Brand New Viewing

On rewatching an old favourite film with my kids and double-screening the television with their faces.

In preparation for ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’, which would be the first Spidey I took my kids to the cinema to watch, a big ol event in the Shukla household, we decided to work our way through the Tom Holland-era Spidey films. Cos Marvel is homework and every film is set up and pay-off for a bunch of other stuff, and surely the point of saga is that each instalment of that saga should 90% stand alone and 10% give the nerds a big ol pat on the back for sticking around so long. I long for Marvel films that tell one story well, present a character’s arc and send us off on a journey. If a story is too much ‘oh wait, you need to understand this cos of this and this and this, I will lose patience. Even though I know the this and the this and the this, I just wanted to be invested in this story now.

Saga gripes aside, I sat down to watch ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ with my kids last week, and I ended up double-screening between the television and their faces. I got to experience the film through their eyes. Because, my goodness, we as parents want our kids to love the stuff we love and enjoy it as much as we do. And of course they’ll find their own things to love and we’ll try our best to love them, but all we’ll do is tell them all the things from our day that inspired what they now love. What will be done to them was once done to us and so on and so forth and there is nothing brand new anymore.

Even Spidey’s Brand New Day. Which, in comics lore, was a jolt backwards. The Brand New Day in question was a retconning to an older simpler Spider-Man.

I’m off track already. Because the thing I wanted to tell you was, I got to see my kids’ faces when Peter Parker knocked on Liz’s door to take her to the homecoming dance of the title, and Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes opened it. The villain was Liz’s dad. And we got to see Liz’s goofy dad, in his citadel, be a family man. A far cry from the ruthless opportunist who had turned himself into the underworld’s Tony Stark, an arms dealer of sorts.

My kids’ mouths were on the floor. My eldest child looked at me, like ‘you can do this in a story?’ She could not believe it. My youngest child bolted upright in her seat, and so tightly wound and tense was she, she kicked out into the air three or four times before hugging her knees like her life depended on it.

I grinned. I had forgotten the power of that moment. Maybe, because I teach creative writing, I might have seen it coming when I saw it in the cinema the week it came out, with Nish Kumar and my other nerd pals. There’s always a moment where our hero goes into the metaphorical cave because that’s where the thing they have wanted since the first page lies, and they find a nightmare vision of that resolution, the mirror opposite of what they want, and in that moment of bleakness, sometimes called the lowpoint, they realise what it takes to fight for what they need.

Michael Keaton being the father of the girl Peter Parker’s fancied the entire movie is that moment. It’s easy to be cynical about structure. But in this moment, a mixture of performance and culmination make it satisfying. And you know what? For two kids, it fucking worked. They were hooked. They were invested. They were obsessed.

It’s a hard moment to get right, because it’s the moment everything your protagonist has been chasing is presented in a bizarro-world hall of mirrors, and the distorted reflection is so nightmareish, it makes them self-actualise in some way.

And experiencing that moment through my daughters’ eyes, rather than my own, my ‘seen this a bunch of times, here we go, let’s get to that daring end sequence’ jadedness, I saw what they were seeing. I guess that’s the other thing about making work. When we look back at that work, we see the compromises we made along the way, we see the slippage between what’s in our heads and what’s on the page and we see how we are better writers now than when we first sat down to write this thing. We don’t experience it for the first time the way a reader or a viewer will, and ultimately, that’s the reaction that matters.

My daughters are now Team Holland Is The Best Spider-Man, and I’m loathe to show them Maguire-era’s horror Spidey, cos man, Sam Raimi knew how to scare the shit out of you, or the Andre Garfield emo-Spidey, because the deft, light, teenager Spidey that Holland plays is lights out incredible. I’ve now seen the film, and so have my kids, and really, all I had to explain to them was who Florence Pugh’s character was. The rest, they kinda just got. I would have loved to have seen more Tombstone and my youngest daughter was utterly appalled by The Punisher’s potty mouth, but a good time was had, and I got to experience the whole thing through them. Which was magic. Ten out of ten. Would recommend.

Thanks for continuing to subscribe. I do appreciate it, especially when I took off more time than I thought. I will endeavour to keep this going. While I appreciate the paid subscriptions, because they do help to keep funding this thing, I will make every single piece on here free for everyone. If that means you want to stop your paid subscription and access everything for free, no worries, I understand. Mick Hucknall said it best. Money’s too tight to mention. If you want to continue to fund this, I appreciate you. Other ways to fund this are to sling me a coffee through this site or buy one of my books.