Representation in the Amazing Spiderman Movies

Despite having a second life as a masked crime-fighter, he deals with issues that are typical for a young adult like dating, chores, and navigating relationships with family. Due to his popularity, there is an abundance of Spider-man content out there, so today, I'm going to focus on The Amazing Spider-Man movies based on the comic book series of the same name.

In the first movie, which was released in 2012, the Parker's home is burglarized and young Peter Parker is sent to live with his aunt and uncle while his parents go on the run with secret documents they believe the burglars were hoping to find. As a teenager, he meets Dr. Connors, a scientist who once worked with his father. During his visit, he is bitten by the radioactive spider that gives him his powers. He also learns about the work Dr. Connors is doing to give people the ability to grow back amputated body parts, something the doctor is passionate about because of his own limb difference. Peter finds the formula Connors needs to complete his work in a pile of old papers left behind by his father. Connors' boss, Rajit Ratha becomes convinced that there is big money in the discovery and threatens to test it on unwitting elders living in a nursing home. To spare them the pain of unethical testing, Connors tests the cure on himself. At first, it seems to work. His arm grows back, but the transformation doesn't stop there. Instead it continues until he turns into a giant lizard. When the cure wears off and he turns back into a disabled human, he becomes convinced that his lizard form is the next step in human evolution and endeavors to turn everyone else into human-lizard hybrids. Peter, who is still developing his skills as Spider-man becomes the only thing standing in the way of Dr. Connors and his evil plot.

This film, its sequel, and the comic books used as source material rely heavily on the trope of the Disabled Villain. As much as I love Marvel, this is one of the issues with remaking the same content in different formats over the years. If the source material leans on a particular problematic trope it inevitable gets transferred to the TV show or movie based on it. And because a large portion of entertainment today is a reimagining of an existing book, comic, movie, or TV show, it is very easy to repackage the same problematic messaging - like disabled people are bad - over and over again without ever realizing we are doing it.

Before we go any deeper into this discussion of the Disabled Villain, I'll take a moment to mention a few things I enjoyed about this iteration of Spider-man. I worry that if I mention only the negatives you might think there are no positives - or that we should throw out the good with the bad. And, of course, we shouldn't. We should celebrate the good and learn from the bad. So, let's start with the good.

Andrew Garfield is a great Peter Parker. I find Peter Parker’s relationship with Aunt May really endearing in this series – especially when he finally comes home with the eggs she asked him to pick up. I think their physical interactions are really nice, too. It’s a bit harder to find examples of teen boy characters in film and television who maintain healthy physical and emotional interactions with parental figures, but this version of Peter Parker shows a balance between growing up and being his own person but still being able to share hugs, affection, and softness with his aunt and uncle, so it’s a healthier side of masculinity than what’s usually portrayed.

Another thing that I really enjoyed in the Amazing Spiderman were all of Peter Parker’s experiments to create his web shooters. It’s fun imagining him setting things on fire and causing all kinds of ruckus up in his room without anyone noticing. Like – the Aunt May in Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse feels super legit ‘cause she knows exactly what’s going on. No one’s getting anything past her so she’s basically like the quote-unquote man in the chair. But anyway, The Amazing Spiderman’s portrayal of Peter Parker sneakily building all his gear in his bedroom is just fun. I know every Spiderman iteration does something like this, but I think Andrew Garfield plays it really well and I just enjoy this version of it.

Let’s come back to the Disabled Villain. I’ve also heard it referred to as the Evil Cripple. In the first Amazing Spiderman movie, the antagonist, Dr. Curtis Connors, is an amputee whose scientific research starts out with the goal of creating cures for terminal illness. This grows into the need to pursue perfection for himself and all of humanity – which in and of itself is reminiscent of eugenics, but that’s not really mentioned. Of course, he associates perfection with the eradication of illness and disability. He crosses human and lizard DNA and injects himself with it in order to teach his body how to regrow his arm. It works, but it also turns him into a giant man-lizard hybrid. He comes to believe that this is the pinacle of the human race, and he uses an aerosol device to spread the DNA blend to other people.

In the Amazing Spiderman sequel, one of the antagonists, Harry Osborn, develops symptoms of Retroviral Hypodysplasia. It’s a made-up illness that’s passed genetically. He starts exhibiting symptoms shortly before his father’s death. The symptoms are tremors, a green rash, pale skin, white pupils, and chronic pain. As the illness progresses, the person grows claw-like nails, pointed teeth, and scales. Eventually, the body exhausts itself and the person dies. Harry Osborn becomes obsessed with saving his own life. At first, he asks Peter Parker for help with attaining Spiderman’s blood because the spider that bit him had self-healing properties. When Spiderman turns him down because of the risks associated with continuing this kind of genetic research, Harry becomes violent, breaks Electro out of the secret lab where his father’s old friends are experimenting on him, and Harry manipulates Electro into helping him break into Oscorp where prototypes of the cure are being kept. Harry takes the cure, but it backfires and turns him into the Green Goblin – a classic Spiderman nemesis.

Both of these villains fit the classic Disabled Villain Trope. Dr. Connors and Harry start out as perfectly fine people who become taken over by their obsession to cure their own conditions. This trope is problematic in a few ways. First, it assumes that what all people with disabilities and chronic illnesses want and need is a cure. This may be true for some, but there are also many people who aren’t interested in a cure, especially when their immediate needs for accessibility and inclusion haven’t been met. People have really varied and complex relationships with their disabilities and chronic illnesses. While some people seek cures, other people absorb their disability into their identity and don’t have any desire to be cured. Some people find that the emphasis that the medical industry and non-disabled people place on cures prevent money and social action from going toward inclusion, accessibility, and acceptance. By seeking to help people in the future we neglect the needs of people today. When non-disabled people focus all of their efforts on a cure that may or may not ever be possible, they overlook the things we could change right now like making it easier for people to access mobility aids, workplace accommodations, affordable and accessible housing, inclusion of people with different neurotypes and so much more.

Another thing this trope does is emphasize the idea that not only is disability and chronic illness distasteful, but so are the people who experience them – because disability, especially visible disability is used to make the villains seem visually vulgar. For example, Harry Osborn’s illness becomes more visible as he descends into villainy. In cases like this, the visibility of disability is a tool used as a shorthand to show the or the darkness that someone possesses. If you’re familiar with James Bond, the villain in Skyfall is an example of this as well. Raoul Silva played by Javier Bardem starts out suave and debonair, but during his villain reveal, he removes facial prosthetics. As his face changes shape the audience is meant to recognize his villainy because without his prosthetics, he is supposed to look grotesque and, that way, his outside matches the hideousness of his heart.

When we lean on these tropes in our entertainment, we learn to subconsciously associate people with disabilities and chronic illnesses with evil, with hideousness, and vulgarity. In the long run, this only furthers exclusion, ableism, and even disablism in our society. Writers often use tropes like this as either shorthand so that audiences know who is good and who is bad or to create a sympathetic villain. Audiences think, “I’d go bad, too, if my life was like theirs.” But people with disabilities and chronic illnesses are just like everyone else – with talents, failings, biases, and goals. People with disabilities can be villains, heroes, friends, family, and casual bystanders. When disability is only portrayed through tropes, audiences get an incomplete picture of a community that rarely gets to tell its own stories or own the way the rest of the world sees them. We need the big folks in entertainment to take seriously the issues with the way these tropes impact the disability community in the real world.

Something else that I noticed is that the same thing that happens to the disabled characters also happens with people of color in this series. In both movies, the only non-white people with speaking lines are villains – It's another trope trap for minorities!

In the first Amazing Spiderman, Dr. Ratha is presumably the money behind Dr. Connors’ research program. Dr. Ratha is a South Asian scientist who wants to push forward research at a faster rate and is willing to engage in unethical research methods to meet his demands. He decides to run scientific studies on people in nursing homes without their knowledge or consent. He manipulates Dr. Connors into testing the lizard DNA on himself in order to get enough data to convince Dr. Ratha to leave the people in the nursing home alone. Dr. Ratha doesn’t get any backstory – he’s just a run-of-the-mill villain who does bad things because he’s a greedy bad guy. He’s a very flat, one-sided villain with no depth or personality, but he is the only noteworthy non-white character, and he is identifiably a bad guy.

In the second Amazing Spiderman movie, Electro is a socially awkward Black man who has an unhealthy obsession with Spiderman. Although it isn't overt, it's possible to consider him autistic-coded, in which case he could also fit into the Disabled Villain template. But he’s basically a regular guy who is picked on by his workmates, overworked, and his skills and work ethic are taken advantage of without him getting any sort of reward. When his body becomes able to absorb electricity, he ends up wandering the streets of New York, trying to understand what is happening to him. He is misunderstood by the police and the public, seen as a freak and a menace even though he’s just trying to figure out what’s going on in his body. The police antagonize him without trying to deescalate the situation. The way people treat him in this moment makes him act out. During the fallout, he gets picked up by a mad scientist and taken to an underground Oscorp facility to be experimented on against his will.

All of these events are reminiscent of things that have happened to the Black community in the US – being targeted by police, viewed as dangerous by the White majority, and being used in unethical experiments. In this movie, these things are used to make a sympathetic villain, a good person who was wronged so many times, they just had to turn against the world. But when we use this backstory frequently enough that it becomes a recognizable entertainment trope, we do a disservice to the people it portrays. In this case – Black people. Electro is basically the only non-white character in this movie with dialogue or impact on the story and his trials and tribulations are used to make him a sympathetic villain, but still a villain. Because he’s the only non-white character of note, this really stands out. When Black people are only cast as villains, we subconsciously encourage the idea that Black people are dangerous, and we also subconsciously encourage continued discrimination based on skin color.

Andrew Garfield is such a fun Peter Parker that I wanted to stay in the moment while watching these two movies more than I did. I happened to be taking a sick day when I watched these movies, and I got so distracted by these tropes that I had to sit myself up and type up notes about them. Because as soon as I saw these villain tropes, I couldn’t unsee them, especially when they appeared in both movies back-to-back. If I watched them on separate days, maybe I wouldn’t have noticed the trend, but it’s like they wrote out the formula and dropped in a new cast of characters. I think, ultimately, this comes down to issues in the source material. Comic books are filled with these particular tropes and Spider-man is no exception.

I feel like – the more I write these essays, the more it will look like I hate Marvel, and that is far from true. Marvel has become a special interest of mine and it’s something I turn to whenever I need something comforting. And also, Marvel Comics has been around for a long time and is a product of the self-censorship of the entertainment industry which was designed to exclude anyone who didn’t fit the straight, white, cisgender, non-disabled male ideal. Back in the day, when it came to representing other folks, the best Marvel could do was sneak people who didn’t fit that norm into the roles of villain or victim – if they were represented at all.

But in the 21^st century, Marvel can and should do better – and I think the comics are actually working on this. If you go and read more recent comic books you can see some changes happening, but a lot of the TV shows and movies are modeled after older content. I suspect that’s because it’s easier to get the rights to those, but I’m not really sure. I do think it means that the audio-visual content out there might need to deviate from the OG source material or create new material altogether. I think if we take the Spiderman remake arc as a whole and some of the newer comics into consideration, like I said, we can see progress. The Miles Morales Spiderman is a fantastic shift toward complex, positive representation – so if we look at Spiderman in its totality, we are trending toward improvement. But looking at The Amazing Spiderman movies in isolation shows some of the issues present in superhero movies even in 2012 and 2014 when these movies were made. And, really, it was kinda yikes.

I have one final thing I have to bring up – and it has nothing to do with the movies, I just found it delightful, and I wanted to share it with you. I was reading one of the early comics a while ago – it might have had Dr. Curtis Connors or maybe the Vulture, I’m not sure but somebody forgot Peter Parker’s name. There’s one page where he’s referred to as Peter Palmer by the narrator and the fact that this particular mistake made it to print just makes me giggle. So – if you ever have nothing to do, you can dig through the old comics and see if you can find it. If you figure out which issue it’s in, let me know.

Thanks for sticking around and making it to the end of this essay. If you're interested in reading about another character, or even another iteration of Spider-man, let me know. I love deep-diving into this kind of research. Until then, thanks again, and I hope you find a moment to read something splendid today.

Sources

• https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/mar/14/the-disabled-villain-why-sensitivity-reading-cant-kill-off-this-ugly-trope 
• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0948470/ 
• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4633694/ 
• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1872181/ 
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Spider-Man_(film) 
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Spider-Man_2