Why I’m Not Scathing Spider-Man

This past week, as the closing credits were rolling on Spider-Man: Homecoming, my fiancée turned to me and said, “Does it make me a bad feminist that I liked that more than Wonder Woman?”

I may not be able to rule on the feminism, but I’m with her: Homecoming may not have reached as high, either technically or as a social icon, but it did its job of entertaining really well.

Is it fair to compare the two? You be the judge! Spoilers past the fold!

Let’s be clear from the start: Spider-Man had way less pressure on it than Wonder Woman. Not only are there plenty of other male hero flicks out there, you can even choose from not one but two previous incarnations of Spider-Man … totaling five different films!

Plus, Spider-Man has been one of Marvel’s premier titles since his creation. Marvel may not have a “Batman” frontrunner franchise the way DC does … but if you had to pick just one, Spider-Man might be a safe bet.

Plus, Spidey’s got a lot going for him. He was the character that some piece of Stan Lee always wanted to write. If you’ve never had the chance to read it before, please stop here and read Stan’s “How I Invented Spider-Man” article from Quest Magazine in 1977. I won’t be offended if you spend your time reading that, and never continue this blog post — it’s far more worth your time!

… but if you have come back to finish this, I’ll point this out from the article: Spider-Man is the character Stan Lee wrote when his wife asked him when he was going to start writing stories that he himself would want to read. Stan decided to write about a super-powered “loser.”

Friends, Peter Parker is Charlie Brown with superpowers. And everyone else is Lucy, yanking the football away: the women, the villains, the uncaring bosses. Captain America gets the praise; Iron Man gets the money; Peter gets a rock in his halloween bag. And we love him for it. Because some piece of us (like some piece of Stan) is pretty sure that’s what we would be like if we got the Spider-bite.

Spider-Man is also one of the first real heroes to “deconstruct” the genre. Sure, the Fantastic Four showed up in the real world of New York City first … but Spider-Man showed up on the ground level. Stan gets in a few good laughs about how other heroes can fly, but Peter can only stick to walls. It’s a lame power. He’s super … but not as super. Spider-Man pokes fun at the superhero genre … but he’s still got enough of the fundamental moral fiber and downright decency that we pick up the books for, without going off the edge into 90’s-era hyper-violence, like some other red-costumed deconstructive heroes we might name.

On her side, Wonder Woman was written earlier, as an alternative to cheerfully macho, Golden-Age male supers (think of Superman’s all-American smile over his chiseled jaw as he catches the punches — and “speeding bullets” — of Joe Everyman, Mugger). But Wonder Woman was also written in an age in which the audience wouldn’t accept a female hero … so her alternative approaches to violence were perceived as weaknesses. She became the Justice Society of America’s secretary, then later a junior member.

It would take decades before she became part of DC’s “Trinity” of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman … and too often she was put in the role of older sister or mother figure (to these two motherless men), breaking up their testosterone fueled squabbling … at least long enough for them to refocus the testosterone onto the villain-of-the-month. Unfortunately, the recent film seems to have doubled down on her martial prowess: nobody will watch Wonder Woman and come away doubting that Diana is as lethal as the Man of Steel: after all, each of them (spoiler) executes a “god” (and essentially a long-lost family member) at the end of their respective pieces. And all it cost was the original idea that Wonder Woman might help us see something heroic in an alternative to violence.

The point is: while Wonder Woman would doubtless destroy Spider-Man in straight-up fisticuffs, Peter’s got the deck well-stacked in his favor when it comes to being a loveable screen presence. Add to that the fact that the recent DC films have either abandoned their starting line-up’s usual power of “inspiration” (many of the best Superman stories, for example, include a few panels devoted to how the people who see his unbreakable moral action are changed by the experience, and make better choices in their own lives), or at least that they’re doing a long, multi-film lead-in to the characters coming to understand the need to have that role (spoiler: that’s my hope for Justice League), and you have a pretty uneven battle for hearts and minds.

At least for my heart and mind.

I’d love to have loved Wonder Woman. The DC animated universe does a great job with her — her naïveté in those 23-minute shows is cast around her status as a woman out of time (think Captain America in Marvel), and it’s consistently charming and funny without making her less serious. Her moral fiber is similarly potent, and she is as in charge of her actions, body, and (to a child-appropriate point) romantic life as any of the male characters in those shows. She’s a character that can push the genre to new heights, and some of it truly is because representation matters.

But as I watched the ending of Spider-Man: Homecoming, my heart broke again a little bit for Wonder Woman. 

Spidey saves the villain. He does it even though the villain can hurt him. Not just beat him up in a vulture suit — anyone knows superheroes can recover from that. Even death is usually a temporary state in the comics.

No, instead, Michael Keaton’s Vulture knows who Peter is. And that’s an existential threat to a superhero.

The only time you really see Peter worried in the comics is when his friend Ned threatens to out him to Aunt May. Vulture can do something permanent to Peter. And Peter doesn’t have to kill him to stop it: all he has to do is stand aside (or even collapse to his knees — he’s pretty battered at that point, and could conceivably even lie to himself for the rest of his life about whether he could have mustered the energy to save the guy!) and Toomes (Vulture) will die. But Peter risks his own life to carry Toomes away from danger, and leaves him for the police. And just hopes.

(He gets away with it because Toomes is a more complex villain than Wonder Woman‘s Ares, who is basically a knockoff of Milton’s devil from Paradise Lost … how’s that for Themysciran irony?!. Toomes has already given Peter one free chance to walk away because Peter’s saved Toomes’s daughter, and family is his driving motivation. At the end of the film, Toomes puts himself at risk to protect Peter’s identity … even though his daughter is moving across the country, and won’t be in Peter’s orbit any longer.)

Sure, Diana Prince might justify her choice to kill him by saying the world doesn’t need a demonic incarnation of war. Or that if she imprisoned Ares, he’d just break out and kill people at some future point (DC puts this moral argument to Batman about the Joker in the Under the Red Hood storyline … with a surprise guest from the past!). But the film doesn’t show us any of that processing: Diana just calls him “brother” and then blasts him.

And even if that processing were there, it’s an increasingly stale conclusion to a set of movies that was even from its early days toying with more elegant conclusions. The first Tobey McGuire Spider-Man had a Disney-esque death for the villain: the Green Goblin (uh … that’s … that’s his real name, guys … it was the sixties …) kills himself while attempting to impale Peter under the guise of lying beaten (Petey’s Spider-sense causes him to leap out of the way, and the Goblin gets the glider guillotine, in an alliteration the even-then-aging Stan Lee must have approved of!).

The first X-Men movie ended with Charles Xavier and Magneto (again: it was the sixties, guys) playing chess, with Magneto remarking “You know they can’t keep me here, in their plastic prison, Charles. I’ll get out,” and Charles responding “And on that day I’ll be there.” This is heroic power serving as a check on violence, rather than destroying potential threats or acting as retribution for past damage. One thinks of Kennedy’s blockade in the Cuban missile crisis, when all of his advisors were warning him he’d look weak if he didn’t declare war (it was … it was the sixties.).

Anyway. Homecoming delivered. Sure, it wasn’t perfect. It made some choices that departed from the comics. We lose some of Peter’s serious scientific activities, and his manic inner monologue (could have done a bit more with Karen on that count, but we got a taste, I suppose). And I don’t think we really need Aunt May to be that sexy — I mean, get it, girl, but Aunt May has some great moments as her dear old self, and I wish we could have seen that on screen.

Like I say, Homecoming wasn’t perfect. But it was light-hearted. And more than that, it was good-hearted. And after walking out of 2.5 hours of Wonder Woman earlier this summer wondering whether I could believe that she was good-hearted, and agonizing over that, given that she had been written into existence to add more good-heartedness to a macho genre, Homecoming was just what I needed from characters that I grew up reading.

Who knew it’d have that shocker?