Spider-Man #247: A Late, Angry and Self-Possessed Review

What was interesting about the new Spider-Man film is that it was not very good, even by the low standards set by the MCU. The simulatory features of ‘difference’ that are often used to delineate between good and bad films – cinematography, pacing, structure etc – are in the latest MCU grotesquery aesthetically bland, formless, and predictable. That (in)famous Marvel wit falls flat on its face as the gout-ridden blockbuster rumbles through a montage of familiar beats that we have literally seen before, ending with the inevitable CGI smorgasbord of things that go bang and rabidly ineffectual punching.

Scorsese hit upon the pull of Marvel films when he described them as the filmic equivalent to theme park rides. The Marvel product, at its most inoffensive, is a well-crafted combination of genuine star-power and highly budget allocation. The money spent on procuring the rights for the soundtrack in Guardians of the Galaxy, for example, is a well-thought-out use of funds that achieves multiple layers of storytelling at once. It provides a tonal blueprint that the film can abide by, while doing some significant heavy lifting for the Starlord protagonist as slightly more than another handsome white bloke with a six-pack. At their best, the MCU is a hyper-efficient exercise in commercial filmmaking: where the multiplicity of industrial strata that go into a single film (source material, screenwriting, marketing, production, direction etc) is streamlined to the point of singularity. I was satisfied, then, when it became apparent something was amiss in the latest instalment.

The film buckles under the weight of its own ambition. It is an overstuffed mess of confusing set-pieces that ram into each other like a truck hitting a queue of stationary traffic. It does not know what to do with the interesting (marketable) choices it attempts to make. The return of the old villains is a great example. Not only are there too many to allow for any sort of interesting character interaction – which is the entire point of their presence – but they are MCU-ified beyond recognition. Dragged from their respective universes into that of the film, any traces of original characterisation are lost. The Green Goblin pivots from Gollum-like menace to quippy comedic relief, Doctor Octopus transitions from morally driven threat to quippy comedic relief, Electro changes from pathos-ridden anger to quippy comedic relief and so on. Why bring these characters back just to change them at the fundamental level? Further still, the points of character development for the Holland Spider-Man that provide the emotional core of the film are completely recycled from the older films, which is an inexplicable U-turn on the initial decision to deny this particular iteration of his oft-told origin story. Death of the family member, fealty to power and responsibility, sacrifice of the hero etc. We have been there and done that twice before, and what was refreshing about Holland’s Spider-Man was that we did not have to go through it a third time. Or so we thought.

Despite all this I cannot remember a previous viewing experience filled with so many whoops, cheers, gasps, and near-orgasmic moments of revelation. At one point a grown man unironically said ‘Hell yeah’. Why this reaction if the film, by the very self- appointed criteria through which it is deemed ‘good’, fails spectacularly?

The moment that got the most whoops and/or cheers was the big resurrection of Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Men. Freed from their studio-enforced dearth, audiences could get what they had been waiting for: the same character, three times . And yet we all knew it was coming. Before release, every late-night interview with Tom Holland would pose the same questions – ‘are all three of you in the film?’, ‘how are Andrew and Tobey?’ – to which Holland would follow that neat formula given to him by his Marvel overseers. Holland would smile and make some sort of joke (‘who?’): keeping the secret to conceal that there was no secret to keep at all. In today’s virtual reality, where the boundary between on and offline has been obliterated, any suggestion that Marvel Studios were committed to keeping the involvement of Garfield and Maguire a secret is naïve at best. But you already knew that, as did this Reddit user.

Back to the audience. There seems to be two roads to go down to explain the outbursts. The first is that these people had no clue that Maguire and Garfield were going to turn up. Not impossible. But, given the fact the viewing in question was a couple of months removed from release date; the film’s marketing revolved around the presence of the Garfield/Maguire villains; and media consumption is long since ceased to be a self-contained exercise; this seems implausible. I prefer the second explanation: audience members knew that the two older Spider-Men were probably going to turn up but were not quite sure. Here the emotional heft is not only linked to the feeling of nostalgic return – à la the reboot – but the feeling of ‘being seen and heard’. The kind psychotechnicians at Marvel have given us what we want! This is fan service in hyperreality. It is what happens when spoilers no longer exist but tickets still need selling.

But is that not the raison d’être of every film studio: to give the people what they want? Bums on seats, fingers in popcorn (and elsewhere)? Absolutely. But there is a difference being shown what you want, and it being given to you. You did not know that you wanted to see the T800 tell John Connor to ‘get down’ until it was shown to you in Terminator 2, nor did you know you wanted to see Heath Ledger wear makeup and a purple suit until he did it in The Dark Knight. There is a level of surprise that is achieved in these examples independent of the extra-textual elements that may inform such surprise. What is different in the latest Marvel film is that path between audience expectation and studio delivery is so unwavering and unsoiled that the (very) few elements of creativity that the culture industry allows for are completely removed, making all the more stark the reality of cultural production under this iteration of capital. Just when the audience wants them to, Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire literally waltz into frame. Who needs to show anyone anything when you can just give it to them?

This is what Marvel have struck upon and perfected, I think: a simulated interaction between spectator-audience and creator-studio. To reduce it to quite simple terms, the satisfaction of “the spontaneous wishes of the public is no more than hot air”, purely because these wishes are as spontaneous as combustion. What Adorno and Horkheimer draw out in The Dialectic of Enlightenment is a simple argument: culture is ideological, the ideology is capitalism, capitalism’s culture is a flattening of everything around it to a formalised sameness masquerading as novelty. What the MCU has done is strike this uncanny balance between the emphasis of the individual – which we see formally in terms of content (we can all be Spider-Man!), and in terms of the wider cultural ecosystem in which the MCU lives (fan forums, Reddit, ComicCon, the psychotic rumour mill) – and the audience’s cynical knowledge that all its films are the same. We see this not only in the quasi-postmodern flourishes of later MCU films (a majority of Endgame takes place in earlier films, Captain America is impressed by his own arse), but also in something like the What If… series. The latter of which is a perfect encapsulation of this relation where difference is simulated: non-canonical fan forum scenarios that makes the Marvel fan say ‘they see me, they hear me’. This is the core of the rabid fandom that accompanies these films. It is enough to be entertained anymore, you must be invested at a libidinal level. This investment comes from the actualisation of what the majority would like to see, or what they think they would like to see. A loving customer base is one that keeps coming back, and what better way to gaslight love than by feigning compassion. Where impotence fertilises everything around you, all that is left is to say ‘I love you Spider-Man!’.

This has political implications, and I’m going to be old-fashioned and say that the MCU carries real ideological function here. While researching this piece I was struck by some of the overwhelmingly positive views of the MCU which I think are telling. Some say that its financial prowess might usher in a new age of original cinema: the market need for novelty will call for a ‘different’ kind of superhero film, aesthetic breakthroughs will be had, capitalist culture will bear its teeth and eat itself and so on. Others celebrate the inclusive diversity of characters and culture – minorities feel seen, Shang-Chi goes to China. These views are deeply indebted to a vision of culture both outdated and (perhaps) false by default. If any director was going to usher in this so-called ‘different’ superhero film, it would’ve been Nomadland’s Chloe Zhao, given a budget of $200 million to make The Eternals. And while I’m not a fan of metacritical data aggregation sites like Rotten Tomatoes, I don’t think The Eternals lit anyone’s bollocks on fire. And then there’s this idea of inclusivity, which I think still revolves around the Afro-futurist Black Panther primarily, but also rears its head in the discourse surrounding the supposed desexualisation of Black Widow, for example – the latter of which you really have to squint to see.

I’m going to toss around a couple of examples. Mark Fisher has an excellent phrase detailing the importance of representation in relation to social emancipation – culture allows for a ‘performative anticipation of the future’. Hattie McDaniel winning the Oscar for Gone with the Wind, a full 15 years before Rosa Parks sat on that bus: that’s the importance of representation.

This might seem counter intuitive. After all, McDaniel’s role is a stereotypical perpetuation of the Black Woman Maid, and she deliberately distanced herself from the NAACP when push came to shove which radically undercuts any claims that she was an actor for the betterment of the African American community. But that is not the point, the point lies in the mere unwhiteness of her body. It’s the breaking down of barriers in earnest by showing which cannot, or would not, have been seen beneath the quotidian day-to-day of bourgeois (white) society – ‘I too am a person, and I just outacted all of you’. It is not so much that black populations were unseen, they were very much seen. It is that their societal and political functions were narrowly perpetuated. They were seen as slaves, workers, criminals, etc. In an interesting dialectical twist, Hattie McDaniel was representing black populations in spaces where they were unseen, by inhabiting how they have always been seen – as the Black Woman Maid. It was the concrete result of her perpetuation of an evil fiction, in her winning an award at a white ceremony that she herself was unable to attend, that was a significant step forward in her very representation outside of the text that is Gone with the Wind.

These ideas of representation and inclusivity, particularly in relation to the racial dynamics of the Anglosphere, more specifically the US, was low-hanging fruit for Black Panther’s marketing team. Black Panther being the ‘first fully black superhero movie’ is not breaking down any barriers except that which were invented to sell the film. The racial oppression that Black Panther is supposedly helping to heal is that of McDaniel’s era, when really it can be best associated with a culture of digitality – it is abstracted, automated, invisible except for the occasional rupture – ruptures that create discursive content for partisan media stations, and that are repackaged in the digital sphere as content. Black Panther thinks that racism is still the lingering ghost of colonialism, its face that of the KKK. Today, America’s racism calls itself Ta-Nehisi Coates and becomes the first black president. Hattie McDaniel’s win lives on a timeline of mid-20th Century black emancipation, her personal actions are irrelevant. While the March on Washington, MLK, Malcolm X, The Voting Acts, and the subsequent violent response of the white US state apparatus have been captured as images, reduced to signs and Oscar-fodder; there was a time where they were true history – there is a demarcation between social reality before the NAACP, and after it. McDaniel’s win precedes all of this, it’s where the rumblings start in the conscious of white America – the America that took some convincing.

Does such a demarcation exist before and after Obama? Black Panther, on the other hand, exists on a timeline of abstracted oppression: where the wounds of racial subjugation open up in the US prison system; in the ghettoization of minority communities across the Anglosphere; in the perpetuation of corporate wage slavery; and, most egregiously, where George Floyd is lynched on video, Tamir Rice never makes it to 13, Trayvon Martin’s murderer walks free and Mark Duggan dies on a street in N17. Now, of course, Black Panther is interacting with these events, but it is presenting itself as a medicine for this new era of subjugation, when really it is the bootlegging of a ‘cure’ for a different time. Like trying to treat a retrovirus with penicillin. Any claims to its political potential through its Afrofuturism buckle under the weight of a material America fast running out of a future itself.

So, there is a double simulation occurring across the MCU, and it’s something that is spreading across the mainstream cinemascape. A make-believe of forward-thinking sentiment that makes you feel, as a Marvel fan, that you are on the right side of history combines with the simulated involvement of the individual that makes you feel that you are seen, heard and valued. There is a double ideological function here then too – one of individual and collective consciousness. You as an individual are seen, heard and validated. Your dreams of three Spider-Men are realised and you whoop for joy, finally recognised by an industry that once ignored you. And what you whoop for is historic! A mainstream mega-franchise dedicated to righting the evils of the past: equality, equity, fraternity, is that Matt Murdoch? Your collective consciousness stimulated and validated by a corporate machine keen on squeezing every well-intentioned quid, dollar and euro out of you.

Despite all of this I do believe there will be the one superhero film to end them all. The film that The Eternals could have been, that breaks the aesthetic and political monotony of mainstream cinema. It’ll involve Captain America joining with his QAnon brothers to storm the Capitol – a glorious return to social realism.