The Copaganda In Marvel's Spider-Man Is A Symptom Of Its Neoliberal Attitude
Marvel’s Spider-Man begins with an assault on Fisk Tower. Spidey fights his way up the skyscraper while taking out dozens of Kingpin’s goons along the way, and when he reaches the top he meets up with a police bomb squad meant to help him detain Fisk. To Spider-Man’s surprise, the cops are working for the Kingpin. Spidey subdues them and calls his police contact, Yuri Watanabe, to let her know that some of her men were on the take. Yuri doesn’t react to this news and corruption within the police force is never addressed again. There were a few bad apples that tried to kill Spider-Man, and that’s all there is to it. From that point forward, the police are only represented as trustworthy allies to Spider-Man, and vice versa, despite the first mission explicitly showing us that they’re not.
I’m far from the first person to point out the copaganda problem in Marvel’s Spider-Man, but while reviewing the PC port I couldn’t but help fixate on these moments, like the crooked bomb squad in Fisk’s tower, and how they inform the kind of person this Spider-Man is. There’s a pervasive neoliberal ideology throughout Marvel’s Spider-Man that’s difficult to ignore and impossible to reconcile, considering Spider-Man’s history as a working class hero. Spider-Man is fiercely loyal to institutions, like the police, and an enforcer of the status quo. Despite experiencing a near-constant stream of evidence of systemic failure, Spider-Man sees crime and villainy as a problem created by individuals - a few bad apples across the Big Apple.
Related: The Bad Bunny Spider-Man Movie Is Even Weirder Than It Sounds
It’s shocking when, shortly after surviving a cop ambush, Spidey almost immediately gets to work repairing high-tech scanners at police
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