Don’t set your public policy or moral clock by the newest superhero movie. It’s got some flaws. But first the good news. Congratulations are in order for the Disney Corporation’s subsidiary, Marvel Studios. Despite a promise earlier in the year from Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige that the increasingly politically correct studio would be making the Great Leap Wokeward and a partial fulfillment in the form of a fall box office bomb called “The Eternals,” Spider-Man: No Way Home appeared a few weeks ago and bears no signs of going woke. And, with over $1.1 billion in global sales already, it is definitely not going broke.
That’s not to say that some didn’t try. The Daily Wire reported that Marisa Tomei, who has played Peter Parker’s Aunt May in the current series, lobbied to make her character a lesbian. Apparently, the love of money is not only the root of all evil; it may also be the rooting out of dumb ideas. Aunt May is not that good of a moral guide in the current movie, but at least we don’t learn anything about her sexual appetites.
Instead of preaching or in-your-face displays of LGBT+ virtue-signaling, the current movie allows one to pleasantly munch one’s popcorn while enjoying what made the Marvel Cinematic Universe great in the first place: humor, action, and a sense that the studio doesn’t hate its own fans.
Tom Holland’s Peter Parker/Spider-Man is the delightfully dorky and awkward figure we all love, interrupting Benedict Cumberbatch’s Dr. Strange incessantly as the latter attempts to weave a spell making everyone forget what the evil Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) had revealed in the previous movie, Spider-Man: Far From Home: Spider-Man’s secret identity. The humorous scene is the trigger device for some sort of disturbance in the multiverse, bringing supervillain opponents of Spider-Man from several parallel universes (aka previous Marvel Spider-Man franchises). That gives us the opportunity for action and humor, as Spider-Man must collect and imprison these figures so that Dr. Strange can send them back.
It is also the opportunity for rewarding fans who are delighted to find all the old villains: Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin, Jamie Foxx’s Electro, Thomas Haden Church’s Sandman, Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus, and Rhys Ifans’s Lizard. Tom Holland’s Spider-Man ends up being no match for these figures, so we are then treated to the coup de fan service: the appearance of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, Spider-Men from those parallel universes/series, to help fight these figures. It’s a rollicking good time with plenty of action scenes culminating in a wonderful fight around and on the Statue of Liberty.
I don’t want to reveal too many of the details, but I will say that in the end a good time is had by all. Except, I suppose for those wokescolds who are only content to destroy other people’s cinematic universes. This is not a “film” but a movie-movie that makes for a pleasant diversion.
All the same, however, and at the risk of being an imagino-conserva-wokescold, I must register problems with the movie’s moral compass. It’s only fair, after all. There are more possibilities of going agley than gay and more ways to wend astray than woke. One might object that if it’s only diversion, why judge a bit of escapism? But as Tolkien observed, we judge the good of escapism by whether it simply helps us escape for a few moments from the burden of our duties or whether it helps us escape for good from the ideas of our age that imprison us.
The problems with Spider-Man: No Way Home, as one might expect from a movie about heroes and villains, are in the nature of fighting evil and the nature of evil itself. The first we might call the problem of progressive perfectionist activism, while the second is the problem of evil as external.
The first problem we might consider as less serious, given that many adventure plots begin with the fevered stupidities of youth being brought to action through the sympathy of adults. That spell of Dr. Strange’s that, with Holland-Parker’s hilarious interruptions, is designed to make everybody forget that Peter Parker and Spider-Man are the same but ends up importing supervillains from parallel universes to wreak havoc on Holland-Spider-Man’s, was cast in service of problems getting into top-tier universities. That’s right. Though he’s not guilty, and the feds won’t charge him for, the murder Mysterio tried to pin on him in the last movie, all this multiverse mayhem is because Holland-Parker, his girlfriend M.J. (the earnest and beautiful Zendaya), and his best friend Ned Leeds (the endearingly schlubby Jacob Batalon) are suffering from the bad publicity and . . . having trouble getting into MIT.
If Holland-Parker is not guilty of the murder, can we at least say that he might owe a little time in the slammer with Lori Loughlin, Felicity Huffman, and other celebrities who were indicted after the Varsity Blues investigation? All these real-world people did was fake a few test scores and, through ivory tower Svengali Rick Singer, pay off some admission flacks, coaches, and deans to get their kids into college. Parker-Holland has convinced Dr. Strange to try a dangerous spell that ends up releasing supervillains who cause millions of dollars in damage and no doubt shed a bit of blood in their rampage through New York City.
As I say, I don’t want to make too much of this. Teens gonna stupid and all that. But it gets worse. Dr. Strange, having done no due diligence before the spell, realizes how ridiculous Parker’s agreement to such a spell was (given that the crisis is college admissions and Parker’s friends didn’t even appeal MIT’s decision before agreeing to mystical mind-control magic) and then discovers what his spell has wrought. He angrily tells Holland-Parker to collect the supervillains in order that he might dispatch them to their home universes lest we have the usual comic book problems of possibly breaking the fabric of reality. After snatching up these characters and putting them in force-field prisons under Strange’s mansion, however, Holland-Parker discovers that the assembled supervillains have been snatched into his own universe right before they are about to fight their own Spider-Men and die. After retrieving the troubled Norman Osborne/Green Goblin from the charity Aunt May works for, Holland-Parker determines upon a better-living-through-chemistry-or-computing plan to “cure” all the assembled villains. When Dr. Strange tells him, sensibly, that this is a stupid idea, Holland-Parker takes the box containing the spell with which the supervillains are to be dispatched and leads Strange on a chase that ends up with Strange stuck in the Mirror Dimension. He then lets the assembled villains out of their cells and takes them to his friend’s apartment to work the cures. As you might expect, this does not completely work out and we have a lot more destruction before the film ends.
What a perfect example of the progressive perfectionist activist. Like one of the Soros-funded district attorneys, Holland-Parker is going to let the bad guys go in order to do a bit of social work and neuropsychiatry on them. He’ll deal with the root causes, you see. In another world, especially a cinematic universe, it may be different, but this sort of activism in our world does not merely lead to lots of cool CGI crashes, but a lot of misery. In our world, this kind of thinking leads to record numbers of murders, as over a dozen cities in the U. S.—including my own St. Paul, Minnesota—achieved in 2021 about two weeks before the movie’s December release date.
This problem of how to deal with evil is not, however, the worst problem in the movie. That honor goes to the notion of what makes people evil in the first place. Holland-Parker, without knowing much of anything about these figures from their parallel universes, determines based on internal gossip that all of them are only supervillains because of the accidents, involuntary or self-induced, that gave them their powers in the first place. Thus, with the help of the two other Spider-Men who join him, all he has to do is come up with chemical or computer solutions to these figures and force them to take the cure. And then they’ll be good.
Alas, if only it were so easy. But it’s been a particular temptation of our age to believe that evil is not a matter of the will but a quirk of the brain chemistry that can be managed by technology or pills. John Henry Newman described this temptation in his 1841 essays that comprise The Tamworth Reading Room. He noted the error of “believing that our true excellence comes not from within, but from without; not wrought out through personal struggles and sufferings, but following upon a passive exposure to influences over which we have no control.”
I have no doubt that some who commit crimes are insane, but what is to guarantee that, freed from, say, the power to harness electricity or the power of sand, Max Dillon/Electro or Flint Marko/Sandman will not want a return to power over others again? Marko’s story was, after all, that of a criminal who gained superpowers—his will was already corrupt. And though Dillon only turned to crime after falling into a vat of electric eels, his own rebellion against Parker’s cure in this movie shows that the charge he gets from power over others is not dependent on electricity.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the action as much as anyone, but I couldn’t help but smile when my ten-year-old daughter told me, “He and his Aunt May caused all their own problems.” Perhaps my child could be the district attorney of Philadelphia? Chesterton says we can live without literature but not without stories. The reason to defend Dick Deadshot, Robin Hood, and Spider-Man is that they teach us basic lessons about the moral structure of life in entertaining and fantastic ways. Spider-Man: No Way Home avoids the most obvious of our contemporary lies about reality, but it too paints a flawed understanding of evil, both in how to prudently fight against it and how it attaches itself to us humans.
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