Spider-Man

I’m not a Marvel person – I’m not a comics person. I make an exception for Jessica Jones, of course – especially Krysten Ritter‘s interpretation.

I’m also not a DC person. I used to watch Batman reruns with my dad in the 1970s, and holy shit, I loved Batgirl (a librarian, of course). Batman as played by Adam West also really reminded me, physically and quite fondly, of my dad. Broad-chested, fit, sincere, and slightly ridiculous.

But our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man was my formative superhero, one I found on my own. With the help of Dynamite Magazine (front cover, Donny & Marie, weekly family viewing) and The Electric Company, which featured a live-action Spider-Man. The 1970s were some shit, let me tell you. I feel like every creator was on drugs.

Spidey lives in New York City. He swings from building to building in a canyon of skyscrapers. With webs made out of…look, it’s an adolescent boy’s fantasy. This stuff coming out of my body is going to make me a superhero? Because nobody’s figured out how to harness it yet?

The apartment in Spiderman 2 is all too similar to the roach-infested place I had in 1987. A one-room situation in an SRO with a bathroom in the hallway. Crazy people in the corridors. And yet I was safer there than I was in a lot of other, more luxurious, homes.

Watching Spider-Man movies, I’m not here for the special effects. I’m here for the portrayals of NYC. I’m here for the defeat of psychopaths. Because who would believe the crazy shit they get up to? How they make you feel crazy? “I saw a man with 8 mechanical arms” – I am here to tell you, if our friendly neighborhood psychopaths were that obvious, we’d be lucky.

But they’re not obvious. They’re fucking insidious. That’s the point of them. That’s how they get us. So if you’re feeling rocked by reality, if you’re feeling like no one would believe you, if you’re feeling like those you love are getting bored by your observations – it’s by design. They want you to be isolated and alone. They want you to feel like you’re losing your mind. They want you to feel like they are the only solution and the only way out of…whatever it is. They want to wipe you out with the tiredness of battling the invisible war they’ve decided to to wage on you.

And they want you to die. Of despair, or of substances – or by your own hand because you’re exhausted and emotionally done and just want to crawl somewhere and let nature take over. Because if you’re dead, you are out of their way.

The only way to face a psychopath is to keep living your best life. Whatever that means – the freedom of a roach-infested SRO hotel, because it’s yours; the freedom of a ground-level apartment with a lot of plants and the ability to cook what you want; the freedom of your own mind to listen to what you want, watch what you want, make what you want.

And that freedom makes you untouchable.