Avengers: Nature and Culture

Last night I took a break off from studying and saw the Avengers movie (which I highly recommend). To my surprise, there were a lot of environmental themes running through the plot. For example, the Stark building at the opening of the movie was just renovated into an energy dependent high rise, when Nick Fury was explaining to the Avengers about the motives for saving the tesseract he said it would supply unlimited clean energy to the world "Something the {world} badly needs." 

One character in particular, The Hulk, embodies a theme relevant to our Nature and Culture class, where does nature belong in man. Dr. Banner is described to be similar to Hawkins in the movie, but inside of him there is 'the beast'. The beast was created through Dr. Banner's hubris, as he got too fancy with his experimentations with gamma radiation in his quest for power and wealth, he became too exposed. The creation story itself is an allegory to man's experimentation with nuclear energy and technology pioneering without considerations of the consequences. As a result, Dr. Banner turns into the Hulk, an animal whose classic enemy is the military. The Hulk's actions is a metaphor for what nature would do to man if nature could pack a punch. At first Dr. Banner dislikes the Hulk, but he learns how to utilize the Hulk by fighting the good fight so that both Dr. Banner and the Hulk are happy. 

Dr. Banner makes peace with the Hulk inside him, that is the message the screen writers and the comic book creators intended, that when man and nature coexist, they become a hero. 

I found it interesting that the modern day Avengers hold pollution as one of their villains and advocate for responsible scientific discovery.