Moreover, the artificial tends to highlight areas where technology, mediation and humanity intersect in unsettling ways, evident in the much-feared but seeming oxymoron of artificial intelligence. Rather, the ‘artificial’ in this term is consistent with deploying the artificial not as a marker of the unreal, but rather as a signifier of unstable boundaries, where easy binary divisions no longer make sense. From the outset, it is important to flag that the term artificial mourning is not necessarily positioning mourning facilitated through popular culture as ‘unreal’ or necessarily ‘less’ than trauma in the ‘real’ world. This chapter argues that within that context, the Spider-Man films enact a form of artificial mourning, acting as a popular cultural arena in which some of the immediate tensions and traumas of the post-September 11th Western world are articulated and explored. The trilogy of Spider-Man feature films are also set in New York, although it is neither an historically accurate representation, nor the comic book version, but a third cityscape which imaginatively borrows and builds on both of these precursors. Spider-Man and his everyman alter ego Peter Parker have always lived in New York City, albeit an alternate New York situated within the Marvel comic book universe.
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