In Which a Gentleman Goes Far Too In-Depth on “Spider-Man: Far From Home”

The pivotal scene in Spider-Man: Far From Home comes at the film’s narrative midpoint. Quentin Beck, alias Mysterio, sits down with Peter Parker, alias -- do I really need to tell you? – after the two have teamed up to defeat a fire monster from another dimension. The two have developed a bond over the course of the first half of the movie, as Beck (here delightfully played by Jake Gyllenhaal) has stepped into the father-figure role that Tony Stark had played for Peter up until his death at the end of Avengers: Endgame. They chat, and laugh, and over Beck’s protestations, Peter entrusts him with the pair of glasses left to him by Tony.

These are more than just a stylish set of frames and polarized lenses, however. These particular glasses act as a control interface for… well, it’s really too complicated to explain, but it’s basically an orbital superweapon that Tony thought Peter would be the best custodian for. Peter isn’t interested in being the world’s guardian, though; he just wants to get back to his class trip and tell MJ that he has a crush on her and be a normal teenager. So, impressed by Beck’s demeanor and self-evident heroism, Peter entrusts Tony’s tech to him and goes back to his schoolmates.

 As soon as Peter has gone, the room he and Beck have been sitting transforms in a wave of blue light. We learn the truth – or, at least, those of us who don’t know anything about comic books learn the truth – that Mysterio and his interdimensional enemies are illusions that Beck has created specifically in order to convince Peter to transfer the Stark glasses, and the power they entail, to him. His object attained, Beck crows about his triumph in a toast to the group that amounts to his production team, observing that he thought the backstory they had dreamed up was too outlandish and absurd for anyone to believe – but that, in a post-Endgame world, it turned out that people would believe anything.

 I’ve seen some reactions to Spider-Man: Far From Home that takes this moment, and Mysterio’s illusion tech generally, as commentary on the phenomenon of fake news. Such a reading is reinforced by an inspired post-credits sequence that introduces J.K. Simmons (who, remember, played Peter Parker’s colorful but upright newspaper editor in the Sam Raimi Spiderman films that were in the first wave of the superhero movie revival) as a ranting Alex Jones-type conspiracy theorist. Fake news is, indeed, a fertile subject for exploration. Even more interesting, I think, is the bigger question of how ordinary people view and interact with the world once they’ve been through a set of events as cataclysmic and galactically scaled as that which the Earth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has. With respect, though, those ideas aren’t what I found most interesting about Beck’s toast. Instead, it’s the meta-commentary that his words make regarding the MCU and its viewers themselves that is the most crucial for reading this film. To wit: after eleven years of Marvel movies, it’s impossible to think about this scene and not come to the conclusion that we, the audience, are the ones who will believe anything and accept any scenario, however absurd, if it comes in MCU packaging. The movie isn’t commenting on “fake news” as a phenomenon in the world; the movie is commenting on us, the people who continue to go watch MCU movies.

To be fair, I think the film, whether consciously or not, is aware that its audience has been pushed to its limits in terms of what scenarios it will accept. The refrain going through my head in the first half of the movie was, “Why on earth do I keep doing this to myself?” as I suffered through what amounted to, in my mind, more MCU mumbo-jumbo about multiple universes, monsters with inexplicable origins, and breathless pseudoscientific declamations about the end of the world. As it turns out, and to its great credit, Spider-Man: Far From Home uses our willingness to accept that this kind of dumb shit (my term of art for this sort of storytelling) is the norm in the MCU to set up the turn whereby Beck can then become the story’s villain; the first half of the movie is necessarily stupid, but its stupidity is in the service of its story. After the first half of this movie – which also amounts to after twenty-two and a half Marvel movies – we find that we’re beyond the veil and we’ve entered a different kind of a Marvel movie.

And, of course, “a different kind of Marvel movie” is exactly what Marvel has always told us it would deliver in “Phase IV” of its multiverse-devouring entertainment plan. There’s a problem, however, that’s been characteristic of Marvel movies for some time already and that is particularly pronounced in a Spider-Man movie, and it’s a problem that is going to carry through Phase insert-Roman-numeral-here for as long as every Marvel movie has to build on the last one. This universe has outgrown its own characters, and there’s a disconnect between the size of stories that feel like they fit the universe and the size of stories that feel appropriate to the characters that we’re following.

Spider-Man: Far From Home so dramatically illustrates this issue because the extremes of Spider-Man as a character make him a bad match for the scale of the MCU. Spider-Man appeals because he is an ingenue – a normal teenager who happens to have superpowers but who struggles day-to-day with typical adolescent issues like dealing with his mean-spirited teacher or worrying about whether the girl likes him back. There’s a reason that he’s your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man and not, say, your friendly space-and-time-traveling Spider-Man. That word, “neighborhood,” comprehends a set of values and ideas that are grounded in our own lived-in world – in the act and acts of living in that world – and it sets him apart from more self-consciously mythic characters like Superman, who operate on a grander, more allegorical scale. I think that the writers of this film, again to their credit, have thought a lot about this question of why audiences like Spider-Man, and it’s why, for instance, so much space is given to Peter’s grand plans to win MJ over.

Twenty-three movies in, though, the MCU doesn’t need Spider-Man movies or stories qua movies or stories that are distinctly within the framework of the Spider-Man character. What the MCU needs is the ability to leverage the Spider-Man brand (because that’s a great way to sell movie tickets) within the intergalactic scale of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (because the whole point of the MCU is to be able to consistently draw customers regardless of which hero is on the poster). If you’re making an entertainment that’s selling itself as a Spider-Man movie, however, you still need to stay at least somewhat true to the tropes of the Spider-Man mythology. (MJ’s Zendaya, incidentally, is a ready-made synecdoche for this idea of staying true to the mythology while giving it a new dimension – she’s not the red-headed Mary Jane Watson, but she is Mary Jane’s spiritual stand-in within the MCU.)

As it turns out, the juxtaposition of the galactic scale of the MCU and the tropes of the Spider-Man mythology makes for an awkward fit. Watching Spider-Man: Far From Home, one feels like one is experiencing two distinct and divergent movies. In one, Peter Parker is on a summer class trip to Europe with his classmates, plotting how to win MJ over and watching his best friend Ned transform from wannabe Euro-tripping Lothario into lovestruck purse-carrying paramour. In the other, a masked superhero who happens to be called Spider-Man is trying to prevent destruction on a global scale and watching a supervillain lay waste to ancient European capitals.

A lighthearted summer movie about Spider-Man’s class vacation in Europe actually sounds pretty fun to me. When that story is placed into the context of the larger Marvel infrastructure, however, it is soon forced to the limit of its own internal logic. Take, for example, one sequence early in the film, when Peter and his classmates are in Venice, the first stop on their Grand Tour. Peter has just helped Beck (not yet known by his nom de guerre of Mysterio) to defeat a water creature that was seemingly intent on laying waste to the Jewel of the Adriatic. The evening after the battle, he is summoned to a powwow with Beck and Nick Fury (Sam Jackson’s eyepatch-wielding Avenger-whisperer and a long-term staple of the Marvel superhero films). Fury implores Peter to come to Prague with him and Beck, as that is where they expect the next of the “elementals” to appear. Peter, however, refuses, justifying himself by opining that if he disappears from his class trip, everyone will figure out that he is Spider-Man. The next day, in an amusing turn, Peter’s teacher declares that “the tour company” has offered them an upgrade and they are now going to Prague instead; the film will perform a similar sleight of hand later on, this time under the more sinister auspices of Beck, in order to bring the class to London so Beck can try to kill MJ and Ned (since by this point both of them know that Beck / Mysterio is not the hero he claims to be).

Now, of course, there are at least a couple of approaches that Nick Fury, a high-ranking government official with access both to U.S. government resources and to the resources of the Avengers apparatus, could have dreamed up to extract Peter from his class trip and send him to Prague without hijacking his class trip and potentially putting all of his classmates into what Fury at this point believes could be mortal danger. The movie even points to one of them when members of the class wonder if their parents, after seeing the destruction in Venice, will demand that they come home.  Why not, on the basis of potential danger down the line, sequester all the students in government custody and then bring Peter to Prague solo? Even simpler (and we know in retrospect that this is theoretically possible because of Far From Home’s second post-credit sequence) why not let Peter’s classmates continue on their way and replace Peter on it with one of Fury’s shape-shifting minions, thereby allowing him to functionally be in two places at once? It’s because a Spider-Man movie needs Peter’s classmates to be in danger in order to raise the stakes and motivate his action, even though a Marvel movie has numerous means at its disposal to solve Peter’s declared problems.

Now, I’m aware that I place more emphasis on importance of internal story logic than do many moviegoers. In the case of Spider-Man: Far From Home, however, I think that this issue of story logic is worth taking into account even if it’s not something that one tends to care about, because in this context, it’s an issue that arises not from the vagaries of the scriptwriting process but from the constraints of working within the framework of the Marvel mold. For another constructive example of how this issue can manifest, let’s talk for a moment about Black Panther. One of the reasons that that movie was so successful was because it didn’t really feel like a Marvel movie, and it didn’t feel like a Marvel movie because it was so contained within its particular world of Wakanda and the succession struggle therein. The movie wasn’t weighed down by the need to connect its setting or characters to the larger Marvel project, because its mythology allowed Wakanda and its characters to start off siloed and disconnected; the film itself was to be the first connection of this particular character and setting to the MCU. (One might make the same observation about the first Guardians of the Galaxy film.) Yet Black Panther, too, manifests the limitations of working within the MCU framework, though in this case they are limitations of theme rather than of structure; when the film hints at – or even loudly declares! – ideas that it wants to be about, it immediately has to revert to the Marvel imperative that it resolve itself as simplistically and comprehensively as possible. Never let it be said that an audience had to think about something!

To be clear: Black Panther is a better and more accomplished film than Spider-Man: Far From Home, and the problems each film manifests are distinct both in scale and in nature. The reason I group the two together here is that their flaws are not inherent to the films themselves but are features of the Marvel filmic structure. In the context of the MCU, It’s simply not enough to make a fun movie starring Spider-Man. The film has to pass the torch from its previous set of featured heroes to the next, since Spider-Man is to be the main attraction of the next cycle of the Marvel universe; it has to justify why certain characters are around and others aren’t; it has to build on ideas and storylines not just from the last Spider-Man movie (Spider-Man: Homecoming) but from at least the last cycle of Marvel movies overall, probably five or six in total; it has to maintain the same tech-focused, soft-science fiction narrative language that has been the bread and butter of the MCU; it has to account for what happened to all of Tony Stark’s world-destroying private technology following his death in Avengers: Endgame… etc. The movie has to do a lot of heavy lifting, in other words, beyond the already-difficult task of providing two hours of reasonably well-executed entertainment for its audience.

Having addressed some of the structural issues engendered by the ever-expanding scale of the Marvel universe, I want to return to where this essay began. As others have observed, the character of Mysterio the illusionist in general, and that character’s depiction in this movie in particular, play upon ideas about cinema that are even more pertinent in today’s CGI-driven movie culture than they were when the character was first introduced however many decades ago. (A quick credit here to Sean Fennesey of The Ringer’s Big Picture podcast, which is where I first heard this point made.) Gyllenhaal is terrific throughout this movie, but never more so than in the handful of scenes that amount to dress rehearsals for what will be Mysterio’s escapades. These scenes see Gyllenhaal stepping into the sort of crazed-director role that will be immediately familiar to anyone who has either personally observed or heard about second-hand the shenanigans of Hollywood’s more difficult creative personalities.

In light of my contention that Mysterio’s polemic about the credulity of the post-Endgame population of Earth is a commentary on us, the consumers of Marvel movies, I want to push the Mysterio-as-Hollywood-stand-in reading a bit farther. Just as Mysterio’s comments are about us as much as, if not more than, they are about the citizens of his world, so too is this character an unconscious embodiment of the MCU itself far more than it is a commentary on Hollywood in general.

At first blush, there’s an obvious rejoinder to this thesis, which is that Mysterio’s illusions are meant to deceive an unsuspecting populace, while we, the audience, have entered willingly into the illusion of the MCU (and of movies more generally). Yet, the more I’ve thought about it, the more apt the metaphor seems. Beck / Mysterio’s argument, after all, isn’t that he can deceive people, but that the people themselves want to be deceived. One of the overarching themes in Spider-Man: Far From Home is the idea that, with the death of Tony Stark / Iron Man at the end of Avengers: Endgame, there’s a vacuum that needs to be filled, because people want to have a hero they can look up to and believe in. In Beck’s view, he’s giving the people what they want as well as getting the recognition that has in the past been denied him, and if he has to blow up a few buildings – and kill a few kids – in the process, well, that’s just the cost of doing business. In other words, Mysterio’s illusions work because people want to be deceived, just as Peter Parker wants to be deceived. Their collective suspension of disbelief is a pretty fair analogy for that of the audience watching them.

The question, then, is how the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief for a Marvel movie differs from that for any other movie. Every movie, after all, seeks to build a world and bring the audience into it. The difference is that, in Marvel movies, the world and its superheroes are the ends in themselves. Where the function of movies, and of art in general, is to tell fictions that nonetheless access deeper emotional or philosophical or moral truths, the function of the Marvel illusion is to perpetuate the viability of the illusion for as many installments as possible. When we, the moviegoers, buy tickets to these movies, what we’re buying isn’t the opportunity to see a story; stories, in point of fact, are utterly inimical to the Marvel philosophy of filmmaking, because stories must end. What we are buying, rather, is the experience of hanging out in the Marvel universe and watching characters that are by now familiar faces. Mysterio, the illusionist, spins deceptions that work because people want to believe them; Marvel, the illusionist, spins the deception that in stepping into its worlds we are also watching a movie, and we willingly pretend that it is so.

Reading back over the last couple paragraphs, it all sounds kind of dire and overblown; I don’t think we can stress enough that, clearly, people enjoy these movies and want to pay to watch them. That Marvel has found a formula that works spectacularly well is beyond dispute. And yet… well, I think what I walked out of Spider-Man: Far From Home feeling wasn’t that Marvel had cracked the code and figured out how to make movies about nothing and still make money. Instead, I felt like the juggernaut was sort of slowing down, losing its balance, and trying to figure out how to keep its feet under itself. If indeed, as I posited in the first part of this essay, the MCU has outgrown the characters that sustain it, how long is it going to be able to get moviegoers to continue to buy into its illusion? I suspect – and I could well be wrong – that with Avengers: Endgame, we’ve seen the high-water mark of both the popularity and the cultural relevance of this franchise.

That is exactly the kind of prediction that gets prognosticators in trouble, and by making it I’ve probably ensured the continued cultural dominance of the MCU well into the 2050s. If that’s the case, it’s something I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, there’s something to be said for any movie, however dumb, that gets people excited enough to go to the movie theater. On the other, as a lover of the movies, I can’t help but imagine with fondness a Hollywood in which the level of financial investment and filmmaking knowhow that go into making one of these Marvel pageants instead went into something new and different and weird.

How long until the next Star Wars movie comes out?