TAJ
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Exposition, breh.
Half the people I know who watched this never even saw The Avengers.
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Spiderman: Homecoming - Adrian Toomes (The Vulture) isn't working class
- Thread starter jack_package_200
- Start date
Exposition, breh.
Half the people I know who watched this never even saw The Avengers.
To be fair, everyone in the MCU hates Tony.
I think the author of that article is (wrongly) conflating economic class with social class. Being working class is about so much more than how much money you have in the bank: it's about your family history, your social networks, your speech styles, the school you went to, your societal prestige. I have a University degree and work as a teacher. I was born into poverty and worked my way up from nothing; it was hard, and still is it times. That history doesn't just go away because I'm relatively comfortable now. Most of my family still live paycheque to paycheque. I still consider myself working class, and will always do so even if I get to a point where I own multiple businesses and pull in a large salary.
Unless the author is contending that you're only working class if you live and die in poverty. That seems a bit of a depressing message to put across, and rather condescending.
Unless the author is contending that you're only working class if you live and die in poverty. That seems a bit of a depressing message to put across, and rather condescending.
DeathoftheEndless
Crashing this plane... with no survivors!
True, but that money came from selling weapons.
Subpar Spatula
Banned
Not Cap.
TAJ
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
EDIT Nvm
Blackpanther25
Member
I have a friend whose father lost all of his money (he worked hard for btw) in his business guess what class he belongs to now.........
Subpar Spatula
Banned
Homeless?
I think this was it. He was running a scrap business, probably doing ok but nothing special.
Got screwed out of a lucrative contract, lost out on a lot and suffered financially for it. Became a successful criminal, therefore, profit.
I figured the working class part was true, and he got rich in between. He tries to maintain that ideal after but he's long past it being true by that point.
Petty-bourg reactionaries masquerading as the working class have been carried conservatives to electoral victory at least since the days of Reagan, so it's kinda cool that the new Spiderman incorporated this phenomenon. One of the most destructive attitudes in America is that hard work in traditional blue collar positions is more legitimate than hard work in white collar positions, even though the most poorly-treated and disrespected American workers tend to be those locked into shitty part-time jobs at malls or fast food restaurants.
Something I see a lot are right-leaning folks like Mike Rowe who claim to celebrate working class people while really just valorizing the act of work itself, usually suggesting that particularly unpleasant work deserves more than the shitty jobs that involve air conditioning and computers. While I don't think Mike Rowe has bad intentions, shitty work is an aspect of our society that needs to be minimized rather than celebrated. Treating farmers as heroes and fry cooks as moochers is very reactionary, because this hard labor evangelism comes at the expensive of other working class people, like retail clerks or nurses, who work all day doing shit jobs but don't get a TV show because they're not wearing overalls. Mike Rowe also usually celebrated workers who, despite having shitty jobs, either owned their own business or had a viable path for advancement. While I don't to trade my current film gig for a career raising hogs, that kind of job offers a stability and financial independence that working class people don't enjoy, because even the farmer who works in pig shit doesn't have a boss to answer to. Considering this, it's really suspicious that conservatives who go on about hard work and bootstraps never mention the millions of day laborers and farm workers in America, who work just as hard and dirty as Mike Rowe would like yet have no means of being their own boss or even making a living wage.
This omission has some particularly nasty implications when you consider that dirtier blue collar jobs (steelworkers, farmers) have long been associated with traditional norms of masculinity and of whiteness. Reactionary movements have celebrated workers without helping them since before the USA existed, because hard-working laborers are a nice mascot for traditional values, a noble savage upon whom you can project your own attitudes of white supremacy and self-reliance, in contrast to the soft-handed city folk who would rather vote for a more progressive set of elites. When Trump devoted a whole graph of his speech to ordinary, hardworking Americans, he wan't talking about the millions of black and brown women scraping by at a retail job for less than $10 an hour, and he certainly wasn't speaking about the millions of Spanish-speaking immigrants who work so hard with so little regulation that a farm worker dies on the job every 22 hours.
The petty-bourg perspective of Michael Keaton's character is very common on the right, and directly enables an anti-worker agenda in the insinuation that small business owners who get their hands dirty the real workers, and not those lazy minorities who suck up our tax dollars even though they've never driven a tractor or fixed a tire. Mike Rowe and Mike the Vulture are not working class people, and their role as small-time employers usually positions them in direct opposition to the interests of workers. Ceding ground to their agenda harms working-class causes like the unionization of retail workers, because small-time capitalists like The Vulture can't squeeze as much profit out of organized workers. It's cool for a comic movie to showcase real-life villainy for a change.
Something I see a lot are right-leaning folks like Mike Rowe who claim to celebrate working class people while really just valorizing the act of work itself, usually suggesting that particularly unpleasant work deserves more than the shitty jobs that involve air conditioning and computers. While I don't think Mike Rowe has bad intentions, shitty work is an aspect of our society that needs to be minimized rather than celebrated. Treating farmers as heroes and fry cooks as moochers is very reactionary, because this hard labor evangelism comes at the expensive of other working class people, like retail clerks or nurses, who work all day doing shit jobs but don't get a TV show because they're not wearing overalls. Mike Rowe also usually celebrated workers who, despite having shitty jobs, either owned their own business or had a viable path for advancement. While I don't to trade my current film gig for a career raising hogs, that kind of job offers a stability and financial independence that working class people don't enjoy, because even the farmer who works in pig shit doesn't have a boss to answer to. Considering this, it's really suspicious that conservatives who go on about hard work and bootstraps never mention the millions of day laborers and farm workers in America, who work just as hard and dirty as Mike Rowe would like yet have no means of being their own boss or even making a living wage.
This omission has some particularly nasty implications when you consider that dirtier blue collar jobs (steelworkers, farmers) have long been associated with traditional norms of masculinity and of whiteness. Reactionary movements have celebrated workers without helping them since before the USA existed, because hard-working laborers are a nice mascot for traditional values, a noble savage upon whom you can project your own attitudes of white supremacy and self-reliance, in contrast to the soft-handed city folk who would rather vote for a more progressive set of elites. When Trump devoted a whole graph of his speech to ordinary, hardworking Americans, he wan't talking about the millions of black and brown women scraping by at a retail job for less than $10 an hour, and he certainly wasn't speaking about the millions of Spanish-speaking immigrants who work so hard with so little regulation that a farm worker dies on the job every 22 hours.
The petty-bourg perspective of Michael Keaton's character is very common on the right, and directly enables an anti-worker agenda in the insinuation that small business owners who get their hands dirty the real workers, and not those lazy minorities who suck up our tax dollars even though they've never driven a tractor or fixed a tire. Mike Rowe and Mike the Vulture are not working class people, and their role as small-time employers usually positions them in direct opposition to the interests of workers. Ceding ground to their agenda harms working-class causes like the unionization of retail workers, because small-time capitalists like The Vulture can't squeeze as much profit out of organized workers. It's cool for a comic movie to showcase real-life villainy for a change.
Subpar Spatula
Banned
This is the biggest thing to come from super hero movies: "Why are people critiquing them? They're just fun movies."
Snarky(HEART)
Banned
because he was stealing millions of dollars worth of shit
Pai Pai Master
Banned
Yes and for some reason this escapes people...
dude I don't even like superhero movies, it's just cool that these poor suffering smalltime capitalists are getting their mask torn off on the international stage
Absolutely, despite what a certain business owner in this thread asserts.
The bodega owner may even hire a few seasonal/non-seasonal workers to staff his bodega, but I'd argue he's still working class. Like he told Parker, ya gotta study so you don't end up like him.
What did he mean by this?
Member
Brehbreh got a contract to clean up a fukin alien invasion
I would say he already had a very successful business if New York City contracted him
I would say he already had a very successful business if New York City contracted him
Affeinvasion
Member
The overall premise of the article is that business owners that employ actual working class workers are not working class themselves. Toomes probably started out as working class and it's often hard to shed those associations once you move up a tax bracket or two. The dumb thing is that he had a contract with the city and then a government agency came in and pushed him out. Rather than sue the city for breach of contract he immediately moves into arms smuggling.
TAJ
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
For all we know he only got a contract to clean up that building.
What money was he going to use to sue the city? And how was he going to win when it wasn't even the city's call to push him out?
Well said.
How much experience do you have in the construction industry?
Getting a city contract doesn't mean much, especially considering the size of the NYC. We don't even know if Toomes was the General Contractor for the project.
Subpar Spatula
Banned
The movie doesn't play him as a hypocrite. The movie plays him as Tony Soprano-lite.
Clean-up or construction after a huge disaster is lucrative and highly competitive. You have to bid for these. We know he was the owner because he put in his own money for crew and equipment.
Maybe I'm misremembering but it wasn't said explicitly that it was citywide. Could have been just an area.
TAJ
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
I guess they needed to have him say, "Boys, if it's good enough for Tony Stark then it's good enough for us.". I mean he 99.9% did but I guess he needed to really, really say it.
Vincent Alexander
Member
Biggest misstep in Homecoming (for me) is that we never see what family life is like for Toomes before he turns to evil. I needed to see the garbage life he had (economically) so that I could emotionally connect with and logically understand a man who would
...presumably protecting them from going back to the way things were. Only thing is that we have no idea how the heck things were, and what he saved his family from by smuggling and selling weapons. So in the end, he just comes off like a crazy nut that I can't emotionally connect to at all.
threaten a high school kid with a handgun in his car to protect his family
(Tony Soprano is not a good guy!)
I hear bodega owners are swimming in fucking cash.
What are you talking about? We know why he did what he did, it was to keep his family from being homeless or at the very least struggling to keep afloat. They don't need to show outright him coming home with a lunch pail, taking off his hat and sitting down to a dinner of ketchup and water.
Twig and Berries
Member
You were confused by the absence of Uncle Ben, your interpretations are worthless
TAJ
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
The project for that building would have included repairs and he specifically says "salvage" so we know he wasn't.
Raigan5088
Banned
This is a Spiderman movie...............
Get the fuck over it
Get the fuck over it
Subpar Spatula
Banned
Most folks are fine discussing it. It's you who has a problem.
As a result of illegally selling weapons.
No.
Glass Rebel
Member
Hypocrisy is like... one of the defining traits of Tony Soprano.
To be fair, that's not your average high school kid.
Also, I never took him protecting Peter's identity as a gesture of good will. I saw that as Toomes wanting to take Spidey out himself.
shockthrill
Banned
what is petty-bourg?
If you own a business you're not working class. Even if a bodega owner struggles to turn a profit, he or she is more financially independent than a clerk who depends on a paycheck. When a business falters, employees are far more likely to lose their livelihood than employers. A failing business can always be sold, allowing the owner to start a new enterprise or retire early. Employers often endure very difficult economic hardship, but still have a material advantage over working class people thanks to their ownership of property.
The petty-bourgeoisie are a segment of our population comprised of people who own a little bit of capital. It's a pretty loose category, but usually includes professional salaried employees, independent producers, and small-time business owners. Despite not being wealthy, petty bourg employers have a similar exploitative potential to the greater bourgeoisie because they dominate the lives of their workers.
He is. Just the same way Toomes was at a certain point despite being business owners. I don't think that by being a business owner it excludes you from being part of the working class. My uncle owns a landscaping company and employs around 10 people yet still goes out everyday and works. Despite being able to buy equipment for work he isn't swimming in cash.
I do think that's a legitimate argument, I just don't know if that distinction really changes anything about the portrayal of the character in the end. His whole thing is that the little guy (whether he's "true working class" or just a small business owner) gets screwed by The Man (Stark/Feds).
He's a medium guy who thinks he's a little guy and in his quest to one-up the big guy, he hurts a lot of real little guys.
This is a pretty cool metaphor for how society actually functions, because middle-class dreams have been the wind in the sails of a lot of dangerous movements.
Subpar Spatula
Banned
Wait, you're saying Homecoming has a misguided notion of what it means to be poor compared to Raimi's Spider-Man? Where Peter Parker has a shitty yet huge Manhattan apartment with no roommates despite delivering pizzas? What are you smoking?
I'm not so sure about this. The only damage that hurts "the little guys" is all collateral damage from Spider-Man getting involved. Seriously—all the damage is because of Spider-Man's involvement, from the bodega to the ferry to Coney Island. We don't see any "little person" actually hurt from Toomes' actions. We can make an educated guess that some of his weapons were used for stuff more nefarious than just heists and robberies, but we have nothing to go on in the film itself.