Spider-Man 2
Sam Raimi

Patrick Hayes

It doesn't even need to be said that there can be a worrying tendency to take the sub-pub-philosophising that goes on in Hollywood blockbusters a little too seriously. Take The Matrix as an example: mix together an action-adventure standard with a dollop of Descartes' evil genius - and you get a million geeky teenagers (or post-teens - adults in age but not intellect) tapping away on the web discussing the 'genius' of the Wachowski brothers. But The Matrix is hardly delivering a Philosophy 101 lecture course en masse, as suggested by some who should really know better, it's merely offering another form of fantastical escape from the (often dull) reality of being a kid.

Now, of course, Toby Maguire has long mastered playing geeky teenager roles and Maguire's Peter Parker really is the uber-geek: the geek who reluctantly has great power thrust upon him and needs to learn to handle it responsibly.

Reluctant heroes are increasingly popular of late: Gibson's Wallace, Crowe's Maximus, Owen's King Arthur and Jane's Punisher. Even Brad Pitt was pretending to be reluctant in Troy, although he was just a little too relaxed and mechanical: sure he attempted angst-filled reflections about the people he'd causally slaughtered a couple of times, but his brow couldn't quite form a second furrow and the one time Pitt almost managed emotion was in the scene with Peter O'Toole where he broke down into tears almost certainly from the awareness of the futility of his inability to act human.

Maximus and co are trained warriors, however, and have dedicated much of their lives to putting huge amounts of effort into their training. Now this isn't the case in Spiderman 2. Peter Parker is a nobody whose great achievement in life was being bitten by a spider: Indeed this is the great populist allure of the films: the power is given completely arbitrarily. It's like winning the superhero lottery.

But, of course, this is a comic book adaptation, historically renowned for bad effects, camp costumes, tenuous narratives and a fight scenes consisting in a series of 'bash', 'pow' and 'whap's. Spider-Man 2's great achievement, however, is that it is able to walk the line between ironic distance and seriousness perfectly: Whilst Peter Jackson managed to iron out any irony in Lord of the Rings, he did so by the skin of his teeth - Sam was a little suspicious in his obsessive friendship for Frodo and the whole 'one day they may tell stories about us' thing was kept buoyant only due to the sweeping sound of a thousand violins and the fact that the audience was shattered after three and a half hours. Only Tarantino, both the great creator and still grandmaster of the 'self-aware' film could save Star Wars 3. This idea, however, was cast aside a long time ago and no matter what happens now, we won't be able to forget the (completely innocent, but blatantly Oedipal) image of Anakin tossing and turning in bed crying out 'mother' in dreamy breaths in Episode 2.

Marvel's great trick with their movie adaptations has been to sacrifice an all-out-in-yer-face first movie with a view to planting firm foundations for character and plot development so that a lot more fun and a greater sense of involvement can be had in the sequels. This technique, that would have up until recently been viewed far too great a risk, worked with X-Men and even more so with the fewer central characters in Spiderman. And Sam Raimi is having fun. Having turned Spider-Man into an elaborate soap opera, the fight scenes, large and enjoyable, come as an added bonus and always manage to be integral to the plot rather than contingent add-ons. Even the reference to the tight New York sense of community post 9/11 (after Parker/Spidey stops a train crash) is quite touching rather than sickeningly cheesy (it's a good thing U2 had already decided to unleash 'Hands that Built America' on the world before this point).

The film offers an exaggerated and very clear-cut example of how the need to keep our public and private roles apart can play havoc with our sense of identity: Parker decides that his responsibility to the public as Spider-Man must necessarily prevent him from living an ordinary life with ordinary relationships. His attempts to forge a stable sense of identity by inhabiting one extreme or the other result in either deep psychological and moral confusion in himself or a great amount of confusion in the way that he his perceived by others. This problem (presented here in the barest bones) is the very one that, as Deleuze and Guattari have argues, has caused a rise in schizophrenia in the modern age.

The extreme version of alienation and estrangement presented, however, cuts through all the ambiguities and shades of grey characteristic of our contemporary condition (well presented in Lost in Translation) with a chainsaw. If anyone ever writes a PhD thesis on the existential crises in the Spider-Man films, they really would be better off questioning the purpose of their own lives (although explanations as to why the dropping of a miniature sun into the Hudson river doesn't result in any steam would be welcome). If you want films devoid of dramatic irony, then watch anything the Japanese have produced recently. If you want gritty realism, then the Russians have knocked any competition dead from the past decade with the remarkable The Return. What Raimi manages with Spider-Man 2 is to fill the usual void of cynical distance prevalent among Western audiences, providing an increasingly self-aware mainstream audience with a lot of fun.