Over the last two weeks, I have written three articles about Spider-Man and the different ways the character has connected with audiences for almost 25 years.
I looked at why Hollywood’s tracking failed to predict the extraordinary opening of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, how Spider-Man went from a valuable asset during Marvel’s financial difficulties to one of the biggest cultural icons in the world, and in No Man Is an Island: Spider-Man, About a Boy, and the Toxic Illusion of Going It Alone, why Peter Parker’s determination to carry everything himself makes him painfully relatable.
This article is really a sequel to that last one.
Because the more I thought about Brand New Day, the more I realised Peter’s struggle with vulnerability did not begin with this film.
It has been there from the beginning.
The early Tom Holland, Spider-Man films were frequently described as what might happen if John Hughes had made a superhero movie. But perhaps the Hughes influence went much deeper than high-school corridors, awkward romance, school parties, embarrassing teachers, and teenage comedy.
Peter Parker behaved like a teenager.
He made enormous decisions based on what felt right at that particular moment, without always considering what would happen afterwards.
Brand New Day is where Peter finally has to live with some of those consequences.
Spider-Man was never really about the superpowers. It was about what those powers reveal: how a human being stays human after gaining them.
It was about remaining human after you got them.
What If John Hughes Had Made a Superhero Film?
In Homecoming, Peter desperately wants to prove that he belongs alongside Tony Stark and the Avengers.
He is essentially a kid trying to accelerate himself into adulthood.
Tony represents everything Peter thinks a superhero should be: wealthy, brilliant, confident, and powerful. He can walk into almost any room believing he belongs there.
Peter is almost everything Tony is not.
He struggles financially. He doubts himself constantly. He suffers from imposter syndrome. Even when he eventually gets the girl he has loved for years, part of him cannot quite believe he deserves her.
That makes Peter almost the anti-Tony Stark, despite spending so much of his early story idolising Tony and trying to become him.
By Far From Home, Peter is overwhelmed by the responsibility Tony has left behind while simultaneously wanting to do something wonderfully ordinary: go away with his school friends and tell MJ how he feels about her.
The superhero and the teenager are constantly fighting over the same person.
Then No Way Home takes Peter’s teenage decision-making to its logical extreme.
Peter has an enormous problem and reaches for an enormous solution before fully considering what that solution could mean.
Eventually he makes the biggest decision of all.
Everybody will be safer if everybody forgets Peter Parker.
It is heroic. It is loving. But it is also an extraordinarily absolute solution from a frightened young man.
There is no middle ground. No discussion with MJ and Ned about whether they are prepared to accept the risks that come with knowing him. Peter decides that because he loves them, he must make that decision for them.
That feels surprisingly John Hughes.
Not because John Hughes ever had to deal with a magical spell tearing apart the multiverse, but because his teenagers frequently experience whatever is happening to them right now as enormous and definitive.
Love. Humiliation. Parents. Friendship. Popularity. Identity. Belonging.
They make mistakes because that’s part of becoming an adult.
Peter Parker just happens to make teenage mistakes with potentially universe-ending consequences.
When Spider-Man Becomes the Patient
That is why Brand-New Day feels like a different stage of Peter’s story.
The earlier films essentially asked: What happens when a teenager gets Spider-Man’s powers and tries to act like an adult too soon?
Brand New Day asks: What happens when that teenager grows up and has to live with the consequences of the decisions he made?
And one of the simplest moments makes Peter’s vulnerability unexpectedly physical.
Spider-Man gets shot.
After years of watching him dodge bullets, you could be forgiven for assuming Spider-Man’s enemies attended the same firearms academy as the Stormtroopers in Star Wars.
Or perhaps we have simply started treating Spider-Man’s costume in the same way we treat Batman’s.
But Spider-Man’s suit is not armour.
There is a human body underneath it. A body that can bleed. A body that can break. And a body that sometimes needs somebody else to save it.
The hospital sequence therefore does something similar to the hospital scene in Superman Returns. Putting an apparently indestructible superhero into an environment associated with ordinary human vulnerability changes how we see them.
For once, the superhero cannot save somebody else.
Other people have to save the superhero.
And that is Peter Parker’s story in miniature.
His powers make him extraordinary. They never make him invulnerable.
Who Protects Spider-Man?
There is also an echo of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2.
When Peter’s damaged mask comes off on the train, ordinary New Yorkers discover that Spider-Man is simply a young man.
They could expose him. Instead, they protect him.
Brand New Day takes that idea somewhere even more intimate.
A hospital cannot treat Spider-Man as an abstraction. Doctors and nurses have to treat the human being underneath the costume. They become custodians of the secret Peter has spent years desperately trying to protect.
And they keep it.
That raises an uncomfortable question about No Way Home.
Did everybody really need to forget Peter Parker?
That does not necessarily mean Peter made the wrong decision. He was faced with an extraordinary situation and did what he believed was necessary.
But perhaps his solution tells us something about Peter himself.
His instinct was not: Who can help me carry this?
It was: How can I carry all of this so nobody else has to?
He believed removing himself from the lives of the people he loved was the ultimate act of protection.
But perhaps it was also the ultimate expression of the flaw that has followed him throughout these films: his belief that loving somebody means carrying the danger for them rather than trusting them to carry some of it with him.
Brand New Day even demonstrates how cooperation can protect his identity. When the Punisher pretends to be Spider-Man, the certainty about who is underneath the mask can be disrupted without Peter Parker having to disappear.
The people who discover Peter’s identity do not inevitably betray him. Sometimes they protect him.
Perhaps Peter’s secret was never the burden. Believing he had to carry it alone was.
But Did They Completely Forget Peter?
Brand New Day also complicates what ‘forgetting Peter Parker’ actually means.
Bruce Banner can apparently retain knowledge connected to Spider-Man while failing to recognise Peter when they meet at university.
More intriguingly, when Peter performs his old handshake with Ned, there appears to be something instinctive underneath the conscious absence of Peter from Ned’s memory.
Perhaps memories are not switches that can simply be turned off.
Ned may not consciously remember Peter, but years of friendship have left fingerprints.
Then there is MJ.
Her discovery of Peter’s letter confronts her with physical evidence of feelings and experiences her conscious mind can no longer access.
She does not remember their relationship.
But that does not necessarily mean their relationship left nothing behind.
They may have forgotten Peter Parker. But perhaps Peter Parker has not completely disappeared from them.
And that makes what happened between Peter and MJ even more painful.
Peter Parker, Jack Dawson, and the Girl He Thinks He Doesn’t Deserve
There is almost a Titanic quality to Peter and MJ.
Peter is Jack Dawson looking across the divide at Rose, except Peter’s divide is as psychological as it is social.
He puts MJ on a pedestal while seeing himself as the awkward kid who somehow wandered into a world where he does not belong.
And just as Jack can be heroic without possessing the power to give Titanic a happy ending, Peter discovers that possessing extraordinary abilities does not mean he can save the relationship that matters most to him.
That is what makes the ending of No Way Home so devastating.
Peter is not hit by an iceberg. He loses MJ in a much stranger way.
She remains alive and physically within reach, but she has forgotten the boy who loved her.
Peter remembers their relationship, their experiences and everything they meant to one another. MJ remembers none of it.
By Brand New Day, this is no longer simply another romance inserted between action sequences.
It is the fourth film in a relationship audiences have spent years following.
Ross and Rachel With Web-Shooters
In that respect, Peter and MJ have something in common with Ross and Rachel in Friends.
Once audiences spend enough time with two characters, the relationship itself becomes one of the reasons for returning.
We are no longer simply asking: Who will Spider-Man fight next?
We are asking: What happens to Peter and MJ?
We want them to look at one another and finally understand what the audience already knows.
That is why the moment when MJ discovers Peter’s letter is so powerful.
She is effectively discovering evidence of a love story in which she was one of the participants, but which she cannot remember living.
The audience remembers it for her.
We know how much Peter loved her. We know that she loved him. She does not even know who he is.
The superhero film has quietly become a romantic tragedy.
And perhaps that also helps explain why Spider-Man can connect with audiences far beyond those primarily attracted by superhero spectacle.
The films offer action and fantasy, but they also offer romance, friendship, insecurity, loneliness, and years of emotional continuity.
The audience is not merely following Spider-Man. It has become invested in Peter Parker and the people he loves.
Season Four of Peter and MJ
And perhaps this is also where the industry underestimated Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
Studios and trackers could look at it and see another comic-book film, then model its potential audience according to superhero franchises, franchise fatigue, and the recent performance of the genre.
But perhaps audiences were buying something broader.
They were buying Spider-Man, certainly. They were buying spectacle.
But after four films, they were also buying Peter Parker, MJ, and an unresolved relationship they had followed for years.
They were buying loneliness, romance, self-doubt, friendship, and the question of whether somebody who spends his life saving everybody else will finally accept that he cannot save himself alone.
The industry may have been measuring interest in another Spider-Man movie when part of the audience was waiting for the next chapter of Peter and MJ.
In other words, Brand New Day was not merely the fourth Spider-Man film.
For some of its audience, it was Season Four of Peter and MJ.
The Vulnerability Fantasy
And that brings everything back to vulnerability.
Spider-Man is not simply a power fantasy.
He is a vulnerability fantasy.
Peter is scared, insecure, lonely, and overburdened.
His extraordinary abilities do not cure those things. If anything, they magnify them.
He can possess enough strength to save hundreds of people while still wondering whether he is good enough for one person to love him.
That feels particularly relevant in a world where somebody can have thousands of followers and still have nobody they feel able to talk to.
We have become extraordinarily good at appearing connected while remaining profoundly isolated.
Peter’s instinct is similarly to carry everything himself.
Teenage Peter believes: Being responsible means carrying everything myself.
Adult Peter has to discover: Being responsible sometimes means trusting somebody else to carry it with me.
That gives the familiar idea that there is a hero in all of us another meaning.
Heroism does not require the absence of fear, insecurity, or vulnerability.
Peter’s vulnerability can itself become part of what makes him heroic.
And perhaps that is ultimately where the John Hughes influence has taken these films.
The story did not end when the awkward teenager became Spider-Man. The powers were merely the beginning.
Peter still had to screw up. Fall in love. Make terrible decisions. Regret them. Lose people. Get hurt. Need other people.
And eventually discover that the person he was desperately trying to become was not necessarily better than the person already underneath the mask.
Young Peter thought growing up meant becoming somebody like Tony Stark.
Perhaps growing up actually means becoming comfortable with being Peter Parker.
So maybe the four-film arc is not: Boy → Superhero.
It is Boy → Teenager → Spider-Man → Adult.
The superpowers just make growing up considerably more expensive.
And perhaps that is the secret of Spider-Man’s extraordinary longevity.
Beneath the mask is not an invulnerable billionaire, a god, or an idealised hero.
It is somebody who worries that he is not enough.
Most of us have never swung between skyscrapers.
An awful lot of us know what that feels like.
