Couples Therapy and ‘Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’
Spider-Man has been my favorite superhero character for as long as I can remember. Even as the endless torrent of movies have stultified me from paying attention to things like the ostensible Marvel cinematic universe, Spider-Man has retained a core place in my heart. However, when 2018’s Marvel’s Spider-Man released, I was skeptical – so I rented the game for a weekend, intending to hit credits and never touch it again. I was wrong, thankfully, and I ended up crying my eyes out at its story – as well as its sequel, Miles Morales. While I was a little burned out on the Insomniac formula by the end of Miles’ short runtime, I still couldn’t resist the hype for this year’s release, Spider-Man 2.
Rather than gush about the way in which Spider-Man 2 evolves mechanics importantly and successfully, especially in terms of how both the 2018 game’s DLC as well as Miles felt stale by the end, I want to focus on a pivotal late-game story moment that occurs between two characters. And even though Venom, my favorite of the Spider-Man villains, makes a core appearance in Spider-Man 2, and though the game successfully feels far more “fun” than its predecessors, I was moved by something I didn’t expect: the collision of Peter Parker’s romantic relationship and the alien symbiotes controlling Harry Osborne.
A Symbiotic Relationship
Towards the latter half of Spider-Man 2’s story, Harry Osborne has become fully corrupted by the alien symbiote and the Venom personality has manifested. New York City is resultantly covered in symbiote tendrils and gnarled structures wrapping themselves throughout skyscrapers and tunnels. Citizens are being taken over by symbiotes and attacking others in order to convert them to the Venom hivemind. And in the midst of all of this, Harry Osborne, Peter Parker’s best friend, makes an unwelcome surprise visit to Mary Jane (MJ) Watson, Peter’s romantic partner.
Peter’s last point of contact with Mary Jane is a video call where she has just received praise and recognition as a writer at the Daily Bugle, a job she hates. In this otherwise celebratory call, they are interrupted by a knock at the front door, and Peter sees Harry’s symbiote tendrils approach and wrap themselves around her. As the call goes black and MJ doesn’t answer his attempts to reach her, the story becomes a race against time to prevent Harry from harming her. As Peter finally arrives at the house, Harry is not fully ensconced in the Venom persona that I was fearing as a player. Rather, he is clearly on edge and not fully himself, but he appears in his normal human form without a suit. Soon, however, the situation goes sideways and results in a fully fleshed Venom corrupting MJ with a symbiote suit that takes her over completely.
Though Spider-Man is my favorite superhero, I can’t claim to have fully comprehensive lore on all the iterations that the comics and other peripheral materials have established about symbiotes. But for some reason, when Venom infects MJ with the symbiote, I was surprised. She doesn’t react in the same mindless manner as your everyday New Yorker – your garden variety symbiotes that become rote enemies in the late game. MJ’s infection comes with a distinct character design to her suit, including some ridiculous “hair” that serves as a whip in combat, and whose health bar identifies her as Scream instead of MJ.
With the personality Scream taking over, the symbiote has an amplified effect on MJ’s insecurities, worries, and frustrations. These otherwise unexpressed or repressed parts of negativity inside of her burst forth in what becomes a fast-paced boss battle between Peter and Scream. Peter clearly dreads having to confront Scream, knowing that he will have to fight her and potentially hurt her in order to break MJ free of the symbiote’s control and influence.
The Scream Fight
As the fight begins, Pete warns MJ not to listen to the voices that are being produced by the symbiote. While the symbiote promises control, Pete’s experience while wearing it has taught him to fear and respect its power by this point in the story. As Spider-Man pins Scream down during an intermission between health bars, he reminds MJ about the book she wrote to help other people. Scream reacts violently, revealing how this book was pointless because she feels like no one read it or cared about it. MJ’s usual personality breaks free for a brief moment to contradict these feelings, saying that if even one person was helped by her book then it was worth writing it.
Spider-Man seizes on her insecurity about the book, intending to reassure her by saying (in between punches and parries, mind you), “I read it! And it helped me!” But these words of affirmation backfire, and Scream’s personality hurls the reply, ”All I DO is help you,” again revealing an unspoken feeling of resentment within their pre-symbiote relationship. For better or worse, MJ hasn’t been able to say that she feels this way, but the Scream personality gives her that permission, and everything that has been bottled up is now explicitly wielded as aggression.
When you bottle something up within a relationship and let the resentment metastasize, it’s dangerous. And when the first piece of negativity is let out, it’s impossible to put it back in the bottle. Most of the time, people bottle things up because it’s easier to keep the peace in the short term; such a decision tacitly harms the possibility of peace in the long term. So when the bottle finally opens, it explodes, embedding glass shards into everyone involved. We see that happen here in Spider-Man 2 with this Scream fight, as she continues throwing verbal daggers at Peter, “My life is constantly interrupted by you,” by which MJ blames her lack of career fulfillment on the fact that Peter keeps losing jobs and failing to meet bills.
Scream continues, claiming that Spider-Man – or anyone, for that matter – doesn’t need her, that her efforts aren’t recognized or valuable. But Spider-Man insists otherwise, saying that even he needs MJ. And in a second flicker of clarity, the MJ personality breaks free again to echo the sentiment that she needs him too. Until this point in the game, the visual language of the cutscenes have indicated that MJ might be having misgivings about this relationship, despite what 2018’s Spider-Man seemed to conclude. There are even a few scenes where it is framed like Harry and MJ might split off and become a couple themselves, but that’s luckily something the game never explores. Rather, in this Scream scene, we see the first step towards healing a deep emotional wound that Peter had no idea was even aching.
But then, Scream returns, taking back over, accusing Peter of wanting to remain the “stronger” partner within their relationship – almost like the role of Spider-Man within their relationship matters more than either of them as individuals. Peter, in apparent shock and disbelief, responds, “What?! No! You’re stronger than me in so many ways,” reminding MJ that she has been singlehandedly holding their lives together, something that takes immense strength.
Couple’s Therapy
Finally, as the fight concludes, Peter is successfully able to free MJ from her symbiotic suit and the Scream personality disappears. After a moment, they embrace, and MJ confesses that she thinks she’s been feeling “lost” for a while. This symbiote was manifesting the results of months where she was trying to be someone inauthentic, someone she wasn’t. They exchange apologies and ‘I love yous’ before Spider-Man has to zip off to City Hall to assist Miles against the onslaught of symbiotes. But the wound has been disinfected because, however difficult, they cleaned it together. All it took was communication and a willingness to meet the needs of the other person.
Even though Scream has too many health bars for a boss fight, it’s my favorite moment in Spider-Man 2, because I think of this lengthy exchange as a twisted version of couple’s therapy. That is, what happens in this Scream fight is unpleasant and hurtful, but it provides the necessary backdrop for the rifts within this romantic partnership to finally heal. The good faith that Peter brings to the relationship is rekindled, and by the time MJ escapes the suit, she has finally felt the reassurance that she has desperately needed for months. It’s an optimistic view on relationship struggles.
In the ongoing ‘will they, won’t they’ mixed with ‘true love’ tropes that the Peter and MJ relationship always seem to be going through, I simply want them to find a healthy way to support each other. It pains me, the player, to agonizingly talk at the screen, like, “come on, just say what you are feeling so you can both get back on the same page!” But then I realize that this difficulty in communication is reflective of real life, not just a plot device.
What Peter and MJ are struggling with is something that I deeply relate to, which is why I think I was impacted more by the Scream fight than the final boss. In romantic partnerships, you can never fully anticipate the needs of the other person. You can certainly learn to approximate them better, but there’s always the possibility that your understanding of the person and how they are feeling about the relationship aren’t in sync. I see that happening here with MJ and Peter, where Peter has lost sight of MJ’s obvious needs, and MJ has not spoken up for herself as actively as she needs to for the relationship to remain strong. MJ simply needed to say these things to Peter, and he was instantly willing to change to support those needs. Sure, her words wouldn’t have worked when he was wearing what would become the Venom suit, but Peter as a person cares enough to humble himself to grow for her.
I can’t “blame” anyone (apart from the symbiote) for the violent confrontation in this scenario. While it’d be easy to read this relationship as unhealthy or even toxic, I think what makes this scene meaningful is that both partners repeatedly choose to stay when things are difficult, even though it’d be far easier to leave in those moments.
It’s clear that Peter needed a dramatic confrontation with MJ’s feelings in order to truly feel them as real and worth taking seriously. I’ve always grappled with the notion that it’s easy to dismiss and minimize the pain that others experience, but when you are experiencing pain yourself, it’s the most certain and consuming thing in the world. Peter needed to feel her pain to believe it, or at least to change. Though the Scream scene is functionally a series of gut punches, the relationship is better because of the bruises.
There’s another level at which I relate to this scene. Whereas I see a struggle to know how to fully communicate with and support your partner, I also see a deep struggle to balance life with the actual relationship. In a life of chasing leads and fighting crime, when is date night? MJ is ambitious and has to constantly work in order for her efforts to be rewarded with salaried positions that provide her creative autonomy. Peter, on the other hand, struggles to hold down a consistent job because the imperatives of being Spider-Man always take precedence over the chemistry lesson he happens to be substitute teaching. Not only are these two individuals struggling with their own unique life balances, they also have a relationship to nourish. And that extra component is where they both – but especially Peter, let’s be honest – struggle.
As context for my personal connection to this aspect of the struggle going on within the Scream fight, I spent the past few years thinking I was aromantic. To me, this meant living independently without a need or desire for finding a partner. In that time, I developed important elements of my identity like my gender and politics; I also forged beautiful friendships through my creative passions. I didn’t, in other words, feel a lack of love. I knew how to live a life that was tailored to my needs as a person, and that was sufficient. I created, if you’ll forgive the grandiosity of this analogy, my own personal Spider-Man identity.
My Own Experiences with Relationship Difficulties
Enter this year, when despite years of being certain that I was content to be alone, I found myself falling in love. And while I wanted to spend every possible moment with this endearing person, I also keenly felt the tug of absence from the other life I had spent years creating without them. I had struck gold but was running out of room in my suitcase to take it all home. There was thus an inescapable tension between wanting to build a life with someone without compromising or sacrificing the ways in which I was finding fulfillment before, which is where I see my own struggle to reconcile those two lives in these moments between Peter and MJ. Peter is Spider-Man and can’t give that part of himself up, not least of which because the city quite literally needs his protection. Peter also needs the romantic fulfillment that he has found with MJ, the stimulation she brings into his life. She keeps him grounded, despite his tendency to web sling.
So much of Spider-Man 2 confronts this tension between fierce individualism and obligation versus profound love and connection. It feels vacuous to suggest that simply compromising is the solution to this conundrum, because both the person and the relationship need tending. But the concluding scene to this game seems to offer a similar shrug, that Miles will take over the city while Peter finally sets his role as Spider-Man to rest – albeit until the next apocalyptic event. I know my concerns and life roles are nowhere near as contributive to society as Spider-Man’s, yet I feel no less pain at giving them up than Peter does. Spider-Man 2 says that Peter’s role as a partner and as a scientist will be sufficient to bring him meaning, but I am of course skeptical: he’s Spider-Man, and even the dialogue at the end knows that.
I haven’t mastered or resolved these tensions in my own life, but I appreciated seeing them mirrored in Spider-Man 2, especially the Scream scene. It felt therapeutic to be a part of someone else’s couple’s therapy, as though I understand myself and my relationship better now. I need to remember to communicate more actively, like MJ, when I am feeling hurt. I need to remember to seek out ways to support my relationships, rather than waiting like Peter for them to tell me that I am failing to do so. I need to keep working through the struggles of balancing selfishness with selflessness, me as an individual versus me as a partner. Being greater, as the marketing tagline of Spider-Man 2 goes, takes strength and effort – and I don’t have the advantage of being a superhero.
Spider-Man 2 has a lot to offer, but I think the way the game delivers human relationships and emotionally impactful scenes are its greatest triumphs. Each of the Spider-Man games has worn me out by the end, in terms of mechanics. But their stories have also brought me to tears each time, as I contemplate my relationships that look like the ones the protagonists grapple the hardest with: Dr. Otto Octavius, Phin Mason, or in this case, Mary Jane Watson. Insomniac is obviously teasing a third mainline Spider-Man entry, and after how successfully Spider-Man 2 impacted me on this level, I’ll keep the tissues ready.
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