Marvel's Zombie Cinema

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]In early May 2026, Joe Russo killed the Marvel Cinematic Universe. No, wait, that's not quite right. Let me try again.

[00:00:13]In a recent interview with website CBR, Joe Russo, one of the two directors behind Captains America: Winter Soldier and Civil War, as well as Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, that is one of the creatives responsible for introducing the Spider-Man of the MCU, made the rather startling claim that this Peter Parker was in no way involved with the death of his uncle Ben, at least as they see it. Why is that significant? Well, I'll keep this short because you all know this already, but the preventable death of Uncle Ben was traditionally the thing that kickstarted Spider-Man's real heroic career. Peter could have stopped it, but chose not to, albeit unknowingly. And this episode cemented in the young hero the importance of the mantra that closes out Amazing Fantasy issue 15. With great power, there must also come great responsibility.

[00:01:04]He blames himself, not altogether fairly, but not altogether unfairly. And from that blame comes a cleareyed appreciation of the stakes of his choices.

[00:01:15]At its simplest, a retcon, that is a retroactive continuity adjustment, is a claim about the past. And the first way to talk about a retcon is to focus in on the continuity part to interrogate whatever claim is being made about the past and see how well it holds up. The attribution of that great power line to Uncle Ben is a retcon, for instance.

[00:01:38]First spoken by the narrator, Spider-Man's writers over the following decades realized it had to come from somewhere in universe for Spidey to be consciously aware of it, and that attributing it to Ben added weight and thematic depth, expanding Spider-Man's origin without contradicting it. Or refocusing on our headline retcon, we can fairly easily critique Joe Russo's reasoning. I quote, "What I related to with Spider-Man was this idea of a kid with incredible responsibility, right?

[00:02:07]And I think you could manifest that responsibility through accidental death, right? And feeling the pressure and the sense of loss in your life in a way that would keep the spirit that we wanted. If Peter blamed himself for his uncle Ben's death, I think he becomes a very different character. That would have been a different interpretation of the character, a more intense interpretation of the character. Now, the point here isn't simply the one many have made. To quote a Gizmodo article on this topic, describing Peter having a role in Ben's death as just a different interpretation is insane, given that it's arguably the interpretation of the character. No, the point is a more straightforward one.

[00:02:44]This is Civil War's interpretation of Peter, too.

[00:02:48]>> When you can do the things that I can, but you don't, and then the bad things happen, they happen because of you.

[00:02:54]>> Now, this is barely anything. It doesn't tell us how Ben died, when Ben died, why Ben died. It may very well be that Peter didn't have anything to do with it, even indirectly. But the one thing this line does tell us is that Peter thinks he did, Peter blames himself. And given that this line paraphrases the classic great power, great responsibility spiel, it is the film's implication that this Spider-Man's origin played out in a roughly standard way. Sure, we don't flash back to MCU Uncle Ben saying it to Peter, but the audience understands that we're not omitting the saying of the line because it didn't happen or because Peter doesn't understand it, but because we're in a Captain America film and it's 2016 and we only saw it 4 years ago and also 9 years ago and also 14 years ago.

[00:03:41]Skipping the origin, even for a character as well known as this, is always problematic. Partially because origin stories often have the juice, and you're leaving a lot of a character on the table, maybe even the biggest part by jumping ahead, and partially because even if the audience does have an awareness of some broader Spider-Man story with which to fill in the blanks, where is he in it? That's what this line does. You may well say, who are you to argue with the guy who made the film Pillar of Garbage? And that's a fair question. But Jeruso directed the film.

[00:04:17]He didn't write it. So now he just needs to watch it and we'll be on an even playing ground. But I don't want to get too caught up in this retcon itself.

[00:04:25]Because this is not the first time we've been confronted with the idea that Civil War era Spider-Man hadn't really had his origin. Wasn't yet Spider-Man.

[00:04:35]No. In making this claim, Russo is following the lead of 2021's Spider-Man: No Way Home, which functioned less as a conclusion to the so-called Home trilogy and more as a sort of reboot for MCU Peter Parker, enacting a phase shifted version of the sort of thing the Civil War viewer presumed we were skipping for time. In part, I think No Way Home serves as an admission of the flaws of that origin story skipping trend, an attempt to recapture some of that passed over juice. No Way Home thrilled a lot of people at the time, but in the years since, its high esteem has waned. Today, even the film's defenders would concede that the film is more thrilling than it is satisfying. And there is a sense in which this particular hedging captures that distinction. You know, should we have the cake or should we eat it? Let's do one and then 5 years later the other two imply an origin and then stage one.

[00:05:31]That is regardless of the way this might delegitimize the hours of Spider Manning we'd seen before this point.

[00:05:39]Or no, because it's not just an origin, is it?

[00:05:54]This weirdness in No Way Home, the way it seems torn between ending its trilogy and performing a belated origin ritual, I discussed in a video a few years ago.

[00:06:04]Don't watch it. I wasn't good at video essays yet. It kind of sucks. One part that didn't, though, was the link I drew between No Way Home and an article I'd read on Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Interpolation by the Force by Simon Orana in the online journal Nano. Bit of a scary title, I know, but the part of it I want to gloss here is pretty straightforward. In the overt A New Hopiness of that film, that would be New Beginning, the film resembles not so much an actual original movie as an extended commercial for the Star Wars franchise itself. That is, the infamous way Abram's film retreads episode 4 practically beat forbeat was the point.

[00:06:46]As Orana puts it, the film essentially recreates a new hope. allowing a new generation of fans to experience the franchise aresh. In this view, episode 7's peculiar balance between new and old emerges not as a failure on Abram's part, but a success on Lucas Films. The film functions primarily not as work, as movie, but as marketing. It is a point of access for younger generations to literally buy into an experience, a heavily merchandised nostalgia that had only been available to experience vicariously before this point. Go see episode 7 and it's as if you'd been there for that magical monocultural moment in the summer of 1977.

[00:07:32]All this obviously applies just as well to Spider-Man: No Way Home. The film serves not just as an exercise in lucrative nostalgia for older viewers, but as an asif, an ursat's nostalgia for their younger counterparts, too. It's a device to have this next generation buy into Sony's flagship super franchise and its inevitable re-entry into the Marvel Studios world. Whatever amount it failed as a movie, The Force Awakens succeeded unambiguously as brand revitalization.

[00:08:03]And so perhaps even consciously, No Way Home echoes not only this broad marketeteering function, but episode 7's specific approach. New protagonists, supposed focal points, jostle with wrinkled returning faces for spotlight and agency. In No Way Home's case, MCU as doppelgangers arguably win out. And all this happens at top a very familiar narrative skeleton. Not just an origin, but the origin. The Force Awakens remakes A New Hope, far more so than No Way Home does Spider-Man 1, but after two films swerving the expected, John Watts' third Spider-Man film emphatically reverts to the mean. Our hero, no longer in Iron Man's shadow, is heranged by J. Jonah Jameson seeks revenge on a murdering Green Goblin, ends sewing his own suit, swinging through Manhattan, and yes, above all, he hears those words, great power, great responsibility, ostensibly for the first time.

[00:09:07]Spider-Man is in his Star Wars sequels era, or rather Marvel is in theirs because the second way to think about a retcon is to think about the retroactive part. Something is being clarified or changed. Sure. But what is worth clarifying or changing? Why? Why now? A reccon is not merely a claim about the past. It is also a claim about the present and perhaps about the future. I was being glib a moment ago. No, maybe Joe Russo didn't write the start of this Spider-Man story, but he did direct it.

[00:09:46]And more than this, he and his brother helmed that film in close collaboration with its writers Christopher Marcus and Steven Mcily. This same team is, of course, behind the upcoming Avengers Doomsday, which looks set to perform a version of this same ritual again. It brings back retired characters, retired actors. And beyond this, it seems intent not merely on doing this nostalgic marketeteering for the Fox X-Men films, too, but doing it a second time. Because what was 2024's Deadpool and Wolverine, if not precisely this, an exercise in performing, legitimizing our nostalgia for us? In some cases, practically manufacturing it outright. This is accomplished throughout the film and indeed beyond it.

[00:10:39]>> These films are many things, certainly not all of them bad, but and more so every year. One of their functions is undoubtedly to work at making pasts knowable, transparent.

[00:10:54]We might even say resurrecting them.

[00:11:03]A leading feature of our ideology of a unitary transnational capitalist world culture is the practice of translation.

[00:11:12]Translation becomes not merely a useful desirable practice but an imperative one. Linguistic barriers are obstacles to the freest exchange of commodities and therefore must be overcome.

[00:11:25]Underpinning the ideology of universalism is the ideology of unlimited business. That's an excerpt from Susan Sag's 1995 essay on being translated.

[00:11:37]Accessibility in art is a fantastic thing, whether it be one's ability to read foreign literature or to engage the culture of the past. It's pop culture even. But there is a difference between being able to watch a new hope Remy Spider-Man and having their modern equivalents act as faximiles.

[00:12:00]Engaging with art is not the same as being sold an experience of it. And within that slippage lies the potential for catastrophe. Lucrative catastrophe but catastrophe nonetheless. on being translated 30 years old though it is saw this clearly. The new cultural populism and its globalizing economic underpinning which insists everything should be available to everyone carries with it the implication that everything should be translated or at least be translatable. Sag writes everything is to be recombined remade ideally in the most portable effortlessly transmissible form.

[00:12:42]Transmissibility is smoothness, immediacy, transparency. As we discussed in February's MCUification video, Marvel and indeed Hollywood at large have been pursuing a cinema of flow of transparency for quite some time.

[00:12:59]Incidentally, this is why the cameo has largely superseded the de facto remake as this nostalgia cinema's weapon of choice. Some of you may recall the vertical/horizontal meaning framework. I suggested in last year's Superman video. Briefly, horizontal meaning arises within a work from the progression of a plot, a character arc, a theme through conflict, and so on, where vertical meaning is brought down from outside a work, illusions, Easter eggs, and so forth.

[00:13:30]The sheer verticality of cameo means there is nothing to hold back its smooth apprehension. Like pulling a fence post out of the soil instead of a tree.

[00:13:41]Meaning becomes frictionless.

[00:13:44]Largely cinema's pursuit of transparency has meant a hollowing out. As philosopher Bjong Chilhan puts it, strictly speaking, the only fully transparent thing is emptiness.

[00:13:57]or as he also puts it elsewhere, only what is dead is transparent. These comments come in his book, capitalism and the death drive, the larger project of which is a simple argument. The living world is being destroyed by dead capital.

[00:14:15]That is, in its fantasy of unending accumulation, in its efforts to push aging and illness and limits out of public view, in its drive to stockpile wealth and weaponry as talismans, warding off death, death haunts capitalism now more than ever. In Han's words, capitalism rests on a negation of death and its striving for life without death creates modern life as the necropolis ruled by a necroilia that turns living beings into lifeless things. Han's examples range from cultural trends like always on grindside culture and anti-aging mania, performance zombies, fitness zombies, and Botox zombies. These are manifestations of undead life. He writes to the economic and political server farms. The places propagating big tech's agenda of total surveillance and total prediction, total transparency, which is to say total negation, total repression, are places of death. Only life that incorporates death is truly alive. And by extension, unknowability, because only the dead remember everything. I mentioned my MCUification video a moment ago. again that surveyed the past few decades and attempted to trace Hollywood's and above all Marvel Studios expression of and subumption into a particular economic logic. But that logic has not remained static. Efforts toward perpetual accumulation, perpetual transparency, toward the smoothing down of our world have only intensified. We might speak now of a terminal capitalism. So, is it really too much to suggest that since these sequels eras began, and particularly since Marvel's sequels era began, since the biggest franchise in the history of cinema caved inward, since obtrusive cameos, self-referentiality, and the reanimation, the transmissibility of the past became the height of its aspirations. We can see in the No Way Homes, the Deadpool and Wolverines, and the Avengers Doomsdays of the world. A trace of that negated, repressed other that we can see the spectre of death reemerging protruding into this world till you're 90.

[00:16:37]>> Is it really too much to suggest that we can begin to speak without exaggeration of a zombie cinema? After all, to paraphrase Han, only cinema that incorporates death, i.e. that permits ending, that permits the unknown is truly alive. The alternative is necrilia.

[00:16:58]Zombie cinema. Then the endless resurrecting of specters, uncanny doppelgangers who in their efforts to make the past fully knowable, end up haunting the present and contaminating, foreclosing the future with a kind of living death. Perhaps paradoxically, the instant legibility, the frictionless verticality of this zombie cinema can make it harder to read, to grasp. In looking through the maximally transparent movie, we struggle to look at it. The Gizmodo article I referenced near this video start makes the point that No Way Home doesn't even do the line properly. May's death is framed as a punishment for Peter trying to do the right thing in trying to help the multiversal villains instead of sending them back to face their grim fates. An undeniably heroic thing rather than it being a result of Peter's own flaws.

[00:17:54]Even this is not the origin. Not really.

[00:17:57]It's a semblance of it distorted invisibly.

[00:18:03]Things may be accelerating. We can no longer bear protraction. the longlasting, the quiet, Han writes later in capitalism and the death drive. We no longer have the patience for a long, slow narrative that spreads out through endless connections and vicissitudes.

[00:18:19]And increasingly, it seems Hollywood doesn't have the patience to provide it either. Disney made headlines mere weeks before Spider-Man retcon gate for more straightforwardly ominous reasons. Huge companywide layoffs that cut deep into Marvel. I talked about those and the very direct way they tie into the things we've discussed here in a supporter exclusive video last month. I'll link it in the description in case you want to watch it. Something that came up was the overblown but not entirely unfounded suggestion that Disney plan to make up for their laidoff concept artists through the use of AI tools. Tools per force fattened up on trained to spit out at Infinitum the work of those fired.

[00:19:02]What could be more fitting than zombie labor for zombie cinema?

[00:19:12]I don't think Jer Russo killed the MCU because of something he said about Spider-Man in a movie 10 years old. I have been accused of reading too far into things like this before, and that's fair. So, let me try again. In early May 2026, Joe Russo didn't kill the MCU. He did one better. He scratched through its suit, revealing carryion in place of skin. He showed us it's been dead for quite some time.

[00:19:44]Thank you for watching. I know it's been a minute since I posted, but uh you can watch my next video right now early and adree over on Patreon. It's like half an hour long. It's called Delete All Landlords. I get my gams out in it. Uh, you can also see a teaser for the video afterward, which is kind of about what non-zomified superhero stories might look like. This year, I've really tried to challenge myself as a creator, which means cooler videos, but also less regular ones. And if you end up enjoying any of the stuff that's coming out as a result, the best way to help me keep making them is signing up with a membership on YouTube or Patreon. But, uh, do it via a web browser, not on iOS.

[00:20:20]Apple takes a huge cut of the money for no reason. Big thanks to every Spider-Man ever for giving me some thoughts on this script. And of course to all my current supporters, especially Birding Baddy, Kanan, Daniel Goldton, Deathstroke HQ, Harry Price, Quang Hu Leu, Nothing's something something capitalism bad, Steven Van Doran, Thomas R, and Weirdy Beardy.

[00:21:02]Hallelujah.