No Way Home: Spider-Man and American adventurism
how the superhero genre imposed imperialism on the box office
It's hard to recall now, in an era where a dart thrown at a movie theater marquee has a near total probability of hitting a superhero title, but there was a time when the genre was considered to be going the way of the Western. Back in the early 2000s, the idea that superheroes might be the ticket to the most profitable franchise in film history would get you laughed out of a Hollywood board room.
There had been plenty of good superhero movies, from Superman in 1978 to Tim Burton's Batman in 1989. But in the year 2000, the film industry was reeling from the steaming, toxic mound of turds that had been Batman and Robin, a cash-grab so brazenly terrible that it has been ranked as the worst movie of all time and was considered the final nail in the coffin for superheroes on the silver screen.
And then Tobey Maguire put on some red-and-blue spandex and changed the course of cinema history.
Easily forgotten is how groundbreaking Sam Raimi's 2002 Spider-Man really was. We look back on the camp of it, at the cackles of Willem Dafoe and the somewhat alien facial expressions of Maguire, and laugh at the movie's somewhat ramshackle construction when glimpsed against the pristine polish of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), forgetting that, were it not for that shaggy charm, the MCU would not have existed. Raimi’s movie revived the superhero genre, making over $800M, a figure that doesn’t beat out some recent entries in the genre but at the time was unheard of.
Plenty of would-be cinema purists grit their teeth at the corporate behemoth that is the superhero genre in the 2020s, and they are not wrong to do so. Superhero movies have become such an overwhelming box office juggernaut that studios have calculated it better to make a terrible superhero movie than a great independent film. One need only look at the pithy box-office earnings for Steven Spielberg's West Side Story compared to the projected $200 million for Spider-Man: No Way Home's opening weekend later this week to understand how dire the situation has become.
No Way Home is the culmination of nearly two decades in film history, so it makes sense to take a step back. We need to journey into the mid-aughts to understand how we got here.
Famously, the Twin Towers were edited out of the trailer for Spider-Man, which debuted a mere seven months after the 9/11 attacks, and while it is cliché for millennials to explain everything through the lens of pre-and-post 9/11, the superhero genre is one area where that paradigm shift can most clearly be observed.
Between the releases of Spider-Man and Iron Man (the movie which is credited with popularizing the MCU) came Batman Begins, which took the world by storm in 2005, at the height of the Iraq war. Christopher Nolan's take on the caped crusader was in many ways an explicit treatise on the justifications for war. Batman's failure to shut down a threat abroad (in the form of Liam Neeson's excellent performance as terrorist leader Ra's al Ghul) inevitably leads that threat directly to Gotham's doorstep.
Nolan's lauded sequel, The Dark Knight, is even more explicit in its subtext, positioning Batman as the sole entity separating Gotham from chaos, which is embodied in a practically Miltonian sense by his nemesis, The Joker. The movie's enduring, infamous quote, "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain," reflects a moral claim often repeated by the Bush administration. War is ugly and immoral, they claimed, but we are fighting an existential threat and have no choice but to do ugly, immoral things in the name of the greater good.
Like The Joker, the motives of our supposed terrorist enemies were vague. They didn't have an ideological justification for their actions. We were told that they were bent on destroying our "way of life" (whatever that means) with no consideration for the consequences of their actions. If we didn't stop them, they'd never stop trying to hurt us. It is worth remembering the time Obama compared ISIS to The Joker.
The Dark Knight was released in the summer of 2008, only a few months after Iron Man. Together, these films formed the basis for the superhero genre we know today. It is not a coincidence that in the wake of these two movies, so many cape films are funded by the Pentagon, providing free PR to the most bloated military force in world history. A 2007 licensing agreement between Disney and the Pentagon stipulates that Marvel must portray the military according to standards dictated by the Pentagon in exchange for access to military vehicles and personnel.
If Nolan's Batman trilogy represents the mania of the Bush era, the MCU represents the status-quo of the Obama years. It is no coincidence that the arrival of Iron Man, which cemented the MCU as a viable project and set the course for the next decade-plus of cinema, roughly coincided with the election of Barack Obama.
Iron Man, for the uninitiated, follows billionaire arms dealer Tony Stark as he is taken captive by a group of terrorists and builds a suit of armor to brutally escape his captors. He then fights his own company to stop selling weapons and becomes Iron Man.
Of course, Iron Man is himself a one-man army. The thesis of the film seems not to be that bombing people is bad, per se, but that it takes someone as smart as Tony Stark to decide who should get bombed.
The neoliberal project, complete with its banal, managerial handling of drone strikes and foreign intervention, reached its zenith with Barack Obama, a man who, like Tony Stark, presented himself as the smartest man in the room and used that to justify the continuation of America's forever wars.
Under Obama, we were promised, America would not be vengeful or cruel. Instead, we would be calculating and efficient, never taking pleasure in the killing of our supposed enemies. Like superheroes, we would do what we must, and no more.
Tony Stark, like Obama, was a man who could make bombing brown people seem cool, and perhaps even humane. I think often of the raucous celebrations that erupted when Obama announced that Seal Team Six had killed Osama Bin Laden, and compare it to the final scene in which Tony announces to the press that he is Iron Man.
I promise this is all coming back around to Spider-Man, but for now, let us consider the consequences of Iron Man's success and the subsequent rise of the MCU. Marvel's "cinematic universe" is the most profitable franchise in the history of Hollywood, having earned an eye-watering $23 billion dollars over its fourteen-year run. The backbone of that success lies in the 2012 box-office domination of The Avengers, which built upon the fan reception of Iron Man and the equally jingoistic Captain America: The First Avenger, bringing together Marvel's main characters for a crossover that blew away box office expectations and remains one of the highest grossing films in history, adjusting for inflation.
As a team, the Avengers are often employees of Uncle Sam (many are former soldiers, others are government contractors), and their history of interventionism mirrors that of our real-life military. The Avengers' intertwinement with the military industrial complex became so glaring a plot point that it was the central thrust of 2016's Captain America: Civil War, in which the Avengers are asked by the government to sign papers agreeing not to involve themselves in foreign affairs without permission—permission not from the country they'd like to intervene in, but from the United States.
In real life, the United States maintains more than 750 military bases in over 70 countries abroad. To put that number in perspective, America can mobilize more tanks to the German-Polish border on short notice than Germany can. The country with the next largest number of overseas bases is China, and it has only a single, small base in Djibouti.
Alright, now we can talk about Spider-Man.
Traditionally, Spider-Man has represented the power of the local over the global. Unlike other heroes who traverse the globe and even outer space, the web-slinger sticks to the five boroughs of New York. He is not global. He is your friendly neighborhood Spider-man.
That is the Spider-Man to whom we are introduced in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man. He is a New Yorker first and foremost, and the movie doesn't bother to expand its scope beyond those few square miles. Many have speculated that the essential New Yorkishness of Spider-Man is what propelled it to success. The city was raw and still licking its wounds in the wake of 9/11, and along comes a spandex-clad symbol of the city's resilience fighting a demented terrorist on a flying hoverboard. It was an image around which all of America could rally.
Willem Dafoe's performance as Norman Osborne, aka The Green Goblin, is legendary, but what made the character work as a villain for audiences in 2002 was—I believe—the fact that he unintentionally functions as a loose metaphor for the 9/11 terrorists, an agent of chaos who bombs civilians. He is, in this way, a proto-Joker.
However unintentional the parallel may initially have been, studios identified a formula for success. More importantly, so did the United States Department of Defense. In a previous era, it was the Western—with its whitewashed visions of manifest destiny and macho cowboys—which told Americans how to feel about being American. The Western was American mythmaking at its finest, polishing over a century of genocide with fictitious images of unsettled land and male heroics. But in the era of global neoliberalism (and the global box office), the superhero movie speaks not only to Americans, but to the rest of the world. In short, superheroes tell the world how to feel about America's outsized role in the global order.
In 2002, Spider-Man stuck to his own block. In 2019's Spider-Man: Far From Home, he was gallivanting around Europe and blowing shit up like the rest of the Avengers. That change reflects a tectonic shift in culture. Simply put, like America, Spider-Man has become hegemonic.
That hegemony trickles down to the box office; this is how we have arrived in a world where Spielberg can adapt Sondheim’s most acclaimed musical and receive mostly yawns, while various Spider-Man characters have trended on social media for months in anticipation of Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Cinema purists like Martin Scorsese are quick to point to the MCU as the death knell of true artistry in film, but we must consider its current prominence holistically in the context of multiple decades of geopolitical turmoil and American decline.
These films about demigods, these modern myths, are popular because they reflect the state of our society like only a myth can. They are American psychology made manifest in technicolor.
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