How Would You Decide?

At one point in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, our eponymous hero struggles with his DNA. Like, literally. Having dedicated himself solely to the cause of crime fighting for several years, without friends, family, or anyone to confide in, Peter Parker’s spider genes keep acting up, causing him to sometimes lose control over his powers, even his behavior.

But Peter is smart, and he has even smarter friends—like Dr. Bruce Banner aka the Hulk. Unfortunately, Banner doesn’t know about Peter’s identity just yet, so the latter sneaks into one of the former’s lectures at the university. As it turns out, Banner already wears what Peter believes he needs: a DNA blocker which prevents him from turning into big green monster without warning.

Peter approaches Dr. Banner after his class, confirms he understands the basics of the device correctly, then asks the professor what else is possible. Could another inhibitor target another kind of genetic mutation? What about suppressing only certain strands of DNA? Could it even be possible to “develop some kind of automatic inhibitor… that would just adjust to any type of mutation”?

Banner uses the words “dangerous” and “complex,” but, in principle, he agrees with Parker: a lot is possible if you get the tech just right. Immediately, Peter’s brain starts thinking about what his solution might look like. He is already halfway out the door, lost in thought, when Banner calls after him:

“How would you decide?” “What’s that?” “Well, what parts of nature are good or bad? What if you’re trying to control the expression of something that needs to be expressed?”

The prompt is not enough to stop Peter in his tracks, but it does make him leave with a puzzled look. Still, he works his way up the inhibitor ladder, first to one that keeps his own, arachnoid DNA at just the right levels, and later even to that universal inhibitor he only mused about theoretically mere weeks before.

But the more he uses his devices, the more side effects he notices, and once he tries to apply them to other powerful beings in his quest for good, all hell breaks loose. As it turns out, even if we could program our genes like a computer, the consequences would be unpredictable.

In the end, that’s all suppression is: pushing something down that wants to go up. If you’ve ever tried keeping a beach ball underwater indefinitely, you know how that ends—and once the ball slips from your grasp, it’s too late to keep it from shooting wherever it wants to go.

It’s a big lesson for Peter, and one of the aspects that gives the movie a beautiful human dimension: Some things—some emotions, ideas, patterns—can only be expressed. It’s on us to work with them rather than against them. And since it’s always too early to tell, it’s not on us to decide, but to try our best every day and show ourselves grace when we fail.

Whether the DNA is human, arachnoid, or otherworldly: even when it feels all wrong, it is probably already on the way to setting itself right.