Raimi-thon Night 3: Spider-Man 2

Note: I have COVID, slept poorly and I'm a bit delirious with it all. Give me some berth, here, okay? A bit of wiggle room. I'm not at peak. 

So as previously posted, in writing about Darkman, I have Sam Raimi on my mind. I'm excited to see his new film! I was, actually, kind of excited by the prospect of seeing Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness before I had even realized it was the new Sam Raimi, the news coming as a happy surprise late in the trailer, which already had me excited, as the previous Dr. Strange movie - along with Taika Waititi's Thor: Ragnarok and Constantine and Hellboy - was one of my most-enjoyed superhero movies ever. 

It is hard for me to write about something so normally beneath my notice, but I guess I should confess at the outset - though it feels like this should be kept secret, like masturbation or an enjoyment of Jim Steinman - that I do have some fondness for Marvel (and the odd DC) superhero movies, if I'm in the right mood. I do sometimes join the unwashed hordes, and sometimes have plenty of fun in so doing. I just don't see every one, nor care for every one I do see.

I have no interest in the Deadpool films, for example - feel about them re: superhero movies the way Ayn Rand did about later James Bond films (or at least the ones after Dr. No - she described them as "bootleg romanticism," a sort of hypocritical, bad-faith romanticism that needs to snigger at its hero, to mock the hero and have him, too). And since I was an eight year old, when I was watching Saturday morning cartoons and actually reading comic books, I've always found Superman a bit too clean, a bit too, uh, "comic book"; I gave Quentin Tarantino credit for his clever ideas about Superman and Clark Kent at the end of the Kill Bill movies, but it didn't make me want to watch Superman movies (I've seen almost none, just that first Christopher Reeve one). I'm well behind on The Avengers, have no interest in the X-Men, and find aspects of Batman distasteful, but primarily because my experience of him has been largely filtered through the not-even-very-crypto-fascism of Christopher Nolan, whose craft I acknowledge but whose sense of responsibility to the real world, in terms of the ways his films interact with the political landscape, I find somewhat lacking (see here - please do not mind the weirdly gigantic picture of Adrian Mack, which is some sort of artifact of a long-ago Blogger template shift). 

In fact, more than the flashy, bold, and busy feel of these films, more than the preponderance of action over thought or character, more than - what was it Scorsese called them, "roller coasters? - the roller coaster aspect, the main reason I don't watch every single entry in every single franchise is that the MCU, in particular, is just too damn prolific. Like Guided by Voices albums, Marvel superhero movies are produced at a pace that makes my keeping up impossible, so much so that I shudder at the prospect; I wouldn't be able to feel truly "up to date and in-the-know" unless I took a year off and listened to nothing but GBV I've missed, or watched nothing but Marvel movies I've let slide by. But I don't WANT to spend a whole year on nothing but GBV albums (or MCU movies), and realize that even if I tried to, at least three more records (or movies) would come out during that year, so I would still be behind regardless: a fool's game!  

So Erika and I just keep up with the characters we most enjoy, like, say, Thor or anything with Mark Ruffalo as Hulk or, because of Erika's own childhood, Wonder Woman (Wonder Woman is to Erika what Carl Kolchak is to me. I shall not judge, and truth be known, I enjoyed the Wonder Woman episodes and movies we watched more than I've enjoyed going back to Kolchak: The Night Stalker). 

...But this gets a bit complicated when there's a new MCU movie we want to see, and I haven't been doing my homework, because one of the problems that MCU movies have that GBV albums don't is that things happen in one franchise that bleed over into others. Characters, concepts, plot points are introduced in an Avengers movie without which you won't fully understand what's happening in the Black Widow movie, that sort of thing. But if you haven't heard Class Clown Spots a UFO, it won't take away from your ability to enjoy How Do You Spell Heaven? (as far as I know - I don't really know either album; but I'm guessing that there are no characters or themes introduced in one that are repeated or expanded upon on the other; even if a new bandmate was introduced on the earlier album, and - quelle surprise! - he's still around on the later one, not knowing the older album won't keep you from understanding what he's doing or where he came from or what his role is supposed to be - unlike the addition of a new character in the MCU). 

And I do want to understand the rules of the multiverse, relevant to the Dr. Strange sequel, and they apparently are laid out and elaborated upon in detail in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Which I haven't seen, having fallen off the Spider-Man train after the first Andrew Garfield movie (it was fine - I'd just had enough, as did many other people, it seems).  

So I have some homework ahead of me. Of course the original Spider-Man franchise, the Tobey Maguire one, was directed by Sam Raimi, so it's not a chore at all; Erika and I are now watching the Spider-Man franchise in toto, beginning with the first Raimi movie, with the thought being we will work through them all up to the present day before attempting Dr. Strange. With me still recovering from COVID, we have a little time to spend before we can go to the theatres, anyhow. 

We watched Spider-Man 2.1 last night - the expanded cut of the second movie, which she'd never seen before in any form. While the first is as enjoyable an origin story as possible, the second one is where things really amp up. Neither film is as packed with Raimi touches as Darkman was, but both are very much his work, and the second in particular gets downright meaty, if you're inclined to analyze films.

Y'see, Spider-Man has troubles with "performance" in the film. He loses his powers - becomes, um, impotent. He even loses the ability to shoot his goo. 

No, no, not that goo. His webbing. But given the context - his crisis of potency - you would have to be, I think, pre-pubescent not to think of the goo as a metaphor. I even found myself remembering those days when, around age 14, I was masturbating frequently enough - I think my record was eight times in a day - that I discovered the more you jerked off, the less goo came out. I remember having dry orgasms - nothing came out at all, because I hadn't given my body a chance to catch up; my mind went exactly there when Spider-Man first started discovering he couldn't get his web to shoot. 

And there's an awful lot of "stuff with hands" in the movie - including hands that "take over" Dr. Octopus, that start to think for him, like a pubescent boy might feel about his own bodily changes, masturbation included. "It's not me, it's my hands, Ma, I swear - they made me do it!"  

I kept up some smartass banter along these lines as Erika and I were watching the film, and even she finally got into the spirit of it, asking, for instance, in the scene where Aunt May is dangling from a long web that Spider-Man has shot from his wrist, "Does this mean she's really hanging from a long strand of his jizz?" She normally kind of mocks the stuff I read into movies, on this level, but I could tell she was entertained by the idea.

I found myself thinking of the rather fascinating Urotsukidoji films - Japanese tentacle porn anime, the stuff I gave Lemmy, in which male adolescence is expressed by images of male bodies erupting tentacles and doing rapey things with them: the engine of the films is a sort of horror of male adolescence, as made for and expressed by other male adolescents (or their adult descendants). The picture of adolescence in Spider-Man 2 is less sexual by far and far kinder, but it still has a person torn between two identities, two orientations, and there is a strong temptation to read his secret identity as a metaphor for something in Peter Parker's life  - masturbation, homosexuality, or even too much  consumption of comic books (or superhero movies, or other childish things) well into childhood: yes, Spider-Man 2 works as a metaphor for the adult consumption of Spider-Man, like Spider-Man himself is a figure for the inability of the geeks in the audience to let go of their childhood and grow up - back when obsessiveness over comic book culture was still being treated as a pathological thing, a failure of socialization, and not a cultural norm. Back then, you dig?:

I won't even attempt a queer reading here, though one does sense there is one to be had, by which it is Spider-Man's complex relationship to the James Franco character, whatever his name is, that is really what's getting in the way of his being with MJ. The very youthfulness of Tobey Maguire lends itself to reading Spider-Man as figuring some aspect of male puberty/ adolescence, in any event - at least as much as Ginger Snaps works as a story about female puberty/ adolescence. However you read it, Parker's devotion to this secret aspect of his identity begins to interfere with his ability to pursue adult relationships, in particular his one with MJ, whom he very nearly loses; and his near loss of her feeds into the loss of his superpowers. Turns out he needs a balance of both in his life to be functional - without MJ, he can't be Spider-Man, but without Spider-Man, he can't be with MJ. (I think I tried to sell Erika on the idea that this is why I need my movies and music and such - that my collecting is my own version of "being Spider-Man" - but I think she was skeptical, there). 

The second thing we noticed in watching Spider-Man 2, besides Spider-Man seeming to be a metaphor for something, is that, of all the superhero films we have seen - because I think Erika agreed with me on this - Spider-Man 2 genuinely feels like you are consuming a comic book. Rowan Lipkovitz, on Facebook, also pointed out Ang Lee's Hulk film here, and I can see what he means, but the use comic panels and so forth, consciously quoting comic art, is not what I mean, as much as the rhythms of the storytelling. Pushe way the characters behave (Jonah Jameson, especially) is self-consciously broad-stroke archetypal in the way comic book characters are; the way the images are framed to pop is akin to comic book panels; the progression of the story feels like the progression of a story across multiple issues. Raimi, of any of the Marvel filmmakers, seems to really understand what reading a comic book feels like - not just what a comic panel looks like, but how the story progresses. It seems like he might well have grown up reading them obsessively himself, and is better than anyone I've seen at making you feel like you are reading a comic book while watching his film. I don't recall feeling like that, or feeling that as vividly, for any other Marvel film. It's possible, of course, that the only reason I feel this way is because I in fact did read Spider-Man comics as a child, unlike The Avengers, for example, or Iron Man or X-Men or all those other comics I ignored. Mostly my comic consumption involved horror and fantasy comics, or Howard the Duck or, a bit later, Cerebus or Heavy Metal or undergrounds, but I did read a lot of Spider-Man as well, for awhile, such that watching the movie took me right back to my eight year old self, to the little boy who still lives inside me somewhere, that earlier stage of evolution that hopes its host lives long enough to see Stegron make it to the big screen. 

...Stegron being Spider-Man's half-human, half-stegosaurus nemesis, who at one point leads an army of resuscitated dinosaurs in a march on New York, as I recall. Let's not get into it here. The point is, Spider-Man 2 was great to revisit, one of the very best of the Marvel movies - made early enough in the current cycle of superhero fare that it no doubt can be considered, uh, seminal in framing how Marvel handled its properties. It's a very fun way of gearing up for Dr. Strange. I gather Raimi himself has confessed to not thinking much of Spider-Man 3, up next, but I am looking forward to revisiting that one, myself; I strongly recall it being characterized by a giddy excess, which at the time I thought made it the most "Raimilike" of the Spider-Man films.

And yes, again, all of this is somewhat unworthy of my abilities as a writer, a bit trivial. What can I say, I have COVID. Let me entertain myself how I choose. Spider-Man 3, here we come!