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just sort of faded away—he let a few setbacks completely derail him. His excuse was that he couldn’t devote the time to it and still keep up with his responsibilities as Spider-Man.
Oh, come on. Night classes. Part-time work. He’s got the brains, he’s got the contacts—he could do it if he wanted to. He could still go back to it, even now. People expect scientists to be eccentric. Keeping odd hours is entirely within acceptable tolerances, so long as the work gets done. He could do it.
But he doesn’t.
Instead he keeps on working for J. Jonah Jameson and the Daily Bugle even though he knows that Jameson’s an obnoxious cheapskate, and worse. Oh, he’s occasionally made half-hearted efforts to sell his photographs elsewhere, but just as he has with his scientific studies, he gave up far too easily. He’s never tried to study photojournalism, never tried to develop multiple markets for his work the way most freelancers do; instead he just keeps on selling Spider-Man pictures to a man who loathes Spider-Man.
This is clearly self-hatred at work.
As for his love life, he seems to have deliberately sabotaged that for awhile, too. He willfully misunderstood Betty Brant’s concerns, refused to take Liz Allen’s attention seriously, actively avoided meeting Mary Jane for months. Okay, he got Gwen Stacy killed, and that was a genuine piece of horrible misfortune directly related to being Spider-Man, but if anything he was less reluctant with women after that; it certainly wasn’t the start of his romantic failures.
Really, if you look at what he actually does, rather than what he says, it’s clear that Peter Parker is deliberately sabotaging himself in any number of ways. He says it’s all because of Spider-Man, but it doesn’t really look like it. He’s screwing up his own life, and ignoring opportunities to straighten it out.
So why would he ruin his own life?
That’s easy. Why does anyone reject happiness? Guilt.
Peter feels he doesn’t deserve happiness. After all, he let Uncle Ben get murdered, when he could have prevented it. He can’t allow Peter Parker to ever have all the things Uncle Ben wanted for him, if Ben isn’t there to see it. Ben Parker was encouraging him in his plans to study science, so with Ben gone, science is no longer where he’s meant to be. He can’t have the research career that his uncle was guiding him into, because that uncle is gone, and it’s all his fault.
Ben would tease him about girls, and offer him advice, and Ben and May provided his role models of a loving couple, so with Ben gone he can’t have that, either. So he screwed up his love life.
Ben never let him worry about money, even when things were tight, so with Ben gone he’s constantly obsessing about it, even while he’s refusing to find a steady, high-paying job.
Everything Uncle Ben wanted for him, he’s unconsciously rejected. He’s not worthy of it. He’s turned his entire life as Peter Parker into a constant penance.
But on the other hand, there’s one thing he does that’s directly, openly meant to make up for his failure to save his uncle, one step toward making amends, and that’s being Spider-Man. Tracking down criminals, defending the weak and helpless, making the streets of New York a little safer—that’s what he knows he should be doing, so that no other Uncle Bens will die through his failure to act.
And that means that when he’s Spider-Man, the guilt goes away! Because he’s out there doing what he should have done all along. When he’s swinging on a webline, that huge burden is lifted from his shoulders. When he punches a mugger it’s a relief—it’s one more bad guy who won’t kill anyone’s uncle, who won’t threaten Aunt May or Mary Jane. He’s making it right with Uncle Ben.
Of course he feels good when he’s Spider-Man! It’s the only time he’s out from under that crushing weight of guilt. He makes jokes as he fights villains not to disconcert them, but because he is feeling no pain. He feels good. How can he be grim when he knows he’s doing the right thing?
When he’s Spider-Man he’s the fun-loving, happy-go-lucky guy that Uncle Ben wanted him to be.
When he’s Peter Parker he’s the loser who let Uncle Ben die, and who has been suffering for it ever since.
It’s the guilt that makes the difference. Bruce Wayne knows it wasn’t his fault that Thomas and Martha Wayne were murdered; he’s fighting crime not out of guilt, but out of a determination not to see other innocents suffer as he did. It’s obsessive altruism. He’s turned his whole life into a battle against the external evil that destroyed his happy life.
For Peter Parker, though, it is guilt. He let Uncle Ben die, and he’s turned his whole life into penance for that personal failure that destroyed his happy life—and he’s making absolutely sure that he never gets that happy life back. It’s all neurotic compensation for that one careless moment when he let a criminal go free.
Oh, there are times he slips up and enjoys life even when he’s not swinging around New York in his tights. Aunt May and Mary Jane have worked hard to cheer him up, and sometimes it even works for awhile—or at least, he pretends it does, so as not to upset them. But he hasn’t continued his education. He hasn’t looked for work in the sciences. He hasn’t told J. Jonah Jameson to get stuffed, even though he knows perfectly well that Jameson is guilty of attempted murder and other crimes.
(Yes, Jameson has tried to kill Spider-Man, and that’s attempted murder. He’s let his newspaper be used in various possibly-criminal conspiracies. Mr. Jameson, however well-intentioned he may think himself, is not a nice man—and Peter knows it, but continues to work for him.)
Ordinarily, someone as guilt-ridden and self-destructive as Peter might well have wound up dead, in prison, or in therapy by now, or might have simply gotten over it. Mourning is all very well, survivor guilt is a powerful thing, but there comes a time when one should move on, if at all possible.
Peter Parker hasn’t let himself move on. He hasn’t dared serious therapy for fear of revealing his secret identity and endangering those he loves.
Instead, he goes out to play in his tights.
Being Spider-Man has become his escape from guilt, but it’s also how he can keep feeling guilty, and not move on. It gives him a way out when his life becomes unbearable, a way to avoid breaking under the strain. It gives him something other than himself that he can blame for his failures—it’s all because he has to be Spider-Man, so he doesn’t have time to improve his life. The world needs Spider-Man. He can’t attend night school or get an online degree because he has to go fight Doctor Octopus or the Kingpin, and there just isn’t time to do both.
So he tells himself.
But what it really is, is that he can’t let go. Spider-Man is, in a very real sense, all he has left of Uncle Ben. Aunt May has moved on, and Peter could—but deep down, he doesn’t want to.
Because being Spider-Man is fun.
And if he lets go of the guilt, if he admits to himself that his life is a mess and maybe Spider-Man should have a slightly lower priority, if he acknowledges that he’s done what he could to make up for letting Uncle Ben die—in short, if he grows up—then he’ll be letting Uncle Ben go, and he’ll be losing his excuse for spending so much of his time out there reveling in the sheer physical delight of swinging on his web, dodging danger, and punching out thugs.
If he admits that he’s being Spider-Man for fun, rather than out of duty, then he can’t justify letting it ruin his life. The whole emotional structure he’s built up for so long will collapse.
He’s not ready to face that. And with the system so wonderfully balanced, so perfectly self-sustaining, he probably never will be.
For which all those New Yorkers whose purses might be snatched, who might be accosted in dark alleys, who might be injured or killed in the collateral damage of some super-villain’s attacks, can be very, very grateful.
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