What super­hero movies taught me about journalism

As Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock tells every­one in Ven­om, he is a reporter. A cru­sad­ing jour­nal­ist hold­ing big cor­po­ra­tions to account. Some­one so ded­i­cat­ed to telling the truth, he balks at the idea of broad­cast­ing a puff piece on Charl­ton Drake (Riz Ahmed), a pow­er­ful busi­ness­man who is test­ing alien ​‘sym­biotes’ on San Francisco’s home­less pop­u­la­tion. Smelling a sto­ry, Brock breaks into Drake’s secret lab­o­ra­to­ry and acci­den­tal­ly merges with Ven­om, a sym­biote with a noble bloodlust.

Ruben Fleischer’s film isn’t inter­est­ed in offer­ing a nuanced rep­re­sen­ta­tion of jour­nal­ism. Unlike The Post or Spot­light, Ven­om is nei­ther a rous­ing endorse­ment of the First Amend­ment nor a real­is­tic por­tray­al of what it real­ly means to work for a major news­pa­per. Frankly, watch­ing Brock send out fol­low-up emails and rewrit­ing press releas­es wouldn’t exact­ly make for top block­buster enter­tain­ment. Brock’s pro­fes­sion is sim­ply win­dow dress­ing, a super­fi­cial char­ac­ter trait that ser­vices the plot. It allows the screen­writ­ers to believ­ably estab­lish ten­sion between Brock and the film’s pri­ma­ry antag­o­nist (Ahmed).

Venom’s ver­sion of jour­nal­ism fits snug­gly along­side the oth­er por­tray­als in super­hero movies. Much like in the rom-com – a genre whose depic­tion of jour­nal­ism has led many an aspir­ing writer to believe they’ll soon be able to afford a pent­house apart­ment – the role of a super­hero jour­nal­ist is to give the writ­ers a get-out-of-jail-free card when plot­ting an adven­ture. Sim­i­lar to how Richard Gere’s job as a colum­nist in Run­away Bride cre­ates a flim­sy rea­son for him to meet Julia Roberts, the super­hero jour­nal­ist is often thrust into dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tions because this is what peo­ple have been con­di­tioned to believe the job demand of them.

In 2016’s Bat­man v Super­man: Dawn of Jus­tice, Amy Adams’ Lois Lane inter­views a ter­ror­ist only for it to go wrong just so she can be saved by Super­man. Dur­ing an inter­view with for­mer Spi­der-Man Andrew Garfield, Adams indi­rect­ly summed up the role jour­nal­ism plays in most super­hero movies when she admit­ted she felt she was ​“in ser­vice of the sto­ry instead of the char­ac­ter”. Adams is rack­ing up appear­ances as bad jour­nal­ists, and while that is the point of her self-destruc­tive char­ac­ter in HBO’s Sharp Objects, Lane is at least shown to be a good inves­ti­ga­tor in Man of Steel, track­ing down some­one who doesn’t want to be found and deduc­ing that Clark Kent is Super­man by speak­ing to a man at an IHOP.

Lane’s pro­fes­sion puts her in a vari­ety of sit­u­a­tions from which she invari­ably needs res­cu­ing. In 1980’s Super­man II, she chas­es some ter­ror­ists to the top of the Eif­fel Tow­er only for Super­man (Christo­pher Reeve) to fly in and save her. In Bat­man v Super­man, her inves­ti­ga­tion caus­es Lex Luther (Jesse Eisen­berg) to kid­nap her and drop her from a build­ing to be saved. In the 21^st cen­tu­ry, film­mak­ers have tend­ed to bal­ance out Lane’s need to be con­stant­ly res­cued by giv­ing her mas­cu­line traits. She shoots whiskey – a hall­mark of every hard-boiled hack – and rein­forces the idea that the jour­nal­ists who report hard news must be exemplar’s of virility.

Marin Cogan describes female jour­nal­ists in pop­u­lar cul­ture as ​“slut­ty ambi­tion mon­sters”. In con­trast to real life, female jour­nal­ists can be found sleep­ing with their sources as far back as 1981’s Absence of Mal­ice. Even Lane ends up hav­ing sex with Super­man in a bath­tub or, in Mar­got Kidder’s case, the Fortress of Soli­tude. The com­mon depic­tion of jour­nal­ists like Lane and Brock in a super­hero movies is essen­tial­ly an exten­sion of the cru­sad­ing gumshoe estab­lished in films like 1976’s All the President’s Men.

The worlds super­heroes inhab­it have roots in the pulpy noir sto­ries and seri­als of 1930s. Superman’s cre­ators, Jer­ry Siegel and Joe Shus­ter, were part­ly inspired by ​‘The Front Page’, a play lat­er adapt­ed into the rapid-fire 1940 roman­tic com­e­dy His Girl Fri­day. It’s no coin­ci­dence that Sam Rai­mi pays homage to clas­sic Hol­ly­wood screw­ball come­dies in his Spi­der-Man tril­o­gy, yet he also makes some vital obser­va­tions about the media indus­try via The Dai­ly Bugle.

Cig­ar always in-hand, pub­lish­er J Jon­ah Jame­son (JK Sim­mons) is prof­it dri­ven, hir­ing Peter Park­er (Tobey Maguire) because Spi­der-Man sells papers. The ethics of Peter pub­lish­ing his self­ies as news is a conun­drum that’s nev­er real­ly dealt with, but we wit­ness the arro­gant vul­gar­i­ty of turn-of-the-cen­tu­ry jour­nal­ism in Jameson’s smear cam­paign: ​“If we can get a pic­ture of Julia Roberts in a thong, we can cer­tain­ly get a pic­ture of this weirdo,” and, ​“If he doesn’t want to be famous, then I’ll make him infa­mous!” There is lit­tle attempt at objec­tiv­i­ty here.

But the pure comedic joy of watch­ing Sim­mons inter­act with the rest of the news­room dilutes the poten­cy of the rep­re­sen­ta­tion . That is, until 2007’s not-as-bad-as-you-remem­ber Spi­der-Man 3. The final film in Raimi’s series con­tains arguably Jameson’s best moment, as he strug­gles to con­tain his rage when deal­ing with an entre­pre­neur­ial kid (“films extra”) and allows the direc­tor to fin­ish a run­ning gag with panache. He also pub­lish­es a retrac­tion for the first time in ​“20 years” when it tran­spires that Eddie Brock (Topher Grace) has faked a photo.

In Spi­der-Man 3, jour­nal­ism is no longer mere­ly a back­drop but inte­gral grist in the nar­ra­tive. Brock is set up as Parker’s bit­ter foil, and his dis­missal sets him on the course to becom­ing Ven­om. Jame­son doesn’t hes­i­tate to fire Brock, and Rai­mi shows us a side of jour­nal­ism rarely seen on film – a news­pa­per that owns up to its mistakes.