In The Avengers movie that opened this past weekend, Mark Ruffalo plays the Incredible Hulk, a creature born from a scientific experiment gone awry who joins a team of superheroes seeking to save the world. The risks of scientific progress and efforts to save the planet are also at play in his real-world battle against hydraulic fracturing, Ruffalo tells City & State.
What follows is an edited transcript.

City & State: How did you become involved in fracking activism?

Mark Ruffalo: I heard about hydrofracking before I moved my family to New York, and I thought it was going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. It was going to bring this vibrant new economy to upstate New York. But I also started to hear some questionable things about it. So I went to the old Internet and started doing some research. At this time, there was very little to learn. The gas industry is very rosy and extremely positive. There were inklings from EPA whistleblowers and people in Wyoming whose homes were filling with gas and were coming up with these neurological disorders from the drinking water. So I decided, “I have to go look at this for myself.”

CS: Where did you go?

MR: I went to Dimock, Pa. It wasn’t really to find anything wrong. It was just to see what was going on. But in a room of 40 people, it became clear to me that these people were under siege in their life, and the American dream was betrayed. What about the EPA? The EPA wouldn’t allow something like this to happen. Well, this isn’t regulated by the EPA, really. Well, what about the DEP? Well, they’ve pretty much turned their back on us. What about your attorney general? They’re not interested. There were victims there, and basically they were being told they were lying. You had these Americans who obviously had a problem, and everybody turned their backs on them. I didn’t want to get involved, honestly. But if I am who I say—I care about people and I care about injustice—then I realized this is coming to my community, where there are people that I love and I care for, and it can’t happen like this.

CS: But fracking could create jobs in New York’s poorer regions.

MR: There’s only a fraction of the jobs the industry says they’ll create. They tend to be incredibly transient. Cornell did a study last year on what the effects would be, especially in small communities that rely on pristine water and pristine air. A lot of these communities have only agriculture and tourism to support them. What happens is the community is left worse off after the bust. A few people end up making a lot of money. It doesn’t make its way out to the rest of the community. The workers leave. The area is left with less economic diversity. It kills off other industries. I understand that we’re in bad times. The other thing that’s interesting to point out is the fastest growing job sector right now in the United States, at 10–18 percent a year, is the green sector, or the renewable-energy sector.

CS: In your experience, are people aware of the hydrofracking issue?

MR: When I started three years ago, I just thought, There’s no way. We’re done for. We have the biggest industries in the world; we have Exxon Mobil and Chesapeake just dumping so much money. It was a done deal. Thousands of families have reported contamination now. These people are poor, they’re desperate. When their wells become contaminated, their properties become worthless. They turn to the gas industry, and the gas industry says, “We didn’t contaminate your well, but we will buy you out and give you water if you sign a nondisclosure agreement.” We will never know these people’s stories. You have people in Dimock, and some people in Wyoming now, these mothers whose children have come down with asthma and weird autoimmune-deficiency diseases, whose school is right next to compressor stations, and they’re getting together and they’re starting to get their stories out. They’re not taking the short money, which is what we’re seeing in Dimock. They’re saying, “No, we’re going to live through this, we’ve been wronged, and we’re going to get our stories out.” It’s very different now than it was even a year ago. Fracking is a national issue. There’s a lot of new information coming out, and the longer this goes on, the more we’re going to find out how damning it is.

To read the full interview at City & State click here.

Previous Marvel Comics superhero movies such as Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America and Thor were like roughly cut puzzle pieces that looked odd and unfinished by themselves—pretend movies derived from already established brands. Most of them, particularly Jon Favreau’s dung-colored Iron Man, were poorly directed.

Now, fitted together in Marvel’s The Avengers, the superhero tales still don’t quite cohere; instead, each superhero’s traits and powers have been simultaneously inflated and streamlined (Scarlett Johannson’s Black Widow, barely a cameo in last year’sIron Man 2, is almost a character here) with the sole intent to overwhelm, not merely entertain. That’s why a corporate brand is part of the title.

A live-action version of the comic book series about “The Earth’s Mightiest Heroes,” Marvel’s The Avengers is promoted as the ultimate Comic-Con—the franchise of franchises, the movie contemporary audiences have been trained to anticipate and genuflect to.

This whopping sales campaign manipulates immature, undeveloped adolescent taste into the mistaken notion of cultural fulfillment. The Avengers is neither good nor important, yet the more it consummates Marvel Comics’ current strategy to secure the adolescent comic book/graphic novel/video game market, the more it illustrates Hollywood’s shameless insufficiencies.

To discuss The Avengers as a story—or even a thrill ride—is delusional. Best to tally some of the actors’ deceits—which parallel the media’s complicit self-deception—as they trivialize the emotional satisfaction that is supposed to come from modernizing myth and legend.

The Captain America role traps Chris Evans, who was a great tease as the Human Torch, in an uninteresting anachronism, now a truly faded idea of American Exceptionalism. The same holds for the Halloween freakazoids Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Bruce Banner/The Hulk (a CGIed Mark Ruffalo).

As villainous Loki, Tom Hiddleston, who was so moving in Spielberg’s War Horse and Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea, comes closest to giving a performance. He suggests the intense young aspirant Peter O’Toole, though without the glorious voice and no story details to frame his petulance, just a pretext for the superheroes to fight his plan for world domination.

The film’s only probable hero is zillionaire gadgeteer Tony Stark, who Robert Downey has finally learned to make his own using hipster witticisms that lend this basically unhip movie erratic self-satire.

Only a capitalist icon with Stark’s endless resources makes sense to an audience of semi-illiterate consumers catered to by the leisure industries and discouraged from an interest in characterization, theme or ideas. That’s why Sam Jackson’s Nick Fury can simply watch action from the sidelines (occasionally firing off a gunshot or an epithet), pretending to be a leader in his ghetto eye patch. (Insert convenient Obama comment here.)

Director Joss Whedon brings TV squalor (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) to this, his second big screen superhero outing. Whedon doesn’t have Zack Snyder’s personal style, the élan that at least made Watchmen and Sucker Punch thoroughly idiosyncratic and fitfully compelling. Whedon directs impersonally, which is to say he manages the proceedings as one runs a fast-food joint.

This analogy ought to appall the very fast-food patrons who flock to The Avengers, yet cannot accept that an artistic enterprise should be more than ground patties of optional substance. Like Whedon, they can’t tell the difference between art and conviction-less product.

This proves the brainwashing that has happened to pop audiences in the generations since comic books and TV stole their imaginations from cinema and literature. Much of this tragedy has to do with the impact of TV (Whedon’s background), which has destroyed popular understanding of narrative complexity.

Each superhero should represent overcoming some social difficulty; now they’re just gimmicks. Whedon simply makes the action go on and on. He has no sense of dramatic build or rising to a climax. He overloads the spectator with one climax after another (imitating Michael Bay angles, particularly the same skyscraper-devouring turbine f/x from the last Transformers flick).

Unlike the lyrical teen fantasy Chronicle or Neveldine/Taylor’s daring Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, which addressed life, death and morality, Marvel’s The Avengers has little to say other than “Buy me!” Millions of mentally hijacked moviegoers will respond like Pavlov’s dog, barking “Wow!”