“I don’t wash the towel, the towel washes me,” he reasons. “What’s next, am I gonna wash the shower? Wash a bar of soap?”
Nick’s rant is funny enough on the page, but it’s perfected by Johnson’s delivery. Nick Miller has confidence and aptitude, ranging from skills as a plumber to the ability to write a novel. But his idiosyncrasies, a sort of code to which only he understands or adheres, keeps complicating his life.
If there’s anyone who can understand the need to keep a code no matter what the personal cost, it’s Peter Parker. And that’s why we loved Johnson’s portrayal as a sad, defeated grown-up Peter Parker in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Johnson perfectly captured not just the pathos of a divorced guy in his r/malelivingspace apartment, eating pizza in his underwear. He also captured Peter’s absurd commitment, an attitude that could be misinterpreted as swagger or confidence but is actually just making a decision and holding to it, no matter the cost.
With Nick Miller, such undertakings are absurd to a comedic degree. With Peter Parker, it’s heroic. But it’s the same impulse in both cases.
With Great, Grown-Up Power
We’ve seen Maguire, Garfield, and Holland play Peter Parkers who have such excessive principles. But again, they’re all younger men, and young men have made worse decisions and had terrible outcomes and still manage to bounce back. These Peters have much lower stakes.
It’s much different for a grown man to be constantly late for his family and unable to hold down a steady job. To anyone who doesn’t realize that he can’t get it together because of his great responsibility as Spider-Man, Peter looks like an absolute loser. Even those who know why he slips out of a meeting to put on his costume think that he’s gone too far, even if he saves the day in the end.
