SpiderMan 2: Doc Oc

This is a particular type of post that may pop up here from time to time. Once upon a time I wrote an essay on the second of the Spiderman films that had Toby McGuire in it, the one with Doc Oc. In the midst of new computers and shifting material from from one drive to another and external hard drive crashes and all the rest over the years, I have even less than no clue where any digital copy of that essay might be. But I do remember some of the main points, so I am going to try to reproduce them here to have them down for posterity before the memory of it undergoes any more slippage.

This actually may not be that long, not anywhere near as long as the original (maybe I will watch it again while on my elliptical machine sometime soon to see if that kicks anything else out of the memory, but for now I'll just put this out there just to have another post out of my queue of drafts).

The basic gist is that of a certain religious image being used to build the hero character. The image is that of priestly vestments. Priesthood is defined by sacred action. In actual religions, this is cultic, ritual action at an altar. For the superhero, the action central to the role of hero/priest is self-sacrificial saving of others from danger etc ... heroic action. And doing these actions in the suit sort of sanctifies the suit, makes it "holy." Basically, through doing the self-risking saving activity in the suit, the suit is consecrated as priestly vestments. That was the basic thesis of my original essay: among the major tropes that the film uses to build the hero character is that of priestly vestments, giving to the hero a priest motif that emphasizes the unique connection of their action to their identity as symbolized in their garb.

For me, a main point this essay serves is to do battle against the secularizers. There are people who deny the use of religious imagery in all but the most blatant cases (and there, they usually try to find some way to say "yeah, that movie/book/etc sucked"). Admittedly, there is a real danger of eisogesis when it isn't so blatant, but there has to be some grasp too of the fact that art doesn't do things with big block letter labels in neon. And the secularist way of reading gets pretty silly at times: anything that has a straight line of more than two inches can be phallic, but unless ever detail of the crufixion is there, crown and all, and damn near requiring a a cue card on screen that says "crucifixion motif," then it is obviously not that, according to them. I even know of a guy from Pittsburgh who is a musician and signed on with some guys to produce an album through their studio, basically with them backing him financially, and basically their biggest requirement was to take all the religious imagery out of the songs ... pathetic (in that instance, I think you have to dip under the two-inch margin to find the phallus).

I'll start with a nice little bit of trivia from the peripheral materials of the movie. The trailer rocked. When I got the DVD, I used to sometimes sit and watch the trailer cranked up on a serious 5.1 surround sound system I had set up in the common area of the group boarding place I was living (an old 10-room convent with small bedrooms and a ton of common space). The music for that trailer, the classical choral piece, is called "Larcimosa," which term means "most tearful [sorrowful]" and is the title of a section of the Deis irae section of the Requiem Mass.

So, probably the biggest piece of evidence I offered is that, when Spiderman goes back into action, he has to get that particular suit back from Jameson's wall. He can't just do another suit up. And the reason is that that is "the" spidey suit. In the terminology of this trope, it is the only one that will do because it is the only one that has been consecrated in priestly action.

A key point about the use of this trope is that it is further used to portray a tension between the two sides, the priestly and the lay, the superhero and the regular guy who gets to lead a normal likfe.. It is difficult to keep the former from overtaking the latter and obliterating it, to keep Peter from getting lost in Spiderman. This them obviously stretches across movie 2 and (the universally panned) movie 3 in more ostensible ways in the question of his relation to MJ: will he be able to do the normal life of getting married? But my point in this essay was that it is also represented in this film in several details/comments about the suit that might be missed at first and thought simply throw-away. They are definitely sideline and not as major elements, but I do think that they are meant to distinctly support the major elements through details on the image of the suit. And they are some fun, funny lines. There are two main instances. One is when he comes out of the laundromat with the colors of the suit having bled into his whites: he's having trouble keeping the normal guy and the superhero distinct just as he has trouble keeping the colors of the superhero's clothes from bleeding into the regular guy's clothes. In this instance I also think there is a possible latent reference to pain in the struggle in that everybody knows the word "bleeding" for this laundry phenomenon; commercials for detergent use it all the time with no worry. Like I said, it is only latent because the word is not actually used on screen ... but I would argue that it is distinctly there at the latent level ... that's not something that only some people call that laundry phenomenon: "bleeding" is so commonly used for it that it is practically a dictionary definition.

There is a further aspect of this first instance that relates also to the next one. The most glaring instance of colors bleeding is into "the whites" ... the undies (recalling here Walter in the Big Lebowski throwing out a ringer full of "the whites ... my dirty undies, dude!"), which itself has sexuality connotation because, well, that's what's housed in the whites. I don't mean anything stupid like "he's not getting laid." Sexuality here is in the larger context of life path: whether he can get married and lead a "normal" life.

The second instance is the ride down the elevator when the guy says "nice spiderman costume" and he says that it rides up a bit in the crotch. Some might dismiss this as accidental, since, if looking for a lighthearted comment on the suit, riding up in the crotch is the most natural from a standpoint of material likelihood. That's true enough, but that simply makes it convenient; it doesn't make it not also an image being used artistically for allusion. The crotch obviously has sexual connotations, and if the suit rides up in the crotch, that means it is cutting into his sexual life in the form of getting in the way of advancement in relationship with MJ, especially not being able right now to be that guy who goes with her to "get married in a church."

Another piece was the idea of the tension being represented in the shots with the mask half gone so that half of his face is Peter and half is Spiderman: half lay, half priest, all tension.

The last piece I would add I can't remember if I had it in the original or not. This is just to add to the religious imagery. In the trailer, Doc Oc brings Spiderman bound into Osborne's penthouse living room and places him on the couch before Harry, who stands over Spiderman with a knife. This is too obvious as religious ritual sacrifice to be denied. Any attempt to deny the imagery is simply being obstinate.

Things in art don't have to be neatly tied out in singular relations. Spiderman can be both priest character and the sacrifice offered by the priest. And I think it would be eisogesis to try to mesh the two together into a specifically Mass image in which there is the concrete presence of the idea of priest and victim being one (Christ). It's simply that two religious motifs are being used (religious vestments and religious sacrifice) and, because art if precisely not prosaic, it doesn't have to make sure everything ties out with a nice neat bow or that the same character doesn't get cast, at least on the level of imagery allusions, as what seem to be opposing role (priet and victim) at different points.

So, that is, in a nutshell, what I can remember of that essay.