Spider-Man, every which way you want him
You'll believe a man can get bitten by a radioactive spider.
Hi everyone, it’s been a while. I’m planning to revive this newsletter just as an occasional place to write about pop culture. I’m not going to stick to any schedule and only write when I feel like I have something worth saying. If covering football is my job, this is a hobby. Anyway, onto the webhead.
This contains spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home and, like, all the other films before it.
As stories go, Spider-Man is pretty far fetched.
We all intuitively understand this. You ask anyone seeing Spider-Man: No Way Home whether they think any of it would really happen, and you’ll get funny looks. Obviously, it’s ridiculous. But people buy into the storytelling logic. That’s easy with comic books or cartoons. Those are already several layers removed from reality, and no one is going to sit here and complain a cartoon is “unrealistic”. Live-action films have a little more work to do.
The first attempt at a Spider-Man film sat in development for decades before anyone figured out how to do it properly. Even James Cameron, director of two of the three biggest movies ever made adjusted for inflation, a man who never delivers a flop, couldn’t figure it out. Such names as Tim Burton, Tony Scott, Barry Sonnenfeld, David Fincher, Ang Lee, Michael Bay and M. Night Shyamalan were all considered, but Sony Pictures decided on Sam Raimi to direct.
Raimi was a lifelong fan of the property, which meant he had a very specific take percolating in his head for decades. That mostly meant filtering the early years of Spider-Man comics – those published during Raimi’s childhood – through his splatstick sensibility. If you’ve watched the Evil Dead films, you know he wasn’t exactly going for realism. He leans into the ridiculousness of his premises by adding surrealist elements of horror and comedy.
That’s how he approached Spider-Man, and it delighted for two films. Raimi tried to capture the feeling of reading those silver-age comic books he loved, and in doing so created a world that felt removed enough from reality that you could buy Peter Parker getting bitten by a radioactive spider and waking up with superpowers. He did this through some really imaginative direction to create a distinct larger-than-life world, along with some out-there performances to really blend with the fabric of the movie.
But the most important tool was grounding it in character motivations. These weren’t the most emotionally complex films of all time, but building around genuine emotion sold the whole thing. Peter loses his powers in Spider-Man 2 for no apparent reason, but we buy it because it makes emotional sense for the character at that moment. On the other hand, Harry Osborn getting amnesia in Spider-Man 3 makes no real character sense, and immediately feels cliched and forced, taking us out of that reality.
They’re nowhere near as out there (and much better in terms of pure quality), but Raimi’s Spider-Man almost feels akin to the 1960s Batman TV series. While that show had a reputation for not being “serious”, it took the Batman comics of the era very seriously, and simply tried to present something as close to the source material as possible. If you’re literally transposing a comic book into live-action, you’re inevitably getting something ridiculous. Raimi took that approach and made it better, building a cohesive world where you really could believe comic book nonsense would happen.
The whole thing came tumbling down with Spider-Man 3, a misguided film that doesn’t know what it wants to be. Sony and former Marvel executive Avi Arad wanted a darker tone, insisting on bringing Venom to the party. Raimi pushed back against that by adding even more out-there elements, most notably the infamous dance sequence. The scene itself is actually a delightful bit of Raimi-style filmmaking, but it fails because it clashes with the darker and more serious elements of the film. Spider-Man 2 had an equally ridiculous montage set to “Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head”, but that film understood its tone perfectly. Spider-Man 3 was serving too many masters, so it wasn’t a huge shock to see Sony reboot the project afterwards.
In some ways, The Amazing Spider-Man director Marc Webb along with writers James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent and Steve Kloves had an even harder task than Raimi and co. A reboot only five years after the previous film is going to raise eyebrows from audiences. That they – presumably at Sony’s behest – started by repeating the origin story only made things harder. So they had to find every way they could to make this film feel different to Raimi’s trilogy.
That meant nixing the more out there tone. Raimi’s New York City was one that elt equal parts 1960s and 21st century. This one needed to be today’s New York (or, looking at it now, the New York of a decade ago). Whereas Raimi created an unreal world to make the audience believe a man would get bitten by a radioactive spider, Webb’s film would bring that story closer to the world we know. While Tobey Maguire’s Peter embraced the down-on-his-luck nerd aspect of the character, Andrew Garfield’s take was cooler and easier to look up to. This isn’t my preferred approach for something like Spider-Man, but they were trying to break with the past, and I’m not sure I’d have a better idea.
It didn’t really work. It did more than solid numbers at the box office, but Sony was unhappy enough with the final product that the sequel went in a totally different direction. It kept the one element everyone liked – the chemistry between Garfield and Emma Stone – and changed almost everything else. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a bigger, louder, much less realistic work than its predecessor. It’s actually a much more visually interesting film, with cinematographer Dan Mindel bringing a far more exciting and comic book-like look than his predecessor John Schwartzman. The score – composed by a motley crew of seven different people including Hans Zimmer, Junkie XL and Pharrell Williams – combines with those visuals to make something that looks and feels really bold for a blockbuster. But the screenplay, as usual for Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, feels thrown together and constantly chasing the next shiny thing.
The first Amazing Spider-Man went for a more realistic tone that clashes with the comic book plotting, while the second opted for something much weirder that I kind of respect, even if it ultimately falls apart. At the end of the day, these films never found any kind of consistent tone, so it makes sense they’re not as beloved as what came before and after.
The third reboot of Spider-Man didn’t really need to build its own tone at all. This one takes place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so the template is set. There’s still plenty of work to do, but Peter Parker should be able to coexist in a world with Tony Stark and Steve Rogers fairly naturally.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe house style isn’t my favourite. Producer Kevin Feige and his team of writers and directors tend to compensate for the stranger elements of the comics with bland and unobtrusive filmmaking. It’s been widely noted that the MCU favours bizarrely muted colours and almost unnoticed musical scores. As Patrick Willems pointed out, the blacks in Marvel’s colour palette are literally dark grey.
If I’m feeling particularly uncharitable, that feels like a metaphor for everything they do. The source material is already pretty out there, so this is countered by making the safest adaptation choices possible at every turn. Interesting filmmaking choices are flattened out. Function is prioritised over form. You’d never see anything like the absurdist humour in the Raimi films here, lest someone on the internet call it “cringe”. Feige and co understand the basic meat and potatoes of classical storytelling very well, so it works. The old complaint about Hollywood executives not knowing what they want doesn’t apply here. The Marvel team know exactly what they want every film to be. It’s just never going to be my favourite thing.
Maybe some of this is just on me rather than the films. I grew up with the Raimi trilogy. I remember being heartbroken when the first film controversially got a 12 rating in the UK while I was just 10 years old. I remember when that move led to the creation of the entirely new 12A rating, to my delight as I finally got to see the film. I remember downloading the Spider-Man 3 promotional photo of Peter in the black suit as the desktop background to my family’s computer. I lived and breathed those films.
And then I grew up. By the time 2017 rolled around, at age 25, films from that year like Phantom Thread or Call My By Your Name were much more my speed than Spider-Man: Homecoming. Had I been an adult in 2002, I would’ve surely preferred Punch-Drunk Love and Far From Heaven to the first Spider-Man. Maybe the films didn’t change as much as I did. Maybe many of the young people who love the Tom Holland films today will be older and grumpier like me one day. I just don’t know.
Marvel already took the liberty of introducing this version of Peter Parker in Captain America: Civil War, so Spider-Man: Homecoming could skip the introductions and get right into it. After that, writers Chris McKenna and Eric Sommers1 alongside director Jon Watts also wanted to build something that didn’t feel the way the five previous Spider-Man movies did. “When the screenwriters of Spider-Man: Homecoming sat down to come up with the third big-screen iteration of the character”, the YouTube channel (and friend of mine) Captain Midnight put it in his now-famous video essay on the film, “they created a laundry list of things they felt they had already seen over and over again in Spider-Man films. The list had obvious stuff like the spider bite moment or the death of Uncle Ben, but it also included some things that’d be easy to overlook, like the fact that every Spider-Man movie has included plenty of scenes of the character swinging around downtown Manhattan”, he explained. The writers, therefore, “made the decision from the very beginning that their film wouldn’t include any of that stuff.”
Figuring out what not to is one thing. Deciding what to do is a much greater challenge. By far the most lively scenes in Homecoming are of young Peter and his classmates hanging out and experiencing normal high school problems. I really do wonder if Watts has an excellent teen romcom in him that we’re not seeing because he’s making franchise movies instead. But cute high school scenes does not a $200 million blockbuster make. Every time Homecoming moved further towards the superhero side of things, it felt a tired and stale working of the standard Marvel formula.
The other big problem in Homecoming and its sequel, Far From Home, was the series’ relationship to class. Spider-Man has always been Marvel’s most famous street-level hero. While the Avengers and the Fantastic Four are off dealing with problems on an intergalactic scale, Peter Parker has been a friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, dealing with paying the bills from a low paid job with the tasks of day to day superhero-ing. The MCU’s Spider-Man didn’t have those problems in Homecoming and Far From Home. He used a multimillion-dollar suit gifted to him by his mentor, one of the richest men on Earth. If he had any serious ground level problems in his and Aunt May’s life, he could just call in a favour.
This was emphasised by both films using nominally working-class villains. Far From Home is especially guilty of this, making the main threat a group of disgruntled tech workers badly treated by Tony Stark. These films, it felt, increasingly had no room for anything other than an embrace of the winners in capitalism. “The Marvel films can never think too heavily about the amount of power a character like Tony Stark accrues”, Emily VanDerWerff explains, “because to do so would require contending with the degree to which Marvel has run almost all of its closest competitors out of the game.” Perhaps as a consequence of Marvel’s cultural dominance, it feels incapable of telling stories about anything other than powerful people winning out. The movies even shy away from showing the effects of superhero events on ordinary people, in stark contrast to Raimi’s films.
To my pleasant surprise, No Way Home directly addresses a lot of these problems. It presents Peter with a genuine moral problem where he doesn’t rely on calling in technical support. There’s something really quaint about seeing MJ and Ned help him out the old fashioned way. It’s become common to suggest the Marvel Cinematic Universe and particularly its dialogue is straight out of the Joss Whedon playbook. I don’t think this is true at all, mainly because bad Whedon dialogue is deeply uncomfortable for all involved, whereas Marvel is terrified of making you feel uncomfortable. But this movie felt like it borrowed heavily from classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes, as a teenager tried to rectify a spell gone wrong metaphor for life troubles, hit the books with his friends, and had to make a serious sacrifice and step towards adulthood to put things right.
The film had to bring in two other Spider-Men while maintaining the existing tone, and that meant bending certain things. In that sense, it was the ideal time to bring back a lot of classic Spider-Man tropes missing from the previous two entries, and give audiences the kind of film they hadn’t been getting for some years now.
I don’t think Watts, McKenna and Sommers intended for this to be an origin story trilogy. I think Homecoming and Far From Home were made to function as proper Spider-Man stories. But the smart thing about No Way Home is the way it retrofits this arc for the trilogy. When we see Peter alone with his hand-made suit at the end of the film, he is no longer a tech bro, “Spider-Boy” or “Iron Man Jr”. He is, finally, Spider-Man. And that felt right.
I’m hesitant to overpraise No Way Home, a solid 7/10 blockbuster. This is in part because it’s doing very, very well, and it doesn’t exactly need my help. But the main reason is that another recent blockbuster attempted so many of the same things while executing them much, much better.
And that will be the discussion for next time.
Yes, Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley and Christopher Ford are also credited for this screenplay. But considering Mckenna and Sommers became the series’ writers going forward, it seems fair to call that duopoly and Watts the core creative team here.
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