It was a cozy Friday night in late October when my husband suggested that we watch The Amazing Spider-Man. I had never seen it. I had never been interested. Not for any good reason—and certainly not because a few months after the film came out in 2012, I ran into Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield in a Chelsea brunch restaurant and accidentally traumatized us all—but I never felt compelled to check it out. Maybe it’s because 1.) I love the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies (especially the first two) and 2.) I have little interest in the source material itself. One good Spider-Man franchise is plenty for me, and more than I ever knew I needed anyway.
And yet, we put it on.
And… I have thoughts. I said most of them out loud as I watched, so this essay is a bit of an annotated stenograph of my viewing experience. It’s not a rant. It’s not a runt, either, so strap in.
Wait, wait, wait. I should say upfront that I thought the film was good. I thought it was interesting. I understand that this group of movies is based on its own comic book series, with its own deal. I’m not hung up on those differences; I’ve seen Into the Spider-Verse and I understand that ostensibly there are quanta upon quanta of Spider-Men swinging around the space-time continuum. Whatever. My thoughts rest with this adaptation and this adaptation alone. Mostly!
My first thought is that it’s great that the director’s name is Mark Webb. Full points for incidental puns.
The movie begins with a flashback, to young Peter Parker playing with his parents Campbell Scott and Embeth Davitz, when there’s some sort of distress signal that makes them leave their house and drop tiny Peter off in Queens with their friends Sally Field and Martin Sheen. These people are Aunt May and Uncle Ben. In life, I like to play a game where I imagine fun alternatives to the casting of Aunt May and Uncle Ben (even though Rosemary Harris and Cliff Robertson, in the Raimi films, are the gold standard to me). Sally Field and Martin Sheen are an interesting pairing. I mean, I kind of think an important element of “Aunt May and Uncle Ben” is that they can’t keep their hands off each other, and Sally Field and Martin Sheen definitely can. I feel like we need a couple with more spice… you know who would be good? Jessica Lange and Bill Pullman.
But also, I think “Aunt May and Uncle Ben” is an opportunity to showcase the ethnic populations of Queens. Let’s get some Italian-Americans in there! I’m told Marisa Tomei is Aunt May in the Tom Holland ones, but unless she’s allowed to reuse her Oscar-winning persona from My Cousin Vinny, I don’t think it is nearly good enough representation. How about this? I would like Uncle Ben and Aunt May to be played by Chazz Palminteri and Lorraine Bracco.
How fun would that be?
I wrote a sample of what that script would look like:
Int. Aunt May’s kitchen, late at night.
Peter walks in via the back door, stealthily. A light flicks on.
Aunt May [early-70s] sits at the kitchen table, curlers in her hair. She looks pissed.
Aunt May [smacking him as he walks by]
Article continues after advertisementPeta, why are you late again? What’s wrong wit you? I spent twelve hours making this sawse and you don’t show up for dinna?
Uncle Ben [early 70s with a huge head of dark gray hair, slicked back as if with motor oil] walks in, wearing a white tank top, an open plaid shirt, and sweatpants, carrying a wheel of Parmesan. He has very hairy arms.
Uncle Ben
Peta, Jesus Christ, your aunt spent twelve hours making this sawse and you don’t even give us a fuckin call? You betta apologize to your aunt right now. And you can fougettabout borrowing the car this weekend. Fuckin knucklehead.
Aunt May
Article continues after advertisementHave you eaten tonight? Look at you, you’re so skinny. Sit down, I’m gonna make you something.
Peter starts to protest.
Aunt May
Don’t fuckin talk back to me. You want chicken parm or managott?
Uncle Ben
Kid’s a fuckin stoonad.
Do you know how quickly I would watch this?
Anyway, Peter grows up with Aunt May and Uncle Ben, because his parents are never seen again after that night! He becomes a kind of cool guy. He is played by Andrew Garfield, who is a world-class actor, and he gives it his all. This Peter is an emo artist type, not meek at all. He knows how to fight, he stands up for what’s right. This is a surprising twist. “Isn’t he supposed to be a nerd?” I ask my husband. “Not in this one,” he responds. Well, okay then.
Peter has a crush on Gwen Stacy, a popular girl and science star who likes wearing thigh-high socks under tall boots. I don’t remember this being a fashion fad in 2014, so I’m perplexed about this costume choice. Gwen is played by Emma Stone, who is obviously an excellent actor, and lends a surprising amount of comedy to a role that almost feels written to be boring.
They attend a school called Midtown Science, which has a large outdoor campus and a football field.
I pause the film, here. “Wait, wait, wait,” I say. “This high school is in midtown Manhattan and it has a whole sunny outdoor courtyard? AND A FOOTBALL FIELD?” I stare at my husband, aghast. “There’s no room for that stuff in midtown.”
My husband nods sympathetically.
“This looks like it’s filmed in California,” I say angrily. “This is not New York! What are they doing?!”
My husband holds my hand and asks if we can keep watching the movie.
So, anyway, one night, Peter finds his father’s briefcase and it has some clues in it that lead Peter to Oscorp, the big science and research company based in Lower Manhattan. Turns out, Gwen is the “head intern” there, and her mentor is the very guy Peter wants to find: Dr. Curtis Connors, his father’s former research partner. Dr. Connors is played by Rhys Ifans, who is an actor extraordinaire. I say this because I first encountered him as Hugh Grant’s insane roommate Spike in Notting Hill. Please take note of the clip below.
Now, here is Rhys as Dr. Connors, just to compare.
Now that’s acting! My god! IS it even the same man!?
Dr. Connors researches lizards. His work is personally motivated, because he’s missing an arm. He studies how lizards can regenerate their tails and such, and wants to use their genetic whatever in making a treatment that can allow all animals to regrow limbs. Obviously this means he will inject himself with lizard genes and become a giant lizard.
“He’s going to become a lizard,” I inform my husband, who has seen the film. “He’s definitely going to become a giant lizard.” My husband remains quiet, I’m sure wondering how he got so lucky as to find a life partner with such profound extrapolative capabilities.
Well, we find out soon enough that Dr. Connors’s funding is going to be pulled if he doesn’t start human trials with his regrowth serum, so he injects himself with it, and, big surprise, turns into a giant lizard. The giant lizard personality is definitely evil. Like, the human Connors is not a bad guy. He’s a little obsessive, but if that’s a crime, lock me up too, Your Honor! But yeah, his lizard side is definitely bad. He hates the feebleness of humanity, wants to turn everyone else into lizards, blah blah blah mutant-supervillain stuff. You get it.
But by this point, I almost can’t feel triumphant that I predicted the extremely subtle, hard-to-anticipate lizard transformation plotline. You see, there have been many scenes of Peter trotting up the steps to his Aunt and Uncle’s house. The house is ostensibly located in Queens… yet this block is a row of beautiful attached Georgian homes with columns and wide front porches. This isn’t to say that Queens doesn’t have its fair share of elegant, suburban neighborhoods with grand old homes… but they don’t look like this.
“This isn’t Queens,” I say, suddenly. “Where the hell is this?”
I pause the movie and look it up. The Aunt May/Uncle Ben home is in Windsor Terrace, the neighborhood to the West of Prospect Park, in Brooklyn. AKA not Queens.
“Why don’t they film in Queens?” I ask.
My husband, who was not involved in making this movie, doesn’t know.
“THIS is supposed to be the home of blue-collar Uncle Ben?” I ask. But I backtrack because that’s not even the important thing. Maybe Uncle Ben does well for himself! Trade jobs are WAY better paying than a lot of jobs that require 4-year degrees. What do I know?
But the more important thing is… why aren’t they filming in Queens, when this takes place in Queens? If they want to pick a schmancy neighborhood to show Uncle Ben’s financial success, why don’t they pick a schmancy neighborhood in Queens?????
“Sam Raimi filmed in Sunnyside and Woodside and Forest Hills!” I say loudly. “What is this Windsor Terrace-ass nonsense? This is Queens erasure!”
(I grew up in Queens.)
By this point, I’m so annoyed that we have to stop watching the movie and go to bed.
We resume the next night.
We watch the saddest part of the movie, which is when Uncle Ben dies. He doesn’t say the “with great power, comes great responsibility” line from the Raimi films, but I guess that’s fine because this is a different movie. Not to make a comparison for comparison’s sake, but just to ground my observation about this new one in context: there is, notably, less of an emotional payoff to Uncle Ben’s death in this film than in the first Raimi film; that film burrows deep into Peter’s shame and grief and ties his transformation into Spider-Man into these feelings of self-loathing and loneliness and a need to make good on Ben’s sacrifice. The Amazing Spider-Man attempts a similar arc, but it is far more rote, as if it’s getting the necessary character-building part out of the way.
An interesting thing about this Spider-Man is that, yes, Peter’s bitten by a spider and it messes with his DNA a little bit… but not fully. He can’t shoot webs out of his wrists; he makes some special bracelets that are loaded with Oscorp’s patented super spider silk. He’s not just a brooding, artsy outsider… he’s a damn fine inventor! There’s that nerdy Peter Parker we know and love!
This poses an interesting theme: how technology can assist humans when their own biology is limited. Why doesn’t Dr. Connors devote his life to building precise, robotic and prosthetic arms and other limbs for individuals who are missing them? Why does he have to try to regrow body parts? He murmurs a lot, both in human and lizard form, about science as the pursuit of “perfection.” And his lizard self definitely wants to make a master-race of powerful lizard-people. I feel like, in superhero movies, most scientists-turned-supervillains secretly (or not so secretly) harbor fascist ideals, and Connors’s eugenicist motivations versus Peter’s corrective approach through invention is a neat mapping of this age-old, insidious moral pitfall.
Somewhere around here, there is a VERY exciting development, which is that Denis Leary shows up. I love this development. Denis Leary should be in everything. He plays tough NYPD Captain George Stacy (Gwen’s dad), the kind of character that I think actual Denis Leary would find annoying. He’s kind of a stick-in-the-mud, doesn’t like that crazy vigilante Spider-Man running around, doesn’t say cursewords around his kids. And yet, he’s got an edge. A weird thing is that he and his family are supposed to be very upper-crust; they have a huuuuge apartment on Central Park West, eat branzino for dinner on random Tuesday nights. According to a cursory Google search, in today’s world (13 years after this film), NYPD captains make an average $142,446 a year, plus overtime (which as we all know… can lead to a lot more moolah). Still, that’s nowhere near enough to afford a palatial apartment in this particular zip code. And the Stacys have like four kids! Kids are expensive! Is Mrs. Stacy secretly a Vanderbilt? How can they afford this place?
Then again, we know this film is pretty eccentric in its understanding of NYC neighborhoods, so I guess I have to let this go. Also, you know, this is a movie where people can inject themselves with lizard DNA and mutate into large Godzilla-esque monsters, and I’m getting hung up on the lack of realism in its representation of contemporary urban real estate. Go figure.
Garfield’s performance in this movie is remarkable; he’s doing some Shakespeare level stuff with some, like, 80s Michael J. Fox boy-next-door charm mixed in. He’s truly one of the best actors working today. An interesting thing about the Spider-Man in this movie is that he kind of… tells everyone he’s Spider-Man. He rips off his mask to comfort a kid in a perilous situation, tells Gwen, tells a couple other people. There’s comparatively little tortuousness of the alter-ego compared to Raimi’s films. I don’t know why this is, but I find it intriguing.
We’re almost there. I’m sleepy, but I’m going to finish this thing. The film climaxes in a very big action scene at the Oscorp Building downtown, wrapping up what is, overall, a very interesting and creative adaptation.
You know, I don’t really watch superhero movies. I have nothing against them, but it’s not my genre. For me, The Avengers refers to the Diana Rigg TV series from the 60s. For me, the cultural importance of Robert Downey Jr. has to do with his performance in Chaplin. I watched WandaVision because I like spoofs of old TV and I didn’t know what the heck was going on.
But, all in all, I had a good time experiencing this different Spider-Man take. I like Garfield. I like Stone. At one point, C. Thomas Howell shows up, prompting my husband and I to go, very excitedly, “is that C. Thomas Howell???”
Don’t get me wrong, there’s some Queens erasure that will not stand, and at one point Spider-Man rescues a kid from a car that is dangling off a bridge but just leaves all the other cars that are dangling off the bridge without checking if there are people in them too, but I found the whole thing an interesting counter to the mainstream Spider-Man lore we’ve been living with, and loving, since 2002.
And, you know, it was fun.
