The Punisher is the best pop culture depiction of PTSD in America

The Punisher is easily the most violent of Netflix’s adaptations of Marvel comics, and one of the most violent series the streaming service has ever produced. The carnage — actual and emotional — is brutal, relentless, and unapologetic.

The show’s gore — which includes graphic scenes of torture — has left it open to legitimate criticisms, including from my Vox colleague Alex Abad-Santos, that it simplifies the problem of violence, in the wake of real-world horrors like the recent mass shootings in Las Vegas and Texas.

Beyond the bloody veneer, however, is a much deeper meditation on PTSD and what it’s like for soldiers to transition back to civilian life after war. I’m not sure any pop culture work has captured the chaos and isolation of PTSD as vividly as The Punisher. Everything orbits around the anti-hero, Frank Castle, a former Marine whose family is murdered and who devotes himself to uncovering the conspiracy behind those deaths and killing those responsible.

It doesn’t stop there, though. The show also zooms out and tries to examine what happens to veterans when they return to a country that idealizes them in speech but neglects them in deed. I’m a veteran myself and while I’ve experienced nothing like what the characters on this show experience, the way it handles life after deployment resonated. I’ve seen people struggle with this transition and the anguish of the characters felt authentic even if it was, at times, overly dramatized.

Showrunner Steve Lightfoot is British, which makes him an interesting choice to tell what seems like a quintessentially American story of violence and grief. I spoke to him about the controversy over the show’s use of violence and what he hoped to help the American public understand about the PTSD haunting veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

[Warning: this interview contains spoilers. If you haven’t watched the show, read with caution.]

Sean Illing

Grief is the thread that connects everyone in this show. How is Frank Castle defined by his losses?

Steve Lightfoot

I’m glad you felt that, because that was the thing for me. No matter the character you are writing about, you have to find something universal, something that everyone can identify with, and everyone understands grief. Most of us can’t relate to Frank’s life. We haven’t had our family murdered, we haven't been Special Forces soldiers, we haven’t been through that.

But I think grief is something pretty universal, and I think the way men often deal with grief is not always that healthy. They can go to rage, they can bottle it up, they can sort of act out rather than express the feelings. And I thought Frank was an ultimate example of that kind of damaging response to loss.

Sean Illing

The issue of PTSD hovers over this season. It’s a pretty visceral look at what it’s like for soldiers to transition from war to civilian life. What did you want to say about this?

Steve Lightfoot

I know you’re a veteran, so I’m frankly more interested in your opinion. I’ve always been interested in the veteran experience, if I can call it that. I tried to write a serious drama about UK soldiers in Afghanistan a while back, but we never got to make that show. But I did a lot of research and talked to a lot of vets. I read a lot of memoirs, and I tried to understand the experience.

I don’t know how to tell a story like this without dealing with the fact that we’re sending these young people to war, year after year, deployment after deployment. We’re asking them to manage these extreme environments and then return home as though everything is fine. How could we do this show and not touch on that?

One thing I’ve learned is that if you’ve met one veteran, you’ve met one veteran. Everyone is different, and everyone has their story, their struggle. I’m happy that some vets feel that we’ve captured that.

Sean Illing

You avoid using the term “PTSD” in the show, even though it’s clearly present. Is that intentional?

Steve Lightfoot

Again, I’m so glad you noticed that. I think PTSD has become a label in society, and that’s a problem. It’s almost become degrading in a way, which is a shame. So we don’t use the phrase in the show because we don’t want it to become a catch-all and because everyone’s experience is different.

The show is about the drama and the emotional damage that comes with going to war. It’s about the impact of this on the people who do the fighting and the killing. At the end of the day, this is just a TV show, but we tried to show all sides of this very real experience.

Sean Illing

Did you set out to cast real vets to play some of the these roles, or was that something that was decided later?

Steve Lightfoot

It was very deliberate. I thought we needed to find real vets to play the guys in the group therapy sessions. It terrified me at first because I thought they’d start tossing chairs at me if we got it all wrong. But I thought it was the right thing to do. Luckily, they were very supportive and thought we got it mostly right.

Netflix

Sean Illing

American soldiers suffer disproportionately from PTSD, and we really don’t have an explanation for that. I’m curious what you think after having worked on this story, which is a uniquely American story.

Steve Lightfoot

I’m British, but I’ve lived in America for a long time, and I choose to live here. Most of our writers are American. We all love this place. But I think a lot of us struggled with this question. I talked to lots of vets and people who work for the VA, and there really is no clear sense of what’s gone wrong.

A lot of these guys leave the military and the only way they get a chance is if they are put on some kind of disability, which carries a whole new set of problems. I think there’s a lot of genuine suffering, but there is also the fact that soldiers are sort of held accountable for their actions in society in a way they weren’t in previous wars.

I can’t speak to whether this is true or not, but I know that some feel that almost vilified for what they did in the name of their country, for what they were asked to do, after being put in impossible situations. Psychologically, they’re not able to come home and feel good about what they were asked to do. Frank Castle is an extreme version of this, but there’s a part of his experience that many veterans can relate to.

Sean Illing

I think some of it has to do with the sense of community soldiers find in war: you live, sleep, eat, fight, and die with 30, 40, or 50 people, and they become your family, and the emotional bonds are intense. But when you get home, that sense of community is gone, and the world is stripped of that intensity and purpose.

Steve Lightfoot

I think that’s very true, and we were told that again and again by therapists and social workers who work with soldiers. A lot of people think of PTSD as guys not being able to get out of bed and having flashbacks and that’s part of it, but it’s also about missing the adrenalin and the bonds forged in combat. You see a lot of them get into trouble by trying to find some replacement for this.

Sean Illing

You can see flashes of this in Lewis, who is maybe the most tragic character in the whole show.

Steve Lightfoot

Making him a tragic character was always the idea. Obviously, he’s a fictional character, but we really tried to show how someone like that — a young and alienated veteran — can get radicalized when he comes home and feels his life empty and purposeless. I’m glad you found him tragic and not a villain, because I saw him as a victim of circumstances beyond his control. He couldn’t live without a war, and so like Frank, he found a new one.

Sean Illing

The show has been criticized for glorifying violence in an age of mass shootings. Were you conflicted at all about the way the show treats or arguably celebrates violence?

Steve Lightfoot

I was certainly cognizant of it. When I took the job, I was taking on a show in a long tradition of action thrillers dating all the way back to Westerns, and so I don’t think we were a special case in that sense.

But the truth is that I wrote the show a year ago, and then we’ve had so many horrendous incidents, most recently the mass shooting in Las Vegas. It’s just sickening. One thing I tried to do was to show the costs of violence, to make it clear to the audience what it feels like and how it destroys everyone it touches.

So my view from the beginning was that if we’re going to do this, we have to show the costs of it, both physically and emotionally. I wanted the audience to see that Frank was ruined inside, that he’s not a happy guy, and that he leaves a piece of his soul every time he exacts revenge on someone. We couldn’t fully explore the bigger political context of violence, but we could at least show what it does to individuals.

Sean Illing

So what’s in store for season 2?

Steve Lightfoot

I don’t know yet. I’ve got some ideas and I can’t wait to dive back in. I still haven’t heard anything definitive from Netflix, but hopefully we’ll learn something soon. I’m excited about it, though, and we’re ready to get started. There’s always another war for Frank to fight — that’s for sure.

Marvel’s The Punisher is currently streaming on Netflix.

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