Life lessons from the latest superhero film
Anyone who hangs on to the very end of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” as viewers have been conditioned to do by decades of after-the-credits Marvel surprises, will discover an uncomfortable truth: Despite taking place in New York City, almost none of the movie was actually filmed locally. The fine print reveals that the “New York” that Spidey swings through is actually located in various parts of Scotland and England.
Despite this fakery — which might make the sets feel a little bit off to anyone who knows the city well — “Brand New Day” is very much a New York movie. The film even closes with a long, loving montage of ordinary people doing ordinary things on real New York streets. It’s the filmmaking equivalent of a big wet kiss to the city.
This is only appropriate: Ever since he first swung on to the scene in August 1962, Spider-Man has been deeply intertwined with New York City.
“Brand New Day” honors this connection viscerally with its scenes of Spider-Man swinging through Manhattan, which manage to capture the breathtaking scale and density of the city’s skyline. A distinctly New York energy can also be found in the relationship between Spider-Man and the Punisher. Affectionately bickering underneath their superhero identities, Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) and Peter Parker (Tom Holland) come across as uniquely New York (stereo)types: outer-borough wiseasses. They embody the great Toni Morrison line about how to survive in the city: “Talk shit. Take none.” They also represent different New York qualities. The Punisher, with his predilection for violence, speaks to the brutal, unrelenting nature of the city while Spider-Man channels the hope and optimism that fuels the ambitions of so many New Yorkers.
You don’t have to know anything about New York City to appreciate the chemistry between Bernthal and Holland. That’s a good thing, because the vast majority of Spider-Man’s fans likely have no relationship whatsoever to New York City. He is, by many measures, one of the most beloved fictional characters on the planet. Over the years, his adventures have resonated powerfully with literally billions of readers and viewers across the barriers of geography, language and culture.
The core themes of Spider-Man are universal: How do you weather the inevitable storms of growing up? Is it possible to meet the demands of your job while also having a fulfilling personal life? How do we honor our loved ones while being true to ourselves? Anyone who has ever felt like their responsibilities outpaced their competence can recognize themselves in Peter Parker.
But Spider-Man isn’t a generic fable about an everyman hero. Peter Parker isn’t from Anytown, USA — or Krypton, via Kansas. He’s from Forest Hills, Queens. When he isn’t using his webs to get around the city, he takes the subway. Many of his most important moments have occurred in and around famous New York City landmarks, including his failure to prevent the death of his girlfriend Gwen Stacy, which happened at the Brooklyn Bridge.
It’s not just his zip code that makes Spider-Man a New Yorker — it’s his mentality. You can see it in his sense of humor — jokes used as a coping mechanism and a weapon at the same time. You can see it in his inventiveness — by building his own web-shooters and sewing his own suit, Peter Parker MacGyvers the tools he needs to fight crime. And you can see it in his capacity for improvisation. When Spider-Man’s plans fall apart in the middle of a fight, he always manages to come up with a new way to win. That’s a hustler’s ethic. It’s also how you get by in a city that doesn’t hand you anything.
Spider-Man’s connection to New York isn’t a random narrative choice. He was dreamed up more than 60 years ago by Stan Lee (née Stanley Lieber, the son of Romanian Jewish immigrants), working alongside a team of (mostly) Jewish writers and artists in Marvel’s headquarters in Manhattan.
Plenty of scholarship has been devoted to exploring Superman’s Jewish origins. So it should come as little surprise that elements of his creators’ New York immigrant experience, and the promise and peril of assimilation, managed to find their way into the Spider-Man comic book. Peter Parker struggles with the pressure of living up to the expectations of his Aunt May and Uncle Ben. Feelings of generalized guilt and a desire not to be different are recurring themes in the Spider-man canon.
While echoes of the New York immigrant experience happen at the level of subtext, the decision to locate Spider-Man’s adventures in New York City served an explicit purpose, adding a dose of verisimilitude to inherently outlandish stories. “So many other characters lived in cities like Gotham City and Metropolis,” Stan Lee said in a 2004 television documentary, “but I suspect the readers knew those cities were just made up.”
In contrast, the New York City setting helped make Spider-Man more relatable. There’s no such thing as a real superhero, but Spider-Man is realer than the rest. Superman’s adventures often take him around the world and across the universe, while Spider-Man is usually trapped in the city, struggling to make a living and maintain his sanity amidst the hassles and cacophony of a teeming metropolis. Spider-Man and New York City are a marriage made in heaven: an imperfect hero for an imperfect city.
An enormous box-office hit, “Brand New Day” merits a place in the top tier of superhero movies. But, despite being filmed an ocean away, it also deserves an honorable mention in any listing of great New York movies, It may not be as artful as “After Hours” or as funny as “Quick Change” or as over-the-top as “Escape from New York,” but, like these films, “Brand New Day” has something important to say about the city where it takes place. Like other great movies about the city, “Brand New Day” offers a primer on how to be a New Yorker: Look for the humor when times get tough, rely on your own ingenuity, don’t hesitate to argue with those around you and never let anyone see how hard you're working to hold things together.
