What Spider-Man: Brand New Day tells us about stress management
What happens when Spider-Man starts looking less like a superhero and more like a burned-out corporate worker? Spider-Man: Brand New Day turns Peter Parker’s loneliness, relentless routine and emotional isolation into a sharp meditation on burnout, stress and the late-capitalist crisis of connection.
Unlike Superman, who enjoys a godlike status for being an extra-terrestrial, or Batman who comes from a family with decades of generational wealth and social respectability, Spider-Man has offered millions of admirers across the globe an opportunity of identification at a deeply personal level. Being an orphaned teenager from Queens, New York who lives with Uncle Ben and Aunt May, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) brings to the table all those insecurities and challenges (social, economic, emotional) that can be applied to the personal lives of thousands of young admirers themselves, regardless of the country or times they live in. In the original narrative, Peter constantly balances his superhero activities with his ordinary life as a student, photographer, scientist and eventually a professional. Much like ordinary teenagers, he struggles with school, money, work, love and family while simultaneously also fighting powerful enemies. It is this similarity with ordinary lives that seems to be the main factor behind the tremendous craze and iconic status of arguably Marvel’s most popular superhero.
It is this resonance with ordinary lives that Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the latest instalment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, plays upon. The MCU version of Spider-Man has often been criticized for not having to face enough struggles, as everything was supposedly being handed down to him on a platter by Tony Stark. However, Tony’s death in Avengers: Endgame opened up new possibilities to explore in the Spider-Man lore, and Spider-Man: No Way Home ended with Doctor Strange erasing all memories of Peter Parker from everyone’s minds. Brand New Day thus begins with Peter Parker leading the life of a modernist flaneur, essentially alone in a city of teeming millions. Bereft of camaraderie (lacking any sense of togetherness) relationships and social life, he becomes a faceless entity, a non-person leading the corporate-like routine of vigil, identification, chase and apprehension of one criminal after another.
The identification with corporate life becomes evident early in the film when Detective deWolffe warns him that lack of a social life may eventually lead to his burnout. True to her assumptions, Peter starts experiencing issues with his superpowers and overall physical condition. His problems seem suspiciously similar to the conditions experienced by thousands of corporate workers all across the globe- social isolation, increased anxiety, and constant stress due to the ‘fight-or-flight’ nature of his life as a vigilante superhero. Repeated scenes of Peter engaged in his research inside a poorly lit room populated by gadgets parallel the life of a lonely corporate worker slaving away for hours in front of a desktop.
Eventually, we see him making a deliberate attempt to shed this life of social isolation as he genuinely tries to reach out to the people who previously played an integral part in his life- he buys flowers for MJ ( Zendaya) and a buddy-handshake with Ned manages to strike up his recognition of Peter. He assures Jean Grey (Sadie Sink) that she is not alone, and even manages to strike up a warm relationship with a reclusive loner like The Punisher. The film, therefore, imagines a brand new day when stress can be overcome by abandoning the increasingly lonely lifestyle of the late capitalist era, and opting for community and camaraderie.
