Sorry for the post delay, ladies and gents. Much like a labor analyst, the first week of the month is always the hardest at my job.
Anyway, it's come to my attention that I have yet to write anything relating to Asperger's, even though it's right there in the damn masthead. (Do you call it a masthead for a blog? I dunno.) I'm sure it'll come as no surprise that I'm a pretty big comic geek, but it was way more a part of my life in middle school and early high school, largely because (as I suspect is the case for a lot of people, whether they read comics or not) that was the stage in my life at which I was most in need of the escapism inherent in the medium. (Dear God, that might be the most pretentious-looking sentence I've ever written.) I think that had a lot to do with why Captain America and Spider-Man were probably my two favorites over at Marvel; they were superheroes who started out as essentially the same kind of people who read comics. But what always made Spidey in particular appealing to me was the fact that, even though he fought crime out of a combination of altruism and guilt (if you have anything resembling inner peace, you were probably not created by Stan Lee), he is, to put it bluntly, a sarcastic little shit, even while fighting crime. He was essentially what I always wanted to be: a guy who was great at both snarking on people who deserved it AND backing it up physically where necessary. Even though I've got a lot of affection for Sam Raimi's original films (yes, even the third), I always felt like they suffered for not including that aspect of the character.
This is largely, I suspect, to do with my own experiences growing up. I've discussed the idea that I think my tendency towards sarcasm is a defense mechanism in response to my own difficulty with non-literal, non-verbal communication, but I think it also developed in middle school in response to the realization that, if there was an argument (and there often was), I wasn't going to win it with physical force. In theory, sarcasm and wit seemed like the Great Equalizer. But, as is so often the case, I was up against the gulf between what's in my head and what comes out of my mouth. One of my most painful memories is telling a clutch* of bullies on the bus, in my best deadpan, that they were "absolutely hilarious", assuming they'd be devastated. It sounded so great in my head.
But anyway, despite my initial reservations about the need for its existence, one of the things that caught my attention in Marc Webb's reboot of the Spider-Man film franchise was its inclusion of the proportionate snark of a spider**. And Webb's film, for this and for other reasons, rings a lot truer for anyone who's been through high school than Raimi's original. A lot of this is also to do with the central performances; even though Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone are 28 (!) and 23 respectively, they're a lot more believable as high schoolers, not just physically but in the way they interact. And true to form, Garfield is particularly great when he tries to put his feelings into words to Stone's Gwen Stacy, giving it an awkward, puppy doggish quality that is familiar not only to Aspies but, I suspect, to anyone who's ever been in high school. I don't get any particular Aspie vibe from Garfield's performance, but still, I think it's fair to say that Spider-Man is essentially someone who has all the drawbacks of Asperger's by day and all the strengths of it by night (and also Spidey-Sense, which is nice).
If we interpret Spider-Man as an Asperger's analogue (and we don't have to, but let's just say for the purposes of the discussion), that makes the film's choice of villain interesting as well; on a surface level, there's nothing particularly novel about him (as the Playlist points out, this makes three out of four "Spider-Man" movies where the villain is a scientist and an erstwhile mentor of Peter Parker's), but Rhys Ifans' Curt Connors is motivated not by greed or generic scientific zeal, but by his own disability, in his case a missing arm. As his attempts to grow it back mutate him into the Lizard (oh, quit whining, he's in half the ads), he at one point speaks of the desire for "perfection". And yet, look at Connors' life before his transformation; he's still a brilliant, accomplished scientist (the film makes clear that he lost his arm at least a decade ago), and the only time we ever see his disability inconvenience him is when Peter has to hand him his coffee. So TL;DR, we can read the film as the story of someone who embraces his disability and becomes a hero and another person who refuses to accept it as a part of him and lets that refusal turn him into a monster. If a teenager on the spectrum is watching this film and he or she takes that away from it, it's hard to find fault with that.
There's a lot more to like about the film, particularly the city-porn shots of New York, the performances from Stone, Denis Leary and Martin Sheen (the latter gets a tearjerker of a closing speech that works beautifully) and the really organic-feeling comedic moments, and there's plenty to criticize as well (the villain's potential is largely untapped, there's a pointless deviation from Spidey's origin story and the use of a tall, sinister Indian bagman as a secondary villain feels pretty dated), but I feel like I'm already running long, and other reviewers and bloggers have covered these aspects better than I can. But I'd definitely recommend it;
*A group of bullies is called a clutch. Look it up.
** This is not an actual thing.
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