The actor:	Cliff Robertson
The character:	Ben Parker, alias “Uncle Ben”
The film:	Spider-Man
The line:	“Remember, with great power comes great responsibility.”

Uncle Ben? More like Uncle Luke 12:48! “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded, and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” After the one about how difficult it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, this is the Bible verse that the rich have dodged, interpreted, and otherwise hidden from most. It’s fitting that Peter Parker, who is given much, has much demanded of him for multiple movies thereafter. (So, so multiple the movies. Is Across the Universe the fourth Spider-Man 2 movie since the Raimi one? If you count the Venom movies, are there five? Am I missing some?)

This isn’t close to being my favorite line from Spider-Man. My favorite line from Spider-Man is anything that Randy Savage says during that magnificent cameo. And despite how instantly recognizable “with great power…” is, I don’t know that it’s even the most popular line from this movie on the Internet.

Unquestionably, it’s the “with great power” business that’s lasted the longest, like the way that industrial runoff is most potent and poisonous closest to the DuPont plant. This is the kind of thing that Alfred could reasonably say to Bruce without winking an eye, that Pa Kent could say to Clark. Ben says this to Peter in the car, looking at him from the driver’s side while Peter is impatient to get out. Amazing Comics #15, where Spider-Man was famously first revealed, was published in 1962. You can practically hear, in that same year, Gregory Peck telling Phillip Alford and Mary Badham about why someone has to defend Tom Robinson.

Our superheroes never really do connect to their real fathers, not any more than Disney princesses connect to their real mothers. The lack of a mother means that Ariel and Belle and Jasmine have to feel their way towards sexual and matrimonial performance with only their clumsily protective fathers (who are too old, look at those white mustaches and beards) to guide them. The lack of a mother who provides adequate love to Cinderella or Rapunzel means they jump at the chance to feel someone’s affection. But superheroes without an actual dad in the picture seem to luck out with good surrogates. Amusingly, having and knowing a real father as Tony Stark, T’Challa, and Thor do tends to be an enormous burden on their psychological development. Maybe it’s the ‘T’ thing, who knows, be careful not to name your boy child something that starts with ‘T.’

Of the three that we’ve brought up already, Uncle Ben is the most dramatically successful, and it’s not because it proves to Peter that if you screw up one time, then one of your dearest loved ones will die a horrible death that you could have prevented. It’s because he’s the only one who raises a real boy. Alfred gets Bruce, who is always going to inherit the Wayne fortune and be taken care of in some way because of his money. Pa Kent knows that he’s just Joseph from the start. Ben, of course, has no reason to believe that he’s raising anything besides a preternaturally bright kid with some orphan trauma. Peter Parker is ludicrously smart because it gives him a chance to develop his hero persona on his own—Tom Holland’s Spider-Man has broken the line of Peter Parkers who need to be actually brilliant—but there are certainly plenty of parents out there with gifted children. In other words, Ben has to be a parent, not a caretaker or babysitter or bodyguard. These words mean more because they don’t come from a sidekick, but from Dad. Happy Father’s Day, everyone.