- This video is brought to you by Mountain Dew.
(upbeat electronic music)
What's up, guys.
Michael here to talk about the importance
of not associating with infamous teen superheroes
while applying to MIT,
or, you know, "Spider-Man: No Way Home",
the biggest installment of MCU phase four to date,
and a movie that's so hard not to spoil
that we'll say this earlier is unusual.
Spoilers ahead for "Spider-Man: No Way Home"
and all the previous Spider-Man films,
so please step away from your device
if you want a spoiler-free experience of the movie.
Okay.
Now that that's taken care of, ever since we saw this movie,
we can't stop thinking about
its most philosophically interesting aspect.
No, it's not the multiverse, though, that's cool
and you should definitely stick around
for the post credit scene.
Today, we want to talk about identity,
meaning how we become who we are,
who is involved in this process
and how our identities can be changed and challenged.
So put all your magical spells in a safely sealed box,
put down your signed copy of "Flashpoint"
and grab your favorite donut and coffee combo
because, today,
we're talking about "Spider-Man: No Way Home".
What makes a Spider-Man?
But before we get into it,
I wanted to take a second to talk about
this episode's sponsor, Mountain Dew.
There are times when you're looking for something to drink
and you know that only one drink will do, Mountain Dew.
The next time you want a truly refreshing break,
you deserve more than just to be satisfied.
You deserve to be totally blown away,
which is what you'll get from Mountain Dew,
and from the concept of the multiverse,
but mostly from Mountain Dew.
And now, back to the show.
Peter Parker or Spider-Man
has had a rough time during his run in the MCU.
He's fought a purple sack chin titan
set on destroying half the life in the galaxy,
he's been snapped into oblivion for five years
and he's had to watch his mentor
and surrogate father figure die,
all while trying to survive the infinity war
that is high school.
All of these experiences
have profoundly shaped his identity.
"Infinity War" and "Endgame"
have left him kind of traumatized.
Losing Tony has made him even more dependent on Aunt May
and his wannabe uncle, Happy.
And his relationships with Ned and MJ
have given him the somewhat carefree joy of a teenager
who is dating Zendaya.
This type of identity formation can be explained
via what Scottish philosopher David Hume called
the Bundle Theory of the Self.
This basically means that our self identities
are completely made up of bundles of impressions,
which are just the various experiences we have in our lives.
This means that before you have experiences,
you don't have a self-identity,
no matter how precocious of a baby you were.
Your identity will be completely formed
by what happens to you across the course of your life,
because things happen to us.
For example, we find out our high school crush's dad
is trying to kill us, while wearing a bird costume.
Those experiences, unfortunately,
create memories in our brains.
Those memories then join the bundle of impressions
of other things that have happened to us,
and so on and so on.
This is an interesting way to think about
one of the film's biggest surprises,
and again, major spoiler alert,
the re-introduction of previous Spider-men,
Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire.
But let's be honest, we all saw it coming.
Because even though all three Spider-Men
are variants of Peter Parker,
they all have their own unique character and identity.
You have Holland, the kid still figuring it all out,
who's wounded, but ever earnest and hopeful.
Then there's Maguire, the youth pastor of the gang,
who's older and more experienced.
He has a calm maturity and a bad lower back
that comes from years of swinging around town.
And then there's Garfield, who for his part
has the emo energy of an overachieving elder millennial,
who still hasn't quite made the leap to full adulthood.
It would suck to be in that scenario.
Even though these three men are all Peter Parker
and are all Spider-man,
their identities are all distinct
due to their unique experiences.
And in the case of Garfield's Spider-Man,
we get to see his identity grow in real time.
When he saves MJ from falling to her death,
he's able to relive and reprocess the trauma of losing Gwen
in a similar fall,
and the guilty feels about not saving her.
And this theory of identity
helps us to understand Peter's plan
to cure the film's villains,
inspired in part by Aunt May's conviction
that everyone deserves a chance to change.
Also, R.I.P. Marissa Tomei's Aunt May.
She was a real one.
Because under this thinking, folks like Dr. Octavius
aren't born inherently evil,
rather, they're damaged due to violent
and traumatic experiences,
like falling into a vat of electric eels.
As a result,
they are just as able to have experiences
that reshape their identities as a sensitive Spider-Man is.
But of course, there is some essential similarity
between all three Spider-men,
even if they have all had different experiences
in different corners of the multiverse,
like how super tall people likely have some things in common
because of their shared physical experience of
hitting their heads on low beams
and cramming their legs into economy airline seats.
In this case, our three spider guys
all share the material and biological similarity
of having power is given to them via a spider bite,
even if only one of them is able to shoot white goo
out of his wrist.
In tandem, they share an understanding
of how isolating being extraordinary is.
Jean-Paul Sartre, who oddly enough,
shares some fashion sensibility with Doc Oct,
used the term facticity to describe the concrete details
and facts upon which our human freedom exists.
Facticity means that our freedom and identity
are limited by both concrete circumstances
and previous choices.
For example, someone born short doesn't have the freedom
to be a center in the NBA
because of a fact outside of their own control.
Similarly, if you get a radioactive spider bite,
the course of your life
has probably been irrevocably changed.
But in the film, as in our own corner of the multiverse,
the Peters' identities aren't wholly wrapped up
in their amazing bundles of memories
or in their spider-spiked bodies.
Their identities have also been shaped
by the world around them, by their immediate friends,
their families, their enemies,
and their positions in society at large.
Holland's Peter is who he is
not just because of his various memories,
but also in how others perceive him.
And Tony recognizing Peter as capable of being an Avenger
drastically shifted his identity,
just like how MJ
recognizing him as a worthy make-out buddy did.
In these cases, his identity is shaped
when he internalizes the image of himself
reflected to him by others,
which is one of the reasons that it's so damn upsetting
when Peter tells Dr. Strange or Stephen to cast a spell
that will erase the memory of Peter's identity
from the entire (beep) multiverse.
Because in doing so,
Peter is no longer going to be fully recognized
for who he is by, well, anyone.
For a lot of social philosophers
in the Post-Hegelian tradition,
recognition and in particular mutual recognition is crucial.
It's the process by which our identity is shaped.
It takes place when our consciousness
is recognized by other consciousnesses.
At a fundamental level,
this means that an aspect of becoming a thinking human
is being recognized as a thinking human
by other thinking humans.
At a social level,
this means that being recognized as a member of society,
a friend, an object of ethical consideration, et cetera,
fundamentally shapes your identity.
But by the end of the film,
Peter has lost most, if not all of the forms
of social recognition that shaped who he was.
His aunt is dead,
his friends and potential college administration advocates
don't remember him,
and he's no longer the most famous person on earth,
an experience which did shape him for better
or mostly for worse.
In a sense, this allows the movie
to basically kill this iteration of Spider-Man
and hit the reset button on his identity.
Hume might say that he still has the bundle of memories
that help create his identity,
but at the level of social identity,
he's pretty (beep) out of luck,
or I guess (beep) out of shared recognition.
With no friends, family, or fellow Avengers
to affirm his identity,
he's just some guy in a (beep) apartment,
making his own costumes on a sewing machine,
and trolling the Nextdoor app
so that he can jump into neighborhood crime.
So basically me, if I lose my job
and my wife leaves me for a tech CEO on the same day.
So who is Spider-Man going to be moving forward?
Hell if we know.
What we do know, that without Stark Tech,
his friends or his family, all he has is fading memories
from a life he can never return to.
It's all super sad.
So hold onto your memories and be nice to your friends,
because if you don't,
you too might lose some or all of your identity.
But what do you guys think?
Does Tom Holland's Spider-Man still exist,
even if nobody recognizes him?
Let us know in the comments.
Big thanks to our patrons for recognizing our work,
and don't forget to check out our podcast.
Hit that subscribe button,
like you're curing it of its evil tendencies,
and don't forget to ring that bell.
And as always, thanks for watching.
Later.
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