is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Spiderman 2: Electric Boogaloo. And Anchorman!
Spiderman 2: Electric Boogaloo. And Anchorman!
I did not like Spiderman 2. I am aware that practically everyone else in the world did like Spiderman 2 (except my dear friend Mr. Perrone, whom I thank for lending to me a shoulder to hide in while watching, and who witnessed my odd convulsive uncontrolled/nervous giggling fits post-movie). Nonetheless, many people of good taste and fine judgment liked Spiderman 2. Judith liked Spiderman 2. Colleen and Gayle liked Spiderman 2. Evany loved the shit out of Spiderman 2. Caroleen said: It is what it is. They all agreed that it was true to the comic book and a good summer blockbuster. And they are probably right. But it was trying to be more than that I think. And that�s where it failed, I think.
The thing is, on the surface of the thing, it might seem like I ought to have liked the movie. After all, one of my favorite things, filmically speaking, is to view the making of difficult ethical decisions on the part of a filmed protagonist. And it was interesting that Peter Parker aka Spiderman was a loser never able to pay his rent, be good to his friends, or offer meaningful love to the girl he loves, all because he is a superhero whose heroic commitments are simultaneously all-demanding and shrouded in secrecy. He has to live the double-life of the person who always does good but can�t take credit for it (and this, I suppose, makes him into some sort of Kantian superhero, who does good not because he wants to be considered good, but because he knows what good is. To know what good is and then not to do it would be a contradiction! Irrational! An offense against what Rousseau calls moral freedom!) or even have his good works be known. It takes a great deal of strength and courage for a mere human being, even one endowed with spiderific powers, to do good continually without getting credit or love in return. What makes us do good? Is it reward? Is it the expectation of being loved? Or is it our goodness/our knowledge of what is good/right?
Oh Spiderman aka Peter Parker, you are so misunderstood! I know how you feel! We all do! My motives are so good! And yet I am constantly failing to live up to them!
And so S aka PP withdraws and stops doing good. I thought the best scenes of the movie were the ones where he neglected to do what every person should do: he does not intervene when he sees a person getting mugged in broad daylight. He doesn�t snap into spidertastic action when a huge accident occurs. He slips into the anonymity of being just another human being and looks on passively with the rest of the crowd. (And thus does his part to usher in the silent end of justice in the human world.)
And I liked that he did show how heroism is human, not superhuman, when he enters the burning building and saves the child despite all dangers to himself, and all this while he is mysteriously incapable of summoning forth his spidery powers. (Here he demonstrates that often, if justice is done, or good achieved, it is only because some plain old unremarkable human individual does something.)
And I suppose that is the point of the movie, to demonstrate that heroism and the sacrifice it entails is everyone�s job, or everyone�s possibility. And that, my friends, is up my alley, as it were, thematically.
Nonetheless it all left me a bit cold, unaffected, untouched, as it was portrayed in Spiderman 2. Why? And why the odd uncontrolled giggling later on? It�s curious. I found the movie to be slow, boring, unsubtle, and way too full of set-up and build-up that remains unrewarded. For such a moralistic tale, it was strangely bland and uncompelling. Plus the bad guy isn�t even truly bad! It�s just his mechanical arms that are bad! (Evany argues that the arms take advantage of his non-heroic self, the part of his self that doesn�t use its intelligence for the benefit of humanity as opposed to the heroic part of his self. That heroic part of the bad-guy�s self lets us know before he lapses into badness that intelligence is given to human beings for the purpose of bettering the lives of all human beings, as opposed to the betterment of one person�s self-interested goals. Maybe Evany is right. However, I still think the bad guy lacked all forms of interesting bad-ness.)
The movie�s intent seemed to be to hit people over the head with just what it takes to be good. That�s not so bad, intent-wise. It is a fucking hard thing to be good, and to do good. And doing good can lead you astray and make you do wrong to some while doing good to others. The border between good and bad is not always starkly delineated. The movie aimed to show all this, I think. Perhaps it even wanted to say that there are no moral absolutes. Except this one: doing nothing in the face of injustice is inhuman. So, sure, the movie teaches a good lesson. But do we really live in a world where in order for that point to be meaningful we have to be hit over the head with it over and over again, and then preached to about it to boot? Maybe we do. And maybe that�s why the movie made me sad. And then nervous, and then slightly panicked, which translated into unexplainable giggling.
Or maybe it was just slow, boring and unsubtle. The Lord of The Rings movies hit us over the head with this and other epic-type themes over and over again and did so in a way that I found very moving on occasion. Spiderman 2 did not move me. Not one bit. Not with love, not with heroism, not with the struggle between sacrifice and self-interest. And all of those are my themes.
I actually liked the first Spiderman movie. In fact I always like to say this to my students at some point during the course of a semester: �As we learned from the movie Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility.� I like to say this while teaching something like Sophocles� Antigone, or Rousseau�s Social Contract, or the failure of the United Nations to offer meaningful human rights to all human beings. These contexts, it seems to me, demonstrate that the power/responsibility link is as old as socialized human behavior, as is human failure to live up to it. And so saying we learn this from Spiderman seems to me to be a HILARIOUS and dark joke. But maybe it�s not a joke at all. Maybe we do need Spiderman to teach us heroism. It makes me sad to think so. It even makes me panic a bit to think so.
That is not to blame Spiderman 2 for giving me bad news about U.S.-dwellers� ideas about responsibility, news that I could also get just about anywhere I look. So, yeah, in the end, even though I did not enjoy the movie at all, and had that �there goes 2 freaking hours I will never get back!� feeling about it, in the end, if it works�if it makes anyone think twice about what is required of each human individual if there is to be anything resembling justice or good in the world�so much the better. Spiderman 2 fucking rules!
All this from the girl who really liked Anchorman a lot. In fact I keep trying to use this Will-Ferrell pick-up line on anyone who will listen. �I�m just going to put this out there. If you don�t like it, send it right back. I want to be on you.� I also appreciate the long conversations he has with his dog wherein he pretends that the dog�s barking is a language he understands: �What? You pooped in the refrigerator? How did you do that? And you ate the whole wheel of cheese? That�s so amazing, I�m not even mad!�
11:00 p.m. - July 18, 2004
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