SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME - With Great Power Comes Great Franchisability

Director: Jon Watts
Writers: Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers

Cast: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jacob Batalon, Jon Favreau, Jamie Foxx, Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, Marisa Tomei, Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, Benedict Wong, Tony Revolori, Angourie Rice, J.K. Simmons

Runtime: 148 mins.

2021

The NEW

J. J. Abrams, who has perhaps done more to influence the last decade of blockbuster cinema than anyone this side of Kevin Feige, did a particularly bad job with Star Trek: Into Darkness. That film, like this one, was the sequel of a reboot. That film, like this one, rehashes the preboot series. That film, like this one, treats the rehash like a reveal even though nobody in their right mind expected otherwise.*

*Star Trek: Into Darkness and Spider-Man: No Way Home also both feature a smug yet perturbed Benedict Cumberbatch.

There is a scene in Star Trek: Into Darkness in which the evil villain kills the father of a main character. She is grief-stricken, she weeps. Thirty seconds later, she is speedwalking down a space hallway spitting exposition. There is no evidence that she has just undergone a traumatic event, nor does her father's death impact anything in the remaining runtime. Drama is the technique of showing growth and change and choice through adversity. If something just happens in a movie and everyone forgets, we don't feel any sort of way about it. Actions hunger for consequence.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 10 - Quilting Point

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Silence Lay Steadily

The finale begins with a revelation: the room behind the red door was not unattainable, after all. It is the promise of attainment. Each child spent time in the red room, each within their own personal safe space. The knockings and scrapings and hauntings were not malicious ghosts, but each other experienced through a shroud of perspectival trickery. The red room channels the power of wish fulfillment, and a space to be alone is certainly a common wish in a family of seven!

"A ghost is a wish." Trapped within their former safe space, each living Crain sibling experiences the sordid side of fantasy. The house spoonfeeds them visions of their deepest desires as it feeds. The past creeps in, and it takes a herculean effort to stay present.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 9 - Regression

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Screaming Meemies

Olivia Crain (Carla Gugino) is the only character in The Haunting of Hill House who isn't double-cast. Finally, in the penultimate episode of the series, the weight of that sinks in. Olivia does not have a Then and a Now. In a show rife with literalized metaphors, this storytelling choice is a quiet blow to our psyche.

Current day Olivia is a phantom limb. She is impossible. This is foreshadowed in the opening scene, when she holds her sleeping children close to her even after her arms grow numb. She asks her husband to leave them be, so it comes as something of a shock when he removes Luke undetected from her dead grasp.

Olivia is no dearly departed saint, nor is she entirely responsible for her own collapse. She is caught in an anxiety spiral, and anxiety breeds neurosis. Is there a word for something that you make true by worrying about it? Negative actualization? Prophecy? A psychotic break? More than anything else in the world, Olivia is afraid of, well, the world, and what the world will do when it gets hooks into her children. "I'm scared. That's all there is. I'm nothing else." This is the story of a woman who would squeeze her children to death to stop them from growing. It's not because she means them harm-- her own childhood trauma has instilled in her a powerful need to prevent them from experiencing the pain she has experienced. Pain that has been dulled by her beloved children, who are small enough to fall asleep in the crook of her elbow.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 8 - Death Drive

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Other Reviews in This Series --- Assume Spoilers

Witness Marks

Hugh tells Steve about witness marks-- the evidence that repairs have been done to the inner machinations of a clock. They are "the story of the piece." If you can read the scars, you can understand the entire history of that clock. If you can't, it just looks like damage.

Steve of all people needs to hear this the most, since his defense mechanism is to take everything at face value. His avoidance impulses are titanic. He even got a secret vasectomy! Of course this torpedoed his relationship, how could it have gone any other way? But he prefers a torpedo to vulnerability. He clenches up to avoid passing on his family's sickness. "There's something wrong with our goddamn brains." He wants his blood line to die but he isn't strong enough to admit it.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 7 - Phallocentrism

This review series was requested by Carson Rebel. Many thanks to Carson for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Other Reviews in This Series --- Assume Spoilers

Eulogy

The episode after "Two Storms" was inevitably going to scale back. You can't blame a show for peaking at the peak. We return to our 'monster of the week' format with a Dad-centric episode. In a way, we are relieved to fall back into the familiar narrative shape, and the prominence of his perspective last episode makes it feel as if we ought to get to know him better.

Can't they just talk to their Dad? Now Hugh (Timothy Hutton) approaches each of them in such a kind, open way. Stubborn, but gentle. The siblings' disgusted rebuffs of him may read as cruel from the outside, but the show is eager to contextualize. They cannot just talk to their Dad. Because he couldn't just talk to them.