Erick Massoto is a senior news writer and film critic for Collider. He specializes in thriller movies and TV, satire news shows and anime series.
The Big Picture In the very first scene of 2002's Spider-Man, Peter Parker tells us in a voice-over that this is a story about a girl. For the following five years, we as viewers sort of let ourselves believe that Mary Jane Watson played an important role in the much-appreciated Sam Raimi trilogy. However, as time passed and we – aka the general audience – started to reevaluate female representation in movies, it became easy to see that Peter lied.
Spider-Man was so popular it set the bar for what should and shouldn’t work in a live-action comic book adaptation, and when it came to women, that bar was really, really low. Mary Jane starts out as the embodiment of a trope: the girl next door who can’t seem to find the “right guy” and doesn’t realize her shot at happiness is right under her nose. This trope is problematic on its own, as many revised romantic comedies have shown over the years, but it gets even worse as Spider-Man progresses.
True, her career as an actress and model has picked up, but that has no effect on her storyline whatsoever. She is, once again, a woman who is waiting to be saved by the man of her dreams. And that becomes quite literal. At a certain point in Spider-Man 2, when Doc Ock attacks both Peter and MJ at a café, she stops being a person and basically becomes a plot device — something that was stolen that Peter needs to retrieve.
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