Spider-Man: No Way Home is, above all, a gag. Its purported subject is “the multiverse,” but this mysterious cosmic phenomenon, as it turns out, is really just shorthand for the absurdity of franchise moviemaking. Indeed, studio greed has resulted in several universes of Spider-Mans, causing the character’s traits and motivations to be scrambled nonsensically to the point where he is, truly, a joke. This latest film is the punch line.
Thanks to Dr. Strange and his magic, a cinematic reunion takes place between all three movie-era Spider-Mans, who together must face down old foes including the Green Goblin, Dr. Octopus, the Sandman, Electro, and the Lizard. Abra kadabra. This premise is mostly mined for comedic potential, and the targets of the jokes are the earlier films. Why, for instance, could one Spider-Man shoot actual, natural webs from his wrists? Why did another face off against a “rhinoceros guy”? And why was one of the villains named “Otto Octavius”? These jokes comprise the film. The action scenes merely provide breaks amidst the endless comic riffing.
Of course, no knotty quantum physics are required to understand why three similar but not identical Spider-Mans have graced the screen over the past twenty years. The actual explanation is Sony’s bottom line: both previous Spider-Mans were aborted as soon as they starred in a panned film and thereby damaged the brand. A new cast wiped the slate clean. And why wait around for people to forget the old version, when there was money to be made right away?
Multiverse, indeed.
But this is all well known to the audience. Sony and Marvel aren’t fooling anyone by allegorizing their own money-grubbing as a mind-blowing new paradigm of time and space. If anything, fans know that they’ve played at least an equal part in the tap dance of maximizing studio revenue; after all, if they’ll reliably flock to see a new Spidey only a few years after the last one flopped, then why wouldn’t Sony oblige them?
The jokes about the old Spider-Man films, then, are jokes at the audience’s expense just as much as the studios’. And this, I think, is why people find them so much fun. There’s a kind of self-deriding glee in appreciating jokes that are so obviously dated and bad: the description of the Green Goblin as a “flying green elf” and the speculation that Tobey Maguire might ejaculate webbing, for example, elicit laughs primarily at one’s own self—for caring the slightest bit about the subject matter. Maguire’s Spider-Man, remember, was released in 2002. Why are we so invested?
You’re not supposed to care about the story of No Way Home, which transparently makes no sense, or the stupidity of Dr. Strange, who corrals supervillains in non-soundproof cells so they can chat with one another, or the lack of purpose for any of the villains, some of whom fight on the opposite side of their own stated goals. The film itself is beside the point. The point is that you’re watching it—and that you also watched the others.
This means that inside jokes can be made and understood as if you were hanging out with old friends. You belong: that’s the appeal of No Way Home. Of course, that type of belonging—Marvel’s specialty—has cost you a bit of money and time over the years, hasn’t it?
Self-parody is cheap and forgettable. It’s all the more disappointing in that there are bursts of excellence in this movie that suggest what No Way Home could have been. There’s one excellent scene in particular where MJ is knocked off a ledge, with camerawork recalling Gwen Stacey’s death from Andrew Garfield’s series of movies. Holland’s Spider-Man can’t get to her, so Garfield makes a leap and saves her. He’s overcome with emotion upon landing, apparently feeling redeemed for failing to save Gwen, an event he had cited earlier as a turning point that caused him to be “rageful” and unprincipled. This very moving scene, which takes all of ten seconds, shows that the filmmakers had the ability to capture real character drama if they wanted to.
But they don’t, and they don’t have to. Maybe Dr. Strange will one day take us all to a dimension where superhero films don’t exist, but until then Spider-Man is a rolling snowball with unstoppable momentum. What’s too bad is that we’ll never again see the type of films at the center of that snowball, the films that started the momentum: flawed releases that nevertheless tried to be serious and dramatic—films that aimed for the tone of their comic book source material. With so many layers of parody and self-parody concealing that center now, it’s all a joke, and the joke is on us. People seem to love No Way Home. But I find it a sad place to be.
– Jim Andersen
For more superhero commentary, see my essay on the MCU.