Spider-Man: Brand New Day opened late last month to strong reviews. Up until this most recent film, a fair critique of the Tom Holland Spider-Man series has been a lack of depth in both plot and character development. The third installment, No Way Home, finally required Peter to make sacrifices.
This fourth entry shows what happens when Spider-Man misunderstands his responsibility. In doing so, it reveals an important truth about the human person and our relationship with others.
Brand New Day picks up after the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home. Everyone has forgotten Peter Parker. Devastated by the loss of Aunt May, Peter has decided that the problem has been allowing people to care for him, and his only responsibility is to be Spider-Man.
To Peter, his only value is what he can, as a superhero, offer New York City. But as Pope John Paul II wrote, “A person’s rightful due is to be treated as an object of love, not an object of use.” This is true even for Spider-Man. The people around him are not just objects in need of saving, but human beings, who need to be known and loved and offered the opportunity to do likewise.
No Way Home concluded with Peter promising his friends that he would find and help them to remember him, but instead he watches from afar as their lives go on, sort of, without him. Despite his intent, this is not recognition of their value as persons.
While Ned and MJ make some progress, they aren’t fully able to move forward, openly acknowledging that something is missing and spending time trying to track Spider-Man. A piece of them has been lost, but they don’t know what it is nor how to reclaim it. Peter isn’t any better. He neither seeks to regain his old relationships or to form new ones.
When Peter claims to know Detective Dewolf, she retorts that she doesn’t even know his face or his name. Spider-Man doesn’t know the names of her kids.
Peter spends his time crime fighting, working on his suit, and watching Ned’s videos, the last giving him a false sense of connection with his friends.
We hear Peter’s name once at the beginning of the movie when he reads back over the note, which he chose not to give MJ, the one that would have revealed to her their relationship. The audience will not hear Peter’s name again until almost halfway through the runtime of the movie.
Viewers can assume from the timeline that Peter has not heard his own name spoken by a human being in four years. His loneliness begins to wreak havoc with his powers, heightening them, making him less human. During this time, he consistently gives false names, resides in an apartment secluded from neighbors, and refuses help from the people of New York. He decides, in the words of his note that, “Maybe that’s my responsibility, to live alone with the truth.”
Responsibility is key. Peter has been desperately trying to live out Aunt May’s last words, “With great power comes great responsibility.” But he misunderstands what his responsibility is. He can’t live out his responsibility to others while constantly hiding behind the mask, because he can never fully give of himself while withholding his identity.
MJ finally reads the note, growing angry, insisting that he take off the mask because, “I think I deserve to have this conversation with Peter Parker.” She confronts him because something has been removed, a part of her that he didn’t have the right to take. But it’s too late; she is not the girl to whom he wrote the note. “I don’t love you,” she says. “I don’t love you because I don’t know you.”
Early in the movie, when Peter asks questions of Bruce Banner (The Hulk), Peter provides a fake name and refuses to provide him with personal information despite the fact that there was a time when they knew one another. But when the Hulk is unleashed, it is only the reveal of Peter’s name that gets through to him. “Bruce, it’s me, Peter. I’m your friend.”
It is only when Peter starts to regain relationships with others that he makes progress in stopping Jean Grey, the elusive telepath he has been chasing throughout the movie. Like Peter, Jean resists relationships. Instead, she takes over people’s bodies. She mocks Spider-Man for hiding Peter Parker, all the while using the victims she inhabits as her own mask. Only Spider-Man is free from her powers.
In the end, what brings about Jean’s redemption is for Peter to allow her into his mind. When he does this, he gifts himself to her along with his most precious memory of Aunt May. He allows her into the interiority of the self and allows her to experience the love of May which transforms her and Peter. May herself answers the question posed throughout the movie. What is Peter’s responsibility?
May tells Peter, and through Peter, Jean, “…the people who love you, they love you not because you’re special, we love you because you’re you. Remember that even when it feels like you’re totally alone. That’s your deepest responsibility.” Peter’s responsibility is to give himself over to others and allow them the opportunity to give themselves back to him, even if it comes with a cost. It is in both sacrifice and revelation that we imitate Christ, who both gives of Himself physically unto death and reveals the Father to us.
To quote John Paul II, “The greater the feeling of responsibility for the person, the more true love there is.”
More from IRD:
Tolkien, Lewis and the Great War
‘Men Without Chests’ and Scent of a Woman
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