CONJUNCTIONS:42, Spring 2004
David Shields
MY CAT, ZOOMER, is exceedingly centripetal and social. The moment I spread out my papers on the dining-room table, he lies on top of them. He greets most visitors by crawling into their laps. His favorite activity is lying in front of the fire for hours while my wife, Laurie, and my daughter, Natalie, and I sit near him, reading. His second favorite activity is to lie between the tree of us while we’re watching a movie; he eats ice cream from our bowls while we pretend not to notice. At night, he sleeps in the crook of Natalie’s neck, his paws wrapped around her forehead. And yet if we indulge him by petting him for too long, he inevitably overreacts to this overdomestication by biting or scratching us. Zoomer loves to hide behind a bookcase and swat unsuspecting passersby or lie atop the bookcase, one paw hanging in the air, and look out across the room-a lion surveying the savannah, scoping antelope. He wants to convince himself and us that thoroughly pampered though he is, at heart he’s still a killer. From room to room he drags "his" teddy bear—what Natalie calls his girlfriend—and, despite his having been fixed years ago, dry-humps it day and night, howling with a conqueror’s fury. He’ll spend hours scratching the window when he sees his neighborhood nemesis, Fireball, but when presented with the opportunity to confront Fireball nose-to-nose, he always settles—pseudo-disappointedly—for the safety of imprisonment. On the rare occasions when he does go outside, he hisses, terrified, at all provocations and scoots inside on the flimsiest pretext. He needs, in other words, to convince himself that he’s a tough guy, but really Zoomer’s a pussy. Which is what the movie Spider-Man is about: how important it is for ordinary boys to view their own bodies as instruments of extraordinary power (incidentally, or not so incidentally, this is what has allowed nation-states to go to war since the beginning of time.)
The names of the main characters in the movie are aggressively average, parodies of Leave It to Beaver ordinariness: Aunt May, Uncle Ben, Norman Osborn (who's both normal and born of Oz), and Peter Parker, who has a crush on literally the girl next door, Mary Jane Watson. The words "average," "ordinary," and "normal" recur throughout the film, whose very first lines are: "Who am I? You sure you wanna know? The story of my life is not for the faint of heart. If somebody said it was a happy little tale, if somebody told you I was just your average, ordinary guy, not a care in the world, somebody lied." While Peter says this, a yellow school bus climbs a hill in Queens, belying his assertion.
It's high school; peer pressure is the state of religion. Peter has two choices: try to do what he tells his friend, Harry, spiders do—"change color to blend into their environment; it's a defense mechanism"—or he can stand out, which is terrifying: "You're taller than you look," M.J. tells him.
"I slouch."
"Don't."
Even when Peter punches out the bully, Flash, another kid calls Peter a freak. "Don't ever be ashamed of you are," Norman/Green Goblin tells his son, Harry. And as the Goblin more Nietzscheanly tells Peter/Spider-Man: "There are eight million people in this city, and those teeming masses exist for the sole purpose of lifting a few exceptional people onto their shoulders." Gobby crashes World Unity Day, killing dozens, whereas when he forces Spider-Man to choose between rescuing the woman he loves or a tram full of children, Spider-Man, of course, manages to rescue both M.J. and the children. "You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us," a Yo-Vinnie type informs Gobby. The film, which has made nearly a half a billion dollars, thus figures out a way to deliver an immensely reassuring message to its predominantly male and teenage audience: the transformation of your body from a boy into a man will make you not into a monster who despises the crowd but into the kind of creature whom the crowd idolizes.
When Peter gets bitten by a spider and begins turning into Spider-Man, Uncle Ben tells him, "You're not the same guy lately. Fights in school, shirking your chores, you barely say a word to me or your aunt—what's the story?"
"There's no story."
"You're changing, and that's normal," Ben responds. "This is the age when a man becomes the man he's going to be for the rest of his life. Just be careful who you change into, okay?"
Peter's change from dweeb to spider is explicitly analogous to his transformation from boy to man. When M.J. asks him what he imagines his future will be, he says, "I don't know. It feels like something I never felt before, whatever it is," alluding to becoming Spider-Man but also his feeling of falling in love with her. Before Peter becomes Spider-Man, he wears his shirt tucked in—dork style; afterward, he wears his undershirt and shirt hanging out. He can't be contained. Neither can his chest, which is newly ripped, and his eyesight is now 20/20 sans glasses. The screenplay frames male sexual maturation as the equivalent of stealing fire from the gods: "I feel all this power, but I don't know what it means, or how to control it, or what I'm supposed to do with it even." Asked by Mary Jane what he told Spider-Man about her, Peter says he said: "The great thing about M.J. is when you look in her eyes and she's looking back in your and smiling, well, everything feels not quite normal, because you feel stronger and weaker at the same time, and you feel excited and at the same time terrified." Teenage boys want to believe that the sex instinct trumps and transfigures the day-to-day world.
Which it does and doesn't. The first time Spider-Man rescues M.J., she says to her boyfriend, Harry, that it was "incredible." What do you mean 'incredible'?" he keeps asking her. The second time Spider-Man rescues M.J., she asks him, "Do I get to say thank you this time?" and, pulling down his mask past his lips, passionately kisses him, sending both of them into rain-drenched ecstasy. The script makes emphatically clear that Peter's new-found Spider-Man prowess is transcendent onanism: "He wiggles his wrist, tries to get the goop to spray out, but it doesn't come. He makes a fist. Nothing. He closes his thumb and little finger together. Nothing. He rotates his hand so the palm faces up, extends all five fingers, and brings his ring and middle fingers toward his palm, together. Thwip. A single strand of webbing shoots out from his wrist. The webbing flies across the alley and sticks to the side of the other building. Peter tugs on it. It's tough. He pulls harder. Can't break it. He wraps one hand around it, closes his eyes, jumps off the roof. He sails through the air." All three times Spider-Man rescues M.J., they're wrapped in a pose that looks very much like missionary sex—Spider-Man on a mission. As Peter Parker, his peter is parked; as Spider-Man, he gets to have the mythic carnival ride of sex-flight without any of the messy, emotional cleanup afterward (No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, the ones I love are always the ones who pay").
Throughout the movie, the color green is associated strongly with Gobby, the military, and money. Red is identified with Spider-Man and blood, heart, passion. Go. Stop. Aggression. Protection. Two modes of being male. Spider-Man is about the concomitance of your ordinary self, which is asexual, and your Big Boy self, which is sex-driven. Virtually every male character in the film worries this division. Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Norman Osborn/Green Goblin, of course. But also, when Uncle Ben changes the lightbulb, he says, "Let there be light." When Peter fails to show up to help him paint the dining room, Ben writes a teasing note to Peter and addresses him as "Michelangelo." The testosterone-intensive announcer at the New York Wrestling Foundation has a surprisingly understated side: "'The Human Spider'?" he asks Peter. "That's it? That's the best you got? Nah, you gotta jazz it up a little." Even the "squirrelly-faced" burglar who steals the New York Wrestling foundation's money, and then flashes a sweet smile when Peter steps aside so he can get on an elevator. The heroic self and humble self are in constant conversation and confusion.
One recent Saturday afternoon, in the men's locker room at the Greenlake Pool in Seattle, a ten-year-old kid started humming, at first quite quietly to himself, the Batman theme. Within a minute the tune had made its way through the locker room—about a dozen pubescent boys humming the song. Some sang seriously, others joked around, some stood on benches, others whapped their towels at one another's asses, some danced around buck naked, others continued getting dressed. It was surprising and mysterious and confusing and beautiful and ridiculous and thrilling and not a little spooky.
At the end of Ann Beattie's story "The Burning House," a husband and wife who are separating finally confront each other. She speaks first.
"'I want to know if you're staying or going.'
"He takes a deep breath, lets it out, and continues to lie very still.
"'Everything you've done is commendable,' he says. 'You did the right thing to go back to school. You tried to do the right thing by finding yourself a normal friend like Marilyn. But your whole life you've made one mistake—you've surrounded yourself with men. Let me tell you something. All men—if they're crazy, like Tucker, if they're gay as the Queen of May, like Reddy Fox, even if they're just six years old—I'm going to tell you something about them. Men think they're Spider-Man and Buck Rogers and Superman. You know what we all feel inside that you don't feel? That we're going to the stars.'"
He takes her hand. "'I'm looking down on all of this from space,' he whispers. 'I'm already gone.'"