Thoughts on Spider-Noir

Written by thehouseofvines

If you’re like me you loathe the endless slurry of formulaic comic book adaptations churned out by the Hollywood machine over the last few years. And I say this as someone who has been off and on a comic book enthusiast since the early 1980s. Some of my fondest memories are of sitting in the park, reading older comics I picked up for a quarter a pop, enjoying the smell of the paper, and ink, and age almost as much as the plot-lines themselves. Almost, as this was the great age of comics storytelling and art. I started writing and illustrating my own comics when I was nine or ten, inspired by the masterful way certain stories and characters were handled. I doubt I’d feel the same way had I been reading contemporary comics as opposed to stuff produced in the 70s and 80s.

I couldn’t figure out how to play the B&W version, but that didn’t matter. The colored version was really well done, showing the vibrancy and almost garish use of color during the interwar years, which almost never comes across on film. And it does a really good job of presenting the casual racism of the time by showing things like the segregated Armed Forces or how performers had to go in through the service entrance rather than the front door, without beating you over the head with it. And the obligatory gender- and race-swapping doesn’t take you out of the story the way that the continuation of the Tolkein mythos or Nolan’s upcoming Odyssey most certainly will.

In addition to the masterful casting of Nicolas Cage as Ben Reily/the Spider some of my favorite characters are his spunky Girl Friday, the intrepid reporter Robbie Robertson, and this world’s Felicia Hardy who is played by Chinese actress Li Jun Li. Although only one of those is cast consistent with their comic iteration the performances are so good you simply don’t care. They also do a superb job explaining how the villains (and possibly the Spider too) acquired their powers through experiments conducted on POWs by German scientists rather than random accidents as in the mainstream comic universe, which lends an air of tragedy to these characters lacking in the originals. (Hollywood could learn a lot from watching this series.) The city is almost a character itself, with grimy run-down tenements contrasting with the giant towers and opulence of the wealthy who seek to remake the city in their image, even if they have to resort to illegal tactics to do so. There are no clear-cut good or evil characters, with everyone painted in shades of grey. The good guys resort to criminal activities to get the job done, and the bad guys are visionaries trying to improve the general state of things after years of neglect and corruption and pointless laws like prohibition. This is best exemplified by Cage’s character who in the pursuit of truth and justice for his clients resorts to some pretty nasty tricks and even nastier underworld informants to get the job done. And that’s just his day job. He’s even worse when necessity requires him to don the Spider costume again after the death of his wife had forced him into a five-year hiatus. And many of the criminals are victims of what happened to them whilst serving their country during the Great War, and the indifference of their government and society upon returning home.

I’m only about half-way through the show, so my opinion may change as we approach the end of the season, but I doubt it. Another thing that I appreciated is that they dropped all the episodes at once, rather than forcing you to wait week by week for new additions, which I hate. Why are we paying so much for these streaming services if they are going to act like conventional cable television, only worse? If I want to binge an entire season over a weekend I damn well ought to be able to.

There are a couple more things I could nit-pick as a comics and film nerd, but the amount of stuff the show gets right dwarfs those minor criticisms and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Cage’s performance alone is worth the price of admission (a subscription to Amazon Prime) and each episode just gets better and better. I don’t normally recommend media unless it has something to do with polytheism generally or the Starry traditions specifically, but Spider-Noir is a notable exception. If you haven’t already, give it a shot.

16 thoughts on “Thoughts on Spider-Noir”

    1. Normally I wouldn’t (even with Nicolas Cage in it) because I dislike super hero movies so much, but one of my former spiritual allies often appeared as a spider, and since I still have a soft spot for all things associated with her, and since she used the comic on more than one occasion to communicate with me, I watched it as much for nostalgia as anything else.

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      1. Fair enough. Interesting about spiders.

        I’m not sure i have a particular spirit animal. I have a fondness for many kinds of animals but truly appreciate seeing birds.

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        1. She was/is different than a spirit animal. For instance she could appear as a spider, a scorpion, a hanged woman, a dancing woman, or Saint Paul. I’m sure she has other forms too, but that’s how she came to me.

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          1. Saint Paul. You’ve said. That’s interesting.

            I think of Arachne’s tale. I think too of Saul’s personal role, according to Tradition, in moving the Greeks away from the Gods.

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            1. Tarantism is one of the strains that makes up the Starry Bull tradition. It was part of the phenomenon of “dancing madness” that swept through Europe roughly from the 12th to 16th centuries. Depending on the locale it could be associated with any number of different Saints. Usually it occurred in places that had had a strong Bacchic presence before Christianization. Some scholars argue for continuity (especially since there’s overlap in the symbols and practices) others that it was a completely distinct movement, a response to the societal pressures felt in those places. It often had a strong element of contagious madness about it, spreading from a single individual to affecting all the youths in a given community, and sometimes older people as well. The Saints that became associated with it could either cause the dancing madness or cure it (or both.) We find it most commonly in Italy, Spain and Germany, though there are other countries that have something similar though without the association with the bite of a spider or sting of a scorpion. If the cure (which usually involved setting up basins of water, scattering greenery all over the room, hanging a rope for the victim to swing from, and providing a band who would perform for days until the dancing had expelled the influence of the taranta) was not successful one option that remained was for the victim to ritually marry the Saint. (The commonest Saints associated with the phenomenon were Peter, Paul, Rocco and John the Baptist, though other regions had other Saints.) By the 1950s authentic Tarantism had pretty much died out in Italy due to a decline of belief in Catholicism, access to psychiatric treatment, and pesticides which largely killed off the spiders traditionally held to be responsible for the bite. At that point it morphed into folklore, and tarantellas were performed at weddings (like in Godfather), on feast days, and music festivals intended to draw in tourists and their money to impoverished regions of the country.

              [I believe we’ve discussed this before, but I’ve had a bunch of new folks follow me recently, and since I haven’t written on the subject in a while I figured it wouldn’t hurt to do a brief recap.]

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            1. It was very painful, but I could see the necessity in what she asked. She still has her place in the Bacchic pantheon and oversees a whole strain of the Starry Bull tradition. It’ll be my job to introduce any new members to her, should they be so called.

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  2. I really enjoyed it and I hate spider man movies and LOATHE noir (pacing issues for me). This was so well done with remarkable attention to historical detail and Nicholas Cage was fantastic in it– the only act that I could think of with the kinetic skill to play this would have been the late John Ritter but I don’t think he would have made a good spiderman. This casting was perfect. So now, I can say there IS a spider man movies (or in this case series) I like!

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    1. Yeahhh … I can’t really see John Ritter as a Spider Man, even one from an alternate reality, like in this series. He had the physicality, charisma, and comedic timing to play a superhero, but I’m just not sure which. Maybe Deathlok, Chameleon, Morph, or Vulture. (I don’t know if there are more modern characters he’d be better suited to play, as I haven’t kept up with comics.)

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  3. I myself just finished a brief ( 11 episodes ) slice-of-life anime series called “Bartender”. It features a young bartender named Ryu Sasakura the proprietor of an out of the way western style bar known as Eden Hall in the Ginza district of Tokyo. He is known as Kami no Garasu or The Glass of the Gods ( can’t get more Dionysian than that! ) due to his ability to know the exact drink a customer needs at that particular moment in their lives.
    It’s simple, relaxing, viewing and I definitely recommend it. Available on Prime Video.

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