Disney Plus Dream Vacation: The Avengers

Introduction

Faculty, residents, and students at my university participated in the Disney Plus Dream Job and watched 30 Disney films in 30 days. While we completed the dream job on Friday, December 13, we’ll continue to post our top 25 blogs on Psychology Today. Our 22nd blog post is on The Avengers (2012).

Synopsis

The Avengers (2012) is a film based on the Marvel Comics superhero team of the same name distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. At the time of this posting, The Avengers holds a rating of 8 out of 10 on IMDb and an audience score of 91 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

How it relates to the field of psychiatry

At our medical school, psychiatry is taught through a curriculum that incorporates various forms of popular culture. While the majority of our courses are film-based, graphic novels are also used to teach behavioral science and psychiatry at several levels of education.

At the doctoral level, our Marvelous Doctoral Curriculum (Marvel/DC) reviews psychopathology through the analysis of characters from the Marvel and DC universes. Each didactic is taught profiling two superheroes (one from Marvel, one from DC). This blog profiles Spiderman (I know he wasn’t in today’s film) and Batman, who are comparable per these two websites (a, b). Today’s blog reviews the biopsychosocial formulation of human behavior, with Spiderman representing the “bio” and Batman illustrating the “psychosocial.”

Spiderman

Peter Parker is a high school student who dreams of living up to his heroes in the Avengers (while not depicted in this film, he joins the Avengers in Captain America: Civil War). When he is bitten by a genetically engineered spider, Peter gains superhuman abilities. While it’s difficult to identify that Peter is suffering from delusions (we can see him spinning his way around Manhattan, right?), we could more confidently render the opinion that whatever the identified behavior, biological factors appear to play a central role in its precipitation and perpetuation (the word/root “genetic” is used to describe the spider that bit him).

Batman

Where Spiderman is predominantly the outcome of the biological effects of genetically engineered spider venom, Bruce Wayne’s alter ego results from psychological factors stemming from a traumatic experience when he was a child. While playing at Wayne Manor, a young Bruce falls down a well and is attacked by a colony of bats (Batman Begins, 2005).

Bruce develops a phobia to bats (specific phobia, animal type) as a result of maladaptive avoidance (defense mechanism). In the 2005 film, he is made to face his fear through flooding.

Who is the more super of heroes: Spiderman or Batman? Which universe is stronger: Marvel or DC? We fan the flames of these debates and select two comparable superheroes from each universe, not necessarily to compare, but to highlight aspects of each that teach an aspect of psychiatry. In the case of Spiderman vs. Batman, the formulation of their respective behaviors allows for a review of the biopsychosocial model of mental illness.