Ultra-Realists

Category: Neuropsychoanalysis

  • What is grief, if not love persevering? An exploration of the character Wanda Maximoff through an Ultra-Realist lens.

    By Lauren Simpson, Teesside University

    What is grief, if not love persevering? For Wanda Maximoff, this love becomes desire not just for what she has lost, but for the power to undo what is lost. Through the lens of theoretical psychoanalysis, this post demonstrates how her sense of lack is what defines her constant new beginnings, driving her attempt to feel whole. Popular culture can be seen as an integral tool for understanding theory, as exemplified through the works of Kotzé and Lloyd (2022) in which they apply theory to popular films and TV shows. This blog post follows their approach, by utilising parts of ultra-realist theory to make sense of Wanda’s journey within the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

    To turn to theory, Wanda’s character arc exemplifies Lacanian ideas of lack and desire, which are brought into sharp focus at key moments across her appearances in the various MCU films and TV shows. According to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, lack is a fundamental part of the human condition, and desire arises from this sense of incompleteness (Yuan, 2005). A key aspect of this is realised in the mirror stage, a formative part of a child’s identity where they realise they are an individual in the world, alongside the ‘other’, whom they perceive as whole (Gallacher, 2022). The perception of the other as whole and oneself as lacking then stimulates a sense of desire. The Big Other, meanwhile, refers to the wider symbolic world of language, norms, and authority through which the subject understands itself. It provides the coordinates of desire by shaping what the subject understands as desirable and how they believe it might be attained. Obtaining the object of a person’s desire may lead to a temporary feeling of satisfaction. However, they are essentially stuck in a perpetual state of lack and desire. A person cannot be truly satisfied despite being told they can, as there will always be something else to desire, which is known as the false promise (Dall’Agilo, 2020).

    Building on this psychoanalytic baseline, ultra-realism and Johnston’s (2008) concept of transcendental materialism, this analysis looks to bridge the gap between wider society and biology to explain behaviour. It utilises the idea of neuroplasticity, which shows that the synapses in the brain change to form new connections as a survival instinct based on events the individual has experienced (Johnston and Malabou, 2013). This process is innate to humans. Within the framework of transcendental materialism, but initially developed by Lacan, are the three realms: the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The Real is the unsymbolised abyss at the core of subjectivity. In an attempt to escape the trauma of the Real, the subject latches on to a specific order of symbols in the realm of the Symbolic (Kotzé and Lloyd, 2022). The Imaginary is the site of narcissism where a person forms their own identity and how they perceive themselves. The symbolic order allows for an understanding of the world which attempts to prevent a traumatic return to the Real. It is made up of signs and symbols learnt from those around them (Murphy, 2005). However, symbolic orders may continue even when they no longer serve us, which is referred to as deaptation (Hall, 2012).

    These three realms come alive in Wanda’s character arc. Wanda is no stranger to loss, and her first great trauma can be traced back to the death of her parents in a bombing with the use of Stark Industries weapons, depicted in Avengers: Age of Ultron. In that moment, the loss of her parents gives Wanda’s underlying sense of lack a concrete object. From a Lacanian perspective, their deaths do not create this lack, which is understood as a fundamental part of subjectivity, but provide it with a particular emotional form. Because their return is unattainable, Wanda’s desire for reunion becomes displaced onto a new object: revenge against Tony Stark, whom she blames for supplying the weapon that caused her parents’ deaths. Fuelled by this redirected desire, Wanda and her brother Pietro initially ally with HYDRA and later Ultron, believing that eliminating Stark will bring the satisfaction their loss has denied them. Revenge thus becomes a substitute object of desire, sustaining the fantasy that punishing Stark might resolve the pain and incompleteness associated with her parents’ deaths. This fantasy directs Wanda’s actions until another symbolic break forces her to re-evaluate it.  

    Upon realising the scale of Ultron’s destruction and his plan to eradicate humanity, Wanda and Pietro defect and join the Avengers. Hall and Winlow (2018) suggest that flaws may have been previously fetishistically disavowed, allowing for a dominant Symbolic Order to persist, an example of the deaptation mentioned above. However, once Wanda was proximate to the harms of Ultron’s plan and no longer able to disavow them (Kotzé, 2019). This destabilises the specific symbolic order organised around revenge, as she can no longer maintain the fantasy that defeating Stark would justify an alliance that will destroy humanity. Confronted with a ‘stay-or-go’ dilemma, she abandons the ideological order of symbols organised around vengeance and steps into an alternative one embodied by the Avengers. Only after this shift does neuroplasticity begin to reshape her. Over subsequent missions and shared losses, her brain slowly forces new synaptic pathways aligned with the Avengers’ collective ethos (Johnston and Malabou, 2013).

    One of Wanda’s greatest desires is for a family and a sense of belonging. Unconditional love, which nothing can get in the way of, is the thing that Wanda lost with the death of her parents. The loss of this attachment gives Wanda’s more fundamental sense of a lack a particular focus, leading her to seek relationships that appear capable of replacing the unconditional love and security associated with her parents. Joining the Avengers gives Wanda a sense of this, by offering a surrogate family. She can be seen to desire this so strongly that she eventually forgets the revenge she was desperate to obtain by joining the Avengers. Her time with the Avengers offers her a sense of belonging, and over time, this develops into a romantic attachment to Vision, her emerging object of desire. 

    That fragile sense of family is shattered almost immediately in Captain America: Civil War, where Wanda’s powers inadvertently cause civilian deaths during a mission in Lagos, prompting international backlash and the Sokovia Accords. This event destabilises the order of symbols she has come to rely on and causes an internal conflict as well as the end of The Avengers due to proposed government control. Amongst the Civil War, the missing unity of her new ‘family’ leads to her struggling to choose which side to align herself with. Instead of a simple divide between ‘control’ and ‘freedom’, she faces two competing symbolic orders, both structured by rules and obligations. One is state-driven (the Sokovia Accords), placing ultimate authority in international oversight, the other is Avenger-driven, grounded in peer accountability. She ultimately chooses the latter and sides with the Avengers, becoming a fugitive in the process. This links to the concept of soliciting the trap, whereby an encounter with the Real forces the subject to turn to something, a symbolic order which offers the illusion of order in the chaos (Hall, 2012).

    For Wanda, great joy equals incomprehensible grief and lack through the form of Vision, her partner. In Avengers: Infinity War, Wanda and Vision’s mundane life comes to a halt when Thanos and his army arrive on earth for the Infinity Stones. Wanda must face the realisation that to stop Thanos, Vision has to be destroyed and that his death is in her hands. Wanda is forced to kill Vision to prevent Thanos from acquiring the Mind Stone, only to watch Thanos reverse time, restore Vision, and kill him himself. This double loss intensified her trauma. It can be argued that this is the state of anxiety and trauma people face within the Real (Knockaert et al, 2004). Lacan referred to this trauma in the Real as something everyone will face, ultimately leading to a person’s psychic development. Wanda has to confront the Real to destroy Vision in order to destroy the Mind Stone leading to the further development of her character. Through her grief after the loss of Vision, Wanda and her powers create an alternate reality in which Vision is alive and they have a family, called ‘the Hex’ as depicted in WandaVision. Glynos (2001) explains that fantasy allows the subject to ‘cover over’ the traumatic lack at the heart of being. But as others intrude and Vision questions the reality, the fantasy becomes unsustainable. Eventually, in a moment of ethical clarity, Wanda relinquishes the fantasy, sacrificing her imagined family to restore the autonomy of the town’s inhabitants.

    After the loss of Vision and the collapse of her alternative reality, Wanda’s sense of lack becomes more pronounced, and reunion with her children becomes the primary focus of her desire. By the events of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Wanda has turned to the Darkhold, a corruptive magical text, believing that the greater power will allow her to reunite with her children in another universe. This narrative arc intensifies her descent into obsessive fantasy, no longer constructing illusions, but violently pursuing their realisation. Power therefore becomes an instrumental object of desire: Wanda invests in it because she believes it can remove every obstacle separating her from the family she imagines will make her whole. Once Wanda concludes that the limits imposed by her heroic identity prevent her from reaching her children, she severs her connections to that identity an pursues increasingly destructive forms of magical power. Corrupted by the Darkhold and consumed by the fantasy of being reunited with her children, Wanda shifts from heroism to destructive obsession. Power and fantasy are tightly linked, as fantasy sustains the illusion that power will resolve lack. It is not power itself that Wanda ultimately desires. Rather, she is consumed by the fantasy the sufficient power will enable her to recover her would-be family and permanently protect herself from further loss. But the closer Wanda gets to this object, the more she acquires, the more its impossibility is made evident. Her full embrace of the Scarlet Witch identity therefore marks a final severance from the heroic symbolic order, as she rejects its moral limitations in favour of the fantasy that greater power can finally deliver the family she desires.

    In the climax of Multiverse of Madness, Wanda confronts a version of her children who recoil from her in fear and see her as a threatening intruder rather than their mother. This is one of her clearest encounters with the Real because their reaction directly contradicts the fantasy that has sustained her actions: that she can enter another universe and simply take her rightful place as their loving mother. Faced with an image of herself that her fantasy cannot accommodate, Wanda is forced to recognise the harm produced by her pursuit of reunion. In response, Wanda collapses Mount Wundagore, seemingly destroying the Darkhold and herself. Whether she survives is left ambiguous, but her apparent death signals the end of a fantasy that could no longer be maintained.

    Wanda is a complex character whose experiences of grief repeatedly give her fundamental sense of lack a concrete focus. Across her journey, she attaches the promise of satisfaction to revenge, family, belonging, and power, while repeatedly encountering moments that expose the fragility of these fantasies. Wanda experiences so much grief, and the love she receives on the other side is immeasurable, but she will always experience grief from that love. Wanda experiences the desire for family and a sense of belonging linked to the idea of unconditional love, which she pursues with the Avengers and Vision in her alternate reality. The desire for power is led by this need for family, which becomes her fantasy. Ultimately, as is clear through Wanda’s journey, with great lack comes great desire, all sustained by the ‘fantasy’. Wanda’s imagined futures, whether revenge, family, or power, operate as sustaining fantasies, giving her orientation and purpose. Yet, they are always fragile, exposed when she encounters the Real.

    References

    Acu, A. (2016) ‘Time to work for a living: The marvel cinematic universe and the organized superhero.’ Journal of Popular Film and Television. 44(4). Pp.195-205.

    Dall’Aglio, J. (2020) ‘Nothing in common between the unconscious and the brain: On the (im)possibility of Lacanian neuropsychoanalysis’. Psychoanalysis Lacan. 4. Pp.1-19.

    Gallacher, G. (2022) ‘The neoliberal game: A critical analysis of children’s non-competitive grassroots football’. (Unpublished doctoral thesis). Available at: https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1010&context=sc-theses.

    Glynos, J. (2001) ‘The grip of ideology: A Lacanian approach to the theory of ideology’. Journal of Political Ideologies. 6(2). Pp.191-214.

    Hall, S. (2012) ‘The solicitation of the trap: On transcendence and transcendental materialism in advanced consumer-capitalism.’ Human Studies: Special Issue on Transcendence and Transgression. 35(3). Pp. 365-81.

    Hall, S. and Winlow, S. (2018) ‘Big trouble or little evils: The ideological struggle over the concept of harm’.  In Boukli, A., and Kotzé, J. (Eds.) Zemiology: Reconnecting Crime and Social Harm. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

    Johnston, A. (2008) Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Illinois: Northwestern University Press.

    Johnston, A., and Malabou, C. (2013) Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Knockaert, V., Geerardyn, F., Van de Vijver, G., Van Bunder, D. and Bazan, A. (2004) ‘Trauma as an encounter with the real’. International Journal of Computing Anticipatory Systems. 16. Pp. 81-91.

    Kotzé, J. (2019) The Myth of the ‘Crime Decline’. London: Routledge.

    Kotzé, J. and Lloyd, A. (2022) Making Sense of Ultra-Realism: Contemporary Criminological Theory Through The Lens of Popular Culture. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited.

    Murphy, P. (2005) ‘Jacques, Jacques and Jacks: The shifting symbolic in Derrida and Lacan’. Textual Practice. 19(4). Pp. 509-27.

    Yuan, Y. (2005) ‘From ideology of loss to aesthetics of absence: The endgame in Beckett’s “The Lost Ones”’. European Joyce Studies. 16. Pp. 235-46.

  • Leagues of Gentlemen (and Women) on the illicit (violent) playing fields of neoliberal capitalism: An ultra-realist analysis of Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen

    ‘Criminal markets are now sophisticated and competitive, riven by class divisions created on the back of the individual’s relative success and failures in markets. A successful new proto bourgeoisie drawn from all positions on the former social order dominates a defeated precariat’ (Hall & Winlow, 2015: 126)

    Take director Guy Ritchie’s Netflix series, The Gentlemen (Netflix, 2024), which follows Eddie Horniman, a reluctant aristocrat who inherits his family estate only to discover it sits atop a vast underground cannabis empire. Here is a criminological reality in the 21st century where liberalism has been outgrown and which demonstrates symbolic inefficacy for those competing in the current neoliberal economy. By entering the reality of organised crime, corruption, and violence, a new Symbolic Order of entrepreneurialism and wealth creation materialises that would otherwise not be possible, or within reach for most, within the global neoliberal capitalist system. Thus, recycling the traditional economic business model of supply and demand for controlled substances, the actors in The Gentlemen have diverted their libidinal drives to fill the void of the Lacanian Real for a slice of the high life; where the high rollers of wealth accumulation previously sat and to which access was limited despite the capitalist fantasy and falsehood of ‘rags to riches’  that everyone can compete and succeed within the ‘fair and equal’ neoliberal system.

    What we can see in The Gentlemen is Hall’s (2007: 2012:2015) pseudo-pacification process in action. Let us revisit where this fundamental element of ultra realist theory derives. Hall posits that in medieval England the economy and the family unit were conjoined, where property was owned by the family unit and shared between them from generation to generation to support their existence (Polanyi, 2002; Sombart, 1915). The family units produced on a subsistence level for self-consumption rather than profit as their Aristotelian ‘telos’ or fulfilment. Labour was a family activity and not an economic commodity at this point, and the family units existed under moral guidance of the Church, which acted as the big Other, maintaining morality, stabilising prices, and keeping the peace. However, the co-existence of the market trader, who bought commodities only to sell them unchanged for profit, operated outside this subsistence model but was tolerated as they appeared to abide by the morality and ethics of the Church, which kept trade functional. The emphasis was very much in favour of the peasant labourer and the artisan at this stage rather than the profiteering of the market trader. The change in this system began in the 16th and 17th centuries, or earlier according to Dyer (2000). Dyer suggests that the nobility was more concerned with leisure pursuits such as hunting, prayer and entertainment than managing the land and estates that they owned; this was the realm of the peasantry and labourers, which opened the opportunity for the more entrepreneurial peasants and artisans in motivating aspiration and access to wealth creation whilst paying rents to the landowning nobility. Sound familiar?

    Let’s get psychoanalytic. Hall argues that at the core of subjectivity lies nothing but ‘a powerful and structuring absence that inspires deep anxiety; one which is assuaged by the active solicitation of a coherent symbolic order from which meaning can be established and the individual can orientate and navigate themselves within the world’  (Raymen, 2023: 141). As the Enlightenment overrode the Church’s morality, rooted in unconditional selflessness and sacrificial love, it ushered in a new era defined by the pursuit of profit, where the family unit was eroded and displaced by individualism and market competition. Subjective Lacanian ‘lack’  was reoriented to be fulfilled by economic gain and status seeking, and as a by-product, those less aspirational and entrepreneurial were left behind  – ‘Ha ha, losers.’

    In The Gentlemen, we observe the different socioeconomic units, whether they be family by birth or by entrepreneurial activity, all competing in the lucrative market of cannabis production and distribution using a division of labour and complete vertical integration (see Messina, 2022) to operate an illicit capitalist business model. Let us start at the top with the protagonist Eddie Horniman. Born the second son to the Duke of Halstead, a model of aristocracy in the colonial British Empire mould with a good education and a commission in the Army, Eddie unexpectedly finds himself heir to his father’s estate over his brother, who has been overlooked in the will. Inheriting a crumbling country estate which is costly to maintain, Eddie is announced as overseer of the family assets in an epoch of decolonisation where the past aristocracy has no real purpose or place in the current globalised neoliberal world. Still focused on leisure pursuits and entertainment, the Halstead family, especially Eddie’s Brother Freddy, cling to the defensive unit of family and land in a contemporary landscape of neoliberal market economics. With no notable income to maintain this wealthy status, a truth is revealed to aristocratic Eddie by the stylish, sardonic, sophisticated, and steely (Tudum by Netflix, 2025) commoner Susie Glass; the land he has inherited sits on top of a cannabis mass production site in return for rent; a last gasp deal his late father made to maintain the family income and status. Eddie’s brother, Freddy, still overindulgent in recreational excess, places the family under further strain by running up a drug debt amongst gambling and other failed risky ventures.

    Enter Gospel John, a Merseyside working class fish trader and zealot, to whom Freddy is indebted, known for his violence and a healthy dose of Christian fervour. Gospel John sends his brother Tommy to collect the debt from Freddy. He is shot by Freddy in the process. Now introduced to what the mass production of cannabis on his inherited property entails, Eddie is moved well beyond the safety and comfort of the aristocratic and privileged Symbolic Order he thought he had inherited into the reality of the highly lucrative, competitive, and violent sphere of serious and organised crime. Eddie’s former institutionalisation by the Army and government is now well past its sell by date and part of the vestige of power that once was (Netflix, 2025). The former Symbolic Order now being ‘deaptative’ (Johnston, 2008), Eddie has now become an actor in a new adaptive market economy with a higher scale of violence, yet operating within and on the same model as the neoliberal economic system, which Eddie finds addictive. At the same time, American Crystal Meth entrepreneur Stanley Johnstone is filling an absence, read as ‘lack’, of history and identity by re-inventing himself as a liberal English gentleman of wealth and property, eager to progress in the still rigid codified British class system, whilst the last remains of the Halstead aristocracy is desperately abandoning theirs to adapt and survive in this new reality. All this takes place and is maintained in a space of ‘orderly disorder’ (Horsely, Kotzé, and Hall, 2015) which is being run by convicted gang boss Bobby Glass (Ray Winstone) from a privileged existence in prison, read as ‘holiday’, whilst his daughter Susie Glass runs the business on the ground for him.

    Hall’s (2012) interest in pseudo-pacification comes from the explanation of the decline of violence from the Middle Ages to the present day as market economies emerged and developed and where rates of violence and homicide are seen to have decreased. Economic trade cannot function in a totally altruistic or totally violent space. There must be a reduction of violence for economic exchange to function, not a total pacification but a balance between civility and controlled aggression; something which is evident throughout all the character interactions within ‘The Gentlemen.’ As Hall, in Raymen (2023:143) argues, ‘a perpetual cultivation of dynamic tension between the poles of pacification and stimulation which provides the ideal pseudo-pacified subjectivities for the flourishing of a market society.’ Hall suggests that as economies grew, subjectivity did not lose its aggression. Instead, aggression was preserved and put to an appropriate and scaled down use as a driving energy in nascent market economies.

     As we see in The Gentlemen, violence is a normalised (see Žižek, 2009) part of the organised crime economic modus operandi, an accompaniment to drug production and distribution used to ensure the security and continuous flow of products and maintain market share, just as it is in military form in the legitimate globalised neoliberal market economy. The drive to succeed in this open space of organised criminal enterprise, which can more easily be accessed by anybody, has increased the level of interpersonal violence necessary to compete and survive. Thus, the sliding scale of pacification has been moved further away from civility and upped the level of accepted violence on which Eddie’s new-found market economy operates. Yet, as we see in the various cohesive units within the show, elements of medieval pacification, morality and aesthetics – through the morality and values of the church in Gospel John, and the desire for the iconography and architecture of the nobility in Stanley Johnstone – are holding on.

    Yet for Eddie Halsted, the collapse of his aristocratic status sees him move into the arena of the organised criminal elite to be thrown into a violent economic reality. Interjected with various other criminal entrepreneurs, traders, labourers and artisans within the organised criminal fraternity, we see a wide spectrum of historical socioeconomic roles from the early centuries of capitalism now intersecting in a new global neoliberal illicit economy. Cannabis has been weaving its way into normality over the decades and is now quite commonplace everywhere, legalised or decriminalised in many parts of the world, yet still a controlled substance as defined under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 in the UK. One only has to walk through our post-industrial cities and towns to find the unmistakable scent of weed present.  So much so, that the production of cannabis in The Gentlemen is truthfully portrayed as a new and expanding industry where the means of production, packaging, and distribution are controlled in-house and underpinned by the artisan skills and labour of ‘weed horticulturalist’ Jimmy Chang as chief grower. Hmmm, sounds medieval but with guns to me.

    Effectively, in The Gentlemen (and women such as Susie Glass, Lady Sabrina, and the extremely dangerous and violent Mercy), all actors have become the ‘losers’ of the neoliberal capitalist system. They have therefore entrepreneurially adapted their own game, markets, and Symbolic Order. From the masculinity of the working-class actors to the entitlement of the privileged nobility, by exercising  ‘special liberty’ to lever themselves above the herd and achieve their instrumental and expressive aims (Kotzé, 2024), often violently but with ‘criminal fraternal civility’, all operate in pursuit of that which has been made absent in the restrictive  construct of the lawful neoliberal economy. By diverting their Freudian libidinal drives to fill the Lacanian void with the jouissance of illicit free market competition and its rewards, their aggressive drives have become accustomed to operating on a lesser pacified scale suited to the competition rules of the illicit market in which they operate – a free market that functions in parallel to the legitimised economy, but one which has higher returns and requires intensified competition and aggression to function optimally. Let us face it, the organised crime world does not operate with the same civility as the current economic system, but then the current economic system does not offer the same equally accessible opportunities, and when cannabis becomes legal, criminal entrepreneurs already have the means of production, the market connections and the infrastructure in place to continue their operations and maintain their competitive advantage.

    Reference List

    Dyer, C. (2000) Everyday Life in Medieval England. London: Hambledon and London.

    Hall, S. (2007) ‘The emergence and breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process’. In Watson, K (Ed.) Assaulting the Past. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.

    Hall, S. (2012) Theorizing Crime and Deviance: A New Perspective. London: Sage Publications Ltd.

    Hall, S. and Winlow, S. (2015) Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Towards a New Ultra-Realism. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Hall, S. and Winlow, S. (2018) ‘Ultra-realism’. In DeKeseredy, W., and Dragiewicz, M. (Eds.) Routledge Handbook of Critical Criminology. (2nd ed). Abingdon: Routledge.

    Horsley, M., Kotzé, J. and Hall, S. (2015) ‘The maintenance of orderly disorder: Law, markets and the pseudo-pacification process’. Journal on European History of Law. 6. Pp. 18-29.

    Johnston, A., (2008) Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Illinois: Northwestern University Press.

    Kotzé, J. (2024) ‘On special liberty and the motivation to harm’. The British Journal of Criminology. 65(2). Pp. 314-27.

    Messina, M. (2022) ‘Exploring vertical integration in the supply chain’. Forbes. [online]. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2022/12/29/exploring-vertical-integration-in-the-supply-chain/.

    Tudum by Netflix (2025) The Gentlemen cast is full of Nobility and Scoundrels. Available at: https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/the-gentlemen-series-cast.

    Polanyi, K. (2002) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. London: Beacon Press.

    Raymen, T. (2023) The Enigma of Social Harm: The Problem of Liberalism. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Sombart, W  (1915) The Quintessence of Capitalism. New York: E.P Dutton & Co.

    The Gentlemen. (2024)Directed by Guy Ritchie. Available from: Netflix.

    Žižek, S. (2009) Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books Ltd.