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Matthew
Hello, and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. Friends, it is a brand new day for Spider-Man, and it is a brand new day for the MCU. We’re going back to Will and Steve, our friends from the Hype Is My Superpower podcast, Marvel heads galore, and we’re here to talk about ethical questions from the brand new Spider-Man movie, Brand New Day. As always, folks, I’m going to jump right in. We’re going to talk about a lot of the ethical questions that come up in this movie, but I want to get started by having you go ahead and introduce yourselves, guys, and say what you thought of the movie overall.
Steve
Me first. All right, I’m Steve Stormoen. I am a once and future co-host of Hype Is My Superpower. I thought the movie was fantastic, and I can’t wait to talk about it.
Will
I’m Will Freeland, once and future co-host of Hype Is My Superpower. I love me some Marvel, and I love me some Spider-Man, and this movie was a grand old time.
Matthew
I think I’m with you guys. I had a lot of fun. There are definitely some questions I thought the movie brought up, both about plot and about some decisions made by characters. A lot of my problems, I think, aren’t with the movie itself. It’s where it sits, as sort of the last movie we get before Doomsday, which feels completely unsupported and continues to feel so after this movie.
But I do want to start by naming something, and I’m wondering if you guys caught this. Obviously, this is a movie about superheroes and multiverses and all sorts of crazy things. I think this movie is trying to be a lot more grounded, a lot more based in reality.
And I mostly felt that. But there’s one detail that threw me. Steve, I think you especially, as someone who now lives in New York, can understand this. Peter is a New York transplant. He is someone who was born and raised in New York City, loving what is special about New York City, and according to the movie, he’s ordering food from Little Caesars. New York City, and he’s ordering pizza from a chain?
Steve
Not okay. But he was wearing the Del Mar’s Deli T-shirt. That’s a good sandwich place. You go into Red Hook, you know, it’s good stuff.
Matthew
No, for sure, but there should be a Joe’s Pizza, or a local corner shop, or whatever it is. Anyway, yeah, Joe’s, come on. Putting aside that detail, let me start by talking about the decisions they made in terms of what stories to tell. I went into this movie with two big thoughts. The first was, what’s the aftermath of all of the Spider-Verse stuff, and all of the Spider-Verse movies, which have kind of confirmed that it’s all one big thing? Peter has just met these other two Peters. But even more importantly, this is the last big movie before Doomsday, which has been compared to the Avengers, being framed as the next Thanos-level threat. All the movies leading up to Thanos had planted seeds about him one way or another, whether it was end-credit scenes, whether it was the Tesseract being a literal plot point for a huge part of the first Avengers movie, Captain America setting up the Power Stones, and all that. How much of the rest of the MCU did you carry into this movie with you?
Steve
I fundamentally disagree. I prefer when Marvel is making movies that stand on their own, that don’t rely on the scaffolding of the larger franchise to make them hit and prove their point, but that are enhanced by the fact that it’s there. And I think this movie did that perfectly, because instead of having to build everything from scratch, you get to use already established characters as your supporting cast. You get Punisher, you get Black Widow, you get Hulk, characters who can just walk in and the audience already knows who they are and what they represent. This movie shined by using the franchise to its advantage rather than treating it like a millstone around its neck, like, oh, well, we’ve got to lead up to Doomsday, we’ve got to introduce, you know, spoilers, we’ve got to introduce the next superhero franchise, which they do ably, somehow without it being a slog. So yeah, like you said, the stakes are more grounded. This isn’t an end-of-the-world scenario. The fact that it’s able to tell a relatively simple story within this big, complicated, convoluted universe of decades of continuity, in my opinion, is what Marvel needs to be doing much more of.
Matthew
Well, and to be clear, you said you disagree, but I agree with everything you just said. I think what I was saying is, the second time I watch it, I’m going to enjoy what you’re talking about much more.
The question I was asking is, and it sounds like the answer is no, and that’s fine, for me it was hard not to think of this movie as, this thing called Doomsday is coming out in three or four months, and I don’t know anything about it.
I’m frustrated that we’ve had all this build-up, but also no build-up. I expect this movie is going to help get me there, and I’m wondering if either of you had that same thing, and it sounds like you didn’t, which probably means you enjoyed the movie a lot more than I did.
Steve
I guess the sidestep to that is, hopefully I trust Doomsday to also be self-contained.
Will
I went in with zero larger-world expectations, for the direct answer. I keep going back to phase one, watching Captain America: The First Avenger, which was the last movie before Avengers. Yeah, they had the Tesseract, but we didn’t know that was going to be the plot device in Avengers. It was very much the Captain America story set in the ’40s, and then it ends with that end-credit scene of him being brought back in the current time, in 2012, and then, cool, we go to Avengers and, oh hey, S.H.I.E.L.D. has the Tesseract, that’s going to be the MacGuffin for this movie.
Cool. And it wasn’t until way later that they said, oh hey, I know the Tesseract, slash cosmic cube, is a thing in the comics, but we’re actually going to make it the Space Stone, and we’re just going to crush it in, I think it’s Age of Ultron or whatever, and it’s actually an Infinity Stone, which is part of this larger tapestry. It’s like retconning things you’ve already established. And I don’t mind that.
That’s fine. And by doing that, you’re allowing the movies that had it in the first place to just be their own standalone thing. Without getting into spoiler territory, Sadie Sink’s character ends up being something larger, and so the plot device, the MacGuffin, for this movie ends up being something that can be used for a larger plot down the line, in a much larger conversation, which is a whole ethics conversation we can probably have.
Matthew
And certainly I think Spider-Man might have invented a device that might be a problem for us.
Will
Absolutely. God, I was screaming.
Steve
And I totally agree. And you said the magic word twice, which is MacGuffin. There was nothing special about the Tesseract that meant you needed to know anything from the first Avengers movie to understand what it was doing.
Matthew
I think it’s how it functioned, because you’re right, this movie’s not equivalent to Avengers. It’s that Doomsday has been built up to be the next Infinity Saga.
Will
Yeah, it had all the build-up, and that’s annoying for sure. I think that’s a product of these pivots. If they had let phase four and phase five be the transition period, and then phase six, seven, eight be the multiverse saga, the big multiverse thing, I think this would be a much easier pill to swallow. But they just messed up.
Matthew
And obviously there was supposed to be Kang, and then there was the Jonathan Majors of it all, and all sorts of stuff.
Steve
COVID happened, and they made a bunch of crappy movies.
Will
And we just don’t like highlighting Black characters.
Matthew
Well, the fact that when this movie came out, Wonder Man, which I think has been most of our, certainly my, favorite MCU product, until this, got cancelled. That’s a whole other conversation we can have. And no Blade, we’re not getting Blade either.
Will
No Blade. Photon’s not going to be in Doomsday because she’s probably too powerful. I’m about as upset about Photon being sidelined in Doomsday as the rest of it.
Matthew
Sorry, quick reminder, Photon is Monica Rambeau.
Will
She was introduced in WandaVision, she got powers because of Wanda’s bubble around the town, and then she was in The Marvels, exploring her powers. In the comics she’s a light-based being, incredibly powerful, one of the most powerful characters we have that’s not a mutant. And at the end of The Marvels, she wakes up in another dimension, another universe, where the X-Men are very much a thing. Something came out recently saying Photon’s going to be basically sidelined in Doomsday, and I get it, in the sense that they did this for the lead-up to Civil War in the comics. They took Hulk off the table, they took Thor off the table, because by definition, any side that has one of them is going to win. So in order to have an actual superhero battle that’s not overpowered on one side, you’ve got to sideline some people. Conceptually, I get it. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen it. It still sucks.
Matthew
I think it’s what you said, it’s the pattern. Losing Photon, not getting the Blade movie with Ali that’s been talked about for so long, I’m mad, but whatever. Wonder Man being one of the best projects the MCU has done, and now it’s not happening, whatever. But all three of those being announced pretty close to each other, within the same month, not to mention Sam Wilson’s Cap now kind of being sidelined because the original Cap is coming back, and so much stuff about Black Panther 3, come on, Black Panther 3 is finally going to come out. Marvel has a real problem with Black-driven properties right now, and that’s something that needs to be talked about.
Steve
Yeah, and it looks like the anchor character for the next superhero franchise is a certain redhead, and not a Black woman, like I was hoping. We’ll see.
Matthew
Let’s, this is a spoiler-filled podcast, let’s get into it right away. All right. Holy hell, I want to be clear, I love so much about this movie.
Will
Oh my god, it was such a fun movie.
Matthew
There was so much that was good, and even from an ethical standpoint there was so much that was great, but just in terms of fun: the fight scenes were so good, so well choreographed, and most of us, when a whole bunch of ninjas leap into the air and are about to fall on you with swords in a cinematic way, your reaction isn’t going to be, oh no. It’s going to be, oh, that’s so cool. That was the most Peter Parker moment I’ve ever seen in my life.
Will
Oh my gosh, dude, yeah. So much fun.
Matthew
I really liked the Jean Grey story when I saw it in X-Men 3. I also really liked it when I saw it in Dark Phoenix, although that one wasn’t as good.
Steve
I also have baffled reactions here. Are you maybe alone in both of those?
Will
Well, I’m with the three of us.
Matthew
I’m overemphasizing a bit. My point is, it’s a good story, and the X-Men have had varying success telling it. Fox had varying success telling it, but they’ve done it twice. It’s also been told in both of the animated series.
Riffs on it were done by Buffy with Dark Willow, by Stranger Things with Eleven, by Charmed, the story of a woman who is so powerful and so emotional that she needs a man to talk her down and help her not blow up the world. Am I the only one who’s really sick of that story and was kind of disappointed it was in here? I groaned when I heard it was Jean Grey. I was like, come on, guys, give us something new. Stop telling us Jean Grey is too powerful for her own good.
Steve
I have so many thoughts on this. Will’s a Spider-Man guy, I’m an X-Men guy. And Jean Grey is a character who needs so much work, because Dark Phoenix, everyone knows it’s important, but that story was made almost fifty years ago. It shows its age. Not even in the sense of, oh, times and mores have changed. The storytelling mode of comics has changed in a way that you expect a lot more, and different types of, character development now. And after that, Jean Grey was dead. Then she came back. Then she was dead.
And then she came back. So for most of the time we’ve had naturalistic, character-driven stories in comics, Jean Grey has been dead, and she hasn’t been able to benefit from the kind of character development so many other characters have had. So she’s kind of a void, and I feel this in comics too. I think the movies didn’t do her any favors either. The first two runs of casting her in the Fox movies, those movies were so oversaturated with Magneto and Charles Xavier and Wolverine that every other character basically had nothing to do on screen.
No opportunity for character development. So now we get Jean Grey from a starting point that I think is perfect: she is powerful, and everyone is scared of her. So why does the relationship between Scott and Jean work? Because Scott is so full of self-loathing that he can’t be afraid of her.
It’s all directed toward himself. Why does the relationship between Wolverine and Jean work? Because Wolverine isn’t afraid of anything.
Will
These are the only two people in her entire life, including Professor Xavier, who have ever met her and aren’t afraid of her. And so, when you position her at the center of the love triangle rather than as these two men fighting over her affection, it turns into this really interesting story about a woman’s sexual awakening, or awakening into her full self. If they do Dark Phoenix again, even if they don’t, Jean gets to be a character who stories are about, rather than someone who’s just a prop, where the power just happens to her. I think so much of why the Dark Phoenix story has been done poorly is that she doesn’t get to be a character first. And now she does.
Matthew
But isn’t this just the Dark Phoenix story, but lighter? I mean, I haven’t read the comics, but it feels like we always get the actual Dark Phoenix story, but also this intro story of her, which is also a story about her having so much power that when she gets emotional enough to threaten real harm, someone has to talk her down. That’s why everything you just said, I love, and I’ve never seen that on screen, and I’d love to see it.
Will
Yeah, right.
Matthew
Starting with, I think they were at least aware enough of the “can we stop having men talk down emotional women” story that they had it be Aunt May, but of course Aunt May inside Peter’s head, so that’s kind of a dodge. But I don’t know.
Do either of you have ethical questions about it? I just find this story so boring. And yes, I do think Sadie Sink is the best Jean Grey we’ve ever had, and I look forward to seeing more of her story. Steve, did you not think this was a stale story we’ve seen a thousand times before? That’s a great question, and somehow, no.
Steve
Yeah, I think maybe I’m just happy to have a Jean Grey with some agency.
Matthew
Maybe it’s because you’ve seen the good version of it, and a bunch of things that didn’t come close, so you’re happy to keep trying for that good version.
Will
Yeah, I mean, the desire to see mutants done with care and not rushed in the MCU is really high, so tolerance for that kind of storytelling is a little higher. But I’ve got two thoughts. One: Jean has an insane amount of power outside the Phoenix, it doesn’t have to be the Phoenix that’s the problem, and I feel like this is the story a lot with telepaths in general.
How do I turn it off? When we as regular humans get overwhelmed, we might punch a wall. When Jean gets overwhelmed, she might give someone a stroke two miles away. Writers, as regular humans, don’t have the frame of reference for what that’s like by default. So I think that’s the go-to struggle for a telepath: hey, if we overstimulate this person’s brain, what’s going to happen?
Oh, a lot of people within a square kilometer are going to get real hurt. So, okay, let’s try something different. But for an origin, introductory, teenage, young-adult Jean, I think that makes sense. And I agree, as soon as you hear, hey, this brand, there are three to five stories you just know are always going to happen. If you hear X-Men are coming, there’s almost always going to be a Dark Phoenix arc. If Spider-Man’s happening, there’s almost always going to be a Gwen Stacy death, there’s going to be an Across the Spider-Verse type of key moment, and every Spider-Man is going to have a clone saga moment, because it’s so notorious and terrible, but they always have to have it.
It’s just, everyone’s going to have that. So with X-Men, you’re bringing in mutants, if you’re going to do Jean, there’s probably going to be a Dark Phoenix type of thing somewhere down the line.
Steve
Yeah, it’s pretty central to her character that she’s extremely powerful, that she’s either figuring it out or atoning for something she’s done. But I will say, maybe the thing that made this work for me is that it fits so well with the movie’s other themes and Spider-Man’s arc, where he’s not just a man who’s there to talk her down.
He’s dealing with his own stuff, and it’s only by comparing to, and going through this alongside, Jean that he’s able to resolve his own conflict of reaching out for help, letting other people in, and accepting the changes going on in his own life and his own body.
Will
Oh man. The comic book story beats they pulled from for this movie aren’t what we’re immediately talking about, but I had so much fun with it.
Steve
I was thinking of you for several of them, yes.
Matthew
No, I know a lot of scenes were taken straight from comic book covers. Clearly, Will, you and I have talked about this, the Insomniac video games that I’ve played on PlayStation, that whole rooftop fight scene as the opening montage felt very much like that.
Steve
Oh god, chasing the tank early, yeah.
Will
Yeah, chasing the tank. Oh man, dude, ah, so much fun.
Matthew
So let me turn to something more positive, but stay on the mutants idea, because I thought they did something that addressed an ethical question I’d had about the X-Men for a long time, that I’ve also seen people make memes about, and I’m wondering if you have the same take I did. The story of the X-Men as people who have powers, which makes other people fundamentally distrust them, works and is a great metaphor when it’s the X-Men. But it sometimes seems to break down when it’s like, okay, you are weirdos and mutants and different and freaks, but everyone else who has these crazy powers, often due to genetic mutation, just not their own awakened thing, is totally fine. It felt to me like the movie was trying to square that circle a bit, by saying that the genetic mutant people are most afraid of, and who should be considered in any conversation about genetic mutation being scary, is Bruce Banner. The way they set that up, Spider-Man doesn’t invent the inhibitor, he just has the idea of putting it on others, and all the problems that come with that. But Bruce Banner comes up with it for himself, and he’s clearly thinking about that too. Did it feel to you like they were trying to say that concerns about Bruce Banner actually make sense as part of concerns about the X-Men, and that there’s not going to be a bright line between the two?
Steve
Yeah. I think it also comes down to, people aren’t afraid of the other superheroes with their powers because being a superhero is a job, they go out and save the world, it’s like, oh look at them being good. And mutants, well, there’s the X-Men, but everyone else is just a normal person, they’re not out there using it for good or whatever, they’re just trying to live their lives. And so all of the hatred and xenophobia and cultural reproduction of, like, why does a homophobic parent disown their child, it’s because they had an expectation that their child would be like them and they’re not, and it frightens them. The bigotry comes through, and it’s reproduced within the family unit, that’s where I see so much of the basis for prejudice against mutants coming from.
Matthew
Yeah. I was very interested to see how they’d pull it off, because I think at the end of the movie I was left wondering, what do you do with Bruce Banner? Because I think that’s always been the flip side of the X-Men as a model for prejudice: the idea that a different group has different abilities and is fundamentally scarier or more dangerous than anyone else due to the color of their skin, or the god they worship, or their sexuality, is ridiculous. The idea that the X-Men are fundamentally potentially more dangerous, and have more ability to cause harm, is factual. When you take someone like Hulk, who literally cannot always control it and can be triggered by others, at the end of the movie they talk about Hulk being locked away, non-voluntary, mental-health-related, and I don’t love that, but I’m not sure that Dr. Banner, without being able to control the Hulk, running around, is that much of a good thing either.
Will
No, that’s, it doesn’t necessarily get brought up conversationally a lot, but there’s almost always some skit or video or random-thought essay here and there about, I don’t know what the right word is, not hypocrisy exactly, but a double standard.
You take someone who is a mutate, like a Spider-Man or even a Captain America, or even the gods, and everyone’s generally okay with them until they do something bad, and then you assume all mutants are bad. And it doesn’t, well, in this universe we live in a world of aliens hanging out and no one’s, I mean, unless you’re actually interacting with them on a daily basis.
Steve
I think that’s what it is. The mutants are just out there in the present, and, I don’t know, that doesn’t stop people from being xenophobic in real life either, even without actually having contact with the other. But whatever.
Matthew
So as we said, Banner is the one who invents the inhibitor, but he doesn’t have the idea of putting it on anyone else, that’s all Spidey. Is he the villain? I mean, he’s the protagonist, but he’s, is this the third or fourth time where Spidey, like, the last movie it’s entirely on him feeling guilty that his friends aren’t getting into the colleges they wanted to go to, which yes, that sucks.
There are other ways to deal with your guilt, my friend. Before that, it’s him taking Tony’s tech that he doesn’t fully understand and working with it. It feels like there’s this trend of Peter having power he doesn’t fully understand and wanting to do good without thinking about it causing more harm than good. Is that a theme that’s been with Peter throughout, not just in this movie?
Steve
Yeah, I’d say it’s pretty central to the mythic character of Spider-Man, that it’s a coming-of-age story. Part of that is he always has to screw up first and then make amends. He’s always trying to do the right thing, he doesn’t always know what it is, he’ll get there eventually, but he has to take his lumps first.
Will
Yeah, I was thinking about, after No Way Home, I’d said I was really interested in what a Ned Leeds without the influence of Peter would be, because Ned Leeds is the second Hobgoblin in the comics, so I thought he might go down that path, magical Hobgoblin, because his family has magic or whatever.
So I was really curious, in Brand New Day, to explore that. I never considered what Peter Parker is without his best friends. And I think we get that here, where he doesn’t have someone questioning his decisions. As soon as he started hanging out with MJ, and she starts asking, is this not just you being new, is it not something you should be embracing, he was already so far down the path of, no, I need to erase the evolution I’m going through, that he doesn’t want to hear it. So to both of your points, yeah, he’s got to screw up, but this was a much more remorseless kind of screw-up. Pete stuck in his own head, he’s going to make the biggest mistakes.
Matthew
And this is more on the relationship side than the ethics side, but I think it’s all tied together. I would have been real mad if Zendaya read the letter and said, oh, you love me so much, I must be the person who loved you, let’s just move on, everything’s okay. I really loved what she said, that it felt like real consequence from the last movie, that they can’t just fix everything, that yes he carries all this emotion, but she doesn’t. And I get that they did this kind of hand-wavy thing with Jean Grey’s powers pushing past that block, for both her and for Ned. But I really liked that she drew that line, and especially that she made it about agency.
Will
Yeah, that was crazy. I loved that.
Steve
I’m working on a new theory about the MCU. My favorite thing about Star Wars is the sound direction, that’s the secret superpower of the Star Wars universe, unbelievable sound direction, everything sounds really cool. I think in Marvel, it’s casting. Jon Bernthal is so good, Florence Pugh is so good, Jacob Batalon is so good, every time they’re on screen they just make the scene sing. What an unbelievably cast movie. All of these actors have something to do, and they nail their parts.
Matthew
Just out of curiosity, was this the first or second time in the last few weeks you guys watched Jon Bernthal badly try to mentor Tom Holland?
Will
I haven’t seen it yet, once.
Matthew
It’s right out of the poem, not a spoiler, but Telemachus travels to see Menelaus, who’s played by Jon Bernthal, and they’re amazing in that too. I really loved Punisher in this. I didn’t know how he was going to fit, I thought it worked so well.
Steve
Yes, but now I’ve got two guys from Queens arguing with each other.
Matthew
Here’s my question, and Steve especially. I was originally on a podcast with a couple of folks who aren’t quite as lefty as I am. I don’t know how up to date you are on the Daredevil: Born Again universe, but I know you’re up to date on the Netflix Daredevil universe. I haven’t seen much of Born Again, but I’ve read a lot about it, and I know Punisher’s in that as well, and that’s some of what they’re referencing here.
Steve
I’m about halfway through season two.
Matthew
Yeah, so I love that we’re finally getting movies confirming that those stories are real and important. New York cops don’t come across very well in the Daredevil universe, and I was like, you know what, it’s Spider-Man, so I’ve got to put my ACAB feelings aside a little bit. But wow, is this a movie about happy, shiny police who always do the right thing, which the Punisher is a weird addition to?
That’s true, especially with the New York police, and they even have Wilson Fisk for Mayor posters in the background. So yeah, that was one thing, I was having a little trouble being asked to root for the cops so many times.
Steve
Well, yeah.
Will
Oh man, so comic book spoilers for a storyline from like fifty years ago, but, Jean DeWolff is one of the first big deaths in Spider-Man lore. So when they name-dropped DeWolff, I got real stressed every time she was on camera, I was like, oh no, oh no, oh no. But she lived, so cool. It is funny, to your point, thinking back on all the comics I’ve read.
Cops and officials and government and elected people are portrayed vastly differently depending on what title you’re reading, whether it’s their competence, or just the type of person they are, or how tightly they stick to the law. Mixing a Spider-Man police story and a Punisher police story is a choice, for sure.
Steve
Yeah, and I’d say it’s a lot easier for the cops to come off looking good when they’re fighting, when they’re actually addressing super-villains, and not, you know, over-policing communities of color.
Matthew
So those were some of the big things I wanted to hit. What else came up for you guys, issues or questions where you really liked how they handled it, or had questions about how they handled it, or just thought it was interesting?
Will
You go first. Oh, just the thought, the inhibitor chip. There was the parallel that he put it at the top of his spine, like Doc Ock’s arms, compared to Hulk having a wrist guard. That stressed me out just from the potential behind it. The fact that he made it universal, because he didn’t know exactly what to inhibit on Jean. And then when she put her hair up, I thought, oh, her hair’s going to block it anyway, and then she put it in a ponytail and I was like, damn it. But the fact that we got an inhibitor chip and its evolution, which we kind of touched on: Hulk doing it strictly for gamma radiation so he doesn’t transform, Pete trying to explore stopping his own personal evolution and what he’s going through, and then him thinking outside the box, air quotes, to say, what if we did it for anybody who’s powered?
I was like, holy cow, that was such a subplot. I don’t see people talking about it, I’m not going through and looking for every single person’s post on this movie, but I haven’t seen it brought up. Like, whoa, inhibitor chips, huh, that’s a thing.
Matthew
I’m not seeing it in the general Roger Ebert-website-style reviews, but on TikTok it’s like, oh, okay, so Spider-Man just created the new version of the Sentinels, got it.
Will
Yeah, man, oh boy. That was crazy. I don’t feel like people pushed him enough on it, though. Or Jean, it was a high-tension moment, she was already passing out because she got hit with a trank, but her just saying, “What did you do to me,” and then passing out? There has to be more weight to what just happened. This is a bigger deal.
Steve
Mutants don’t exist as a people yet, I think that’s also the other big difference, mutants see themselves as a collective, as a people. So once this stops being a tool for individuals and becomes a tool aimed at a population, that’s collective punishment, that’s restricting personal genetic expression, and that’s where you get into crimes against humanity.
Matthew
I don’t think we have any doubt about where that train, heading into a more wooded part of New York State, that Jean Grey is on at the end of the movie, is going. I mean, she’s from upstate. Probably, right?
Steve
Yeah, that’s true. They changed her origin, her family situation, a lot for this.
Will
Which I was down for. Were you stressing out about what V-Max was?
Steve
Well, I’m not sure.
Will
I was racking my brain, I was like, dude, what am I missing, what have I forgotten?
Matthew
I didn’t think that was utterly brilliant, I thought it was one of the best notes in the movie. V-Max is just what she’s looking up, you know?
Will
Man, got me. That got me.
Steve
I’ve got something, which is, I’m glad that we’re forty minutes into this podcast, talking about Superhero Ethics, talking about a movie that Punisher’s in, and we haven’t talked at all about whether superheroes should kill or not. We’ve all had that conversation, I think literally the three of us have had that conversation.
We’re used to this, we’ve had this conversation, we can move past it. The discourse is in a different place, and I’m happy for it. We’re more mature as an audience.
Matthew
I’ll throw in a thought on this. I think Spidey was wrong. The frustration I always have is that people blur the line between “superheroes should not kill” and “superheroes should not murder.” The distinction I’m drawing is that murder is taking a life when there’s no imminent danger, when you’ve decided this person deserves to die or the world is better off without them. To me that’s fundamentally different from, this person is an imminent threat, I want to stop them, I’d like to stop them with non-lethal force, but I might need to use lethal force to stop them. And not only does Peter disagree with Punisher, he stops chasing the tank, the literal tank, in order to try and deal with that, which was ridiculous. Punisher, and then the tank succeeds. And we’re supposed to believe that that massive explosion, and all the other explosions, and all the many car crashes, resulted in no loss of life, which I roll my eyes at quite significantly. I did like the Daredevil and Punisher conversation up on the rooftop, one of the best versions of that conversation ever.
I thought Spider-Man was idiotic on this. To me, a big question he had in No Way Home was that he’s trying to find the best possible solution, and sometimes you can’t. Sometimes you have to do something you don’t want to do. And when people are using deadly force, sometimes if deadly force is the only way to stop them, you’ve got to use deadly force back.
Steve
Yeah, I think the ethic of, you know, great power, great responsibility, is that you exhaust every means possible, that you’re aware you’re operating at a different level of threat, and you go out of your way to do what you can to make it a non-lethal situation, I totally agree.
The party with more power has the greater responsibility toward peace, toward non-lethality, or what have you. But in this case, I think it’s also part of Spider-Man that he’s consistently overestimating what he’s capable of. He doesn’t know, and he’s erring on the side of thinking he can take a couple of minutes out of his day to stop Punisher and get back to the tank, no harm done, and he’s wrong. He’s not powerful enough, but his overactive guilt complex makes him think everything is his responsibility, everything is his fault, and that he has to be perfect and do everything perfectly.
Matthew
And I guess that’s where the movie threw me a bit, because most of the time you’re right, it’s his overactive guilt, he’s not responsible. But he did think he could control everyone, which led directly to Aunt May’s death. And that is his responsibility.
That’s it, that’s one of the movies I really, really loved, except when I start thinking about it too much, and about how it fits in with everything else, because I think this movie works fantastically on its own. I don’t think it works as the movie before Doomsday, and I don’t think it’s a great follow-up to No Way Home.
Steve
I was just happy to mostly memory-hold No Way Home. The movie worked on its own, but I just didn’t really like it for the franchise. It did what it needed to do, set the characters up to be where they needed to go. Let’s just tell a story, because in a meta context, that movie didn’t work for me. I was glad to move on from it.
Will
I loved it, but then I liked No Way Home. Well, I mostly liked No Way Home. I think it’s another one of those where, if you sit and think about it, there’s too much to complain about for it to be a good movie. But it’s been a while since I’ve been that stoked about a movie walking out of it.
I had so much fun coming out of No Way Home, I was jazzed the entire ride home about all the crazy things, the Uncle Ben moment, the Peter One, Peter Two, Peter Three moments. In a lot of ways it really highlighted what Spider-Man tries to be and what he wants to be. It was also a Tom Holland Spider-Man about to kill Norman Osborn, he was ready to kill. I think the guilt of that, “I was going to kill,” is probably weighing on him going into Brand New Day. It starts with a four-year montage.
Matthew
And we’ll get back to this, I think I’m going to have that feeling about this movie the next time I watch it, and even more so after Doomsday, because, and this is probably just on me as a fan, I’m so frustrated that they’re building up Doomsday so much and I know so little about it.
Steve
I feel like I know exactly what’s going to happen with Doomsday, and I’m ready to let it ride. Part of it may also be comics knowledge.
Matthew
Yeah, maybe. I know nothing about Doctor Doom, I’ve never seen him in anything.
Will
Man, yeah, Doctor Doom, what a character.
Matthew
And in the same way with Jean Grey, I’ve seen in the previews that the original Professor X and a lot of the original X-Men are in this. So I kept thinking, okay, so at least, like you said, I don’t want the X-Men to be rushed, so is this going to be the movie that helps me understand how all these X-Men fit together?
Steve
I see where you’re coming from. Yeah.
Matthew
So that’s again, that’s just the weirdness of these huge established movie universes. And I will say, putting that aside, in terms of setting a movie with the stakes it wants to have, and acknowledging there are all these other superheroes out there who aren’t going to appear on screen, this movie was perfect. All the scenes in the bathhouse with Yelena saying, no, you’re small potatoes, we don’t worry about that.
Will
Small potatoes, that was great, sounded like a foreign people thing, so good. That was totally perfect. So, to piggyback on that, we talked about this in one of our first podcasts together.
I feel like the MCU is finally here. My fantasy for where I want the MCU to go is, I want it to be big enough that they can afford to do these five-to-ten-minute cameos of characters in other properties, and I also want it to be big enough that something can be standalone, and you watch just that and are happy. Wonder Man season one could be the first MCU project you’ve ever seen, and it would be fine.
You’d be happy, if a struggling actor trying to get their dream job is your thing, go watch Wonder Man, and you’ve watched an MCU project, huzzah. And then with Brand New Day, they’re finally at a point where they’re like, hey, let’s pay Mark Ruffalo for five or six scenes, let’s pay Florence Pugh for three scenes, one of which is remote. Let’s spend the money to get these cameos of established characters for the few minutes we want them, to make it feel like this world is bigger than just the title character. We’re finally there, and I’m so excited, it’s so cool, at least for this movie.
Steve
And those characters all added to the Spider-Man story. They didn’t distract, they didn’t move the story somewhere else, they didn’t take up space they didn’t need. I think the best example of that was Punisher, the arc Punisher had, and the arc Punisher and Spider-Man went on together, their friendship arc, was just really well done.
Matthew
I could have gone without such a long Hulk fight scene, but that’s just preference, I thought everything else was great. It’s been about an hour, it’s been a great conversation, I’m sure we’ll be coming back to it, but any other last thoughts either of you want to mention?
Steve
I saw a post on social media recently from comics-and-sports fan Jason Concepcion, writer, podcaster, etc., who said the basic premise of the new Spider-Man movie, Brand New Day, is that Spider-Man is as beloved in New York City as Jalen Brunson is, and that was just spot on. So true. Will, any last thing from you?
Will
Oh man, it was so much, okay, I’m just going to shotgun-blast it. We don’t have to talk about it, I just wanted it out in the ether. Brand New Day is a reference to the comic book story where they undid the “evolve or die” storyline and brought him back to mechanical web shooters, and so to flip it on its head here, they give him organic web shooters and give him the evolve-or-die plotline, and completely ignore the spider-totem ridiculousness, freaking awesome. And then, Punisher going for a sniper shot on a character, and Spider-Man ducking him out of the way and getting shot, is straight out of Ultimate Comics, when Pete died, that’s when he died and then went full Goblin. And then Punisher carrying him into the hospital at the end after he got shot is straight out of Civil War, when Spider-Man got jumped in the sewers and Punisher had to save him and bring him to the Secret Avengers. There were just so many comic references.
Steve
Remembering Hulk, remembering Peter, but not Bruce.
Will
Yeah, right? Something most recently out of Immortal Hulk, and the storyline “Great Power.” There were so many comic references that were just so much fun to see done on the big screen, not to mention the comic-book-cover collage they did at the beginning.
Steve
I wouldn’t even call these Easter eggs, they’re just ways they used the comics and the material rather than winking at fans and saying, look, it’s a reference.
Matthew
It’s just
Steve
just part of the story.
Will
Yeah, perfect. It was so much fun seeing that, and not like Bendis Street on a street sign, and that being your reference to the comics. It was so much fun to watch this movie, and I’m very happy with it.
Matthew
So let me close by asking this, because I’m wondering if I’m overthinking it, or if you think this was intentional the way I do. Twenty-some years ago, we got the first Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movie, and people forget that we’d had superhero movies before, but that movie really kicked off this new obsession with superhero movies that became the Dark Knight movies, and then the MCU, and all these movies that seemingly never end now. That movie ended with something we hadn’t really seen before, which at the time people really loved, including myself, Peter saying to Mary Jane, I love you, and I’m going to put you in danger if I stay with you, so I can’t be with you.
I have to choose, and I’m going to walk away. At the time, a lot of us thought that was wonderful and noble, and probably a lot of people were like, Matthew, what the hell. I always knew it was terrible, but it took me a while to realize she didn’t have much agency in that decision, and that kind of sucked for her. And we got twenty years of a lot of, particularly male, superheroes making decisions for the women in their lives, often gaslighting the hell out of them, in order to protect them and deny them any agency. It feels like that moment from that movie is now quite panned, quite often talked about as, you know, this is bad. So when Zendaya, MJ, but I keep wanting to just say Zendaya because she’s such an amazing actress,
when MJ says to Peter, and God, the actor’s names are in my head, when MJ says to Peter that she’s mad he took away her agency, that he didn’t tell her, didn’t give her a chance to be part of deciding whether she should know or not, and then further presses him that he has to do the same thing with Ned,
that he’s taking away his agency too, it felt to me like on some level, that scene worked twenty years ago, but today we’re going to say Peter’s wrong to do that, that Peter doesn’t get to make this noble sacrifice, to do something good for the woman he loves, without actually talking to her about whether she wants this or not. Am I overthinking that, or do you think that was an intentional reference?
Will
I wouldn’t draw the one-to-one comparison. I think my takeaway is that it’s an evolution of storytelling, in the quality of character MJ has been established as for the last decade since she was introduced. For me it’s just a wildly intelligent, independent character saying, you took that decision away from me. My instinct is that it’s not about a man doing this to a woman or a woman doing this to a man, it’s just a character taking away another one’s agency. I think, to your point, it is highlighted by the fact that it’s a man doing this to his ex-lover. But for me it didn’t feel like a reference to that earlier scene.
It’s more just, holy cow, this is evolved storytelling.
Steve
I would also, sorry, go ahead.
Will
I was going to tangent.
Steve
Oh, okay. I didn’t clock it as a reference in the moment, but I can definitely see it once you bring it up. I’d also say this is a statement to the maturity of the Tom Holland franchise as it stands right now. He’s not in high school anymore, in fact they’re out of college. These are characters who are growing up, and breaking up with MJ might be an end-of-first-movie decision, and this is a mid-fourth-movie decision, but it goes to show that the essential part of Spider-Man is that he’s a young person, growing and changing, making these decisions with the best he has available, and that changes constantly, because we all screw up.
Matthew
That’s fair. All right, well, folks, this has been a fantastic discussion, thank you so much. I know people can still find older episodes of Hype Is My Superpower. Am I right that the podcast is currently on hiatus while you’re figuring some stuff out?
Will
Yeah, it’s on a break for now, we’re thinking potentially a 2027 volume two type thing.
Steve
Yeah, we took it offline, and now we just hang out with each other.
Matthew
You’re both awesome creators in your own right, though. Will, starting with you, talk to us about where we can find you.
Will
SylverDreamer, S-Y-L-V-E-R, Dreamer, pretty much everywhere, on Twitch and Instagram and TikTok and Blue Sky and Twitter, and technically there’s a profile on Facebook, but I haven’t updated it in like three years. Go find me, and we can talk about Marvel on all those channels. Steve?
Steve
I’m an independent comics creator, I have a title called The Pros, about spies who work for an insurance company. It’s not widely available, but hit me up, you can find me on Blue Sky under my name, and I’ll find a way to get it to you.
Matthew
Awesome, awesome, well, thank you both so much. I am, of course, The Ethical Panda. If you go to TheEthicalPanda.com, you’ll find all my podcasts, including this one, and the Star Wars podcast I do, Star Wars Generations, where we’re going to be covering The Ninth Jedi coming out in just a few days.
I think it’s actually coming out the day after this episode comes out. You can also find me on The Marvel Movie Minute, where we’ve been talking about Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and also in a recent episode of The Film Board, talking about the same movie, hopefully not repeating myself too much, though I think I’ve made the same jokes at least once or twice. Hope you enjoy all that. Please check out all the great things Will and Steve are doing.
On behalf of both of them, and myself, and all the wonderful people here at Superhero Ethics, we have spoken. Thank you so much for having us.
Will
My pleasure.
Steve
Pleased to be here. And goodbye.
