After reading your thoughts on Homecoming: how apropos is it that the climax of the first Raimi movie involves a super-rich arms dealer claiming that he's been like a father to Peter, and Peter immediately replying that Ben Parker was his father?
Okay, so I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately: a billionaire industrialist takes young Peter Parker under his wing, builds him up in his own image, and is in many ways cast in the light of a father to him. Peter is this character’s chosen heir.
Am I talking about how the MCU portrayed Tony and Peter in Spider-Man: Homecoming or Norman Osborn’s wet dream?
One thing I feel is very important to make clear is when I’m critical of Homecoming and of the MCU in general is that I’m not criticizing the characters, because the characters do not exist independently. In what is at this point a multi-billion dollar industry, we have to keep in mind not only the characters, but the writers, the director, the producers, the advertisers, the companies behind the characters, that inform how those characters are portrayed. I grew up being quizzed on what I was being sold at any moment by any piece of media. The more money involved, the more likely it is that everything those characters do or say is influenced by forces beyond the story. And I don’t like the Raimi Spider-Man movies, but I don’t like them because they don’t personally click with me, and I don’t personally like how they interpreted the characters. This just means I don’t watch them often; I don’t like them, but they don’t bother me. But I don’t like Spider-Man: Homecoming because I feel like ethically and morally it presented harmful messages coated in a hard candy shell of “this is fun and engaging, so don’t think too hard about it.” And, even if the messages weren’t ethically and morally dubious, I feel they’re counterintuitive to Spider-Man as a story and as a character. And I think it’s hard to be critical of the relationship between Tony and Peter without offending people who like either character, but the way the relationship was presented was unequal and deeply questionable and I think ultimately harmful to an honest presentation of both characters. To be perfectly clear: Yes, Spider-Man is my favorite Marvel character in comics, but I have nothing against Iron Man. I like the original Iron Man movie trilogy. I have a great deal of fondness for it, not in the least because my grandmother liked it, like, a lot. I have a great memory of being in a nursing home and an aide suggesting that the residents might like to watch Golden Girls. There was one dissenting voice, high and quavering: my grandmother yelling, “IRON MAN.”
I think the concept of the father is a very damaging thing when you look at Spider-Man as a story up close. Good fathers (Ben Parker, George Stacy) are dead. Bad fathers (Philip Watson, Harrison Thompson, I sort of need Amazing Spider-Man to acknowledge currently that Curt Connors killed his son – and of course, Norman Osborn) abound. (There are good fathers who are alive in Spider-Man mythos. They also tend to coincide with the Daily Bugle, Peter’s other home.) And I think this is because Spider-Man, when you look at it from afar, and I feel this was more accidental than intentional – but do you have accidents with a multi-decade, multi-writer ongoing epic, or do characters and storylines assert themselves beyond the creators? – is a story about toxic masculinity. Peter is the hero because despite coming from a place of this, he rejects it and grows beyond it: he has a deep, open love of women, particularly his mother figure, he rejects the worldly goods he could easily obtain through his strength in favor of helping others. Even his intelligence comes second to using his given abilities responsibly in the service of others. Peter, as a man, gives, he doesn’t take. Norman, however, is the pinnacle of this. What Norman does is about power. He rejects his son, who longs for his love and attention, as weak, miring Harry in a swamp of trauma and his father’s abuse so thoroughly it eventually kills him, and attempts to replace him Peter, who he views as strong, capable, the perfect heir. Norman is slick and rich and powerful and a symbol of what is wrong with the world and what Spider-Man, as a character and as a story, rebels against.
To be perfectly clear: my intent here is not to state that I think Tony Stark is the same as Norman Osborn, or a supervillain, or a bad person or any of that. I don’t want to get caught up in the passions of people defending their favorite characters or the actors who portray them. What I’m interested in discussing is how Homecoming took various dynamics present in Spider-Man comics and pasted them into their story in inappropriate and damaging ways. Damaging to Spider-Man and damaging, I feel, to other characters too. I’ve commented before that while Ned Leeds is a character who exists in the comics, his name was blatantly pasted over the character of Ganke Lee, Miles Morales’ best friend in comics. There were best friend options available for Peter that would have been organic. Instead, the movie chose to take aspects of Miles’ life and Miles’ story and paste them onto Peter. Tony was, in the Iron Man films, allowed to have his best friend – what if now, when they make a live action Miles movie, he’s not allowed to his best friend because Ganke is more recognizable as Ned Leeds to the audience than he is as Ganke Lee? I can’t imagine people being as forgiving if the same treatment had happened to Rhodey. A character’s supporting cast is important to that character – and Peter had plenty of available options already waiting. It’s never not worth noting that Miles is Afro-Latino. Peter Parker has never been portrayed on screen by anybody but white men.
The framework of Peter’s dynamic with Norman – intentionally or unintentionally; honestly, I can’t tell, though I feel the main motivating factor behind the creation of this dynamic was definitely the glut of Superfamily works in fandom – was also lifted and twisted around and what we ended up with was a bizarre relationship that seems to glorify the everyman’s desire to win the approval of the authority figure. I’ve been critical since I saw the film of the fact that the stakes in the final battle are the possessions of a billionaire – not human lives. And that’s not a criticism of Tony Stark, that is a criticism of the story choices made in this movie by the people who made it and by the people who put their money into it to further their own agendas, and what they are telling viewers, particularly young viewers, to value. Norman Osborn is about money and power and, yes, weapons: his pumpkin bombs and his glider are his famous inventions, that same glider being his undoing. Spider-Man: Homecoming put Peter in a weaponized suit that employed, among other things, drones. Peter builds in comics, but what he builds isn’t harmful: a transportation system for himself and trackers. No drones (notably Doc Ock’s undoing in Superior Spider-Man), no weapons. The power is harnessed with himself and the message is about how he has to use it. I still think Homecoming rejected the messages present in Spider-Man comics about personal responsibility and the value of human life. I’m not saying the movie should have ever explicitly condemned Tony’s actions in monitoring Peter without his knowledge or his consent, being complicit in Peter’s lies to May, or in ignoring him after giving him a dangerous weapon until, as typically happens when you hand unsupervised teenage boys weapons, disaster repeatedly strikes – I’m asking why the film made those choices in the first place, and I’m asking how such a vital thing in Spider-Man comics – the rejection of the powerful father figure bearing gifts in the embrace of your roots – got so turned around and lost in translation. And I’m asking whose best interest those choices were made in.
I’ll always be suspicious of the fact that, almost exactly three months after Homecoming came out, Marvel announced and then canceled amidst massive online backlash a partnership with a defense contractor.
