Spider-Man: Brand New Day just posted the biggest domestic opening weekend in box office history with a plot about why the manosphere is ruining young men.
Spoiler warning right now. This entire essay is spoilers. If you haven’t seen it, bookmark this and come back after.
The movie starts four years into Peter Parker being Spider-Man full time and nobody remembers who he is. He’s used that as an excuse to disappear into the job completely with no friends or relationships. Just Spiderman stuff, every day, alone. When the movie hits its climax and he’s finally asked point blank whether he’s Peter Parker or Spider-Man, his answer is both. The all-in, no-distractions version of him gets rightfully treated as the wound he’s been carrying since the last movie.
Because the true villain of the film isn’t Jean Grey, Scorpion, or even the Department of Damage Control, it’s stoicism. Or rather “broicism.” I didn’t create that term, but it’s perfect as it’s used to describe what happens when Stoicism gets hollowed out and sold to sixteen-year-old boys between supplement ads.
In case you don’t believe me, the film hands you a mirror early on to make sure you don’t miss it. Frank Castle is living that isolation taken all the way to its end point. The Punisher is alone, armed, and cut off from everyone who ever loved him. And when Peter tries to compare their lives at one point, like they’re the same kind of tough guy, Frank completely shuts that down.
The guy whose icon is on a thousand pick up truck windows next to blue lives matter stickers because people have the media literacy of as a turnip is the one warning the hero away from becoming him.
The most misunderstood thing about the Punisher is that he hates what he’s become. Nobody should aspire to be the Punisher. He’s a tragedy formed out of the tragedy of losing his family, and this movie hits that beat beautifully, and quietly.
Peter’s own body is staging the exact same argument. His powers start mutating past his control, and instead of dealing with what’s underneath it, his instinct is to build a device to suppress it. A chip that can shut off whatever part of himself is inconvenient. Bruce Banner even not-so-subtly asks him who gets to stay, and which parts get switched off?
Then there’s the actual crisis at the center of the film. A grieving, dangerous stranger is tearing the city apart. Every instinct the genre has trained you to reach for (read as: overwhelming violence) fails. What finally reaches Jean is Peter letting her into his own mind to see a memory of the woman who raised him. Jean is defeated by Aunt May telling a scared kid that the people who love him do it for exactly who he is.
In the biggest domestic box office opening weekend ever recorded, the thing that makes Peter capable of ending the crisis is the exact thing broicism tells boys made them soft.
Then there’s MJ.
Peter tells her the truth about loving her and she tells him she doesn’t feel it back (because she genuinely doesn’t remember him, as a result of his own actions)...and he accepts it. He doesn’t even try to guilt her into reconsidering. He swings her home and keeps being decent to her anyway.
Earlier in the film, he’s tricked into a kiss he thought was real. When he realizes she has no memory of it, he brings it up to her anyway (knowing she’d never find out otherwise) because her consent matters even in a scenario where he was the one being deceived.
Some of the reactions to MJ and Peter on Threads was…not great.
But that reaction is the thesis of this movie, stated out loud, by the people it’s about, who can’t understand the point behind basic human decency if there isn’t a sexual payoff for it!
I think the brilliant part of how it was implemented is that the film never argues with them. None of the things I’m talking about were announced in a random speech about toxic masculinity. The film just keeps handing its hero the manosphere’s advice (handle it alone, suppress the inconvenient parts, physical power is all matters, don’t take no for an answer) and watches him decline every single time.
And he still saves the day.
Note:
My one nitpick is that I fully expected them to handle Peter getting shot by Frank the way the comics handled him getting beaten to death by Morlun back in 2005. Body taken away, then gone, nothing left behind but shed skin, and Peter climbing back out of a cocoon healed and changed. That would have been a much stronger button (for me) on the whole evolution. On him finally becoming who he needs to be. I thought the scene with the Punisher helping him sneak out was great, but I was POSITIVE that was how they were going to fix it.
At least they got the important part right.
Funny how people react to speeches and ignore actions. Some people get cancelled for something they said in spite of everything they've done that contradicts it. Some people do awful things but say what we want to hear and are given a pass. Maybe we should get better at listening to what people do.
I thank God that I learned my morality from Asimov, Tolkien, Lee, Ditko (et. al.) by READING all through my childhood in the 70s and 80s (augmented later in life by Plato, The New Testament, and even Marcus Aurelius, I must admit) rather than by being saddled with the instagram/youtube morality peddled to kids in irresistible visual chunks, these days! Among other things, it allows me to experience and appreciate on screen heroes like Spidey and Superman (and Daredevil and even The Punisher), instead of whining when they don’t use their powers to “get even” like Thrasymachus of the Republic would want (or some “leaders” I might mention). And thank God I have a child who reads, too!