#de profundis

I recently watched the first Spider-Verse movie with my son. And it's really striking, how much fundamental conceptual contrast there is between the movie's three different Spider-Men from three different eras, in a way that feels so obvious and necessary that it's not even really worthy of comment or notice.

(NB: we are talking about Spider-Men here. For now we're leaving aside the two who are girls and the one who's a cartoon pig.)

Spider-Man Noir, from the early 20th century, is a grown man doing the work of grown men and engaging with the world of grown men. At the beginning of his career, he was already a working private dick, and he cut his teeth as a hero in World War I; by the iconic character-defining period when we see him, his goal is to fight Nazis, which makes him just like every other man of his generation. He even wears a trenchcoat and a fedora, which is to say, normal-person clothes of his era! The fact that he wears a spider mask, and has spider powers, seems almost incidental.

Spider-Man Classic, vaguely implied to be from the '80s or '90s, is - in his iconic mode - just out of college and trying to make it as an adult. His life is all frantic hustle and cheap apartment living and romantic confusion and getting yelled at by his boss. There is an eternally-awkward lack of coherence between his real-person life and his super-hero life, which is only highlighted by the occasional elements that cross over. The specific version that we see in the movie is doing (a good-hearted version of) the Failed Manchild thing, which makes sense if you extend that iconic mode into a person's late 30s or whatever.

Spider-Man Ultimate, from the 2020s or thereabouts, is a high school kid. His life, when he's not being Spider-Man, is a high school kid's life with high-school-kid-type problems and limitations. He lives with his parents, under their authority. Given that baseline, his career as Spider-Man - a hero fighting serious physically-violent villains for very high stakes - has basically no direct relation to his normal existence, except on the level of psychological metaphor. It might as well be a series of Walter Mitty dream sequences.

- Oscar Wilde