So how does Disney repeatedly peddle the same action film while also making this story acceptable to the media as a progressive identity narrative for the little guy? How does it manage to flatter everyone it crushes under its boot heel?
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Uncle Ben taught us that having superpowers is easy, while being a responsible superhero is hard. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy (Spider-Man 2 particularly) altered the DNA of its storytelling to reflect this knowledge. What was so aggressively off-putting about The Amazing Spider-Man was manifested by a douchebag Peter Parker in a story that had no stakes – in essence, it had no sense of responsibility. Spider-Man: Homecoming hopes to rectify this inequity for its fans by giving Peter back his conscience (and taking away his skateboard and hangover hair), but the film is a half-measure. The emotional narrative of a hero balancing his personal desires with his sense of duty has been Marvelized into a soapbox on which Spider-Man can represent inner-city ambitions and economic anxiety without dealing with them. It is a posture of social activism, but excludes itself from adversity since Spider-Man himself only sympathizes with disenfranchisement without sharing in it. Disney has made him what was once called a “politrick.”
The important thing about politricks is not that they are false promises made by eager campaigns but that those who make them believe in them. The person who makes the promise tricks themselves first. Is Disney a political machine skinning its target audience in exchange for “crumbs of token recognition and token gains,” as Malcolm X said once? Or do they actually believe in purporting the little man’s America in which Spider-Man: Homecoming takes place, like the Empire campaigning for the rights of Ewoks?
It doesn’t matter since the result is the same. Disney isn’t in the business of making cases for human rights: they’re in the business of business. Everything they make has a buyer in mind, not a benefactor. If they support a cause, they do so to justify a toy market with a new audience. I heard a conservative radio host once call the lottery a tax for poor people. I feel like Disney gets that: this is merchandise for poor people.
Tidy white Captain America (Chris Evans) proselytizing to a class of inner-city kids, 90% minority, starts to make the Avengers seem like distant Aryan tightwads. And they might be – Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) sold weapons to Al Qaeda, and now he repents by building government installations for Shield, which if you’ll recall learning in Captain America: Winter Soldier, is actually the latest incarnation of the liquidated Nazi intelligence agency, Hydra. Homecoming reinforces the impartial distance between Avengers and common folk with Captain America’s classroom pep videos, in which he seems toweringly aloof and white compared to Peter’s classes. You expect him to roll his shoulders, not knowing the camera is still on, and say, “Jesus Christ, are we done yet? Holy shit. Where’s my Monte Cristo?”
But this mentionable criticism of the imperial Avengers does not convert into filmmaking: in Infinity War, the world will still depend on them. They will still be the unapologetic good guys. Homecoming is appeasing its target audience by turning Spider-Man into a #blacklivesmatter spokesman, but he still has to tread carefully around Tony Stark’s and Captain America’s legitimacy as heroes. Remember that this cinematic universe is nothing but protagonists. The cards will blow over if one of them is more right than any of the others. Against them, the little man isn’t the theme of Homecoming, and it doesn’t change anything in the spectrum of the Marvelverse. It’s just a crumb.
This icy politricking can’t hurt Spider-Man: Homecoming, which was conceived as a platform for it in the first place. It was made to be deceptive, even if it does it so well that even those who made it don’t know what they’ve made. But it can still smear the reputations of things of which we have preconceptions. The person Marvel is hurting in this case is Peter Parker.
Peter (here played delicately likable by Tom Holland) is what makes Spider-Man special: the little man inside the great power. It’s him and not the spectacular wallcrawler that saves you and says, not “All in a day’s work,” not “It’s what I do,” but “Don’t mention it.” No task is too big for most superheroes – for Spidey, no task is too small. There are bits in Homecoming where someone who can lift cars and shoot webs gives an old lady directions, saves a bike no one noticed was stolen, and appeases a couple of street vendors by backflipping on command. There’s an American flag waving behind him, and I have to wonder if it’s the same flag plastered to the backdrop of Cap’s videos.
Spider-Man is the superhero least available to be praised and most likely to oppose the grandstanding of a multinational conglomerate funded by merchandise. He really doesn’t want you to mention it: unlike Homecoming, he’s not just saying it to convince you of his humility long enough to buy his merch. But since his film is built inside the formula of the Disney franchise machine, it requires our friendly neighborhood hero to accept sequences based on just such praise, to pose for toymakers, to flaunt his costume and his powers without stopping long enough to remember that he’s Peter Parker under there. Spider-Man 2 never stopped being about what responsibility means to Peter. Homecoming acts like it’s got better places to be.
Since goodness in these movies is often just a reply to evil actions – bad guys have motivation, while good guys have motivation only to beat bad guys – the best way to understand Homecoming is to understand its villain.
Michael Keaton plays Vulture with less sociopathy than he played Birdman. He’s a construction foreman turned neo-gangster arms dealer, who sells weapons recovered from the alien invasion that took place in The Avengers to thugs on the street. The film opens with his plight and makes a point of drawing sympathy from it. Homecoming has this incredible ability to most harshly marginalize those with which it most empathizes. Vulture is most hated for having the most to lose: his family, his livelihood, his job. His is the plight of the blue-collar workers climbing like ants over the ruins wrought by the presence of the Avengers, which is how these disasters come about (New York is destroyed because Thor came to Earth, Sokovia is attacked because Hulk lost control and then destroyed because Iron Man invented Ultron, the United Nations was destroyed by Bucky Barnes, and so on).
Vulture (Michael Keaton)
Vulture personifies the outgroup in these tragedies, the man on the ground, and its fear of cultural vulnerability and disempowerment. He is a reincarnation of the original American dream, to make it big from nothing, raise a family, keep the car clean, and not get hit by hydrogen bombs. He and his crew drive into New York like the 9/11 rescue crews and start foraging for claims like prospectors – that’s the connotation communicated to a Western audience. What is communicated by the context of Iron Man’s actions? He is a reverse reflection of that dream. He inherits his father’s fortune, can’t keep a steady relationship, crashes all his cars, and builds hydrogen bombs. Why in Marvel’s universe is this new Industrialist action figure the father archetype and hero while Vulture is cast as the villain of the piece?
If you removed the smokescreen of the characters’ past movies and pretended that Homecoming was made fresh, as an original crime drama, it would be decried as imperialistic propaganda – the mighty government stooge crushing the common man out of what little sustenance he can earn even in the aftermath of his empire’s destructive indulgences. Meanwhile, the common man’s plight is doled out as a tiny token to distract from the imperialists in real life marginalizing it in order to reap it for merchandise. That would be the media narrative.
So how does Disney repeatedly peddle the same action film while also making this story acceptable to the media as a progressive identity narrative for the little guy? How does it manage to flatter everyone it crushes under its boot heel?
It does so with intertextuality, which means: prioritizing how texts (in this case, Marvel movies) interact with each other over what each one says individually. Iron Man has already been established in past films as a redeemed nice guy and hero, so his automatic connection to these other texts overrides the symbols and actions in any of his subsequent films. Disney has written itself this blank check on character development by continuing to abuse the connection between its stories to avoid writing coherent new texts. None of the characters have to develop in any one movie because of their implied macro-arc over the series – Tony Stark can act penitent and unstable in Iron Man 3 and collective and cool in Homecoming because both are implied and neither have to be reinforced. Iron Man doesn’t have to fit in the thematic scheme of Homecoming because his personality is previously established. His goodness is grandfathered in.
Tony Stark in Iron Man 3
Against the weight of this narrative lineage, Vulture, a new character, doesn’t stand a chance at being appeased by the Disney machine, despite having the clearest emotional plight in his film. This has reached the point that even whole other stories are implied – Spider-Man becomes good intertextually even without other texts (his unestablished relationship with Iron Man is far more significant in coloring our expectations of him than his minor role in Civil War). These stories are getting progressively easier to write because they’ve reached the point that less is being added than what is being implied. Homecoming expects us to take Spider-Man and Iron Man at their word even more exactly than Vulture at his actions. This Spider-Man claims to be a public servant, but even if he returns a lost bike or flips on command, he does so in a montage. Even his sentiments with the body-shopped new Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) are relegated to music videos (she teaches him to tie a necktie as part of a dating montage), while his only significant relationship in the film is appropriately with the intelligent female voice inside the iron spider suit that Disney made for him, for being a good boy (he calls her “Karen,” voiced by Jennifer Connelly). As far as a progression in identity politics, or on-screen humanity, the film has no time.
As far as scenes, that is, not montages, there are two kinds in Homecoming: action scenes and scenes with friends.
In action scenes, Spider-Man fights Vulture even when Iron Man defies him not to, the opposite of what each of them should be doing thematically, since this pits Spider-Man against the film’s embodiment of the disenfranchised common man, Marvelized into a profiteering thug. Naturally, the Disney institution would portray someone who steals their technology to support their family as a mercenary who is thrown pathos as crumbs of narrative pity but who has not earned the right to capitalize on them. If this version of Spider-Man had a real human superpower, it would be the power to see the everyman hiding within the criminal. That’s what he would bring to the Avengers, even if he was not always right. He would see the aching father in Thanos, the mid-life crisis in Abomination, the disenfranchised sibling in Loki, the disempowered family man in Vulture. But he’s too busy trying to impress Tony/Disney to act on it.
Despite acting humble, the action scenes in Homecoming just keep throttling the emotions. The only difference between it and most of the Marvel films is that in Peter there is some subtle spark to suffocate, and so the loud tumble dryer of flight sequences and flipping feels actively egregious rather than just tiresome. It would feel no different than if Karen took over the spider suit while Peter was still inside, and navigated the blurry action on auto-pilot, destroying bad guys even when Peter knows them personally and understands where they’re coming from. In other words, it would be no different if he was Venom.
The scenes with friends only accentuate this emotional absence, but even more starkly they illustrate how far this Spider-Man swings below Spider-Man 2. Homecoming presents a Spider-Man that comes at no cost and faces no adversity. But isn’t that all Spider-Man is about? He’s a no-show in his own film, whose friends do not accentuate his hurt and contextualize his duty as they do in the Raimi films, but only further pantomime his shallowness. Ned (Jacob Batalon) lurches around the movie like Peter’s too nice to tell him to buzz off, and discovers Peter’s secret early on in a scene that recalls that Green Lantern movie, of all things (he even tries on the spider suit). Liz (Laura Harrier) is the love interest with no beating heart. The rest of their friends are all archetypes in varying shades of brown – before you write your own article about Disney diversity taking a stab at proto-Trump American bias, keep in mind that this is coming from a company who did this to attract what they call the “urban market” to a movie about a white superhero. A woman sitting in my theater got it right – when Liz tells Peter she’ll go to homecoming with him I distinctly heard, “Aw, hell no,” from a couple rows up. She bought a ticket, but she’s not buying it.
Ned (Jacob Batalon) and Peter Parker
I do actually like that Flash Thompson is an Internet troll rather than a school bully that even in 2002 felt like a dated flashback to the fifties re-enacted by thirty-year-olds reminiscing about their impressions of high school. But what makes Spider-Man: Homecoming so emotionally distant is also what makes it trendy: it is an Internet-age superhero story, a story that cuts to reaction shots in vine video scenes without any emotions left for the narrative.
Spider-Man 2 never stops beating Peter Parker down. Peter’s in it even more than Spider-Man, since his invincible alter ego is more like a break from the work of his life than a full-time pleasure cruise of indulgent hero worship. Even then, the lines blur: he turns into Spider-Man to deliver Peter Parker’s pizzas, but also loses that job because someone needed saving. He’s a genius who can’t pass a class because he has a conscience, can’t stay in love when his love would be in danger, can’t hold down a friendship while also persecuting people for the wrongs that they commit. Raimi has to let Spider-Man see the wrong that hides in most everyone, even his best friends and idols and bosses. He lets Spider-Man stand for the conscience that Peter, overwhelmed, would give up for a moment’s peace. Then Raimi proves that what made Spider-Man special and important was not his powers but Peter’s will to say “hold on!” and to save a person even when he had been made vulnerable by his conscience. He makes Peter come clean after persecuting him with mundanities. And then Raimi makes the love of his life see the spectacular Spider-Man, for the first time, as nothing, nothing at all, but Peter Parker.
Homecoming includes the same feat of mythmaking: it makes Peter Parker transform into himself, join with his alter ego, and come out of his doubts stronger and more complete. But Homecoming can’t rise to Raimi’s level: it re-transcribes Peter’s will to be Spider-Man as a superpower. The scene is Homecoming’s best: he struggles beneath a fallen building, and calls for help. When he realizes no one else can save him, he wills himself out of his low point and into a new understanding, that he is Spider-Man.
This is the essential problem with Homecoming in general. What is Spider-Man, in this instance? To make him vulnerable, where in Spider-Man 2 he was made most so by being happy, Homecoming challenges him to use his super strength to overcome a physical obstacle. The scene is powerful, but it still memorializes Peter as a by-product of physical power and the will to use that power. The cinematic Peter Parker has already outgrown this realization. In Spider-Man 2, Peter saved a girl from a burning building with no power at all, nothing but the responsibility to face a bad thing and do something about it. In Homecoming, Peter saves himself in a moment that aims for emotional clarity, but it’s a distracting half-measure since without the radioactive spider bite he would have been crushed. Raimi worked long and hard to get Peter to the point that he could truly be Peter Parker. Homecoming is looking ahead toward a series that will use this character only as an icon of himself, in sequels that redirect past conclusions in favor of new action (consider the dissonance of Peter meaningfully choosing his cloth suit in Homecoming and then reverting to the robot spider suit in Infinity War). Homecoming may not have prioritized the tech in Peter’s development, but it doesn’t prioritize Peter either: at its climax, the most important thing in the world to it is whether Peter can finally be Spider-Man.
This is why I compare Homecoming so much to its predecessors, not because I like it less, but because it is so clearly aimed at its inevitable corporate future. Raimi assembled scenes to describe a character’s emotional journey, whereas Homecoming is lining up its sister films’ team-up schemes. Peter may say that he cares more about the neighborhood than the Avengers (so does Homecoming), but in the very next film his idolization of Tony Stark comes to bear on the only goal relevant to Disney, whose producers seem to be calling the shots on other studios’ films now: to make him an Avenger.
Consider a similar pair of sequences: the boat sequence in Homecoming and the train sequence in Spider-Man 2. Spider-Man’s body strains to hold these together by his web tethers, his suit tearing, his strength waning. In Spider-Man 2, the train had this unstoppable forward momentum, all of this stressful energy getting away from Peter, and the only way he could stop it was to burn himself out, an inevitable end for any normal boy who moonlights as an important person. But Raimi used this scene as a vehicle to describe what Spider-Man means to the everyman, and to give him back the support of people that even Peter doubted still existed.
Homecoming, which is a movie that professes to be about exactly this, demonstrates nothing of the sort. Peter has to hold together a cruise ship whose destruction is his fault when he disobeys Iron Man as a repressed intention to impress him. Daddy issues are a fascinating turn of emotion for Spider-Man, since this particular crisis has no possible positive result in the context of his story. Imagine the end of Spider-Man, when Norman Osborne offers to be Peter’s new dad. Imagine if Peter had responded by saying, “I had a father: his name was Tony Stark.” Or, “his name was Richard Parker.” Or even, “Thank you Mr. Osborne, I mean, dad.”
Spider-Man and Stark
If you’ll recall, he said, “I had a father. His name was Ben Parker.” His father was the one who taught him how to be good, not the person he idolized as being cool. I don’t suppose that Disney eliminated Uncle Ben from the story lightly: they probably thought that people were tired of the same old origin story and wanted to start in the middle. This idea is sound. But Disney seems to have no object permanence for the emotions in their story: because we do not see Uncle Ben’s death, it’s like it never happened. He is the element that is missing, that is not driving this new Spider-Man to be better than a guy who flips on command. Uncle Ben was the kind of man who cared about little people, who did what he could to protect his family, and never compromised what he believed in with what people expected of him. Homecoming has turned him into a vulture.
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All images are screenshots from the films.
