posted by Scene -- @ 2:38 PM

Spiderman 2: Swinging From Building to Bildungsroman

Peter Parker/Tobey Maguire is the Every-Geek. He’s also working a dead-end job delivering pizzas in wonderfully colorful and multi-cultural New York (praise to Sam Raimi for his racially diverse depiction of the Big Apple), can’t hold a girl who frankly was out of his league in the first place, is juggling complicated family relations while also attempting to strike out on his own, has a best-friend dealing with some issues he is fundamentally unable to help with – and oh yeah, he’s Spiderman.

But you knew that already. What you didn’t know, and what Sam Raimi’s psychologically concerned sequel shows us, is that being Spiderman sucks. Newspaper mogul J. Jonah Jameson/J.K Simmons has waged a media war against the hero, the demands of the job keep Peter from being successful in any other part of his life, and frankly, the suit rides up the backside and itches.

Talk about issues. Raimi and crew delve deep into the psyche of superhero and extend the idea of dual personalities into full-blown neurosis. Parker, though ebullient as Spiderman, is dour and put-upon as Peter. He’s a success as a superhero and a monumental failure as a human being. He can save children from burning buildings but can’t keep the people closest to him from hating him.

His anxieties are both fleshed-out and roboticized in the form of one Doctor Octopus, a.k.a Otto Octavius/Alfred Molina, a college mentor to Peter. Octavius is everything that Peter wants to be – a brilliant scientist with a beautiful wife who garners respect, fame, and funding. But when one of Octavius’ experiments goes horribly wrong and leaves the good doctor under the control of his intelligent though psychotic armatures, Peter finds himself in a clash of ids and egos, Spider versus Octopus, Peter versus his failed hero/vision of himself.

Amidst The Daily Bugle spinning Spiderman’s efforts to foil Doc Ock’s bank robbery into looking like the two are in collusion, Peter also has best friend Harry Osborne/James Franco blaming Spiderman for the death of his father (Norman Osborne/Green Goblin/Willem DeFoe of the first film) and also laying guilt trips on Peter for his assumed friendship with Spiderman. “If you knew who he was,” Harry asks Peter of Spiderman, “would you tell me?”

But perhaps the greatest weight on Peter’s weary mind is the girl – Mary Jane Watson/Kirsten Dunst. MJ is the beautiful and popular girl that the geeky Peter by all rights would never get. Peter does win her love in the first film though, only to dump her by the film’s conclusion like an unwanted subplot because of the danger that being Spiderman’s girlfriend presents; Uncle Ben’s musings on “responsibility” here keeping Peter from what he wants most in life. It’s not easy for Peter to ignore his love -- her face is plastered all over the city in giant and ubiquitous print ads. Her eyes watch Peter everywhere he goes, every building he climbs, every shadow he hides in.

Peter keeps MJ at arms length, but he nonetheless keeps her around. He can’t have her in the way that he wants, but he also can’t let her out of his life. This masochism subjects Peter to all sorts of tortures, the greatest of which are MJ’s constant glares of disappointment and her declaration that she is getting married to another man.

Peter’s psychological problems eventually manifest themselves physically, a sort of superheroic impotence. Those who thought that the scenes from the first film in which Peter learns to use his webshooters were humorously sexual -- shots of gooey white liquid shooting into the air from first-person perspective -- weren’t far off. For if Peter discovering his powers in the first film was about puberty and sexual power, this film deals with the much more complex psychological baggage that comes with sexuality. Peter can’t deal with it, his webshooters failing him and his sticky hands drying up, he just can’t come. This is Peter’s normalcy creeping into his Spiderman persona, his two identities clashing (for how can they be kept separate when they are one and the same?) and his body shutting down in response.

Eventually Peter can’t deal with it all and responds to his identity complex by tossing Spiderman, costume and all, into the trash. A wonderfully cheeky “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” montage follows, as Peter, ever still geeky and cumbersome, stupidly grins his way through life, free from the burden of “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility”.

And perhaps that’s where the struggle initiates. Unlike other superheroes, Peter’s powers and thus sense of Great Responsibility come not from within himself, but from a genetically modified spider and a tragically dead uncle. A victim of a freak accident and a moment in time, Parker carries responsibility on his scrawny frame not because he wants to, but because he didn’t want to. It’s a cross, not a crossroads. His hero’s quest is one of direct guilt, urged on solely by the otherwise preventable death of his father figure (already a surrogate at that), Uncle Ben/Cliff Robertson.

Appropriate, then, that this sequel twists the maxim and delivers them from the mouth of symbolic Doctor Octopus: “It's a gift," says Octavius of Peter’s intelligence, “and you must use it to benefit mankind". So here the power is not the web shooting or the wall climbing, but Peter’s own superior intellect and subsequent sense of morality. Octavius unknowingly posits a thesis more outrageous and valuable to mankind than his proposed clean and renewable energy source: that science and technology are to be used to benefit mankind and the planet earth. And tragically, his own body and mind become the freakish apparatus with which to test his ethics-rooted hypothesis.

Director Sam Raimi finds cinematic glee within Doctor Octopus. His origin scene, where Doc Ock’s tentacles massacre a room full of doctors, is shot much like Raimi’s Evil Dead series, horror movie aesthetics infusing Spiderman 2 with some refreshing out-of-genre verve and cinematic vocabulary (Raimi also once again rewards his Evil Dead fans with a wonderful Bruce Campbell cameo). When Doc Ock is finally in full menacing mode, his out of frame approach is foreshadowed by Jurassic Park sized tremors, the bass pounding, the image on screen skittering like pebbles near a jackhammer.

Octavius, driven mad by his artificially intelligent arms, wants to finish his failed experiment. He needs cash. He needs Harry Osborne. Harry wants Spiderman. And thus Doc Ock stamps and sways his way into Peter’s new life like a drunken stepfather, ready to unload eight arms full of father figure baggage like so many fists. Spiderman returns, and the battles between the two are momentous, symbolic, gorgeously photographed and choreographed; some of the most lively and kinetic scenes of recent memory.

In the midst of one such battle, Spiderman saves a trainload of people and in turn is saved both physically and metaphorically by them. They remove his mask and praise him, nurse him and thank him, thus finally unifying Spidey and Peter, the heroism and the vulnerability, the invincible protector and the psychologically scarred boy, and giving due recognition and validation to each. And while the scene is necessary for this reason, it’s filmed with the same syrup that is the film’s only drawback (at one point they lift Spiderman in the air, arms spread, like Jesus Christ himself). Like Aunt May/Rosemary Harris’s mawkish and lengthy tirade on heroism, the point is delivered and then hammered.

Which leads us to the final battle in Doc Ock’s hideaway, a makeshift lab at the end of a wharf. Octavius’s experiment once again explodes out of control, Mary Jane in immediate peril and the city next, Spidey removes his mask and Peter Parker attempts to succeed where his alter-ego had failed. Peter saves the day by feeding Octavius his own words: “you once told me that intelligence was a gift…” he says, the beginning of yet another unnecessarily lengthy speech.

Peter succeeds in distracting the humanity within Doctor Octopus from the cold intellect of his robot arms. Octavius, once again in control, looks at his steel oppressors with Gollum-like duality and fights their hold on his mind. “No! Listen to me now” (a wonderful performance by Molina) he urges over and over again. The two geniuses put their minds together and come up with a timely scientific solution. Octavius sacrifices himself and his experiment for the good of mankind while Peter Parker, mask removed, saves the girl and his lovelife.

Mary Jane ditches her wedding to be with Peter, now in full disclosure of his secret identity. Their reunion as a couple serves the double purpose of providing both a happy ending for this installment, and a sense of unease for the next (for we know that she is now incredibly vulnerable as Spiderman’s girlfriend).

Whatever the next sequel may bring, it will undoubtedly continue to build on the themes of father/son relationships, as Harry Osborne is set up as the next Goblin by the end of film, urged on by a ghost-vision of his dead father. Either way, whether Osborne is the main villain of part 3 or merely one thread in the plot line, Raimi and team have proven themselves more than capable of spinning complex webs, any size.

Jef.Catapang