kindly to Thor and helps coax him back into action after Thor has effectively checked out of life. While other Avengers treat Ant-Man like a second-class citizen, Hulk happily gives him his food after Ant-Man’s tacos are blown away by an approaching space craft. (Remember, it’s a superhero movie. Just go with it.) Hulk is ebullient, light of heart, compassionate, kind. When he is confronted with his past behavior, he is embarrassed by it, but he isn’t paralyzed by it. It’s Smart Hulk who is sent to persuade the Sorcerer Supreme to part with a stone she is sworn to protect—and he succeeds. She prophesies over him as she hands over the stone: “I’m counting on you, Bruce—we all are.”

Much has been made of Iron Man’s ultimate sacrifice at the end of Endgame, but it’s worth noting that Tony Stark's death was an act of violence: He died in the process of killing Thanos and his entire army. His final act was punctuated with an ego-soaked assertion of his persona: "I am Iron Man." Contrast this act of mass destruction with the Hulk, who like Iron Man put on the glove with the expectation that using it would kill him, but rather than using it to destroy, he brought half of creation back to life.

Thor, notably, wanted to be the one to wear the glove and make the sacrifice play - the latest example of him desperately trying to prove himself as “the strongest Avenger.” But Hulk was the one to do it, and he made the case calmly and soberly, not seeking to make a name for himself but seeking the greater good. “It’s like I was made for this,” he says not with a flourish of ego but a sigh of acceptance.

Hulk doesn’t die, but he is left permanently scarred, a good reminder that the truth will set you free, but it will send you off with a limp.

Flourishing nines reflect the best characteristics of the enneagram three — “the achiever.” Undaunted and ambitious, threes can accomplish great things, and the Hulk certainly does that. He no longer seeks a peace that looks suspiciously like quiet. He seems, actually, to seek the opposite: the confounding complexity of a universe twice as crowded as it once was. A flourishing nine seeks not to make peace but to make shalom — an environment of flourishing — and Smart Hulk’s ambition is met with success.

We all learn a lesson from Endgame, articulated succinctly by Thor’s mother Frigga, with echoes of Thomas Merton:

“Everyone fails at who they’re supposed to be. ... the measure of a person — of a hero — is how well they succeed at being who they are.”

Thor ends Endgame at the beginning of that heroic journey; the Hulk has already arrived, and the universe is blessed for it.

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In previous posts I've commended several books on the enneagram: Alice Fryling's Mirror for the Soul, Chris Heuertz's The Sacred Enneagram, and The Road Back to You by Ian Cron and Suzanne Stabile. In this post I'll commend to you a book about the Hulk. Hulk: Gray is an origin story, written decades after the Hulk's origin. A thoughtful, poignant consideration of how hard it must be to crave peace and love but be plagued with loneliness and violence. The Hulk, it seems, could be any one of us.

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