Spider-Man: Homeless: Why Let Peter Parker Be Forgotten by Everyone

As the latest work in the Spider-Man series of movies, "Spider-Man: Heroes Without Return" has caused a major response from fans, both the touch of three generations of Spider-Man in the same frame and the dissatisfaction with the storyline. This article mainly interprets the main theme of the movie by answering two questions: why Spider-Man wants to save the villains of the multiverse and why Spider-Man wants everyone to forget Peter Parker. Of course, whether the art of expression can support the content of expression is another question and is beyond the scope of this article.

Stills from Spider-Man: Heroes Don't Return

First, whether there is free will in the multiverse

Before reading the two Spider-Man reviews (Spider-Man: Homecoming: American Science Stories in Superhero Movies / Spider-Man: The Hero's Quest: Journey to Home or Journey to Science?). I've pointed out the important role of the scientific element in the film. Similarly, the plot of the third part inherits the mystery of the second part and the multiverse of Avengers 4, so the interpretation of the hero theme of this Spider-Man is absolutely inseparable from the multiverse itself.

In the film, Spider-Man and villains played by Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield come to the Spider-Man universe played by Tom Holland (for narrative convenience, the following three generations of Spider-Man are referred to by actors Toby, Garfield, and Holland). Holland learned the story of the other two universes during the exchange, and understood that if he simply sent them back, the story would unfold according to the original established plot, in order not to let the tragic story happen, Holland decided to heal the villains in his own universe and send them back to the original universe. This plot is the key to driving the development of the story, and its fundamental motivation is whether there is a Spider-Man and his MJ in every universe, and whether Aunt May in every universe must die. If the Spider-Man storyline in every universe is similar, then where is the free will of different Spider-Man?

It should be pointed out here that physics and the multiverse in popular culture are actually quite far away. From a popular cultural perspective, the multiverse or parallel world is not really a completely new thing. From the perspective of mythology and folklore, due to the regionality of these stories, coupled with the variations in word of mouth, the story often presents multiple versions, so it shares the same mother book, playing an image but not accurate analogy, using today's fan culture to understand, that is, these stories are the same mother story fan works, following the same set of character templates and world settings, Joseph Campbell's "Myth of a Thousand Faces" has summarized the myths of the world. After the birth of quantum mechanics, similar to relativity, it became a new source of story, repackaging the original time travel (see: Beginning and End: Why "Reunion 4" looks down on other time travel movies), in which the multiverse also became synonymous with story restart, and different versions shared the parent book like a mythological story, but each had its own timeline and central task. From this perspective, the multiverse itself embodies the value of the mother (to paraphrase today's popular words, IP), showing that these stories are popular, these characters are alive, showing the creative will of authors, screenwriters and others, and the embodiment of their free will (and commercial considerations). A fundamental difference between physics and mass culture is that the multiverse interpretation in physics can only be a theoretical hypothesis because it cannot be observed experimentally, but in mass culture, we always tend to have every universe traversed, and different universes can communicate with each other, presenting a phenomenon of cross-dimensional walls, making the works wonderful and colorful.

But when we return to physics itself, after all Peter Parker in the story has been discussing the physics of parallel worlds, multiverse interpretations often lead to a paradox of free will, which is quantum suicide. Because when we make a choice, the world is divided into two, so when a person commits suicide, if we always choose the branch that he is not dead, can it mean that he is never dead? Similarly, if we always choose the advantageous option in the timeline, like a branch plot in a word game, and always have a perfect ending, can those who die have no meaning of existence, or can we imagine the existence of such a God, in his eyes all the endings of the story have been written, is the universe of quantum mechanics as fatalistic as Newton's mechanical universe? The first thing to point out here is that because we think about the problem of quantum mechanics in the language of analogy, to a large extent, it has traces of thinking about the macroscopic world and linear time, such as the tree diagram itself has the property of linear time. In addition, the development of quantum mechanics and relativity has also shown that there may be some physical gaps between the macroscopic and microscopic worlds, and that the reductionism used in physics (that is, the reduction from the physical laws at the particle level to our macroscopic) may not work.

Let's look at an example of the problem of free will in quantum mechanics that has also generated some discussion in the scientific and philosophical communities in recent years, with John Conway and Simon Kochen proposing the free will theorem in 2006 and the strong free Will Theorem in 2009, driven by academic discussion: "If human beings have free will, Elementary particles also share a part of this valuable stuff. More precisely, if the experimenter is free to choose the direction of positioning the measuring instrument, the reaction of the particle (strictly speaking, the reaction of the universe near the particle) is not determined by the entire history of the universe. As soon as this theory was proposed, it triggered discussions among all parties, and admirers believed that it was the highest peak in the development of quantum mechanics so far, solving the problem of free will from the physical level, and making the philosophical speculative determinism have a clear and unmistakable argument; opponents believed that this theorem was nothing more than a retelling of the existing theory of quantum mechanics, and its discussion from physics was too jumpy to even distinguish the difference between determinism and free will. In essence, this is just another version of the argument between reductionists and anti-reductionists in high-energy physics, the former believing that everything in the world can ultimately be classified as a simple physical law based on it.

Obviously, his thinking will not be too difficult to think about physics, but common sense thinking with a physics hat, and he just wants to help Spider-Man in other worlds and change their ending. Because he believes that not only is spider-man himself, the superhero of the world, but spider-man in other multiverses is equally important. In other words, he does not recognize his correctness and legitimacy as the perfect ending, the sole protagonist, and he is not the observed one chosen by God. Yes, he is trying to prove to God to the audience watching the movie: I do not exist under your observation, I exist because I want to do it.

On the one hand, he offends the audience and makes the audience realize the pain of his own perspective as a god, on the other hand, he respects other Spider-Man and villains, making the three generations of the same frame become particularly warm and romantic. However, the most bizarre thing is that in the end he returns to the framework of the mother's story, Aunt May eventually dies, MJ finally does not know that Peter Parker is Spider-Man, on the one hand, it seems to make the story of the trilogy a joke, he re-zeros from the growth of Iron Man's death, re-learning "the greater the ability, the greater the responsibility", on the other hand, it presents a certain mythological romantic color although thousands of people are looking forward to it, he knows his fate, in order to break the fate and eventually go to fate, will Sisyphus be happy?

Of course, in essence, this is still the embodiment of the will of the creators of the film, and as for whether this is due to their poor donkey skills or the result of balanced commercialization, the benevolent see the wise.

Second, who are the superheroes?

What kind of people are superheroes? People with superpowers? Naturally, Nietzsche cannot avoid discussing this issue. Just as there was a good tradition in ancient China, the West also believed to some extent that human society was moving from the golden age into the dark age, Nietzsche proposed the superman philosophy in this context, only superman can save fallen human beings, he listed some superhuman should have some of the qualities that superman should have, from some superpowers in the body, to the supremacy of moral level, and finally he shouted that God is dead and everyone should become superman. Just like the twilight of the gods in mythology, the old gods die and a new world is born. Due to Nietzsche's own Dionysian temperament, this theory is full of whimsy and personal romanticism. On his basis, different scholars developed their own theories, in which Wittgenstein proposed that "genius is the responsibility": genius is the highest morality, and therefore he is the responsibility of everyone. This is the origin of Spider-Man's saying that "the greater the ability, the greater the responsibility", and it is also widely accepted that everyone mentions it the most.

But this does not explain the question of why the most typical superheroes: Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, etc., all have to disguise themselves as ordinary people, and even the people around them cannot know their true identity. I think this may need to be explained by Kierkegaard's knight of faith.

As the progenitor of existentialism, Kierkegaard pointed out that only what I believed in intersubjectivity could exist, and that he differed from later Sartre in that he attributed this belief to God. He cites the story of Abraham in the Bible. In the story, God asked the devout Abraham to kill his son Isaac to sacrifice, and Abraham finally agreed, and God replaced Isaac with sheep at the end, and the story, which most people regard as absurd, became Kierkegaard's knight of faith. Unlike the well-known and tragic Agamemnon, he did not sacrifice his children to save the country. Nor was he convinced that God would raise Isaac or that God was just testing him, and he didn't even hesitate to decide to kill his own children for religious reasons. He was a devout believer in God, so he would be restless, he would hesitate, it was his personal confusion, and eventually he made a leap of faith and decided to sacrifice his own child. Abraham believed in God, that was his moral code, and now his moral code tempted him not to obey, so he finally decided to obey the code, but this is unspeakable, he can only be silent, "the saint is nameless". Once spoken, this individual belief becomes universal, contrary to Kierkegaard's purpose: individuality is always greater than universality. So we go to Superman: Man of Steel, and when Superman's identity is revealed, he is first molded as a god and then pulled off the altar because he no longer belongs to himself and becomes a symbol of the public.

As for the public, Kierkegaard has no good impression, just as today everyone likes to use the rabble to describe the crowd, he uses the flock of geese to describe those who blindly obey public opinion, listen to gossip in society, and personally attack others by exposing the privacy of others, he believes that these people affected by the media and other people have lost the boundaries of their existence as individuals, not only tarnishing the morality they abide by, but also exposing these morals to the public and interfering with the existence of others. When witnessing the panic caused by cholera in Denmark, he said: "The plague divides people into a single person and teaches them to become a single person", because the epidemic has pulled people out of their collectives, to realize their own dilemma of survival as individuals, to experience the panic, depression, and pain brought about by life, to go through hardships and tribulations to temper themselves, and finally to gain the courage to live, to face the abyss of despair and gain the meaning of survival. If there is an abyss in front of you, you believe that you bravely jump down, complete the "jump of faith", and live to death, which is particularly instructive today.

Leaving aside the great differences in religion, we may also find many similarities between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, such as their emphasis on survival and existence, and their emphasis on the individual to hear, see and feel. If we take a common divisor, then superheroes should respect the existence of each individual. This is also why Batman never uses lethal means to fight the enemy, this violation of the setting is essentially consistent with the violation here, even if it is contrary to the general mood and ideas of the public, but this is their meaning as superhuman, and can not be said, can not be understood, and even once understood the danger of becoming a public.

We look back at this Spider-Man and almost perfectly reproduce Kierkegaard's theory that "a person allowing himself to be trampled to death alive by a flock of geese is a slow way of dying." So in the face of online violence, Spider-Man woke up to the fact that it was stupid to make his true self and faith public before, then it cannot be called faith, and the growth obtained from Iron Man is false, because it can be said. So he finally firmly asks Doctor Strange to cast a spell that makes everyone forget that he is Peter Parker. Because the real superhero is Peter Parker — the big boy next door. As a result, we will find that at least in the film, the treatment of the free will of the multiverse and the treatment of superheroes are consistent, and the film is completely self-explanatory.

III. Conclusion

We can notice that in the title of the film, except for the fixed noun Spider-Man, the emphasis expressed in Chinese and English is completely different. The English subtitles are Homecoming, Far from Home, and No Way Home, focusing on home, as if a neighbor teenager who is away from home (homecoming literal translation is homecoming season), gradually drifting away from home, and eventually homeless. Chinese subtitles are: Return of the Hero, Hero Expedition, Hero No Return, focusing on the hero , depicting the hero after the reboot, killing everywhere, wandering alone. Of course, this is due to cultural differences, but the original English title also highlights the home of the individual, rather than the recognized hero, I think, has been a kind of opening statement, as the hero Spider-Man is getting farther and farther away from home, Peter Parker who has found himself is back to his home, where there is no MJ, no friends, no Iron Man, and even no Spider-Man, that is the moment when Peter Parker completed the leap of faith and really grew. Just like Garfield jumped in "The Amazing Spider-Man" and hugged MJ's body, he lost the love who completely understood himself and knew himself, and he could only pluck up the courage to accept and live to die. Only when you understand this, in this Spider-Man to see Garfield jump down again, there will be a deep feeling, not only the regret of not saving his own MJ, but also the satisfaction of being able to save MJ in other worlds after he grows up.