As I have expounded in my previous articles for this site I am an avid Quizbowler for William & Mary’s team, having competed in multiple states since I arrived at the College. Quizbowl, and academic competition in general, is mostly forgotten about among the broader population, shown as a backwater in comparison to interscholastic sports or musical activities. In some sense, it is a cultural punchline, used to establish someone as an irredeemable geek, as someone who is unable to escape school even in off hours.
To my pleasant surprize, then, when I saw Spider-Man: Homecoming in theatres on its opening day (I became a big Marvel fan back in February after watching all the movies released thus far), I saw that Peter Parker, the amazing Spider-Man, was a member of Midtown High School for Science and Technology’s Academic Decathlon. It isn’t quizbowl, but it’s the same general conceit. Seeing them doing review questions on the school bus to Washington was something I remembered quite fondly from high school, ourselves going to Washington for It’s Academic tapings (although being from Northern Virginia, Washington wasn’t the titanic effort for us that it was for the competitors from Midtown).
Seeing those scenes warmed my heart; for the first time I could remember academic competition, and not mere spelling bees, was held up as something that was an undisputed good. Sure, Peter is a geek, but so are a great many young people nowadays, and this particular incarnation of geekery was a social thing, a competitive thing, an honorable thing.
The scenes of their practice sessions and later the tournament itself did a good job of demonstrating the teamwork that goes into academic competition. In quizbowl, outside of people who have done it a long time, attempting to become an expert in every subject is considered lunacy, perhaps even insanity; there is just so much information to memorize and to recall at a moment's notice. I myself am a history and geography specialist, as that is what I am good at and variants of which I study (International Relations major, for the record), and could not answer even basic science or literature questions that my teammates excel at.
The team’s disappointment with Peter after going gallivanting off to take on the Vulture was also something I was familiar with. Too many times have people promised to go to a tournament and then back out on the morning of, leaving us short of competitors. Academic competition is a team game, and having people renege on their commitments is an infuriating and inconvenient thing. It, too, showed the commitment that such competition is.
Through all the movie, academic competition was not spurned in any way. It was something that was seen as worthwhile, honorable, and respectable, not a way of showing somebody as outcast and miserable, so irredeemably odd that they could not function. This competition was something that isn’t spurnworthy, but rather accepted, something it hasn’t quite achieved today.
