Various Varieties of Things (Tumblr edition)

“Attention crew, this is your captain speaking. Just letting everyone know that, earlier today, an extra-terrestrial probe inserted about half a centuries’ worth of memories into my brain, leading me to briefly believe that I was living a whole other life that felt as real to me as the one I’m living now. Then I woke up after what felt like decades— but was actually only a few minutes— to discover that my friends, my family and my culture not only no longer existed, but had never actually belonged to me in any real sense.

“Warn them about Data!”

The Matrix Resurrections is a good, solid, well-made film with moments of genuine excellence… but the reasons it is all those things is are the precise same reasons that The Matrix was and is a titanic genre classic.

In other words it has a severe case of The Force Awakens disease. Lana Wachowski did what she’s best at, which is make The Matrix. And it’s like… cool, but we already knew you could make an Act I.

Be that as it may. After watching a couple more times, I want to talk about the language of violence that Resurrections uses, and to what degree it’s intentional and to what degree it isn’t, and how justifiable those creative choices might be.

The action in Resurrections is a hot mess. Like, an almost insulting hot mess. The set-piece fights are boring, and where they’re NOT boring they’re often confusing and hard to follow. The big finale, the car chase through the dark city as the Matrix goes into full swarm to throw the entire populace at the protagonists, zombie horde style, is a dimly lit, badly shot, poorly choreographed mess almost all the way through to the end. The train fight isn’t much better, nor is the confrontation with the Merovingians tattered court or the coffee house melee. The best of a bad lot is the gunfight at the office… and the weight of that is carried by Smith.

Before updating this post I re-watched Speed Racer. (Not just as a reference, but because Speed Racer is goddamn amazing.) And I had a hard time believing that the people who made THAT, with its immensely tight action sequences in which racecars essentially become martial artists, fast-moving but still precise and easy to follow, with impeccable timing and camera beats, also made the car chase at the end of Resurrections.

But… okay, sometimes people lose their fastball, right? That happens. They can’t all be winners.

Well… that would be more convincing if it weren’t for the fact that there are three action sequences in Resurrections that work impeccably well.

The first, of course, is Neo’s confrontation with the Analyst in Trinity’s workshop, where he does his big villain monologue while casually utilizing the signature move of Neo from the first trilogy (super-speed, rendered on-camera as “bullet time”) against him. Everything there has the clockwork precision combined with high speed and clever use of camera angles we’ve come to expect from the Wachowskis; it is the action sequence most clearly evocative of the first set of films, I think, (although Morpheus’ training dojo has a strong claim, but we’ll come back there) while also evolving what that sort of violence means in the context of the Matrix.

The second is brief; it’s Smith’s bushwhacking of the Analyst in the coffee shop, where we suddenly switch from the confusing, hard-to-follow scrum to… well, see previous laudatory adjectives. Again, evocative of the first films while also evolving them.

And finally, Trinity just utterly slapping the shit out of the Analyst at the end of the film. Clear lines, clear action flow, easy to follow.

All three of these fights involve the Analyst. Only one of them involves Neo, and in that one he’s essentially helpless while the villain monologues.

So the Wachowskis still know what they’re doing.

I’m going to make a bold claim here; I think almost all the action in Resurrections, especially anything involving Neo, is deliberately bad. I think it is meant to be sub-par and unmemorable as a creative choice, and I think it is constructed that way as a rebuke to a certain kind of Matrix fan.

One of the big thematic through-lines of Resurrections (which I wish they’d done more with) is that the events of the first trilogy have been adapted by the Matrix itself as an entertainment; that Neo’s story of liberation has been turned into another shackle on the people he was meant to liberate. And one of the ways they hammer this home is that the creative team the Matrix provides “Thomas Anderson” with to make a “new Matrix game” has the shallowest possible understanding of what that story was about, which they keep throwing into his face at every chance. They go on and on about how cool and awesome the action was, about the guns, about the costuming, about the bullet time. Everything about this creative team is meant to evoke soullessness, about the ultimate triumph of aesthetics and corporate media development over deeper substance.

The complete lack of huge, memorable, well-executed set piece fights in Resurrections is, I think, a reasoned and deliberate pushback against people who think that the best part of the first trilogy was when Neo walks into that office building with two duffel bags full of guns and utterly wrecks face for like ten or fifteen minutes en route to rescuing Morpheus. The Wachowskis decided that they’d make it bad on purpose; only the more intimated, character-driven fight sequences would be preserved.

To clarify something: I don’t think this was a very good idea at all. “We made it bad on purpose” is… I’m not gonna say it is impossible to pull off, but WOW is it hard. People aren’t going to go “Oh, I see, the badness is making a profound statement about how people engage with the subject matter, yes yes very good etc.” They’re going to go “Wow, that was actually kinda bad” full stop. And it is, in general, not a good idea to come hard at your fanbase for appreciating your stuff in the wrong way. Sometimes that needs doing, but it has to be more well-considered and justified than this was.

And I think this is all very unfortunate, because there’s something really interesting about how they’re using Neo as an action hero underneath all this.

I had to watch Resurrections twice before I realized something. Neo never, not once, picks up a gun. He never really fights with what’s called killer instinct, the drive to win, to dominate your opponent, to kill them before they kill you. He fights defensively; to stay alive, to reach someone, to protect others.

And, crucially, this is how his command over the Matrix, his abilities that stem from being “the One,” manifest. Neo’s signature move is no longer bullet time. It’s his SHIELD. That’s what he does now; he throws up shields to protect himself and more often, to protect others. He doesn’t “win” his fight with Smith in the traditional manner; instead Smith beats him bloody until in the last extremity Neo uses his shield to “push” Smith off the battlefield, essentially winning via ring-out, not by smashing face. The single most interesting part of the car chase is that Neo isn’t going whole hog on the back of Trinity’s motorcycle, two-gun John Woo style, arms akimbo, cutting his way through swarm mode in a hail of bullets. It’s that he spends that entire chase using his shield to keep himself and Trinity safe.

Heck, when Morpheus is trying to wake Neo back up, by doing a dojo sequence callback to the original… in the original, the way Neo’s powers manifested there was to allow him to out-speed and out-punch Morpheus, in other words, to become the more deadly fighter. In Resurrections, the way they manifest is to push Morpheus away from him; to keep himself safe while not harming others.

The most violent thing Neo does in the entire movie is blow up a helicopter… which he does by using his shield powers to redirect a rocket that would have turned him and Trinity into goo. In other words, a primarily defensive move. In the final confrontation with the Analyst, Neo just stands there holding a cat while TRINITY is the one who slaps him around; Neo does not raise his hand in anger.

They managed to completely retool Neo into a hero who uses his power passively primarily to defend, rather than offensively to destroy and wreck, and they did it so subtly I didn’t even really notice at first. I wish they’d leaned much harder on that; its a very interesting direction to take the character, and a MUCH, much better way of subverting the mindset of “Neo is awesome because he kicks the shit out of people with pistols and shotguns and gun-fu” than by making deliberately shoddy action sequences.

But one by one, these ideas are raised and then dropped, or just not given enough room to shine. You see this, in particular, in the handling of Trinity. People talk about how this movie is a response to the way that the original Matrix has been coopted and bastardized by popular culture and political groups, but I haven’t seen much discussion of the way that Resurrections’s Trinity is a direct response to the critique of Trinity Syndrome, where the female lead is just as capable and badass as he is, but somehow relegated to sidekick or romantic reward role while he’s crowned as the world’s savior.

And that’s great! Having Trinity somehow come into the powers of the One is cool, and the moment where she starts flying is genuinely exhilarating. But somehow the only way to achieve that is to give Trinity even less of a point of view than she had in the original Matrix? For all the lip service the film pays to the notion that Trinity has to choose to be free, her perspective and thoughts are almost entirely absent. Her choice to be herself again doesn’t feel earned. There’s the bones of a good heroic plot for her, but they’re not fleshed out. Instead we’re meant to be satisfied by her trouncing the Analyst and flying off the way Neo did at the end of the first movie. It feels shallow, where there was clearly a lot more that could have been done.

Like, I don't think anyone would describe Mad Max: Fury Road as a comedy, and it doesn't even have a lot of jokes (and certainly not if you use the definition of "joke" that everyone seems to these days, that is to say "quippy one liners of the type Tony Stark makes"). But it is absolutely not a humorless movie in the same way that Dune is.

As you may have heard, Zack Snyder’s Justice League is being presented in a 4:3 aspect ratio in order to preserve the visionary director’s directorial vision. It is also being offered in black-and-white, the director’s preferred color palette. Also, Willem Dafoe’s scenes as Aquaman character Vulko have been restored, and new footage has been shot to spotlight Robert Pattinson of The Batman, who is rumored to have a romantic encounter with Lori Lemaris.

However, you may not be aware of these additional requirements in order to experience Zack Snyder’s JUSTICE LEAGUE in its intended format:

Zack Snyder’s JUSTICE LEAGUE requires Netscape 2.01 or later. 

Zack Snyder’s JUSTICE LEAGUE is presented in “pan-and-scan” format. The characters talking from just out of frame are normal.

Zack Snyder’s JUSTICE LEAGUE is best viewed at 640x480 resolution.

Zack Snyder’s JUSTICE LEAGUE: The Soundtrack is available now on UMD.

Zack Snyder’s JUSTICE LEAGUE is brought to you by Mentos: The Freshmaker!

Zack Snyder’s JUSTICE LEAGUE is Under Construction.

Zack Snyder’s JUSTICE LEAGUE is part of the SnyderCut Webring. 

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Zack Snyder’s JUSTICE LEAGUE is presented with limited commercial interruptions. Tobor is Robot spelled backwards.

Zack Snyder’s JUSTICE LEAGUE may contain Olestra. 

I just realized that one of the generation-spanning pieces of media that manages to avoid this trope is… the Dragonball franchise.

I wonder what attracts writers in the idea that people who met under extreme circumstances and bonded at a very young age might not have the most stable relationship as adults, and especially as the caretakers of children, who require stability and healthy boundaries to thrive.

I wonder what’s interesting about the idea that a person who dedicated their life to saving the world might also dedicate themselves to rebuilding after the calamity has ended, and prioritize that work over childrearing in a way that might arouse resentment in children who, after all, weren’t even alive when things were bad.

I wonder what’s worth exploring about the idea that the qualities that made you heroic or charming as a young person among comrades (or as a young character before an audience) might be frustrating or even unbearable to a child trying to relate to their parent.

Or even worse, “wow, these people turned into bad parents and the narrative literally has no idea. It thinks they’re GREAT parents.”

Like, a lot of people were really upset when it turned out that all three of Aang’s kids were kind of messed up by him, but the show never described him as anything but a loving father. It’s just that he was also the avatar, and clearly burdened by the knowledge that it was down to him to continue the airbender line. It’s no surprise that this ended up impacting on his kids, the ones who weren’t airbenders and the one who was.

As the poet says: “they fuck you up, your mum and dad/they may not mean to but they do”. Some people seem to take great offense at the idea that this also applies to the characters they love, even when those characters are precisely the people who are most likely to have unresolved issues that would impact their children. And the reaction is often that the characters have been made evil or abusive, when really, they’re just being human.

My initial criticism that Animaniacs was nothing but cutesy, educational garbage didn’t last long. By the second week of first-run shows I was watching it religiously, and episode 15 became the first one I actually videotaped. It wasn’t long before I had become infatuated with the series, and drawings of all the characters soon littered every blank piece of paper I could find, while a cassette copy of the original album was a mainstay in my tape deck. The winter ‘94 run of new episodes got me through the death of my grandfather, and I remember being obsessed with the “65th Anniversary Special” throughout that Summer. I followed the show over to the WB, kept up with it through the random airings and hour-long “H” episode nonsense, and stuck with it to the bitter end. It’s hard to believe that I was a freshman in high school when it started, and a junior in college by the time Wakko’s Wish was released. It’s even more amazing to think that my fondness for the show has never diminished despite it being gone for almost fifteen years. If anything, I love it even more now. Marathoning the series when the volume four DVD set arrived made me realize just how much I cared about it, and finally having every episode on home video was all the motivation I needed to start this blog. I never thought for a second when I began writing about Animaniacs last April that it would take me until late January to actually finish it, and I never imagined that I’d get as in depth as I eventually did. My review of the first episode looks downright embarrassing compared to the entries I was turning out even a week later and I’d be lying if I said there weren’t times I felt in over my head and considered throwing in the towel.

With the exception of Family Guy, I can’t think of many other animated shows that divide people the way Animaniacs does. For every person that loves every single thing about it and apologizes for even its worst elements, there’s someone else who thinks it’s unredeemable trash that represents everything wrong with '90s animation. In fact, the show had barely begun and John Kricfalusi was already tearing it to pieces, despite admitting that he had never even seen it. There were people who hated the series from the very beginning, and there’s even a 2000 episode of South Park that states there are two groups of people: those who like Animaniacs, and those that don’t. As I’ve made very clear over the past ten months, I don’t think the show is perfect. It’s unpredictable format and huge cast all but ensured that every segment wasn’t going to be a winner, and there were just as many clunkers as there were masterpieces. But when the series was firing on all cylinders it was nothing short of incredible, and that first production season was one of the wildest, 65-episode rides I’ve ever had with a syndicated weekday afternoon series. Animaniacs accomplished things no series had before and no series probably ever will again. It was very lucky to have come around at exactly the right time for the pieces to fall together as well as they did. Even the people who worked on the show consider it one of the high points of their careers. In August of 2010, Doug Walker (aka The Nostalgia Critic) put together an hour-long Animaniacs tribute, featuring interviews with Tom Ruegger, Sherri Stoner, Paul Rugg, John P, McCann and Nathan Ruegger and it’s clear that everyone involved loved being a part of the series. I can’t think of a better quote to end on than one by Rob Paulsen: “I tell people in interviews that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles really changed my career, but Animaniacs really changed by life. I’m incredibly grateful.”

I’ve been asked many times over the past few months what cartoons I’d list as the best and worst of the series. For a show like Animaniacs that’s a very difficult task, so I think the best way to handle this is to break it down by character…

Best Warners Cartoons: “Hello Nice Warners”, “LA LA Law”, “Plane Pals”, “Hercule Yakko”, “Potty Emergency”, “Chairman of the Bored”, “Clown and Out”, “A Christmas Plotz”, “Ragamuffins”, “The Warners’ 65th Anniversary Special”, “Super Strong Warner Siblings”, “This Pun For Hire”

Worst Warners Cartoons: “Roll Over Beethoven” “Nothing But the Tooth”, “Moby or Not Moby”, “Broadcast Nuisance”, “Fake”, “Anchors A-Warners”, “Papers For Papa”, “Cute First…Ask Questions Later”

Best Pinky and the Brain Cartoons: “Win Big”, “Jockey For Position”, “Bubba Bo Bob Brain”, “Yes, Always”, “Brain Meets Brawn”

Worst Pinky and the Brain Cartoons: “Don’t Tread on Us”, “Hercules Unwound”

Best Slappy Squirrel Cartoons: “Bumbie’s Mom”, “Critical Condition”, “Frontier Slappy”, “Woodstock Slappy”

Worst Slappy Squirrel Cartoons: “My Mother the Squirrel”, “Soccer Coach Slappy”, “The Christmas Tree”

Best Goodfeather Cartoons: “West Side Pigeons”, “Hiccup”, “Raging Bird”

Worst Goodfeather Cartoons: “The Boids”, “Girlfeathers”, “Miami Mama Mia”, “We’re No Pigeons”

Best Mindy and Buttons Cartoons: “Les Boutons et le Ballon”, “Buttons in Ows”, “Night of the Living Buttons”

Worst Mindy and Buttons Cartoons: “Up the Crazy River”, “Mesozoic Mindy”, What a Dump", “Super Buttons”, “Mermaid Mindy”

Best Rita and Runt Cartoons: “When Rita Met Runt”, “Les Miseranimals”, “Phranken-Runt”

Worst Rita and Runt Cartoons: “The Cat and the Fiddle”, “Puttin’ on the Blitz”, “Smitten With Kittens”, “Kiki’s Kitten”, “Up a Tree”

Best Chicken Boo Cartoons: “General Boo-Regard”, “The Chicken Who Loved Me”, “Boo Happens”, “Boo Wonder”

Worst Chicken Boo Cartoons: “The Good, The Boo and the Ugly”, “Jingle Boo”

Best Hippo Cartoons: “The Pitter Patter of Little Feet”

Worst Hippo Cartoons: “La Behemoth”, “A Moving Experience”, “Can’t Buy a Thrill”

Best Song Segments: “The Monkey Song”, “Yakko’s World”, “Yakko’s Universe”, “Wakko’s America”, “The Senses Song”, “Schnitzlebank”, “A Quake, A Quake”, “The Tiger Prince”, “The Ballad of Magellan”, “Dot - the Macadamia Nut”, “The Animaniacs Suite”

Worst Song Segments: “The Return of the Great Wakkorotti”, “When You’re Traveling From Nantucket”, “Here Comes Attila”, “LA DOT”

Best of the Rest: “Yakko Warner’s World of Baldness”, “Cartoons in Wakko’s Body”, “Buttermilk, it Makes a Body Bitter”, “Branimaniacs”, “Previously on Animaniacs”, “It”

Worst of the Rest: “Wings Take Heart:, "Hollywoodchuck”, “Katie Ka-Boom: The Broken Date”, “Katie Ka-Boom: The Blemish”, “No Time For Love”

Acknowledgements

First, I want to thank the people who have worked on the show whom I’ve talked to through this blog’s Facebook group. They have given me useful information,  corrected misinformation or enlightened me in general. These include Kirk Tingblad, Tom Minton and Tom Ruegger. I also want to thank Peter Paltridge of Platypus Comix, whose interview with Jon McClenahan proved to be an indispensable source of Startoons trivia. I also want to again thank Peter for coming to my rescue for title card screen shots for episodes 51 and 55. Special thanks go to the members of the Toon Zone forum for supporting me from the very beginning, and voting the talkback for the blog the best Toon Zone thread of 2013. More thanks go out to friends and family who have been patient with me through this long process.

But the biggest thank you is reserved for my very patient and loving wife Elizabeth, who has been there for me through all of this, even when I was trying to get this done alongside wedding planning last Summer and Fall. She watched every episode with me before I reviewed them, would proofread each entry before it was published and had to listen to way too much Animaniacs music during long car rides. There is no way I could have done this without her support. I love you, sweetheart.

And of course, a special thank you is required for all the people who made Animaniacs what it was in the first place - the hard working producers, writers, directors, voice artists, animators, musicians, teamsters, coffee people, therapists, assistants, assistants to the assistants, caterers and anyone else I might have missed. All your hard work is truly appreciated.

I guess that’s it. There’s only one thing left to say…

1 -- "De-Zanitized"/"The Monkey Song"/"Nighty-Night Toon"

3 -- "H.M.S. Yakko"/"Slappy Goes Walnuts"/"Yakko's Universe" (I found the old URL of this one via Twitter: https://legion1979.tumblr.com/post/47904242284/but-lets-not-be-anal-episode-3 )

7 -- "Piano Rag"/"When Rita Met Runt"

18 -- "Pavlov's Mice"/"Chicken Boo-Ryshnikov"/"Nothing But the Tooth"

20 -- "Hearts of Twilight"/"The Boids"

23 -- "Be Careful What You Eat"/"Up the Crazy River"/"Ta da Dump, Ta da Dump, Ta da Dump Dump Dump"

26 -- "Testimonials"/"Babblin' Bijou"/"Potty Emergency"/"Sir Yaksalot"

30 -- "Draculee, Draculaa"/"Phranken-Runt"

57 -- "Of Course, You Know This Means Warners"/"Up a Tree"/"Wakko's Gizmo"

62 -- "Scare Happy Slappy"/"Witch One"/"MacBeth"

90 -- "Pitter Patter of Little Feet"/"Mindy in Wonderland"/"Ralph's Wedding"

Wakko's Wish Part 1

I watched the first episode of DC Universe’s Harley Quinn cartoon last year, and concluded that it was well done but not for me. The show seemed a little too in love with in-your-face violence, a little too deliberately outrageous. The positive reactions convinced me to give it a second look, and as it turns out Harley Quinn really is as good as everyone has been saying. You do need to accept a cheerfully cavalier attitude towards a lot of gruesome violence as the show’s buy-in, but I was actually impressed by how deftly Harley Quinn walks the line between humor and violence, while still stressing that some things are out of bounds for (some of) its characters. Add to that a well-crafted portrait of Gotham complete with a lot of familiar faces, some great storytelling and character work, and impressively gonzo set-pieces, and it’s easily one of my favorite superhero stories ever, not just in animation.

I was struck, while watching the first season, by the similarities between Harley Quinn and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. Obviously, the two shows are very distinct despite both being female-led animated shows. She-Ra is an all-audiences series with an earnest tone and a strong emphasis on heroism. Harley Quinn is entirely unsuitable for children, and nearly all of its characters are villains. But both are also series about the redemptive power of friendship, and female friendship in particular (also, from what I’ve heard about Harley Quinn’s second season, a friendship that eventually turns romantic). In Harley Quinn’s opening episode, she escapes Arkham Asylum with the help of Poison Ivy, after waiting a year for the Joker to rescue her. Ivy helps Harley realize that the Joker never really cared about her, and that she can be a better and more successful supervillain without him. The rest of the season concerns Harley’s attempts to prove just that.

I found myself thinking that Harley Quinn addressed a lot of the problems I had with how She-Ra depicted this theme, while at the same benefiting from its distinct tone and subject matter. I’d like to talk about some of the things it does better.

Some highlights of Steven Moffat’s Twitter commentary for the Day of the Doctor live re-watch.

Some highlights of Russell T Davies’s Twitter commentary for the Rose live re-watch. 

The general public doesn’t get it. They think the clown guy is hilarious. Only Bruce sees how horrific, almost supernaturally impossible his planning, his invasions of privacy would have to be to pull anything off. He ruins the entire public image and credibility of other villains and heroes. He robs people of huge victories with things as banal as pies in the face. With a complex domino effect ending in only a glitter bomb he topples a criminal empire Bruce was OBSESSED over for YEARS and now Batman looks like a big dumbass.

At his final moment of triumph, both Superman and Orion bound and forced to watch, Darkseid unveils the solution to the cube’s impossible puzzle, unlocking the millenia old container to reveal…

a fresh custard cream pie, spring loaded, along with the simplest of notes.

“GOTCHA!” With a little smile instead of the dot on the exclamation point. Darkseid blinks slowly, wipes a dollop of custard from his face, licks it, and begins laughing louder and louder as he steps outside, flies into the air, and heads directly for the nearest black hole. 

.No, but I think there’s an interesting reason why it’s not, and it has a lot to do with textual intent. 

In Batman comics, Batman IS the solution to the problems with Gotham City, which we know because WE ARE READING BATMAN COMICS AND THAT IS THE PREMISE, AND IF YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THAT YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND FICTION. Billionaires in the real world? Terrible, inherently immoral. Billionaires in the fictional universe that has shit like Green Lantern rings and x-ray eyes? Literally the only thing keeping a crocodile man from eating your face. Bruce Wayne is a philanthropist on the side, but, as I’ve written before, writing a check to the local school district or offering comprehensive health insurance to employees of Wayne Industries does not solve the problem of A Murder Clown Is Poisoning The Water Supply Right Now. I do not understand why people claim they want to see fucking Batman meet with his accountant and figure out if construction of the Thomas and Martha Wayne Memorial Humanities Building at Hudson University is a good tax write-off for 20 God damned pages every week, which I assure you they do not actually want, but that’s not the point, really. The point is disingenuous refusal to engage with the text. The actual text of Batman comics is that Batman is a good idea.

The actual text of X-Men comics is that Professor X gathered teenagers and, in the guise of a school, turned them into a secretive paramilitary strike force that went on missions where they were sometimes killed. The argument is whether that’s the best way to go about things, which is an argument that people have within those comics. The text tends to come down on the side that he was right to do so because the alternative is getting murdered by giant purple robots made of racism, but there’s still an exploration. It’s why Cyclops is an interesting character, because he’s The Most X-Man — the guy who found out at 15 that he had to learn how to be really good at aiming the uncontrollable laser beams concussive force blasts that shoot out of his eyes because the alternative was that he and everyone he cared about was going to die. Like, that’s something that’s gonna fuck you up pretty bad, but according to the past 50 years of X-Men comics, it’s also 100% true. 

With Batman, the question is not “why doesn’t Batman provide real solutions to to the real-world root causes of crime” — because that’s an astoundingly stupid question to ask — it’s “how is Batman going to solve the problems that are presented to him in this fictional universe that is uniquely built around him?” 

With the X-Men, the question is usually “how are the X-Men going to survive this experience?” The idea of questioning whether Professor X was wrong all this time is a core component of that. 

The former is refusing to engage with the premise. The latter is asking the questions the premise invites. If you don’t like the premise, you don’t have to engage with the media. There’s a lot of stuff out there and if you don’t like Batman because that idea doesn’t make sense to you, I’m not going to hold it against you. I will, however, hold it against you if you try to break the premise to make it worse. 

Here’s a huge tangent where I just know I’m gonna get lost in the woods: 

I actually feel a similar way to opinions I’ve seen about the MCU, and how it’s built around a very militaristic idea of superheroes, which makes some people uncomfortable. And, you know, that’s fair! Those movies are built around that idea, because they were built on the foundation of a movie that was the absolute embodiment of transitioning from traditional action movies (ie, stories about loose cannon cops, spies, space marines, Kurt Thomas, and other heroes who usually have the backing of a larger organization) and superhero stories (which are almost always about heroes acting independently of, and occasionally in opposition to, those same larger forces). Those movies never really get away from the idea that Tony Stark, the guy who sets the tone for the entire roster of films to follow, is fundamentally a dude whose primary character trait and fatal flaw are that he always believes he can solve his problems by building a bigger gun. The militarized aspect of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers spins out of this as both a structural result of the action to superhero genre transition, and as a convenience to get Iron Man (former defense contractor), Captain America (literal soldier), Black Widow (spy), the Hulk (military scientist) and Hawkeye (for some reason a spy like in The Ultimates and not a redneck carny like he should’ve been). The odd man out is Thor, which, for all the problems with those first two Avengers movies, is why he first shows up as an antagonist in the first one and then completely bails on the whole thing to go deal with his own stuff on the second one. The military structure is literal plot structure.

So yeah, that gets kind of weird when it filters down to Spider-Man. A lot of that weirdness has to do with things that are beyond the control of the universe, in that Marvel’s most beloved character, the second big success the company ever had whose popularity has endured much stronger than the first one, the flagship superhero who was literally on their paychecks and has never not been popular, had to be a late addition to a universe that already had, like, the Vision in it. 

But because they had to work within those constraints, they had to work within the premise they were already given. It makes perfect sense that in that universe, Peter Parker would look up to the world’s most famous superhero nerd, and it makes sense that Iron Man would see Peter as this blank slate that he could stop from making the mistakes that had defined his life. That, to me, is a really interesting dynamic, but it’s also one that requires Spider-Man to take a lot of cues from Iron Man, which is not a dynamic that those two characters ever had in the source material. It winds up giving them different consequences.

And like, if that’s not your thing, I get it. Spider-Man being recruited by the superhero military and having a high-tech suit that talks to him is a jarring shift, even if they do a good job of bringing in most of the core tenets of the character — something about responsibility and… I wanna say… muscles? Is it muscles? — which I think they did. But, if you don’t like that setup, which is a product of the larger universe, then you don’t have to buy into the premise. Like, yeah, it sucks that you’re fundamentally not going to dig this Spider-Man movie, but how do you think I feel? I’m a Batman guy and I literally have to see these movies with their endless terrible premises for my job.

Back when Far From Home came out, I remember seeing someone talk about how the MCU Peter Parker was fundamentally flawed because he didn’t have Uncle Ben, and I don’t think that’s correct. For one thing, Spidey pretty clearly has an Uncle Ben in that movie, it’s just that the reference to him in Civil War is a little less explicit than it usually is, presumably because we’ve seen Uncle Ben die on screen like five times since 2002. Second, it actually makes it make more sense that he’d latch onto the next influential father figure who walked through his front door. Third, even if we got way more Uncle Ben in those movies, it wouldn’t change the fact that the Peter/Tony Stark relationship and the way it played out was a function of the larger universe and the way those two characters had to interact within it. I don’t want to generalize too much or claim to know what people are thinking better than they do, but I’d suspect that if you don’t like that stuff in Spider-Man, the thing you really don’t like is the larger structure of this take on the characters. And that’s fair! 

That’s not to say that a premise can’t be bad, or that a twist on a character that posits a new premise is always good by nature of including some of the stuff that works. Again, I’m a Batman guy, and the last three movies to feature Batman are bad partly because the premise is fundamentally broken (the other parts are literally everything else about those movies because they are irredeemably terrible on virtually every level). But, you know, none of them have Batman writing a check instead of fighting crime, so that’s something.