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Review by John Demetry "Don't believe the hype!" the great Hip Hop group Public Enemy warned its audience. An entertainment reporter on FoxNews called Sam Raimi's big-screen version of the comic book, Spider-Man,a "great" film. In fact, he continued to claim: "MOST critics think it's great!" With that emphasis on "most," he identified himself as a critic! If you can't trust a word on TV news about "Spider-Man", don't believe what you hear and see about "The War on Terror."
Kiss of the Spiderman: Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst
It's all hype. Spider-Man, Spider-Man does whatever a politician can. That is: he's a master at spinning webs. The media blitz has been unbreakable. The rotten cherry on the record-breaking sundae: an 84% "Fresh" rating from critics polled at Rottentomatoes.com. Critical acclaim gives the movie, a mere cog in the hype machine, respectability and validity -- maybe not as movie art, but at least as entertainment. The achievement? Supposedly the degree to which Raimi succeeds at adapting the "graphic novel" form to film. Ridiculous! And this comes from a former adolescent comic book fanatic. One ought to critique the comic-book-to-celluloid movie on the basis of how well it transcends the genre. Evil Dead auteur Raimi might have brought his liberating/exhausting sophomoric visual wit -- a post-modern-Three-Stooges-free-for-all sensibility - to Spider-Man. He doesn't. Danny Elfman's score sounds derivative of Danny Elfman scores for Tim Burton. The action sequences - particularly those between Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) and his arch-nemesis, the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe) - are derivative of both Japanese Godzilla-style cheapies and The Matrix. A goofy mix? Perhaps. But to what end?
Willem Dafoe as the Green Goblin
The split screens and over-lapping images when Peter Parker draws alternative Spider-Man costumes signifies less identity-forming imagination than the very media packaging that the assault of "Spider-Man" represents. This ad-art sensibility infuses the storytelling. There's a point in the movie where each of the major characters gets together for Thanksgiving dinner. I had to whisper in my friend's ear: "Does the Green Goblin know who Spider-Man is? Does Spider-Man know who the Green Goblin is? What is going on?" My friend didn't know either. I should have asked: "Who cares?" The characters in Spider-Man are so insipidly selfish that the narrative connecting them never connects. As actors, they seem to exist in their own little bubbles - wearing masks to their own personal Halloween parties. There's a telling, supposedly comic, moment when the lovelorn Peter Parker pretends to seduce Dunst's Mary Jane from a distance. That distance exists in every interaction in the film. I'm not sure I buy that Maguire is much of an actor -- an Edward Norton wannabe with acne. He's never made a good movie (Woody Allen's scabrous Deconstructing Harry, a possible exception - but who remembers him in it?). Why would cutie Kirsten Dunst fall for this nerd? Just out of high school, isn't Peter Parker too old for adolescent angst? Ah, but that's the mindset of the intended audience - the adolescent comic-book reader in everyone. That's why the super-power metaphor works doubly. For Peter Parker/Spider-Man, it's a metaphor for the growing pains of adolescence into maturity and responsibility. For Norman Osborn/Green Goblin, it represents the corruptions of adulthood.
After Peter Parker makes a Casablanca-style sacrifice, Spider-Man swings on a pole that holds the flowing American flag. The imperialism of images is not freedom. It's time for a war on hype. Befitting its adolescent take on political awakening, I'd call Spider-Man a G.W. Bush wet dream. In the famous words of Stan Lee, creator of the original Spider-Man comic books: "'Nuff said." |
