SPIDER-MAN 2 (2004)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

                          

 

Though Sam Raimi returned as director for the second Spider-film, this time three new writers—including Pulitzer-winner Michael Chabon—authored the script. Yet the tone remained consistent, and, more importantly, the psychological mythicity remained insightful. This time round, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is less trammeled by paternal influences, be it of the good father-figure whose death obliges Parker to be a hero, or the bad father-figure who seeks to tempt Parker into the ways of villainy. But even after choosing good over evil, life goes on—and Parker’s role in life is often that of the schlomazel, once defined as “the fellow who always gets the soup spilled on him.”

 

At the conclusion of the previous installment, Parker sought to do the right thing and to accept his responsibility to be Spider-Man, even though he decided this meant forswearing his love for Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). But trying to live a double life as college student and superhero costs Parker jobs and messes up his courses. Perhaps there’s some small satisfaction that Harry Osborn, Parker’s best friend and symbolic brother, is no longer in the running for Mary Jane’s affections. However, the world knows that Spider-Man was involved in the death of Norman Osborn when the latter assumed the identity of the Green Goblin, and Harry not only hates Spider-Man, he reviles Parker for giving the costumed crusader publicity. (If Harry feels any disquiet about the fact that his father openly murdered people, he doesn’t express same.) Parker’s avocation of taking photographs earns him some money, but his best market is publisher J. Jonah Jameson, who only wants pictures of Spider-Man so that Jameson can revile the hero in his newspaper. With Uncle Ben dead, Aunt May struggles financially, so much so that one wonders how she can be putting Parker through college, even with the best available scholarship. Finally, Mary Jane doesn’t entirely believe Parker’s protestations of disinterest. But when he keeps giving her mixed signals, she eventually turns to a new love. A lot of New Yorkers believe in Spider-Man as their hero, but his example doesn’t prevent a lot of other people from routine dickishness. Finally, in a development derived from Lee and Ditko’s first SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL, the friendly neighborhood crimefighter finds his powers ebbing from what might be called “performance anxiety.”

 

And then there’s the new super-villain in town. Whereas Norman Osborn barely controlled his inner Mister Hyde, and used his industrialist mojo to kill people, Otto Octavius intends to use his scientific genius to solve the world’s energy problems. When Octavius and Parker meet for a scientific confab, Octavius even sounds a bit like Uncle Ben, counseling Parker that intelligence is a gift not to be squandered, or something like that. But then Octavius’s energy-experiment goes awry, so that the harness he wears, equipped with four artificial arms, becomes fused to his body. More tellingly, the physicist’s wife dies in the chaos, and Octavius transforms into Doctor Octopus, monomaniacally fixated on the idea of repeating the experiment, as if its successful completion would undo his beloved’s passing. (This trope was probably introduced to mirror Parker’s own regrets about having taken the wrong action, for nothing like this appears in the comic books, nor do the arms of Doctor Octopus possess cybernetic intelligence.)

 

 

Though I had reservations about the Willem Dafoe version of the Goblin, Alfred Molina renders a pitch-perfect incarnation of the comic-book villain, in that Molina perfectly captures the obsessed malignance of the six-armed psycho scientist. I should note that the movie’s FX team also brings to life the complex movement of Octopus’s metal arms, particularly in combat with the hero’s spider-powers. I still believe Steve Ditko’s artistic depictions of such battles takes aesthetic precedence, but this production comes in a close second.

 

The writers do work in a few of the first film’s “temptation tropes.” Octopus sometimes talks to his arms, as if they were serpents giving him bad advice—or at least, mad extensions of his own personality. Oddly, when Octopus needs technical help with his fusion project, he ends up playing Faust to Harry’s Mephistopheles. The obsessed young industrialist will only give Octopus what he wants if the villain delivers Spider-Man to Harry’s tender mercies. However, this deep dark plot doesn’t quite turn out to Harry’s advantage, partly because he’s still just a junior devil—though it does set up a new plotline, to be worked out in the third film. Meanwhile, Octopus ends up kidnapping Mary Jane as bait for the hero, and the climax culminates not only with the defeat of Octopus’s plans and Mary Jane learning the true identity of Spider-Man.

 

While such revelations are often used just for pure melodrama, here the writers use it to resolve the conflict with which the movie began. Once Mary Jane has realized the reality of Parker’s feelings for her, she can’t marry her new fiancée—but she counsels Parker as well, telling him that he can’t just live “half a life.” Mary Jane’s pledge to love Parker despite his superhero career is the boost Parker needs to reaffirm his guilt-based commitment to a heroic destiny, theoretically free of the desire to fight crime for guilt’s sake. Yet Raimi’s final shot is not focused upon the hero swinging across the New York skyline, but upon Mary Jane watching him through the window. The responsibility she now bears is to give her man confidence, no matter how much his dangerous life torments her.

 

James Franco is arguably the weakest link amid the stellar cast, in that his performance is somewhat overbaked, but even he has some good moments. Maguire, Dunst, Molina, Rosemary Harris and J.K. Simmons are all without blemish, and it should be deemed a compliment to Simmons that later movie-franchises of SPIDER-MAN didn’t even try to equal his take on J. Jonah Jameson. Almost nothing is done with the fact that Mary Jane’s new fiancée is Jameson’s son John, with the result that John is sort of a non-character, who exists to cause Parker pain and to be jilted at the altar. And no scenes showing Mary Jane contemplating having Jameson as a father-in-law? Classic missed opportunity—but not one that causes me to downgrade SPIDER MAN 2 even slightly.