Thunderbolts (2025) functions less as a conventional superhero film than as a cultural dream in which unresolved moral structures are staged rather than resolved. Beneath its surface narrative of antiheroes and state-sanctioned violence, the film quietly incorporates multiple historical and symbolic layers: a Dantean stratification of moral culpability, a post–World War II logic of “necessary evil,” and a near-literal enactment of Jung’s concept of the Shadow, pushed to its historical extreme through its proximity to the figure of Hitler. Within this architecture, substance abuse does not appear as incidental character detail but as a central mechanism through which contemporary culture manages moral contradiction.
The moral universe of Thunderbolts is not flat. Characters are implicitly ranked according to degrees of transgression, controllability, and danger, recalling Dante’s insistence in the Inferno that sin is hierarchical rather than uniform. Yet unlike Dante, the film offers no transcendent Good by which these distinctions are finally judged. Moral evaluation is replaced by operational calculus. The question is no longer whether an action is wrong, but whether its consequences can be contained, weaponized, or managed. This shift echoes the ethical inheritance of the twentieth century’s wars, particularly World War II, when Western culture first collectively justified the instrumental use of evil in the name of survival. The legacy of that moment persists here, stripped of its tragic solemnity and converted into a permanent administrative stance.
It is within this framework that Jung’s notion of the Shadow becomes operative. For Jung, the Shadow represents those aspects of the psyche disowned by consciousness, which, if not symbolically integrated, return in destructive and literalized forms. Hitler, in Jung’s view, was not merely an individual but the embodiment of Europe’s collective Shadow made flesh. Thunderbolts approaches this insight uncomfortably closely. Its characters are not simply flawed individuals; they embody historically catastrophic psychic traits—unrestrained aggression, moral numbing, obedience without conscience, dissociation from responsibility. These traits are not confronted or transformed but mobilized. The Shadow is not integrated; it is deployed.
Substance abuse enters the film as the technology that makes this deployment possible. Drugs, alcohol, chemical enhancement, and emotional numbing function less as escapism than as moral anesthesia. The substances do not primarily relieve pain; they enable action in the absence of meaning. They dull conscience, narrow awareness, and allow repetition. In this sense, substance abuse operates as a pharmacological solution to a moral problem that the culture no longer knows how to address symbolically. It allows the subject to continue functioning without having to reconcile action with value.
This logic reflects a broader American and postwar condition. After World War II, Western societies accepted that certain acts were necessary but unforgivable. The atomic bomb, strategic bombing, covert operations, and later proxy wars normalized a tragic contradiction: survival demanded transgression. Earlier generations bore this contradiction as moral injury. In Thunderbolts, that injury is chemically buffered. Characters are not haunted so much as flattened. Numbness replaces torment, not because the burden is lighter, but because psychic endurance has been outsourced to pharmacology.
Within this structure, addiction functions as a form of ersatz atonement. The subject suffers, but the suffering leads nowhere. There is pain without reconciliation, repetition without transformation. In Dante, punishment reveals truth and restores moral order. In Christian theology, suffering can become redemptive through the Cross. Thunderbolts offers neither. Substance abuse becomes the only available means of paying a price in a world that no longer believes in forgiveness or redemption.
What the film ultimately reveals is a late-modern American dilemma. The culture still believes that some evils are necessary, but no longer believes they can be forgiven. It continues to externalize the Shadow while refusing to integrate it, and then relies on chemical means to silence the psychic consequences of that refusal. Addiction, in this context, is not deviance or weakness; it is adaptation. It is the cost of maintaining a system that requires morally compromised agents to remain operational without collapsing under the weight of what they do.
Jung warned that the Shadow, if not consciously integrated, returns with greater force. Addiction follows the same law. Dosage escalates, effects diminish, and what was once containment becomes catastrophe. Thunderbolts circles this danger without naming it directly. Its spectacle distracts from its confession: that contemporary culture no longer knows how to judge evil, redeem suffering, or bear guilt without chemical mediation.
In Dante, hell is ordered by moral truth. In Christianity, evil is met by redemptive suffering. In Thunderbolts, evil is postponed pharmacologically. That postponement, rather than villainy or violence, is the film’s most revealing symptom.
Brenton L. Delp