When Judgments become Realities
How people make words, and words make people
Do you know what my favorite movie of all time is?
I’ll bet some of you do because I talk about it all the time: it’s Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse.
It’s a *perfect* movie. Every frame shines, every joke lands, every emotional beat sings, every song choice bops. And it all works in harmony, where each moment feels like even more than the sum of its parts. It’s flawless.
…except for one joke.
It’s early in the movie. Miles is wearing a store-bought Spider-Man costume, devastated at the death of his universe’s Spider-Man and the weight of his new powers. So he visits Spider-Man’s grave. That’s when he notices a man also there, an alternate dimension Peter “B” Parker. And after some confusion, Miles ends up accidentally knocking him out and webbing him. A chase with the police ensues, with Miles being yanked along on his web-line by the train, while also dragging an unconscious Peter B Parker by another web-line, who humorously keeps getting knocked into things.
And then there’s this small joke. We see officers sitting in a squad car communicating what they see, and they describe it this way to dispatch: “Looks like a child dressed as Spider-Man, dragging a homeless corpse behind a train.”
I have to tell you—the worst part about this joke is that it works. I saw this movie three times in the theater, and every time the joke killed. But I also watched it one time at a shelter, and the reaction was... different. There were still some laughs, but a few more groans and “WOW”s.
The joke is operating on a few levels. Peter B Parker’s character is comically disheveled throughout the movie; he is “going through some stuff.” They had been in a graveyard, so it’s natural the police could jump to this being a grave-robbing. But if you’re starting to think that maybe joking about a child robbing graves is a little dark in what is mostly a kids movie, you’re on the right track.
Because if you swap out the word “homeless” in that joke, it doesn’t work. I’ve spent the last few days imagining different adjectives in the place of “homeless” and what the audience reaction would be, and in every single case I hear the reaction I heard in the shelter instead of the one I heard in the theatre. Wows and Oofs instead of universal laughter.
How does that happen? How is it that a homeless corpse is funny where no other person’s corpse is? How have we become so desensitized to violence against a certain group of people? I have seen the corpse of an unhoused person—there is nothing funny about it.
This is a problem that affects more than just unhoused people. We are accustomed in media to seeing violence inflicted on particular groups of people more often and it being deemed less important. Depictions of violence against women is a huge problem in media. In comics and film there is a trope known as “fridging” where writers/creators will brutally kill off or inflict harm on female love interests for no other reason than to motivate their male lead characters. Additionally, people of color (when they’re included in films at all) are very often relegated to minor roles, and are therefore the earliest expendable when death comes around. (This is where we get the horror trope that “the Black dude dies first.”)
But Spiderverse is a movie that is especially sensitive to these kinds of things, from a racial, gender, and even storytelling standpoint. (In fact, the main crisis point of the sequel is around the trope of killing off characters just to make the main character grow.) And yet, the “homeless corpse” joke still got through.
I’m not the type of person that thinks kids are going to watch this movie, hear that joke, and decide it’s ok to harm unhoused people. I don’t think the relationship between media and morality is that direct or unilateral. But I believe that a joke like this can only emerge (and elicit laughs) from a culture that devalues the lives of unhoused people and is unmoved when violence happens towards them—and that each time these types of jokes are told, it reinforces that dynamic.
Violence against unhoused people is commonplace. I’ve said it before and will say again that unhoused people are statistically more often victims of violent crime than perpetrators of it. There are countless instances of horrific violence done to unhoused people.
This story was miles from where I lived in 2019: the son of the local Chamber of Commerce President set fire to an encampment, which then spread to become a 45-acre brush fire requiring several days and mass evacuations to finally extinguish. Early on, the encampment (of course) got blamed for starting the fire, until it was discovered that they were the intended victims, not the instigators.
More recently in San Fransisco, a former fire-commissioner was seen attacked by an unhoused person with a crowbar. The unhoused person was on trial, when their lawyers presented more evidence: video that showed just prior to that incident, the ex-commissioner had gone to the man and some others and, unprovoked, sprayed them in the face with bear spray. This incident also prompted more investigation, as there had been several similar bear-spray attacks on unhoused people, some of whom were asleep at the time, by a man matching his description. Once again, the initial story failed to uncover the truth: a housed, well-off individual inflicting violence on unhoused people out of cruelty.
These are extreme incidents, sure, but this happens in small ways too. Unhoused people experience dozens if not hundreds of micro-aggressions every day that communicate their perceived lack of humanity: not being allowed to use a pubic restroom because of how they look, passers-by refusing to make eye-contact, or not being allowed to sit or lie down without someone calling the police. Over time, one of two things can occur: you build up so much resentment about the rest of the world that you isolate yourself further, or you start to actually believe what people say or implicitly communicate to you: that you’re worthless, disposable.
When we make judgments about people, sometimes those judgments come true; people begin to believe the awful things we say about them, and starting thinking and living under the weight of those lies.
It’s tragic, and I’ve encountered it so many times. Some of the most awful things I’ve heard about unhoused people have come from their own mouths about themselves—though I know those ideas didn’t originate there. I think of Daisy* who my wife has gotten to know and who is enamored by our 6 month old. When my wife first asked if she wanted to hold him, she was shocked and said no—that she was “too dirty.” I think of Kanan* who told us that kids would throw rocks at him on the beach for being homelessness, and who routinely poured bleach all over his skin and his clothes so that he would be “clean.” And I think of Jamie*, who I’ve never met, but whose story was told to me by a friend I’ve gotten to know named Monroe Free.
*names changed for anonymity
Monroe was the director of the Knox Area Rescue Mission in TN for over a decade, and when I spoke with him recently, he told me this story about about a guy named Jamie* and how it embodied what Monroe felt was going wrong at the Mission and how he wanted to do things differently:
There was a guy that lived on the streets in Knoxville named Jamie*. And Jamie was known as the meanest man on the street, right?
And he had a reputation for a reason. When he drank, he could get violent. And he had used his knife on a couple of people. And so I was told when I came, “Stay away. If you see Jamie, if Jamie comes on the property, get behind a locked door.”
So, I put word out on the street pretty quickly, I wanted to meet Jamie. And sure enough, he shows up one day, and when he showed up, the staff got behind locked doors and I walked out in front and they were telling me “No, no, no!” I walked out in front and talked to him and, and got to know him. And we developed a good relationship, Jamie and I, and he entered a program, as weak as it was at the time. Jamie really tried to change his life unsuccessfully.
But Jamie left one day, started drinking again, and I took off downtown after him. And I finally found him walking across the parking lot. I hollered at him. He turned around and he said, “Preacher, why don't you just leave me alone? I'm nothing but an old drunk.”
And in that moment that, the whole idea that I started with crystallized: Jamie's problem wasn't that he was an old drunk, but that he thought of himself as an old drunk, that that was his view. And what he was doing was fulfilling his image of himself. And that Christian ministry to him would be helping him change his image of himself.
If he could move from being, seeing himself as, as a drunk, an old drunk, worthless old drunk, to a child of God, you know created a little less, a little less than the angels. If he could change that, if we could help him see himself differently, there would be a fundamental change.
Let this be a reminder that words can destroy, but also heal. Words can kill, but also save. Our words matter deeply, whether we’re using them to or even just about someone. The way we talk affects those we talk about in the moment but also changes our own brains. Every time we speak to or about anyone, we are paving roads in our imaginations, and those around us, that we will later walk down without even realizing it.
Jesus said, “Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.” (Luke 6:45) And he also imagined the eyes as “the lamps for the body”, that the way we perceive things shapes everything about who we are. What’s in our heart comes out of our mouth, and how we understand what we see changes our heart. May we be people that recognize this complicated input-output, and take extra care to cultivate an inner and outer world that upholds and celebrates the inherent worth of everyone, but especially those who others have deemed as disposable.
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This is beautiful. And heartbreaking.
Mad that I did not write this!!!!!!