I had neither dropped a full bag of goods nor accidentally dinged a customer's sedan while coasting a cart through the parking lot, and I don't believe any coworkers had slighted me or managers taken issue with my performance. Nor was my surprising anger aimed at any person or situation in particular: my hostility was more intense than it was directed, a fierce scattershot of animus aimed at any and all comers.

This intense emotion was no less dangerous for not being visible; though no one recognized what I was experiencing, I became increasingly convicted that I was reveling in something sinful. A desire to lash out violently with words or hands--to cause pain or shame--took hold of and rapidly consumed me though I still chose no target. While this aura lasted I felt reckless and powerful, with heightened, focused senses at my disposal.

I forget exactly how this generalized anger dissipated: neither shots nor employees were fired, and I think I would recall any canned goods or cabbage heads hurtling through the air. The lesson was no less instructive, however: I learned on that day that there was something profoundly irrational inside me, something hard to control and intoxicating that might, some day, dangerously manifest itself.

Director Louis Leterrier's cinematic spin on Bruce Banner reminds us--via fantastic hyperbole--that most of us harbor such a creature deep within. Leterrier does this by casting Bruce Banner as an unassuming everyman with an unremarkable emotional makeup, a decision that veers sharply from the Hulk we met five years ago.

The anger which drives our green hero in Ang Lee's earlier Hulk (2003) is an artificial, foreign agent introduced into Bruce Banner's life by a Skinnerian patriarch willing to experiment on his own progeny in the worst possible way. More horrible than the needles Bruce's father applies to his child's body are those moments when a pacifier is ripped from Bruce's tiny grasp, or the comforting hugs of a doting mother vanish in the wake of an abusive husband. The gamma ray "accident" which later grants the adult Bruce his powers merely catalyzes the emotional ingredients inserted within his psyche at an early age, granting him the mass and girth to permanently stamp his latent rage on his environment and those who get in his way. In Ang Lee's film, Bruce's anger is unnatural, the product of a deranged father's machinations.

Louis Leterrier's recent The Incredible Hulk (2008), by contrast, suggests that the various emotions prompting Banner's violent transformations mirror those experienced daily by non-superhumans. This shift in characterization allows the second film to deliver a clear and more generalizable message about the practical benefits of self-control.

The opening of the second Hulk film expends considerable time establishing Bruce Banner's attempts to marshal his emotions. He practices assorted breathing and relaxation techniques so that he can quickly reduce his pulse rate when fear, wrath, or even sexual arousal threaten his carefully crafted calm. This regimen helps him face a considerable degree of hostility and even physical violence without transforming into his green-skinned alter ego. Like Marvel's most popular mutant, the diminutive Wolverine, this green-skinned Atlas realizes that the strength and speed that grow with his anger consistently cost him the ability to control that power, so he attempts to sacrifice his special ability in order to hide himself from those loved ones he might accidentally harm, as well as those military types hoping to deploy him as a weapon.

His success at self-regulation is limited, of course--the action genre and comic book fans demand Bruce's spectacular failure and the cataclysmic consequences that inevitably ensue. His occasional transformations, however, only underscore his more plenteous successes. His condition requires the kind of constant vigilance we would all do well to emulate, while the destructive path carved by his gargantuan self provides a vivid, instructive metaphor in the spiritual and emotional damage wreaked by anger. Perhaps if we faced such visible, tangible consequences every time we lost our temper, we too might learn to tame the beast within--what INXS once playfully, but accurately, called the "devil inside."