SPIDER-MEN?

I loved the new Spider-Man movie Brand New Day; for lots of reasons, most of all how it presents a vision of manhood that could transcend the broken versions that are so loudly available. I’ve written more about Brand New Day below.

In the meantime, if you’re a man* who feels called to a way of being that’s more about imagination than aggression, more interdependency than separatism, more shared responsibility than scapegoating, more creative sharing than selfish individualism, I want to invite you to gather with me and others for a deep dive into evolved exploration of who we are and can be. We call it the Storyfire retreat, and it takes place in just over six weeks (first weekend of October), near Asheville, NC; all the info is at www.storyfire.org.

And if you’re a woman or find yourself elsewhere in the gender kaleidoscope I’d really welcome your support in encouraging men you know to join us - and to share your perspective on what you want men to know.

Let me know if you want to attend by replying to this email - or just go ahead and register for the retreat. Here are some of the things we heard from guys who joined us at the first Storyfire retreat last year:

Men of all sorts – old and young, straight and gay, bisexual, and other expressions of sexuality, partnered and single, black and white and brown, etc. – coming together to practice and learn and support modes of intimacy and emotional health and well-being; this is how I would describe the weekend, and this is a practice in our community that is desperately needed. At this time in history, it may mean life or death.

This was one of the most meaningful men’s events I have ever been to and I’ve been doing men’s work for close to forty years.

The weekend created a strong sense of community, whereby intimacy was expressed and practiced, which was both encouraging, and also, as it cuts counter to our culture’s notion of masculinity. One of the things I experienced from the weekend was a sense of grief that this sort of intimacy and community and support is rare outside of the retreat setting.

Gender matters, but gender isn’t matter. It’s a story.

That story deserves strong and tender attention (if you want to know more of what I think about that, I’ve written more about it here) - the Storyfire retreat is a step in that direction.

*We welcome all men who are committed to a journey of integrity, creatively and non-violently building a safer and more compassionate world, and who have taken some steps on this journey already.

As good friends put it, we welcome men on all parts of the continuum of gender identity and expression, without prejudice about sexual orientation, living status, whether sexually active or celibate, and everyone for whom labels don’t apply. To you we say “welcome.”

All we ask is that you arrive committed to curiosity, to bringing your own gifts, and to caring with generous respect for the other participants. Minimum age to participate is eighteen years old, but there is no upper age limit.

JOIN THE STORYFIRE RETREAT HERE

The Marvel films are generally critic-proof, with rare exceptions; even so, the enormous box office success of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, now one of the ten most financially lucrative films of all time, has exceeded expectations. Those statistics must be read through the lens of knowing that movie tickets are more expensive than they’ve ever been, so the top ten films aren’t necessarily the ten that have been seen by the most people. And the near-limitless availability of content really does mean that it is difficult for a movie to be a cultural event: listening to the score for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial yesterday I was reminded that the impact of that film 44 years ago was rare for the time, and rarer now. Christopher Nolan makes films infrequently enough that they can reliably stir up a cultural discourse, and it’s a good thing that Oppenheimerand The Odyssey have made such an impact - companion pieces as they are in an exploration of the philosophy of manhood, aggression, integrity, and war. It would be good if Brand New Day could do the same, because it’s not only one of the most entertaining comic book films, but a genuine step forward in the representation of what it means to be a hero. (Other worthy choices are Iron Man 2, Wonder Woman 1984, The Dark Knight Trilogy, Hulk, Black Panther, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, the 1978 Superman, and Joker: Folie à Deux; if you want to go beyond DC and Marvel then we should include the glorious camp of Flash Gordon and Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, and the genuine social commentary of RoboCop.)

We pick up Peter Parker (Tom Holland, who I think feels utterly at home in the role) having finally learned how to manage the burden of his gift. Having antennae that pick up any nearby crimes-in-progress can be a huge interruption; but he is mightily helped by developing an app and a police partner (played by the wonderful Liza Colón-Zayas from The Bear, whose busy kitchen and psychological terrain seems a far more stressful working environment than New York law enforcement). Peter still saves the day, but now apparently only once a day; he’s grieving his Aunt May (thankfully Marisa Tomei shows up in dream sequences to reassure him - and us), and he’s trying to navigate a way toward reminding his true love MJ (Zendaya, whose every career choice continues to prove herself to be the actor of her generation) that he exists. Such is the professional risk of being a world-moving hero, for sometimes spells must be cast to make everyone forget who you are; or at least that’s what happened at the end of the last Spider-Man film, No Way Home, which itself was a remarkable reimagining of the myth of redemptive violence, a rare film that asked what villains might actually want after they’ve gotten what they think they needed.

At any rate, the world was saved, but the cost was high: Peter has lost his love and his best friend Ned (Hawaiian actor Jacob Batalon, who plays best friend so well that you might like him to be yours). Hoping that some spark of reminiscence might emerge doesn’t work, and observing MJ with a new boyfriend is salt in the wound. Poor Peter - though this is where the genuine heart and substance of Brand New Day takes flight. Peter’s vulnerability has always been easy to identify with, but it’s often resolved by overcoming it: he saves MJ’s life, they kiss, and all is well. What’s more interesting, because life’s happy endings are usually accompanied by uncertainties or sometimes even catastrophes, is when Uncle Ben dies and Peter blames himself - the microcosm of a heroic calling: to save one person might mean to lose another.

Co-writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers (with additional input from Justin Kuritzkes) have an ear for the questions young people are facing today; and especially the way in which the dehumanizing manosphere is obsessed with getting rich and ripped. Holland’s Peter is fit enough to be a Men’s Health cover model, but he’s by no means egotistical about it; the movie doesn’t make an alienating distance out of the hero’s physique. Ned is adorably chubby but we’re not asked to laugh at him; Zendaya is positioned by the ridiculous image-making industrial complex as one of the most beautiful women in the world, but in both the scripts she chooses and the things she says in real life I get the sense that she doesn’t care much about superficial notions of the good and the worthwhile. And it’s pretty clear that both Holland and Zendaya (now married in real life, but by no means turning their relationship into clickbait) had a hand in shaping the psychological terrain of the script. Director Destin Daniel Cretton, whose Short Term 12 is one of the best independent films of the century, and one of the best per se about the emotional landscape of teenage and young adulthood, is not only adept at bringing that kind of real-world sensitivity into a story about a guy who can suspend helicopters in mid-air with an organic substance secreted in his arms, but his respect for a higher form of cinematic cadence makes Brand New Day a much more artful, and much less frantic film than most of its kind. Indeed that “of its kind” may be off-base, because I’m not sure the most relevant analog is other comic book hero films, and certainly not Marvel ones. Brand New Day more than most lycra-clad extravaganzas is really a film about being a person. Unlike Bruce Wayne - whose billions give Batman an agency that none of us can emulate; unlike Kal-El/Clark Kent - whose superhuman abilities make him not human enough to learn from (or at least reduces the location of our potential learning to what Superman has to do on those occasions when he must give up his magical powers); unlike Diana, Princess of Themyscira, whose near-immortality means that Wonder Woman can evolve over a much longer period than the rest of us (although then must also lose more than we do), Peter Parker must live in a body and a social context where his web-ility doesn’t help him with the titanic struggles of finding community, overcoming self-doubt, and being loved. Brand New Day gives him two father figures - a sadly underused Bruce Banner/The Hulk along with Frank Castle, also known as The Punisher, driven by vengeance to take down bad guys; Peter/Spider-Man are a brilliant foil to Frank’s aggression - and while (spoiler alert) I wished for a more radical ending, in which Frank accidentally kills Spider-Man, and discovers that the end of violence, uninterrupted by creativity, is always despair. A Marvel film that had the courage to let its protagonist die and have him be replaced by a repentant character now committed to non-lethal heroism would be a Marvel film with the kind of courage that Peter Parker embodies.

I should say also that Brand New Day is one of the great New York films, the first one, really, of the Mamdani era - a city full of color, light, and people bumping into each other without stepping on each other’s toes. Strangely enough, one of the films it makes me think of is Midnight Cowboy, because the central friendship in that New York film aches with need, and Peter and Ned’s relationship is a beautiful evolution in mutual support. The whole point of Brand New Day is for Peter to realize that it is entirely possible to be physically courageous without being belligerent, open-hearted without being naive. It upends the hypermasculinity so loudly proclaimed in the current moment by presenting Peter as exactly the kind of man worth championing. For one breathtaking moment it looks like Peter is going to give flowers to a male friend, a wonderful grace note amidst the wider concern to show that love and power coexist, gender is a story, and being a “real man” is about how to use the power and lack you’ve been given to weave your particular beauty, imagination and daring into a tapestry in which success is measured by acts of service and how much room you make for the legitimate needs of others.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE STORYFIRE RETREAT