Your friendly paternalist, Spiderman
"Spider-Man: No Way Home"[1] broke all sorts of box office records. However, it is encouraging that not only I noticed [2]: the film has a particularly strong paternalistic message, even against the backdrop of the entire superhero genre. It all starts with (spoilers) that Peter Parker and Doctor Strange messed up by trying to reverse Spider-Man's deanon - the spell broke and led to a collision of worlds. Supervillains from other versions of the multiverse began to fly into the world of the current Parker. Strange offers to simply catch illegal migrants and deport them, but it turns out that all the supervillains were sucked in before they died in their universes (at the hands of local Parkers). Therefore, the local Peter Parker decides ... to re-educate the villains before sending them and, thereby, save them. The villains, of course, are against it, but to whom and when did this prevent doing good and injure boon?
The most digestible is the re-education of Otto Octavius (aka Doctor Octopus). He connected his robotic tentacles through the chip, but the chip is malfunctioning, making the Octopus aggressive. It is worth replacing the chip and voila - Octavius is good-natured again. It would seem, and it is direct treatment. However, if you think about it, it's not so obvious why "Octavius without a chip" seems to us more "real" than "Octavius with a chip", which can be forcibly healed. The mere fact that the impact of the chip is foreign is hardly an excuse. For example, today there is a treatment option for dementia - when a chip implanted in the brain regulates certain types of brain activity. Is it worth turning off such a chip for reasons of its unnaturalness? Obviously not - such a chip provides it with functionality. But it's possible to turn off the Octavius chip - isn't it because the chipless version of Octavius just seems more normal to us?
Then there are three rather awkward villains - a reptilian, a man-sand and a man-battery - all are united by the fact that mutations and superpowers have turned their heads. So Parker decides to "cure" them of their mutations, making them "normal" again. Here, the paternalistic approach becomes more obvious, because it is not clear why someone can be "treated" for mutations, but Parker himself, for example, cannot? If superpowers deprive a person of the ability to consciously make decisions, making it an acceptable "object of treatment", then, obviously, this works the same way for Parker and Strange. It's just that they are not "treated" because they are "good" - that is, due to arbitrary criteria of "normality".
And the most interesting case is Norman Ozzborn, with his alternative "evil" personality in the form of the Green Goblin. Parker invents a way to "treat" his split personality and gives Norman back full control of his body. Why, in fact, Ozzborn has the exclusive right to this body, and the Goblin - none? For example, in Watts' fantasy novel "False Blindness", subpersonalities were endowed with full civil rights, and the times when they were "treated" were perceived as savagery. Be that as it may, the execution is simply unfolding before us. After all, "cure" for Ozzborn means "death" for the Green Goblin. It's funny that at the same time, Parker makes a grand gesture, refusing to kill his aunt's killer, but in reality he only refuses to kill Norman for the sins of the Goblin, and the Goblin himself is just executed. The question of who to live and who to die is here again decided through compliance with the conditional norm.
In general, there can be many questions. However, in the film, the only one who is against it is Strange. Yes, and that for purely practical reasons. Otherwise, no one raises moral objections to forced re-education. All decisions and difficulties are purely technocratic in nature: you need to take a miracle 3D printer and make everything “right”. The projection on society is understandable: idealistic children, with the help of the latest technologies, bring the world and people into the framework of their ideas of normality, without worrying that some boomers are against it. So who said "Twitter"?
Mihail Pojarsky 2022-01-11
