I Hate Spiderman

Contributing Author V.

Dust mites danced in the morning sunlight filtered through the generic plastic blinds. I was sitting in the fourth row from the entrance of the classroom, third seat from the front. My 11th grade English class was starting a new book, none other than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. I hadn’t been a fan of Tom Sawyer so I was dreading the read, bemoaning my fate as I leafed through the book aimlessly—a school-issued copy, well-worn and full of annotations from generations of students before me. Once each student held a copy in our hands, we opened them to the first page in a sort of synchronised dance.

And then my blood began to boil.

“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.”

Now, I know you’re saying to yourself, “Contributing author V, I thought this was a story about why you hate Captain America appearing in the film Spider-Man: Homecoming. Why in the world are you talking about classic American literature?” Because, dear reader, this is a story about how much I hate meta-commentary.

The first lines of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn hit me like a brick wall and threw fuel on the fire of my hatred for meta-commentary. At first it just bothered me that Mark Twain was doing a self-promo as if he wasn’t an incredibly famous author during his lifetime. Did you really need to shout yourself out, Mr. Twain? Does it even make sense in the story for Huck Finn to be so self-aware? Tell me, Samuel Clemens, were the accolades sung to you not enough, you had to accompany them with the sound of you tooting your own horn?

But this is not about how much I hate Mark Twain. This is about Captain America. So let us shift scenes, from the days of racist kids whitewashing the fence to the early summer of May 2018. I was in bed with my laptop perusing the selection on some streaming site for which I had a free trial. The credits for Jurassic World (2015) rolled in the background as the never-ending content machine fed me more suggestions in a little pop-up window. At this point I was no longer a huge Marvel fan but rather a casual viewer, still I hovered over the icon for Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017). Many of my friends had raved about the film when it came out, and I had grown up watching the previous iterations of Spider-Man (it is really weird that we have had THREE different versions of Spider-Man in my not-that-long lifetime). My free trial only lasted a week anyways so I figured I might as well watch as many movies as possible before it expired.

To be entirely honest, I don’t remember much of the movie. Like it was probably alright. But strong emotions are tied to strong memories, which is why I very clearly remember that Captain America appears twice in PSA videos shown at Peter Parker’s school. Much like with Mark Twain’s shameless self-promotion, my blood reached a boiling point when he was onscreen.

“So, you got detention.” AAARGHGHGHGHH i am foaming at the mouth i am rabid with rage

Even in the movie, Captain America’s appearance is laughed off as a lame joke. But not me. I was not laughing. I was seething.

My passionate hatred for these scenes burns too brightly to be put into words. But I will attempt to explain myself anyways. It lies not with factual inaccuracy, as these sorts of celebrity PSA videos were very popular from the 70s-90s! And I did indeed fall down a bit of an internet rabbit hole exploring these. Did you know MC Hammer did a video called “Too Legit to Quit” where he teaches proper grammar and encourages kids to stay in school? Michael J. Fox made one about the dangers of playing with matches. Really fascinating relics of their time. Even my own elementary school cafeteria was covered in those celebrity “got milk?” ads, which are very odd in retrospect because they weren’t even advertising a specific brand of milk. Just the concept of milk itself.

Even if these PSAs were historically inaccurate, they definitely feel accurate for the character because a goody-two-shoes like Captain America absolutely would be making stuff like this for public schools. Which then makes me ask, if superheroes really did exist, would anybody actually care that much? I mean sure, discovering that people with superpowers exist would be crazy but I just feel like the world would move on pretty fast from all of that, especially since up to this point in the Marvel universe (although I admittedly haven’t watched many movies past this point) I think only New York City had been destroyed and saved by the Avengers. So it’s like, who cares really? Heroes do exist in this world, though not in the same supernatural way—firefighters who rush into burning buildings to save citizens, scientists developing medications for life-threatening diseases, the thousands of nurses and doctors who rushed to help during the COVID pandemic which is probably the closest thing to the Thanos snap that our world has experienced. Do you often think of them?

And that is exactly the problem—the Marvel franchise has become too self-aware and plays everything off as a joke, but also insists on full devotion and immersion from its audience. I don’t have a problem with any media that pokes fun at itself, but where I do draw the line is when the media can’t decide if it wants to be taken seriously or as a joke.

Spider-Man Homecoming, and many other Marvel movies, lie in this hideous midpoint where they acknowledge their own ridiculousness but not to the point of parody. This self-referential playfulness does not permeate the whole story, just enough to hint at self-awareness while also insisting on being taken seriously. To me, it reads as a movie that is not decided on what it wants to be other than just being a blockbuster. It can’t commit to being a silly self-aware parody but also refuses to be any sort of notable cinema. (Nor should it, the Marvel movies are at best box office fodder for greedy cash cow corporations and at worst drawn-out sequences that prey on the human desire to see all your favorite celebrities in one wide shot and watch things go BOOM.) In a word, it is cowardly—too ashamed of their own slop to be unabashed comedy, they need to poke fun at themselves before anyone else does, to distract the masses before their empire of dirt crumbles before them.

Some movies do this meta commentary exceptionally well—the example that springs to mind for me is The Truman Show. Its self-awareness is part of the appeal and the overall message, going deeper to be thought-provoking and add an extra layer to the cinematic experience. What does the Marvel franchise gain by throwing in a jokey Captain America cameo? The meta-commentary style has become so popular and oversaturated to the point of exhaustion. Is there anything more to be said for the genre, especially for movies that amount to nothing more than male humor-centered box office fodder with no real messages or morals?