No Spidey For Me
So here's why I didn't go see the new Spider-Man movie.
It's not that it didn't look shiny. It's not that it looked bad. It's that it was sold, relentlessly, as being about the dark secrets of Peter Parker's parents (say THAT three times fast) and how that led to...some Welsh guy turning into a lizard. Or something.
And that's not what I want out of Spider-Man. Spider-Man, to me, was interesting precisely because he didn't come from a background that was fraught with all kinds of fraughtness. He wasn't a billionaire, like Bruce Wayne. He wasn't the last survivor of a dying world. He wasn't part of a super-secret science team. He was just a guy, with a not-perfect home and a not-perfect life, and something happened to him that he wasn't quite sure how to deal with. And he did the best he could, and he screwed up, and he kept trying to do the best he could anyway, even when it screwed him to do so.
Because deep down, the interesting thing about Spider-Man is Peter Parker. A smart, bullied kid from a broken home who finds that getting the thing that all bullied, smart kids dream about - the proof positive that he really is special - doesn't actually help solve any of his problems. Instead, it just creates new ones.
You get the same vibe from his villains, too. Look at these guys. They wear turtlenecks. They're pudgy. They answer want ads to become supervillains. They get grafted into supervillain suits and can't get out again. Honestly, if any of these turkeys ever actually robbed a bank successfully, you know they'd blow it all over the weekend and be dead broke again on Monday. With very few exceptions, they're not world-beaters or megalomaniacs. And they're appropriate guys for Peter Parker to fight, because they're all the same guy, give or take a few breaks and an Aunt May and Uncle Ben.
You know what you don't see in there? Secret legacies. Conspiracies. Dark shadows of the past reaching forward. Fraughtness, whatever that might be. My Spider-Man's just a guy trying to get by, and I like him that way just fine.
It's not that it didn't look shiny. It's not that it looked bad. It's that it was sold, relentlessly, as being about the dark secrets of Peter Parker's parents (say THAT three times fast) and how that led to...some Welsh guy turning into a lizard. Or something.
And that's not what I want out of Spider-Man. Spider-Man, to me, was interesting precisely because he didn't come from a background that was fraught with all kinds of fraughtness. He wasn't a billionaire, like Bruce Wayne. He wasn't the last survivor of a dying world. He wasn't part of a super-secret science team. He was just a guy, with a not-perfect home and a not-perfect life, and something happened to him that he wasn't quite sure how to deal with. And he did the best he could, and he screwed up, and he kept trying to do the best he could anyway, even when it screwed him to do so.
Because deep down, the interesting thing about Spider-Man is Peter Parker. A smart, bullied kid from a broken home who finds that getting the thing that all bullied, smart kids dream about - the proof positive that he really is special - doesn't actually help solve any of his problems. Instead, it just creates new ones.
You get the same vibe from his villains, too. Look at these guys. They wear turtlenecks. They're pudgy. They answer want ads to become supervillains. They get grafted into supervillain suits and can't get out again. Honestly, if any of these turkeys ever actually robbed a bank successfully, you know they'd blow it all over the weekend and be dead broke again on Monday. With very few exceptions, they're not world-beaters or megalomaniacs. And they're appropriate guys for Peter Parker to fight, because they're all the same guy, give or take a few breaks and an Aunt May and Uncle Ben.
You know what you don't see in there? Secret legacies. Conspiracies. Dark shadows of the past reaching forward. Fraughtness, whatever that might be. My Spider-Man's just a guy trying to get by, and I like him that way just fine.
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