We need to talk about EDITH in ‘Spider-Man: Far From Home’

In 2008’s The Dark Knight, Batman figures out a way to access every single cell phone in Gotham, covertly using their microphones to help track down the Joker. This technology is deemed so obviously unethical that his gadgets guy, Lucius Fox, essentially quits on the spot, protesting, “It’s too much power for one person.” 

Ultimately, though, Batman does prove himself worthy of wielding it — not by using it for good, which he does, but by having Lucius destroy it immediately after. It is, we understand, the only moral choice.

11 years later, Spider-Man: Far From Home entrusts Spider-Man with a technology that’s a bit like Batman’s SONAR, in that it allows our hero to surveil every mobile phone in his vicinity, but vastly more invasive and more dangerous. Indeed, the first two things Spidey does with EDITH are snoop through his classmates’ phones and call a drone strike on his own bus. Accidentally, but still.

Yet for Spider-Man, a character whose entire premise is that with great power comes great responsibility, the question is not whether anyone should get to have EDITH, but who. 

No one wonders if, as Lucius once did, EDITH is simply “too much power for one person.”

Peter spends the entirety of Far From Home grappling with the question of whether he’s worthy of becoming “the next Iron Man,” and whether he even wants to be. The EDITH sunglasses are the physical manifestation of that mantle, and in a moment of weakness, Peter hands them over to Quentin Beck, who promptly uses EDITH to stage a terrorist attack in London.

It should be alarming how easily EDITH transfers from Peter to Quentin and back again, how unquestioningly this super-advanced tech follows Quentin’s orders to kill. (Whether we’d be better off if EDITH were self-aware, like Ultron or Vision, is another can of worms entirely.) It should be horrifying that EDITH doesn’t have more safeguards in place to prevent Quentin from slaughtering millions with his drones — or, for that matter, Peter from issuing a kill order against an underage civilian. 

Both sides, however, treat EDITH as a neutral piece of technology, like an egg timer or a bicycle, rather than one whose very power makes her a potential threat, like a social media platform or an atom bomb. Quentin’s crimes through EDITH are portrayed as outgrowths of his own corrupt soul, and Peter’s accidents as funny little gags about how in over his head he is. 

No one — not Peter, not Nick Fury or Maria Hill or Happy Hogan and certainly not anyone on Mysterio’s side — ever suggests that the very existence of a technology that allows an individual to know this much, control this much, and do this much with a single voice command, is problematic in and of itself. No one wonders if, as Lucius once did, EDITH is simply “too much power for one person.”

In truth, it’s not difficult to understand why the good guys of Far From Home would want to keep EDITH for themselves, full destructive capabilities intact. These films take place in a far simpler moral universe than our own. It’s one constantly under fire from gods and aliens and bad apples with delusions of grandeur, but it’s also one in which a small band of flawed but well-meaning people can be trusted to swoop in and punch the world’s problems away. 

There are no “unintended” consequences in Marvel films, since every single action and detail is controlled by the filmmakers behind them. There is no mistake too catastrophic for a screenwriter to resolve with a third-act redemption arc (see: basically every Iron Man storyline), since that writer also controls how the victims, bystanders, and world at large respond. Lead-character superheroes remain firmly on the side of good for as long as the studio plans to make money off their films. So, yes, we can feel perfectly safe knowing that EDITH is in good hands. All of it is made up anyway.

The discomfort comes when we connect Far From Home to our own reality. Our problems aren’t as simple as Elementals or sky portals, and yet there are powerful people in our world who seem to believe they are, who argue earnestly that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, all the while taking for granted that they are obviously the good guys. 

Far From Home isn’t to blame for this worldview, of course, any more than we can fault The Dark Knight for police corruption. But Far From Home does, in its own playful way, help reinforce our current state of affairs. The happy ending has EDITH tucked safely inside Peter’s shirt collar, there for him to use since he, and we, have come to realize he was worthy of it all along. 

The problem is not that EDITH is unrealistic. It’s that EDITH is all too plausible. There are reports every day of tech companies listening in through our smart home devices, of social media networks selling our information, of governments surveilling its people and waging war with drones. And there’s no reason to believe any of it will stop any time soon — and certainly not with anything as quick and definitive as a 40-minute CG battle in the sky.

Maybe the best we can hope for, anymore, is that the awesome powers unlocked by technology fall into responsible hands, like those of a teenager who sincerely has no interest in ruling the world or destroying it. Maybe that’s what’s changed in the 11 years between The Dark Knight and Spider-Man: Far From Home: that we’ve lived long enough to see what was once an act of villainy reframed as one of heroism.