Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered

The Sublime Object of Web-Swinging: On Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered

Let us begin with the scandal, because the scandal is never where we think it is. When Insomniac released the Remastered edition of Marvel's Spider-Man in 2020, the outrage was not about the game's politics, its labor conditions, or its function as a sixty-dollar advertisement for a surveillance apparatus. No — the outrage was about a face. Peter Parker's facial model was replaced, one perfectly pleasant white man swapped for another, slightly younger perfectly pleasant white man, and the internet convulsed as if someone had desecrated a church. Here we should be absolutely precise, in the good old Lacanian way: the fans were right to be upset, but for the wrong reasons. What disturbed them was the traumatic revelation that the face was always arbitrary — that beneath the mask there is not an authentic subject but simply another mask, a commercial asset, swappable, licensable, remasterable. The Spider-Man mythos has always insisted that "anyone can wear the mask." The Remaster took this democratic sentiment literally and everyone hated it. This is ideology in its purest form: we can accept the universalist message only so long as nobody actually enacts it.

And what is a "Remaster," after all? It is the commodity form achieving self-consciousness. You are sold the same object again — the same New York, the same missions, the same quips — but with ray-traced reflections, so that when Spider-Man swings past a skyscraper, you can now see the commodity reflecting itself back at itself, infinitely. The genius of late capitalism is not that it sells us new things; it is that it sells us the same thing as new, and we know this, and we buy it anyway. Je sais bien, mais quand même — I know very well that this is the identical game I played in 2018, but nevertheless, look how the sunlight hits the Chrysler Building now. The disavowal is not a bug. The disavowal is the product.

But let us get to the real heart of the matter, which — as always — is located not in the story the game tells but in the mechanics through which it tells you nothing at all. Early in the game, Spider-Man must activate a network of surveillance towers across Manhattan, towers built by Oscorp for the police. When you activate them, the map unfolds, collectibles bloom across the city, and the game rewards you with the little dopamine chime of territory revealed. Notice what has happened here: the expansion of a police surveillance network is experienced by the player as liberation. Not depicted as liberation — experienced as it, in the fingers, in the loop of unlock and reward. The game does not need to argue that surveillance is freedom; it makes surveillance feel like freedom, which is infinitely more effective. When critics in 2018 joked about "Spider-Cop" — the game even winks at this, with Peter doing a gravelly noir-cop voice as a running gag — they were performing the classic gesture of cynical distance. And here is the crucial point: cynical distance is not resistance to ideology; it is ideology's preferred mode of operation. The game jokes about Spider-Cop precisely so that you can keep being Spider-Cop with a clean conscience. The irony is the alibi. You laugh, and you activate the next tower.

Then there is the matter of F.E.A.S.T., the homeless shelter where Aunt May volunteers, run by the saintly philanthropist Martin Li — who is, of course, secretly the supervillain Mister Negative. Everyone treats this as a plot twist. I want to insist that it is not a twist at all but a rigorous structural diagnosis, whether the game intends it or not. The philanthropist and the terrorist are the same person: this is not a metaphor, it is simply an accurate description of how philanthrocapitalism functions. It is the chocolate-laxative logic — the thing that causes the disease sold to you as the cure. And Norman Osborn perfects the formula at the civic scale, for he occupies both poles of the circuit at once: he is the mayor of New York and the industrialist whose corporation engineered the bioweapon that plagues the city — and then, wearing his mayoral hat, he hires Sable International, a private mercenary army, to occupy the streets and contain the catastrophe his corporate hat produced. Follow the chain of villains back far enough and you keep arriving at the same address: Martin Li's powers are the residue of Oscorp's experiments on him; Doctor Octopus, who unleashes the escaped convicts of the Raft as his Sinister Six, is Osborn's betrayed former partner, radicalized by their shared corporate history. The disease and the cure, the villain and the philanthropist, the crisis and the emergency powers — one man, two hats, zero contradiction, at least officially. The city's savior-complex hero then swings through the streets repairing, case by case, catastrophes whose genealogy converges on City Hall. Spider-Man is, in this sense, the ideal subject of the system: infinitely responsive to symptoms, structurally forbidden from addressing the cause. He can punch the monsters forever. He cannot punch the arrangement that keeps producing them. With great power comes, apparently, very selective responsibility.

And yet — and this is where we must be honest, because the worst critique is the lazy one — the game contains one genuine encounter with the Real, and it is devastating. At the climax, Peter holds the only dose of the antiserum and must choose: cure Aunt May, the woman who raised him, or preserve the dose to synthesize a cure for the dying city. He chooses the city. He removes his mask, she tells him she always knew, and he watches her die. For one moment, the fantasy structure collapses. The superhero fantasy is precisely the fantasy that you never have to choose — that with enough effort, enough swinging, enough last-second heroics, the tragic dimension of ethics can be suspended. Here the game says: no. The ethical act, in the strict sense, is the one that costs you the very thing that made you a subject. It is the closest a hundred-million-dollar corporate product has come to genuine tragedy, and it earns its grief honestly.

But watch what happens next — watch how quickly the wound is sutured. The credits roll into a stinger teasing Miles Morales, the sequel, the franchise, the next purchase. Grief becomes a pre-order. The traumatic choice, the one moment the game touched something irreducible, is immediately converted into narrative capital for the expanded universe. This is the fundamental operation of the culture industry today: it no longer censors the traumatic; it monetizes it. You are permitted your encounter with loss, provided the loss deepens your investment in the platform.

So why do we play? Here is my final, perhaps scandalous, claim: the story was never the point, and the game knows it. The point is the swinging — that impossibly fluid, physics-defying arc through the canyons of Manhattan, universally described by players in the vocabulary of pure pleasure. The web-swing is the objet petit a of the entire enterprise, the surplus enjoyment that no narrative could justify and no critique can dissolve. And this enjoyment is not innocent leisure; it is a duty. The contemporary superego does not say "Obey!" — it says "Enjoy!" The game commands you to feel wonderful, and it delivers, and in the frictionless glide over a New York with crime but no rent, trauma but no politics, homelessness but no economy, you enjoy on ideology's behalf. The city swings by beneath you, gorgeous and ray-traced and utterly empty of antagonism, and you think: I know very well what this is. But nevertheless. One more tower. One more swing. And so on, and so on.