Allegorizing Spider-Man

Gee, for a movie that nobody likes Spider-Man 3 is getting talked about a lot. Why can't we just ignore it and wait for the next summer blockbuster? Kelly Nestruck at the Guardian Unlimited film blog has a suggestion.  He argues that Spider-Man is an allegory of the Bush administration. He takes us back to Spider-Man 2, which was released during the presidential election of 2004 with a Cheneyesque tagline  "with great power comes great responsibility." (Oh, no, wait--that's the exact opposite of Cheneyesque.) The correspondence between the film's tagline and Bush's reelection campaign was endorsed by no less than the sloganeer  David Frum, who pronounced Spider-Man 2  as "the great pro-Bush movie of the summer." According the Frum, the allegory goes something like this: ridiculed nerd becomes reluctant superhero, gets blamed for the crimes of his arch-enemy, the Qaeda-like Dr. Octopus, eventually triumphs, thus setting the stage for another sequel. It sounds convincing, except I don't think George Bush is Peter Parker/Spider-Man. He's somebody else.

Nestruck updates the allegory first by noting that the "great responsibility" tagline has been dropped from the third installment in the series. He goes on to draw some isolated correspondences between Spider-Man 3 and the current predicament of the United States as a troubled superpower bogged down in Iraq. He accepts Frum's premise that Spider-Man is a stand in for Bush, but I don't think that's the case. In fact, I think the Spider-Man series is actually anti-Bush in that the films reflect and resolve the deep ambivalence many Americans have felt about Bush since the Iraq War started to turn sour in 2004.

I think films rarely have specific partisan political messages, however encoded, as Frum and Nestruck propose. Popular culture films generally have a kind of utopian dimension in which they celebrate the renewal of the social order by ridding itself from, among other things, unworthy leadership. What's striking about Spider-Man is its origin in a completely random and unmotivated act. Peter Parker is accidentally bitten by a spider and thereafter assumes, fitfully, superhero powers. However, there's nothing about Peter Parker as a person that would single him out is somebody who can carry the burden of responsibility. He's just an ordinary guy--but not ordinary and accidental in the way Bush was.

Random meanings attaching themselves arbitrarily to certain symbols occurs throughout the Spider-Man series, but it's especially intense in Spider-Man 3. Take, for instance, the super blob that hurls itself through space and smacks into Peter Parker for no good reason at all. We're told that the blob is supposed to intensify the essential characteristic of whoever it attaches itself to, but the ensuing effects on Peter Parker are a kind of random grab bag of comic elements that don't add up to a coherent personality. Even an apparently unified character like the Sandman becomes more incoherent as the story goes on. The Sandman continues to grow according to some unknown principle of evil mutation. Why does he become bloated and not, say, change shape, as sand tends to do in nature? The villains themselves just keep coming, like so many IED's. One major villain, the suggestively named Venom, makes his appearance at a relatively late stage in the narrative, a violation of classical Hollywood storytelling technique.

Throughout Spider-Man 3 major signifiers appear out of nowhere at random points in the narrative, then unfold their meanings according to some inscrutable design. The film alternates between mawkishness and brutal violence. One moment somebody is crying, the next moment somebody's head is getting snapped off. Just as it doesn't really matter which villain appears when, it doesn't matter which a motion is expressed at any given point in time. What matters is that the enemies are vanquished and all of those feelings we normally associate with wartime are expressed, even if the feelings don't go anywhere.

What's surprising about 3 is that it doesn't really offer any other comforts other than extreme familiarity. By its third installment, Spider-Man's allegorical message has clarified even as it becomes less formally coherent.  It's a story of endless beginnings, an obsessive return to the moment evil first appears so that our own mutant, wounded hero can leave behind his mundane and deeply unsatisfactory life as Peter Parker. More significantly, as Spider-Man Peter doesn't have to take orders from the callous, fast-talking, and empty newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson.  I think this guy is the real allegorical correlate to George W. Bush. The utopian longing expressed by the film is the desire to forget this narrowminded manipulator and join the fight ourselves against an endlessly re-occurring evil. And the evil just keeps on coming: Spider-Man 4 is already in the works. As one of its producers recently said, "I'm going to keep making those films until somebody stops me."

Comments

[Kelly]

Enjoyed reading your thoughts on Spider-Man 3 as "a story of endless beginnings". Just one thing: I'm a he, not a she. My parents have a lot to answer for.
Cheers,
K.

[Richard Prouty]

Sorry about that, Kelly! I try to be careful about the gender of names, but I missed your bio on the page. My bad.

Thanks for calling attention to the allegorical possibilities of Spider-Man 3. I never would have seen them otherwise.