Spider-Man: Brand New Day: The Impact of Memories on Keeping Friendships Alive

Within the packaging of a superhero movie, Spider-man Brand New Day delivers us a profoundly philosophical conundrum, how much do our memories shape us, and those around us? Who are we without them?

This movie left me conflicted with myself, between my desire for a fairytale to close the book satisfied in the knowledge that everything turns out okay, and my understanding that life is more messy than that, there is rarely a right answer or a way that someone comes out unscathed. 

The writers gave us pure unadulterated reality, not a promise that things will go back to the way they were.

Four years is a long time in someone's life and pretending nothing has changed, that they haven't changed, is unrealistic. Think of all the moments in those years that would have transformed them all. The late night study sessions, living away from home for the first time, learning to transition between that awkward phase of teenager and adult, new friends made, ideas discovered. Of course they weren't the same people they had been when their memories got erased. 

It makes you realise how much of friendships are built on shared memories and histories. How many of us have wondered if I met some of my friends today for the first time, would we still choose each other? Possibly, or possibly not. Without those memories tying us together we wouldn't be the same people, have the same jokes or heavy moments of our lives eased by a little companionship. 

But maybe there are those people that would continue to choose you time and time again. For Peter and Ned especially, it is their shared love of lego and old movies that rekindle this friendship, perhaps spurred on by an unspoken unconscious thought of I remember you. But either way that friendship was still there. 

But, without the memories of MJ and Ned, everything the three of them meant to each other would have to be rebuilt from their current, present adult selves. With only Peter left as the link remembering the three of them tied together those memories are forgotten for them, Peter has to meet them at where they are now, the only one burdened with the memory of their past selves. 

All those memories, all those shared moments, gone. 

These memories and friendships impact us more than we know, the moment Peter refuses to give into Jean Grey's call to submit to his own feelings of helplessness and isolation is a testament to that. Peter's refusal to forget all those who impacted him, even though they are no longer in his life, is the most compelling part of this film. A person trying to do their best, despite all they've been through, for the sake of all those who once believed in and loved them.

So, of course we are going to change as people. That is part of the reality of growing up, but can we still keep a hold of those important things as we change: kindness, love, care, humour and courage. Can we carry all of this with us into the unflinching world of adulthood, where there is no one there to spin us a fantasy and we have only ourselves to rely on when loneliness presses down on us?

Spider-man: Brand New Day, says we can. 

Written by, Macayla Riney-Lucas