Marvel's Spider-Man: The City That Never Sleeps

The nineteenth century gave us a strange new figure: the flâneur, the man who walked the city not to get anywhere but to read it — who treated the boulevards as an interior, the crowd as a narcotic, the shop window as a text. He was, we were told, the priest of the genius loci, the spirit of place. It took the twenty-first century to give him a grappling web and a physics engine.

Because that is what Insomniac's Spider-Man is, at the level of pure activity: a flâneur accelerated past the point of walking, past the point of looking, into a state where the city becomes something you feel through your thumbs. The City That Never Sleeps, the three-part expansion released across the fall and winter of 2018, understands this better than the base game had to. Stripped of the main campaign's operatic stakes, the DLC is essentially a return visit — you come back, three months later, to a New York you already saved, and the pleasure on offer is not novelty but reacquaintance. You swing through the Financial District the way one revisits a neighborhood after years away. This is the flâneur's real vocation: not discovery but recognition, the shock of the familiar made strange. The old arcades of Paris were interiors pretending to be streets; the digital Manhattan is a street pretending to be an interior, a city you inhabit alone, in your living room, where every pedestrian exists to be passed.

And here the older question about mechanical reproduction becomes unavoidable. What withers, famously, when a work of art is reproduced is its aura — its here and now, its embeddedness in a particular time and place. But what happens when the thing being reproduced is a place? Insomniac's New York is a masterpiece of reproduction without an original: the island has had its head lopped off somewhere around 132nd Street, the geography is compressed to roughly a quarter of the real thing, and the skyline is a patchwork of the licensed, the invented, and the quietly negotiated — an Avengers headquarters dropped in a few blocks from the U.N., a fictional prison anchored in the East River. The city does not reproduce New York so much as reproduce its aura — the golden-hour light on the water towers, the steam off the grates, the sense that something is always happening one block over — while amputating everything that gave that aura its historical weight. The result is uncanny: a city with atmosphere but no memory, presence without provenance. And the seams show in the most literal way imaginable. The Chrysler Building stands in the 2018 game and then simply vanishes from the sequels, because its design changed hands and the rights couldn't be settled — a landmark evicted from its own skyline by copyright. There is no purer illustration of what happens to the here-and-now of a place when the place becomes a licensable asset: the aura doesn't fade, it lapses.

What fills the vacuum, of course, is the commodity. The open-world city has become our era's true phantasmagoria — the dream-house where capital displays itself as enchantment — and The City That Never Sleeps is unusually candid about it. The map blooms with icons; the icons yield activities; the activities yield suits, unlocked one district-sweep at a time. The player becomes a collector, and collecting, as the great critics of the last century understood, is never innocent: the collector wrenches objects out of their functional context and arranges them into a private cosmos, a dream of completeness. The expansion literalizes this in its side content, which sends you hunting across the boroughs for stolen artworks that a retired master-thief — Black Cat's father — squirreled away in hiding spots around the city, a dead man's collection reassembled by your compulsion. And its central figure is a thief too, though a more disenchanted one than nostalgia would like. Felicia Hardy does not steal for the arrangement; she steals for the money, and specifically for the drives that hold the Maggia's entire pooled fortune. Her first act on screen is to snap a museum painting in two to get at a data drive hidden in the frame — the artwork revealed, with almost programmatic bluntness, to have been packaging for capital all along. She hands the mob a set of fakes, keeps the originals, and plans to vanish into the wealth. She is the expansion's mirror: the game trains your acquisitiveness while giving you a professional acquirer to watch.

And the expansion's own commercial form belongs to the same dreamworld. The City That Never Sleeps arrived in three monthly chapters, ten dollars apiece, or twenty-five for the bundle — and the bundle could be bought before a single chapter existed, purchased on faith as a line item in a deluxe edition. This is the artwork in the age of speculative reproduction: the city sold not as a finished thing but as a promissory note, a rectangle in a store menu redeemed on a release calendar. The title is more honest than it means to be. The city never sleeps because the storefront never closes, and you can pay to enter rooms that haven't been built yet.

Yet the expansion's most interesting material is its historical unconscious, and it surfaces in its villain. Hammerhead is a gangster whose ambition is nakedly reactionary: he wants the old power of the mob — the fear it once commanded, the deference it extracted from a police force he feels has stopped respecting it — restored to a criminal order the modern city has left behind. But he pursues this backward-facing dream by welding himself, at increasing cost to his own body, into stolen experimental military hardware, until the man who longs for the underworld's lost dignity is walking around inside a prototype exosuit and, finally, remade as a cyborg. This is a genuinely sharp image, whether or not the writers would put it that way: the reactionary program always arrives armed with the newest technology. The mythic past is never actually restored — Hammerhead spends the story kidnapping the very Dons whose world he claims to revere and trying to execute them on live television — it is manufactured, at industrial scale, and pointed at the present. We have been warned before about what it looks like when a movement dreams of a golden age and acquires the machinery to enforce it. Hammerhead is that warning in pulp form: nostalgia in an exosuit, the longing for an older domination that can only express itself through the most advanced instruments of the new one.

And then there is Yuri Watanabe, the police captain whose collapse across the middle chapter is the expansion's true subject and its bravest gamble. Yuri begins as the genre's most comfortable fixture — the good cop, the ally on the radio — and ends as something the genre can barely metabolize: an officer who, after watching her task force slaughtered in an ambush and the institutions of law fail catastrophically, steps outside them and starts killing. The game renders her descent in the allegorical mode, all shadow and voice cracking over comms, and Spider-Man answers with the only vocabulary he has: this isn't you, there are lines, the system has to mean something. But the story has spent its hours showing a system that manifestly doesn't work — a city where the police are outgunned, the prisons revolve, and order is upheld by an unaccountable man in a mask. Yuri follows the game's own logic one step further than its hero will, and the writing cannot quite refute her. It does, however, flinch. Rather than let her be the pure product of a broken order, the script gives her a private motive — a third-generation cop whose father was jailed for taking Hammerhead's bribes, a woman who has spent her whole career chasing this one man — so that a structural indictment can be quietly reassigned to a family vendetta. That flinch is itself the dialectical image: the superhero form generates the question of violence and legitimacy compulsively, and then, at the decisive moment, converts it into something personal enough to be survivable. Here the expansion becomes a ruin in the productive sense, a structure whose cracks reveal more than its façade. Beneath the swing physics lies an argument the genre must keep having and can never settle, because settling it would end the genre.

This is why The City That Never Sleeps rewards the kind of attention it was never designed to receive. Games are consumed in distraction — not an insult; distraction is a mode of reception with its own competencies, and the player absorbing a city's rhythms through habit and muscle memory is doing real perceptual work. Each chapter is short, two hours or so of story, and much of the connective tissue is admittedly the same handful of Maggia hideouts and staged crimes recurring across the districts. But every so often the dream-city flickers. You clear the same fortified warehouse for the fifth time; you notice the skyline is missing a tower it used to have; you hear Yuri ask a question the hero cannot answer. In those moments the phantasmagoria becomes legible as phantasmagoria, and the game briefly shows you what it is: a leased reproduction of a city with no history, in which we rehearse, over and over, the fantasy that one good person with enough power can hold everything together. The flash of recognition doesn't ruin the pleasure. It completes it. The flâneur was always half in love with the dream and half awake inside it — and at terminal velocity, over a Manhattan made of light, that turns out to be exactly the right speed for thinking.