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Last week I wrote about how in Spider-Man 3 director Sam Raimi and his collaborators used the alien sentient “black costume” from the comics as a means of investigating the dark side of the title hero’s personality. When he wears it, the black costume draws out and magnifies Spider-Man’s his capacity for rage and violence and his egotism, which Raimi calls his “pride”. Later, Spider-Man’s dark side takes externalized form in the figure of Venom, the bonding of Peter Parker’s rival Eddie Brock (who in the film looks something like him) with the black costume.

The “evil twin” is a standard motif of the superhero genre. But before the Marvel revolution of the 1960s, the heroes of the superhero genres, with few exceptions (such as the Sub-Mariner) were morally perfect, save for trivial faults like Barry Allen’s proclivity to be late whenever he wasn’t in costume as the Silver Age Flash.

It was Marvel that introduced the concept that the superhero had an inner “dark side” against which he must struggle, whether it is the Thing “going bad” in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four in the 1960s or Wolverine striving to overcome his “berserker rages” in Chris Claremont and Frank Miller’s 1982 Wolverine limited series. In the classic Marvel tradition the superhero can overcome his dark side and achieve, or at least progress towards, redemption, as Peter Parker/Spider-Man does in Spider-Man 3.

Sam Raimi and his brother Ivan, who collaborated with him on the story for Spider-Man 3, intended to have the title character reevaluate his conception of both himself and his adversaries. In the previously quoted interview, Sam Raimi states that he and Ivan believe that Peter Parker “considers himself a hero and a sinless person versus these villains that he nabs. We felt it would be a great thing for him to learn a little less black and white view of life and that’s he not above these people. He’s not just the hero and they’re not just the villains. They were all human beings and that he himself might have some sin within him and that other human beings, the ones he calls criminals, have some humanity within them and that the best we can do in this world is to not strive for vengeance, but for forgiveness.”

The need for forgiveness is the great theme of Spider-Man 3, although each review of the film that I’ve read so far ignores it. (Most of the rest of this week’s column is about the ending of Spider-Man 3, so consider yourselves given a spoiler alert.)

Even before he dons the black costume, the Peter Parker of Spider-Man 3 engages in what Sam Raimi calls the sin of “pride,” becoming so swept up in his egocentric pleasure in the fame of his costumed persona to distance him from the woman he loves, Mary Jane Watson.

Perhaps it’s not just pride that is Peter’s failing, but also an inability to see and understand things from another person’s point of view. In the early part of the movie, even as Spider-Man reaches a new height of popularity among the people of New York City, Mary Jane suffers a serious reversal in her career. She is fired from a starring role in a Broadway musical right after opening night, and soon thereafter ends up working as a singing waitress in obscurity, as if she had become a nonperson in the acting profession. The Beat perceptively pointed out the similarity to A Star Is Born (albeit with the sexes reversed), with one lover rising in his career while the other descends.

When Mary Jane tries to explain her feelings about her career reversal to Peter, he cheerfully tells her that it’s not so bad, that it’s like the way Spider-Man used to be unpopular, but his fortunes changed for the better and so will hers. Peter is so swept up by his joy and, yes, pride, in Spider-Man’s new popularity that, despite his good intentions towards her, he is nonetheless oblivious to the emotional pain that she feels, that cannot easily be soothed by a blithe reassurance that things are bound to get better. Peter, as Spider-Man, has achieved the success, fame, and popularity that she presumably sought through her acting career. Now that she has failed, she presumably envies and perhaps resents Peter’s success, and his inadequate empathy for her runs the proverbial salt in her wound.

Perhaps this is the Raimi brothers’ point: that the self-centeredness of pride precludes empathy for the feelings of other people. The prideful man feels that the world revolves around him alone.

Although she does not go to the extremes that Peter does, under the influence of the black costume, Mary Jane arguably has similar character flaws. Why doesn’t she tell him about the bad reviews she received or that she was fired from the Broadway show? Is it her own pride? Moreover, she is so lost in her own sorrow over her failure in her own ambitions, that she doesn’t share Peter’s joy in Spider-Man’s new popularity. She shows him no more empathy and understanding than he does towards her.

Mary Jane’s Broadway catastrophe doesn’t make sense. If her singing voice is supposedly too weak to carry past the first row, wouldn’t the director or producers or conductor or someone have noticed before opening night? Like during her audition? Weren’t there any preview performances? And if no one can hear her past the first row, then why do we see and hear the entire opening night audience applaud after her number? More importantly, don’t the movie’s writers know that for many years all Broadway musical performances have been electronically amplified? Even if Mary Jane had a weak, soft voice, she would have been outfitted with a microphone so that she could be heard clearly even in the back of the balcony.

Furthermore, I’ve been following Broadway theater for decades, and I cannot recall ever reading that an actor was fired from a show immediately after the opening performance. The closest case I can think of was when British actor Henry Goodman was fired as Nathan Lane’s replacement in the Broadway musical version of The Producers, but that wasn’t because of Goodman’s singing ability, and it was during previews, not after the opening night for the new cast. For a leading actress to be fired the day after opening on Broadway is therefore so unusual that it would make headlines in New York newspapers, including The Daily Bugle. Doesn’t Peter Parker, Bugle freelance photojournalist, read the Bugle or some other paper? Wouldn’t he be interested in reading reviews of his girlfriend’s Broadway show? How could he not know that she had been badly reviewed and fired? Don’t Peter and Mary Jane have friends who would ask him about her being fired?

Moreover, Spider-Man 2 established that Mary Jane already had a burgeoning career as a model (with her face omnipresent on posters in one scene) and on stage (as one of the ingenues in that production of The Importance of Being Earnest). It seems odd that she would immediately be reduced to being a singing waitress. Doesn’t she have an agent? And if her voice isn’t that good, why would she be hired as a singing waitress? It’s not as if she would have no competition for the job in a city full of young, unemployed musical performers.

This is a paradox of the superhero genre. I, and moviegoers like me, am willing to suspend my disbelief sufficiently to accept a guy with super-strength who shoots webbing from his hands or a man who has been transformed into a sentient creature made of sand. But I won’t suspend disbelief when it comes to things from real life, like amplification in Broadway theaters.

Furthermore, some coincidences are more credible than others in superhero fiction. One of the coincidences upon which Spider-Man’s origin is founded is that the Burglar whom Spider-Man refused to stop is the same man who later murders his Uncle Ben. This coincidence derives its dramatic power in the origin story from its very unlikeliness. It is improbable that Spider-Man would have previously encountered his uncle’s killer, but it is not impossible. Spider-Man could not have foreseen that the Burglar would kill Uncle Ben, but he should have recognized that the Burglar would have gone on to commit other crimes, perhaps including murder. It is powerfully ironic that the Burglar’s next victim turned out to be Peter’s own uncle. (The first movie implies that the wrestling arena that the Burglar robbed was close to the spot where he encountered Uncle Ben, thus making the coincidence more credible.)

On the other hand, Spider-Man 3 presents a whopper of a coincidence: the meteor bearing the sentient symbiote just happens to land in Central Park right near Peter Parker.

The comics made the symbiote’s presence on Earth seem more logical, at least for a fictional world in which interstellar travel is possible: Spider-Man brought the “black costume” back from the planet that was the setting of Marvel Super Heroes: Secret Wars. One can hardly expect Spider-Man 3 to recap that series; in fact, as far as we know from the Spider-Man movies, the world it depicts has neither interstellar travel nor other superheroes. (With the movie rights to different Marvel heroes parceled out to different studios, as yet we haven’t seen “the Marvel Universe” in which they co-exist depicted in a live action film.) With its three villains Spider-Man 3 is already fairly long, so I can understand that the filmmakers didn’t want to spend time on a lengthy explanation of how the symbiote found Spider-Man. But surely they could have done better than this. Since Peter Parker, in both the comics and the films, is a brilliant science student, what if he had seen the meteorite on display in a laboratory or a museum or even at his alma mater, Columbia University, and the symbiote, hidden within it, emerged upon sensing the presence of a being with superhuman powers?

Even if the Broadway part of the movie’s plot is full of logical holes, what is more important is that it serves as a catalyst for distancing Peter and Mary Jane from one another. It is possible that Mary Jane reads too much into Peter’s friendship with Gwen Stacy in the movie and the fact that, as Spider-Man, he kisses her while suspended upside down, duplicating the famous kiss he gave MJ in the first film. On the other hand, once he is under the spell of the black costume, Peter flirts with Betty Brant and brings Gwen to the restaurant where Mary Jane works to make MJ jealous. Perhaps in watching Spider-Man kiss Gwen, Mary Jane recognized that Peter already was tempted to stray from fidelity, and the black costume amplified this tendency.

It may also be that Mary Jane reacts so strongly to suspicions of Peter’s infidelity because she feels the temptation herself. As she drifts away from Peter, Mary Jane draws closer to her former boyfriend Harry Osborn, although one they kiss, she realizes she has gone too far.

Before that kiss, there’s a charming sequence in which MJ and Harry spontaneously break into dancing the Twist. Both the Beat and The Village Voice have observed a retro feel to Spider-Man 3: consider, for example, that in her Broadway musical MJ sings an Irving Berlin standard, “They Say It’s Wonderful.” The Twist, which was popular from 1960 to 1962, was already dated when Mary Jane made her debut in the comics in 1966.

In the past I have complained that the movies’ Mary Jane lacks an important element of her comics counterpart: the party girl side of her personality, which first attracted Peter to her, and through which she escapes her own sorrows, just as Peter escapes his through the persona of the wisecracking Spider-Man. In the 1960s Stan Lee and John Romita Sr.’s Mary Jane got a job as a go-go dancer, which suited that side of her personality (see the cover to Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 1 #59. I suspect that the Twist scene in Spider-Man 3 is Sam Raimi’s long overdue acknowledgment of that side of the comics’ Mary Jane.

Under pressure from Harry, after he reverts to seeking vengeance on Spider-Man, Mary Jane breaks up with Peter. Harry has threatened to kill Peter if she didn’t, but her rejection still seems like a betrayal? (Why didn’t she just tell Peter that Harry was making her do it? Is this her pride yet again?) Later, after he brings Gwen to the restaurant where she works, Peter strikes MJ so hard she falls to the floor. It was inadvertent, but Peter nonetheless blames himself, and this is the turning point when he decides to rid himself of the black costume.

In the film’s last scene, Peter and Mary Jane make a new start to their relationship. They are thus forgiving each other, and perhaps each is also trying to make up for his or her own behavior towards the other.

More surprisingly, the movie extends forgiveness towards two of its villains.

In the first Spider-Man movie Harry Osborn’s father Norman is the Green Goblin, who dies in combat with Spider-Man when he is inadvertently impaled by his own flying glider, as in the comics. Harry blames Spider-Man for his father’s death. (Note the parallel: Peter and Harry each seek vengeance for the death of a father figure.) In the second movie Doctor Octopus captures Spider-Man for Harry, who unmasks him. Harry also has a vision of his father, who, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, urges him to avenge his death, and Harry discovers a secret room with the Goblin’s arsenal.

Does Harry only imagine seeing and hearing his father’s ghost, in which case Harry is genuinely nuts? Or is the ghost of Norman Osborn real? I like the fact that Raimi keeps the matter ambiguous, whereas so many comics writers, intolerant of mystery, would insist on answering the question one way or the other. I don’t know if the filmmakers know this, but Norman appeared to Harry as a “ghost” in Spectacular Spider-Man #183 (1991). (At the time the comics writers and editors considered Norman to be dead, although, perhaps inevitably, he turned up alive years later.)

Early in Spider-Man 3 there is a spectacular aerial battle between the vengeful Harry, mounted on one of the Green Goblin’s gliders, and Spider-Man. Although the movie does not give Harry a supervillain alias, licensing tie-ins refer to him as “the New Goblin” (such as in the title of Danny Fingeroth’s children’s book Spider-Man 3: The New Goblin, which you can find here). Once again I find myself wondering why the filmmakers could not do better. They didn’t put Harry in a Green Goblin costume, presumably to keep the emphasis on his true identity: when this Goblin attacks Spider-Man, it is Harry Osborn attacking his longtime friend Peter Parker, who, for the same reason, is unmasked in this fight scene. If he wore the Green Goblin’s mask and costume, Harry would be seen as taking on the identity of his father, instead, as he did in the comics. So that’s why they don’t call Harry the second Green Goblin. But I can’t improve upon New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane’s comment about “the New Goblin, whose name sounds like a small-circulation poetry magazine”. I would have called Harry the Hobgoblin, even though in the comics that was the name of a different imitator of the original Green Goblin.

Severely injured in the battle, Harry develops amnesia, forgetting that Peter is Spider-Man and that Spider-Man supposedly killed his father. This seems too convenient for some reviewers to accept. But it is in the tradition of the Amazing Spider-Man comic books when Stan Lee wrote them, in which Norman Osborn repeatedly suffered amnesia, causing him to forget his Goblin identity and that Peter Parker was Spider-Man. In the comics Harry also blamed Spider-Man for his father’s death. learned that Peter Parker was Spider-Man, and became the second Green Goblin to avenge him; at one point Harry suffered a concussion, causing him to forget Spider-Man’s true identity.

In the comics Norman Osborn had Multiple Personality Disorder: an explosion of a green chemical (that was later credited with endowing him with super-strength) gave Osborn an alternate personality, that of the Green Goblin. When Norman suffered amnesia, that alternate personality disappeared into his subconscious. Notice that when this first happened, in Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 1 #40 (1966), Spider-Man decided not to turn Osborn over to the police, and to conceal the fact that he was the Green Goblin. Spider-Man reasoned that, as the Goblin, Osborn was mentally ill, and that Osborn, now that he has been restored to his normal self, should not be held responsible for the actions of his mad, alternate personality. In other words, Spider-Man showed mercy towards the man who was arguably his greatest foe.

Similarly, in Spider-Man 3, when Harry loses his memory of his actions as “the New Goblin,” Peter shows him forgiveness by once more treating him as his best friend.

Oddly, it appears in the film that Peter had never told Mary Jane that Harry knew he was Spider-Man and posed a danger to him. Why not? Didn’t he think she could handle the knowledge? Didn’t it occur to Peter that Harry might menace Mary Jane as well, as indeed he does later in Spider-Man 3? Another aspect of the self-centeredness of Peter and Mary Jane in Spider-Man 3 is that they don’t communicate with each other about subjects of importance to them both, indicating a lack of trust. After all, at the end of the first movie Peter left MJ at the cemetery, telling himself his unwillingness to share his secret with her was for her own safety. In Spider-Man 2 Mary Jane learns that Peter is Spider-Man by accident, not because he decided to tell her.

After Mary Jane kisses Harry but then immediately rejects him as a lover in Spider-Man 3, Harry’s full memories return, presumably because MJ’s rejection reawakened his resentment towards the man she does love, Peter Parker. Harry again becomes Peter’s enemy, threatening to kill him unless Mary Jane breaks up with Peter; Harry then boasts to Peter that Mary Jane now loves him instead. Under the black costume’s influence, Spider-Man engages in a brutal battle with Harry at his palatial apartment, ending in an explosion that might have killed him. Earlier Spider-Man had tried to kill the Sandman; now we see that Spider-Man has fallen so far into the “dark side” that he would leave his former best friend for dead. Harry survives, but half his face is scarred. Like the black costume for Spider-Man, this is a visual metaphor for the dark side of Harry’s soul, like the scars on Doctor Doom’s face, or, more to the point, the scarred half of Two-Face’s visage in Batman.

Sam Raimi and company blame Harry’s hatred of Spider-Man on yet another lack of communication. In their exchanges with each other, Peter/Spider-Man never explained to Harry exactly how Norman Osborn died. In Spider-Man 3, Harry’s butler, who used to work for Norman, finally tells him that he examined Norman’s lethal wound and discovered it was caused by accident.

This raises a batch of questions. Why did the butler wait until now, presumably years after Norman’s death, to tell Harry this? How could the butler, who presumably is not a physician, tell by looking at the wound that Spider-Man wasn’t responsible for causing it? When Spider-Man brought Norman’s body to the latter’s home, wouldn’t Harry have called doctors and morticians? If a butler could tell Norman was impaled accidentally, wouldn’t they have figured this out, too, and told Harry? What did Harry tell the police about his father’s death, and why didn’t he gave them hunt down Spider-Man as the accused killer? And if you were Norman Osborn’s butler, and knew he was the Green Goblin, wouldn’t you phone the police and then head for the hills?

As a result of the butler’s confession, Harry realizes he was wrong about Spider-Man. Later, Spider-Man persuades Harry to team up with him, as the “New Goblin,” to save the woman they both love, Mary Jane, from her captors, Venom and the Sandman. Harry and Peter effectively forgive one another, help each other during the climactic battle with Sandman and Venom, and Harry dies heroically in combat.

I found the conclusion of Harry’s story more satisfying in Spider-Man 3 than it was in the comics, where by the nature of endless comics continuity, it stretched out for decades, with Harry going back and forth between being Peter’s friend and Spider-Man’s enemy, as new writers and editors came and went. I prefer Harry’s redeeming himself through a heroic death in Spider-Man 3 to his death in bed, poisoned by the formula that had given him the Goblin’s powers, in Spectacular Spider-Man #200 (1993). But in the comics, too, Harry had redeemed himself just before his death by saving Mary Jane’s life, and was reconciled with Peter on his deathbed. Harry asks Peter for forgiveness and receives it in his final moments.

The most dramatic–and surprising–act of forgiveness in Spider-Man 3 comes when Peter/Spider-Man forgives the Sandman for what one might well have considered the most unforgivable act in the Spider-Man mythos: the killing of Uncle Ben. According to Spider-Man 3, it was not the Burglar from the first film –and from Spider-Man’s comics origin in Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962)–who killed Peter’s Uncle Ben, but the Burglar’s partner-in-crime, Flint Marko, who later is accidentally transformed into the Sandman, a being whose body has been converted into a sand-like substance. Upon learning that Marko was the killer, Peter Parker is bent on vengeance, just as he was when he confronted the Burglar in the first movie. Under the influence of the black costume, Spider-Man’s vengeful rage turns literally murderous, and he attempts to kill the Sandman in their battle in the subway. To avenge a murder, Spider-Man is willing to become a murderer himself, although, as noted, the Sandman turns out to be virtually indestructible.

The Sandman likewise tries to kill Spider-Man and in the movie’s final act teams up with Venom to endanger the life of Mary Jane. So Marko is hardly an innocent.

Here I’d like to add that the Sandman is the only case I can think of in which the movie version of a superhero comics character represents an improvement on the comics original. Computer animation gives a better sense of what it would be like to see a human composed of sand (or a substance like it), and despite all the amazing ways that Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko portrayed the uses of Sandman’s powers, I feel that the Kong-sized sand giant of Spider-Man 3 tops them all.

Towards the end of the film, the Sandman explains to Spider-Man, who is at that point unmasked, that he did not mean to kill Ben Parker: he was holding him up, but his partner, the Burglar, startled him, and Marko’s gun went off, killing Ben (as we see in flashback). Moreover, Marko says that he committed crimes in order to get money to pay for the medical treatment of his young daughter Penny, whom we saw earlier in the film. Peter believes Marko’s story, forgives him for Ben’s death, and allows him to escape. (So this time Spider-Man let Ben’s killer escape for what Sam Raimi and his co-writers believe is the right reason.)

Forgiveness may seem to be an odd theme for a work in the superhero genre, which so often features villains who incarnate evil in human form. It is inconceivable that, say, Jack Kirby’s supreme villain Darkseid should ever be forgiven for his crimes.

Nonetheless, forgiveness is a recurring theme in Stan Lee’s Silver Age comics. As I mentioned, there is the mercy that Spider-Man shows to Norman Osborn, once his Green Goblin personality has been suppressed. Before that, Lee and Ditko presented the case of Daily Bugle reporter Frederick Foswell, who was secretly Spider-Man’s foe, the criminal mastermind called the Big Man (in Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 1 #10, 1964). But after Foswell served time in prison, Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson gave him a second chance, Foswell went straight, and he ultimately repaid Jameson by dying heroically in saving his life (in Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 1 #52, 1967). But in Marvel’s Silver Age comics redemption did not necessarily require that the repentant character die in expiation of his sins.
Lee also showed forgiveness to three of his early supervillains, Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, by having them reform and become members of his superhero team, the Avengers.

Sam Raimi and company may be aware of the Sandman’s own journey towards redemption in the comics. Various writers have pointed to Tom DeFalco’s story in Marvel Two-in-One #86 (1982), in which the Sandman becomes friends with his former enemy, the Thing. But it was Roy Thomas who first showed a morally decent side to the Sandman by revealing in Marvel Team-Up #1 (1972) this hardened criminal’s devotion to his aged mother, Mrs. Baker. Marko’s young daughter Penny is the movie’s counterpart for Mrs. Baker.

Looking back, we can now see that Raimi’s theme of forgiveness and redemption was emerging in Spider-Man 2. There was Peter’s confession to Aunt May that he had let the Burglar escape before he killed Uncle Ben; stunned at first, May later forgives Peter. Raimi even allows the film’s villain, Doctor Octopus, one of Spider-Man’s greatest archfoes in the comics, to become reconciled with Peter/Spider-Man and to redeem himself through sacrificing his life to save New York City.

If you carefully read Doctor Octopus’s origin story in the comics, you will see that, as with Norman Osborn, the explosive accident that endowed him with super-powers also gave him an alternate, evil personality. Norman Osborn and Dr. Otto Octavius are like Dr. Jekyll; the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus are their Mr. Hydes (see “Comics in Context” #45). In Spider-Man 3 the black costume draws out a Hyde-like side of Peter Parker’s personality. Both Spider-Man 2 and 3 have as a supporting character Dr. Curt Connors, who in the comics transformed into his own version of Mr. Hyde, the Lizard; presumably this fate likewise awaits him in a future Spider-Man movie.

In the comics the fact that Doctor Octopus has a dual personality has usually been forgotten. A striking exception is Fantastic Four #267 (1984), in which writer/artist John Byrne showed Dr. Otto Octavius having reverted to his original personality and then shifting back into his villainous persona.

In Spider-Man 2 Dr. Octavius likewise has a dual personality. The movie establishes that it is his mechanical tentacles, which have artificial intelligence, which affect his mind, turning him into the villainous Doctor Octopus. This anticipates the way that the black costume affects Spider-Man’s mind in the third movie.

Extending forgiveness to all the Spider-Man films’ villains might suggest a different sort of fantasy world, in which no one is truly evil. But there are exceptions to Raimi’s sense of mercy. In the final act of Spider-Man 3, Eddie Brock is forcibly separated from the “black costume,” but Brock freely chooses to reunite with the symbiote, thereby bringing his final punishment–being obliterated along with the symbiote in an explosion–upon himself. If Norman Osborn’s ghost is real, then Norman is unrepentant even in death.

Watching the movie, I felt that Sandman got off too easily. Spider-Man/Peter believes Marko’s story that he accidentally shot Uncle Ben. But why should Peter take Marko’s word for it? The Sandman had just done his best to kill Spider-Man, though perhaps Peter feels they are even, since Spider-Man tried earlier to destroy Marko. But would a judge let Marko off for accidental murder, or for attempting to kill Spider-Man, or for endangering the life of Mary Jane, or for wreaking havoc in New York City? Even if the Sandman is trying to get money for his daughter’s medical care, that doesn’t legally excuse his robberies. So now Spider-Man has let the Sandman go, as he did the Burglar, and the Sandman may well commit further robberies. And what if the Sandman kills someone else, even if inadvertently, in the course of future battles with the police?

My biggest problem with making the Sandman into Uncle Ben’s killer is that it subverts one of the most important elements of the Spider-Man concept: his motivation.

Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s first Spider-Man story (Amazing Fantasy#15, August, 1962) is a sort of pop tragedy. Afflicted by hubris, disdaining the problems of other people, Spider-Man allows that fleeing Burglar to escape capture. After Peter’s beloved Uncle Ben is murdered, Spider-Man captures the killer, only to discover that he is the same Burglar he earlier allowed to escape. Looking into the Burglar’s face becomes like looking into a mirror: Spider-Man recognizes that he–Peter Parker–bears partial responsibility for what amounts to patricide, the murder of his own father figure. Raimi contends that Peter Parker regards himself as “sinless”: the whole point of Spider-Man’s origin is that Peter Parker discovers he is a sinner.

But by establishing that it was the Sandman who actually slew Uncle Ben, Raimi and his collaborators absolve Spider-Man of guilt for this primal crime. If the Burglar was responsible for Ben’s death, it was only indirectly and accidentally, by startling Marko, who then fired his gun. If the Burglar had not been present, maybe something else would have startled the clearly nervous Marko. Uncle Ben might well have been killed even if the Burglar hadn’t been present. Capturing the Burglar beforehand might have made no difference.

This undercuts what Stan Lee himself tells Peter Parker in his cameo in Spider-Man 3: that “one man can make a difference.” Instead, this scenario suggests that Ben Parker was doomed to die no matter what Peter had done. (By the way, when I saw the movie, it was gratifying to hear the audience burst into applause as they recognized Stan Lee on screen.)

One of the factors that distinguishes Spider-Man as a character is the fact that he is driven by guilt. His war on crime is a neverending effort to expiate his sin of failing to prevent Ben’s murder. Sam Raimi acknowledged this in an interview: “with each criminal he brings to justice he’s trying to pay down this debt of guilt he feels about the death of Uncle Ben.” Whenever Peter Parker has doubts about his mission, or attempts to abandon it, as in Stan Lee’s own “Spider-Man No More” story in Amazing Spider-Man #50 (July, 1967), he recalls his origin, his failure to act, the death of Uncle Ben, and his discovery of his own guilt. The moment when Spider-Man recognizes Uncle Ben’s killer as the Burglar he previously allowed to escape is the moment of Peter Parker’s true loss of innocence, and the moment that Spider-Man as crimefighter is born. It is such a psychologically powerful story that Spider-Man writers in comics and other media retell it decade after decade for new generations.

In Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 Peter Parker gives up being Spider-Man, but returns to his costumed role when he realizes that he cannot stand by and allow innocent people to come to harm. So perhaps Raimi would argue that Peter does not need Uncle Ben’s death as his motivation to remain committed to his mission. But certainly Peter’s guilt over his father figure’s murder is more dramatically and psychologically powerful.

Raimi also stated that in Spider-Man 3 Peter Parker learns that life is less simple than he believed: “There are so many more truths than the simple truths of good or bad. . . . For instance, that man didn’t kill his uncle as he had thought. It was another man.” But Spider-Man 3 actually makes its hero’s psychology simpler than it is in the comics. Since “it was another man” whom he had never met who killed Uncle Ben, Spider-Man bears no responsibility for his uncle’s death.

In the movie Peter/Spider-Man symbolically exorcises the dark side of his personality when he tears off the black costume, it attaches itself to his “evil twin” Eddie Brock, and Venom is blown up into nothingness. It is as if Peter Parker has regained his lost innocence, something that never happens in reality. But in the comics it was indeed the Burglar who killed Uncle Ben, Peter recognizes his own sinful part in being the Burglar’s enabler, and Peter will carry the burden of that guilt for the rest of his life. In the comics Spider-Man learned that with great power must come great responsibility, not only to do good, but to acknowledge and expiate the evil within himself.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Writing this column nearly every week, I continually notice things that relate to installments I’ve already written, or to ones I’m planning to write.

For example, in the June 20 issue of The New York Times, columnist Thomas J. Friedman wrote about the masked members of Hamas, and about how masks can be both empowering and intimidating. Friedman also included a quotation by Oscar Wilde about masks that I found applicable to secret identities in the superhero genre. Here’s a longer version of Wilde’s characteristically paradoxical observation: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth”. Hence the Batman is more “real” than Bruce Wayne, and through their costumed personas, Clark Kent and Peter Parker can express aspects of their personalities that are concealed in their everyday lives.

This week I also watched Fritz Lang’s RKO film While the City Sleeps (1956) on Turner Classic Movies. The villain is a serial killer (played by Drew Barrymore’s dad) who turns out to be a fan of “so-called comic books,” a phrase used in the movie twice. It is one thing to be informed by books and documentaries about the attacks on comic books in the 1950s (see “Comics in Context” #95, 180). It is quite another to be ambushed unexpectedly with a slander against comics readers while watching a movie from that period. In the same year that DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz launched comics’ Silver Age, RKO Radio Pictures was instructing the moviegoing public that reading crime comics could turn you into a serial killer.

This seems a wee bit hypocritical of RKO and Mr. Lang. It is explained in the film that “comic books” are bad because they show readers how to commit crimes. The movie repeatedly demonstrates how one can surreptitiously adjust the “button lock” on an apartment door in order to break into the apartment later and kill the lady who lives there.

It’s also ironic that Fritz Lang, the director of this anti-comics movie, was the pioneer of the supervillain (as defined by Dr. Peter Coogan) in cinema (see “Comics in Context” #165) and his most celebrated film, Metropolis (1927), apparently inspired the name of Superman’s home city. (And would the name of Superboy‘s leading lady have been devised by combining the names of Fritz Lang and 1940s movie star Lana Turner?)

It turns out that Paul Dini was right (see “Comics in Context” #180): Boomerang has stopped showing even the pre-1948 Warner Brothers animated cartoons that the network’s parent Turner Broadcasting bought years ago, and has replaced its nightly Looney Tunes show with an MGM cartoon anthology. In the past I’ve praised Turner Classic Movies’ Cartoon Alley, which showcases classic Hollywood cartoons, including pre-1948 Warners shorts. I see from TCM’s online schedules that Cartoon Alley will cease at the end of July. Is this ominous?

Perhaps not. Recently on the Internet radio program Stu’s Show, animation historian Jerry Beck indicated that the classic Warners cartoons vanished from Boomerang because negotiations are afoot to show them Somewhere Else. But where?

In the season finale of NBC’s 30 Rock, Tina Fey’s character, Liz, has a cell phone that rings to the tune of the “Ride of the Valkyries.” Hearing this, another character, Phoebe, asks Liz if she likes Wagner. Liz says no, it’s a reference to Bugs Bunny, whereupon she and her friend Jenna merrily start chanting “Kill the wabbit!” I wonder, since the classic Warners cartoons are no longer on TV every day, if in twenty years a sitcom would portray two thirtysomething women knowing who Bugs Bunny is, much less quoting a specific Bugs Bunny cartoon (Chuck Jones’s 1957 What’s Opera, Doc?; see “Comics in Context” #102). At least these cartoons have been coming out on DVD, enabling parents to introduce them to their kids.

I am pleased that, after running the first two seasons of the animated Justice League series on a seemingly endless loop, Boomerang has finally begun showing its superior continuation, Justice League Unlimited. I hadn’t seen any of the “Cadmus” arc episodes before, in which the American government regards the Justice League as a possible menace. The episode I saw several days ago, “The Doomsday Sanction,” lived up to the arc’s high reputation. I was surprised and especially impressed by its conclusion, in which Batman agrees that the League could become a threat to the world, thus echoing the Batman of Kingdom Come and his counterpart, Nighthawk, in Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme (see “Comics in Context” #150), all of them wary of even well-intentioned individuals possessing near-absolute power.

This week I also realized I had forgotten to mention one of the celebrities I sighted at the premiere for Spider-Man 3 in Astoria, Queens (see “Comics in Context” #181): Micky Dolenz, who first came to fame in the same decade that Spider-Man did, the 1960s, as a member of the Monkees. (You can find pictures of Dolenz at the premiere at www.gettyimages.com). I suppose this supports J. Michael Straczynski’s theory in his run writing Amazing Spider-Man that Spider-Man keeps attracting other characters with animal totems.

The premiere was on Monday, April 30, as part of both the Tribeca Film Festival and “Spider-Man Week in New York,” as officially declared by New York Mayor (and possible presidential candidate) Michael Bloomberg. I resumed attending “Spider-Man Week” activities on Saturday.

The New York Public Library’s Humanities and Social Sciences Library (the famed building on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, guarded by the iconic lion statues) was displaying what was billed as “The Ultimate Spider-Man Comic Collection.” (No, there were no copies of Marvel’s Ultimate Spider-Man on exhibit.) The building is visible in the first Spider-Man movie, when Uncle Ben drops Peter off in front of the library, but I was still surprised that the library was participating in this big public relations spectacular promoting Spider-Man 3.

It was even more of a surprise because back in the mid-1990s I did research into the number of American libraries that collected comic books, and there were relatively few, with only a few noteworthy collections such as those at Ohio State and Michigan State Universities. Back then the New York Public Library’s website conceded it had a few boxes of old comics, but otherwise discouraged people from researching comics there. Matters have radically changed at America’s libraries over the following years.

In the McGraw Rotunda, a few flights up and outside the main reading room stood a few glass cases holding seventeen vintage Spider-Man comic books, primarily copies of those written by Stan Lee during the Silver Age of the 1960s: Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 1 #32 (January, 1966) was the earliest, and Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21 (1987), featuring the wedding of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson, was the most recent. You could easily see many of these comics in the dealer’s room in a large convention. I own copies of many of these comics. I again found myself reflecting that since nowadays museums and libraries display original printed comic books, why, I could turn my own comics collection into a museum exhibit! Moreover, the labels I’d write for my books would be more informative and analytical than the ones that the New York Public Library provided, which were content to credit the writer and artist, summarize the story, and quote some dialogue. As for literary or artistic analysis, there was none. In short, the New York Library’s exhibit was far from “ultimate.” I also found myself wishing that the people crowded around these glass cases knew about my Stan Lee retrospective exhibit down at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, which is far more enlightening about the cultural import of Marvel in the 1960s, if I do say so myself (www.moccany.org).

My visit to the Library and perusal of the “Ultimate” exhibit took maybe fifteen minutes tops, much of which was consumed going up and down staircases. But upon exiting the Library, I entered a nearby discount DVD store, where I found and bought The Jean Renoir Collector’s Edition, an inexpensive three-disc collection of seven of the great director’s lesser-known films. So, visiting the Library hadn’t been a waste of time, after all.

Then I headed up to the American Museum of Natural History, which was contributing to “Spider-Man Week” with an exhibit called “Spiders: Alive!“ in what the museum now calls its “Grand Gallery” (it’s well designed, but hardly grand) on the first floor. On Tuesday the Beat, who always knows about such matters in advance, saw “Spiders: Alive!” when Tobey Maguire, Spidey himself, was making a personal appearance there. When I got there on Saturday afternoon, I had to content myself with the exhibit itself consisting of a row of glass cases holding rather large tarantulas. One of them was called the “Goliath birdeater tarantula,” which should give you some idea of its size.

A lengthy wall text asserted, among other things, that in endowing Spider-Man with the ability to shoot webbing, Spider-Man’s creators “must” have been inspired by a relatively little known kind of spider that can cast its webbing over a victim. Couldn’t the museum have contacted Stan Lee and asked him?
I rather think that if Stan Lee and Steve Ditko had been aware of this particular species of spider, Lee would have mentioned it in an interview, or even in “Secrets of Spider-Man” in the first Amazing Spider-Man Annual (1964).

Just because a scholar can find a real-world analogue to something in a creative writer’s work doesn’t mean that the writer “must” have been aware of the connection. Frank Miller put a scientist named Beaker in Elektra: Assassin. Years ago, I asked him if he named Elektra‘s Beaker after Dr. Bunsen Honeydew’s assistant Beaker on The Muppet Show: Miller replied he had never heard of the Muppet Beaker.

Unfortunately, as comics attract more interest from mainstream culture, we are probably going to see more of these unfounded scholarly assumptions.

For the magazine of Britain’s Tate art museums, academic John Carlin, co-curator of the “Masters of American Comics” exhibition, wrote a mostly excellent essay about members of the high art canon whose work foreshadows that of twentieth century comics artists. Like Alan Moore, artist Bryan Talbot, and myself (see “Comics in Context” #72), Carlin has noticed the similarities between the godlike and heroic figures drawn by the British artist William Blake (1757-1827) and those of contemporary comics. Ignoring Joe Simon’s and Stan Lee’s roles as co-creators, Carlin writes that “Echoes of his [Blake’s] flattened muscular style reverberate throughout the comic’s heroic phase, particularly by artists such as Jack Kirby (1917-1994), creator of Captain America, The Hulk, X-Men and the overall look of Marvel Comics. . . .Kirby used techniques pioneered by Blake to create a realistic sense of epic action through the combination of muscular figures with exaggerated patterned backgrounds. . . .” Was Kirby aware of Blake’s work? If so, it hasn’t yet been revealed in print, to my knowledge. Read that passage carefully, and you’ll see that Carlin is saying that Kirby and Blake used the same “techniques,” and not necessarily that Kirby was aware that Blake had used them. But someone could easily misread this to draw the latter conclusion. Carlin also misses a major (if probably coincidental) similarity between Blake and Kirby: each created his own mythology of fictional deities and heroes.

On the other hand, Danny Fingeroth recently pointed out to me that the full name of the Sub-Mariner’s creator Bill Everett was William Blake Everett. It turns out he was William Blake’s descendant, so perhaps Blake influenced the creation of one of Marvel’s first superheroes. (See this).

Going through “Spiders: Alive!” likewise took no more than ten to fifteen minutes, much of which was spent waiting for people in front of each glass case to move aside so I could get a look. The big spiders were interesting for a short look, but not worth the long trip into Manhattan.

However, just off the Grand Gallery was the newly opened Spitzer Hall of Human Origins, a handsomely designed new exhibit of fossils of mankind’s prehistoric ancestors, which I visited for the first time. (Over the decades since I first visited the museum, this is the third version of this gallery, which was once devoted to human biology, but it is by the far the best.) Up on the fourth floor I visited for the first time the museum’s newly opened and restored Audubon Gallery, which retains the look of a museum hall from the 1930s. John James Audubon is famous as a painter of birds, but the gallery displayed his lesser known but remarkable portraits of North American mammals, and as an X-Men enthusiast, I was delighted to see a stuffed wolverine, mounted as if roaring at the visitors. So the trip to the Museum had been well worth it, after all.

I intended the high point of this particular Saturday to be my viewing Spider-Man 3 itself, which I saw at Manhattan’s enormous Ziegfeld Theatre, and this time I was not disappointed. Director Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies are by far the best of the early 21st century wave of superhero genre movies. Richard Donner’s Superman movies (including the excellent new Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut on DVD) and Tim Burton’s first Batman film give the Raimi Spider-Man movies heavy competition for the honor of the best live action movie based on superheroes that originated in comics. I’m tempted to name The Incredibles, an animated film which is not based on a comics series, as the most successful realization of the superhero genre in a feature film (see “Comics in Context” #62). But the Raimi Spider-Man has now maintained its high level of achievement for three films in a row, whereas Warners’ 1980s Superman and 1990s Batman live action film series plummeted into uninspired camp by their third installments.

Much as I loved the first two Spider-Man films, I had trepidations before seeing the third. Sam Raimi is clearly a devotee of the Spider-Man comics of the 1960s, when Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and John Romita., Sr. defined the character, his world, and the series’ themes. Perhaps Raimi is an enthusiast for the superhero comics of the Silver Age, the years from 1956 to 1970, in general. To me Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 were standard bearers for what I have dubbed the neo-Silver movement in the genre, the effort to resurrect the heroic, inspiring, entertaining spirit of the Silver Age comics while updating it for a 21st century audience. But Spider-Man 3 was said to feature Venom, one of the iconic figures of the darker comics of the 1990s, when the genre, to my mind, was losing its way. With Spider-Man 3, it looked as if the movie series might be taking a leap from the Silver Age into the era of the Grim and the Gritty.

For readers who do not already know, in the comics Venom ultimately derives from the new black costume that Spider-Man acquired on an alien planet in the landmark 1984-1985 crossover series Marvel Super Heroes: Secret Wars. Whether or not the Powers That Be originally intended the black costume to replace Spider-Man’s traditional red and blue one permanently, I have no idea But it certainly seemed that way at the time, boosting sales of Amazing Spider-Man #252, in which it first appeared, as surely they had intended. The black costume was nevertheless a mistake: not only was it less interesting than Steve Ditko’s original design, but the wisecracking, web-slinging Spider-Man should be represented by brighter colors than a somber black. It was yet another instance in which the discerning superheroes aficionado had to wait patiently for the Rubber Band Theory of Cartoon Art (see “Comics in Context” #75) to take effect. Eventually, Spider-Man got his original costume design back.

The black costume was revealed to be a sentient alien creature which bonded to its host and was taking mental control of Peter Parker as he slept, though it did not affect his personality when he was awake. Parker finally rid himself of the alien symbiote, and eventually reassumed his red and blue costume whenever he went into action as Spider-Man. Hating Parker for rejecting it, the symbiote bonded with disgruntled reporter Eddie Brock, who also hated Parker, forming the menace called Venom.

Visually Venom was a new variation on that archetypal figure, the superhero’s evil twin. But in the comics Venom was more massive than Spider-Man, with the steroid-style musculature seen on so many superhero genre characters in the 1990s. Venom also had a long, lascivious tongue, and students of the subtext of the cover for Heroes for Hire #13 (see “Comics in Context” #179) should be able to work out what that means. Venom also used to fantasize about not only killing Spider-Man and other victims, but also devouring them. In short, Venom was an utterly repulsive villain, and such was the mindset of tens of thousands of Marvel readers in the 1990s that they therefore embraced him as a hero. Apparently readers identified with this vicious, insane, musclebound cannibal. (Would I want to associate with readers like this? I don’t think so.) Venom starred in one miniseries after another, and since Venom had become a hero of sorts, Marvel felt obliged to create a new, even nastier version of the character, Carnage, whose human host was a serial killer. Now, you may think that it was harmless for Venom to talk about cannibalism, since he didn’t actually practice it. But in retrospect we can see that Venom set the stage for The Ultimates‘ version of the Hulk, who really does eat his enemies.

So you can see why I was not happy that Venom had found his way into Sam Raimi’s movie trilogy. It turns out that this wasn’t Raimi’s idea, either. According to Raimi’s interview at Comic Book Resources, he and his brother Ivan had already concocted a story for the third movie with the Sandman as the main villain. “When we were done, Avi Arad, my partner and president of Marvel at the time, came to me and said “˜Sam, you’re not paying attention to the fans enough.. . .You’ve made two movies now with your favorite villains and now you’re about to make another one with your favorite villains. The fans love Venom. He is the fan-favorite. All Spider-Man readers love Venom. Even though you came from ’70s Spider-Man, this is what the kids are thinking about. . . .'” Raimi told the Hall H crowd last year that “I had been objecting to the lack of humanity [in Venom].” But Arad and Alvin Sargent, a screenwriter on Spider-Man 2 and 3, educated Raimi in Venom lore, with the result that “‘”¦ in studying him I gained an appreciation for him,’ said Raimi. “˜Venom has always been a character that the fans love”¦ that’s why he’s in here'”.

I’m a Spider-Man fan, and I don’t love Venom, and I believe I have company in this respect. Moreover, Venom debuted in Amazing Spider-Man #299 (April, 1988) and his heyday was in the 1990s, when most of his miniseries were published. Raimi has reported that he did see e-mails from fans who wanted Venom to have a big role in the movie. But although the character is still around in the comics, I notice that a 2000 attempt to relaunch him in a regular series lasted only eighteen issues. Venom is really a creature of the period of the comics speculator boom, which now seems long ago. In contrast, Raimi’s choices for the villains of the first two Spider-Man movies, the original Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus, both Lee-Ditko creations, retain their hold on comics fans’ imaginations after over forty years.

Spider-Man 3 ends up with three major villains–the Sandman, presumably to satisfy Raimi’s fondness for the Lee-Ditko characters; Harry Osborn as “the New Goblin,” continuing Harry’s character arc from the first two movies (and echoing the 1970s Spider-Man comics, in which Harry succeeded his father as the Green Goblin); and Venom, whose presence keeps Avi Arad happy. Some reviewers thought this was too many villains for a single film, but I think that the screenplay makes them all fit, giving a part of satisfactory size to each. Then again, I’m not an admirer of Brock/Venom, and I can see that his fans might think that he got insufficient time and development onscreen: Eddie doesn’t become Venom until the film’s final act.

But had Arad not pushed Raimi to include Venom, Spider-Man 3 would have been a very different movie. The black costume–the symbiote–drives the plot. Peter Parker in the black costume plays a much more significant role in the story than Eddie Brock in the black costume does. Arguably Spider-Man 3 actually has four villains, and the foremost of these is Spider-Man himself in the black costume.

One of the principal themes of the superhero genre is the duality of the human personality. This duality can take the form of the division between the conventional introvert who blends into society (Clark Kent, Peter Parker) and his other identity, the heroic individualist who stands out from the society he protects (Superman, Spider-Man). Often the duality is that of the “good” and “evil” or violent sides within the same individual, as exemplified by characters like the Hulk and Two-Face. In other cases, a superhero’s “evil twin” or counterpart represents the hero’s own dark, evil or violent side. Thus, Venom, as noted above, is metaphorically Spider-Man’s “evil twin.”

Raimi makes the “evil twin” connection visually stronger by depicting his Venom without the exaggerated, gargantuan physique, making him look the same size as Spider-Man. (Though Raimi retains Venom’s sharp teeth, he omits Venom’s serpentine tongue and cannibalistic tendencies, probably out of good taste.) Moreover, Raimi cast Topher Grace, an actor who somewhat resembles Tobey Maguire, as Eddie Brock, further reinforcing the “evil twin” visual imagery. Did any of you see Maguire’s appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman on May 1 to promote Spider-Man 3? Initially Grace came out, pretending to be Maguire, until the real Maguire appeared, feigning anger, and supplanted him in Letterman’s guest chair. Whether or not they consciously intended it, the gag reinforced the “evil twin” imagery of the film.

For the middle section of Spider-Man 3, however, Spider-Man becomes his own evil twin when he dons the black costume. The black costume gives Raimi an opportunity that the Spider-Man comics writers did not take back in the 1980s: the sentient costume affects Peter Parker’s mind, drawing out the darker side of his personality.

This “Dark Spider-Man” storyline fits into Marvel tradition: it does not just resemble X-Men‘s “Dark Phoenix Saga” from the 1980s, which was adapted into X-Men: The Last Stand (see “Comics in Context” #134-135), but also Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s own work from the Silver Age of the 1960s. The duality of Bruce Banner and the Hulk provide an obvious example. But I think especially of the two Lee-Kirby Fantastic Four storylines in which Ben Grimm, the Thing, temporarily went “bad” after his mind was tampered with (first by the Wizard in issues #41-43, and then by the Mad Thinker in #68-71).

The “Dark Spider-Man” storyline can also be seen as an extrapolation of an aspect of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man origin tale in Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962) that Raimi had omitted in adapting it in his first Spider-Man movie. In the movie when Peter Parker first encounters the Burglar (who will later be identified as the killer of Peter’s Uncle Ben), Peter has just been cheated out of the money due him from a wrestling promoter. After the Burglar robs the promoter, Peter lets him escape, as a petty act of vengeance against the promoter. In Lee and Ditko’s origin story, Spider-Man’s motivation for refusing to halt the Burglar is quite different. Having become a show business sensation in his masked identity, the formerly introverted, humble Peter Parker has let Spider-Man’s newfound fame go to his head. The egotistical Spider-Man simply can’t be bothered to (minimally) risk his neck by using his powers to try to stop a mundane robbery. In Lee and Ditko’s compact origin tale, this phase of Spider-Man’s personality lasts only a few pages: the murder of Uncle Ben, and the subsequent discovery that the same Burglar he let escape had killed him, shocks Peter out of his moral complacency. In Marvel’s What If. . .? Vol. 1 #46 (August,1984), Peter B. Gillis wrote a remarkable story, “What If Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben Had Lived?”, in which the swell-headed Spider-Man stays in show biz and evolves into a full-fledged, archetypal Hollywood asshole.

In effect, Raimi uses Spider-Man 3 to go back and explore the effects of fame’s temptations on Peter Parker. Raimi told one interviewer that “in this story, Peter Parker falls victim to his own pride. He starts to believe all the press clippings about himself, that he’s really this hero and someone great”. It’s interesting that Raimi characterizes Peter’s Achilles heel as pride. Pride was the sin that brought about the fall of Lucifer; overweening pride, or hubris, is the characteristic flaw of the protagonists of classical Greek tragedy.

In part because Spider-Man is now acclaimed as a hero in New York City (which rarely happens in the comics), Peter doesn’t sufficiently empathize with his girlfriend Mary Jane over the sudden downturn in her career. At first Peter seems touchingly overwhelmed at watching the enthusiastic crowds gathering for the city’s celebration of Spider-Man, hosted by Gwen Stacy, but once he’s in costume, he gets carried away by the occasion, letting Gwen kiss him as he hangs upside down, shocking Mary Jane, who considers that to be “their” kiss (from the first movie). At this point Raimi’s Peter/Spider-Man is not as self-centered as Lee and Ditko’s Spider-Man was at the midpoint of his origin story, but he’s lost perspective enough to be oblivious to the serious damage he is wreaking on his relationship with Mary Jane.

The black costume’s psychological effect intensifies these egotistical tendencies in Peter/Spider-Man: it loosens his moral inhibitions, and reduces his empathy towards others, so much that in a subterranean battle with the Sandman, Spider-Man actually tries to kill him. The dialogue makes this explicit. Of course, the Sandman, whose body has been converted to a sand-like substance, is virtually indestructible, so Spider-Man’s effort is in vain. Nonetheless, I was surprised that the movie allowed Spider-Man to go that far: he would have succeeded in killing almost anyone else in the same situation. Raimi seems surprised, too, telling an interviewer that “I didn’t like watching Spider-Man go bad. It was unpleasant and I kept worrying, “˜Gee, do I really have to do this to show how rageful and vengeful he is? Do we really have to show how pride can destroy you?’ But, my brother kept telling me, “˜Yes, because he’s going to find himself again.'”.

Recently I rewatched portions of Ethan and Joel Coen’s The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), which they co-write with Sam Raimi. Set in the late 1950s, its protagonist is Norvell Barnes, an innocent young man (and something of a fool) who becomes the head of a major company and unexpectedly becomes a great success, thanks to his invention, the wildly popular hula hoop. Barnes gets carried away with his power and success, unwittingly distancing himself from the woman who loves him. Graduate students of the future, here is the link between Raimi the screenwriter of The Hudsucker Proxy and Sam Raimi the auteur of Spider-Man 3! And although Danny Fingeroth has cautioned me against quoting Wikipedia, I feel I should mention that its entry on The Hudsucker Proxy observes that “A scene in the Sam Raimi directed film Spider-Man in which Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe) addresses his board members is shot in an almost identical fashion to a similar scene in The Hudsucker Proxy and even reuses the same dialogue from the film: “˜Costs are down, revenues are up, and our stock has never been higher.'”

After Peter angrily strikes Mary Jane (which drew a gasp from the audience when I saw the movie), the damage he has been doing to their relationship takes a physical form. Like his recognition of the captured Burglar in the Lee-Ditko origin story, this shocks Peter out of his previous pattern of behavior. In a church, Peter literally tears the black costume from his body, as church bells sound. This scene echoes a sequence from the original black costume storyline in the comics, in which the sound of church bells weakens the symbiote. In the movie, however, since the black costume represents Spider-Man’s own “dark side,” the church bells sequence comes off more as a metaphorical exorcism of evil.

But it’s only a partial exorcism. The evil that was within Peter Parker now takes physical form as something outside him when the black costume attaches itself to his rival and semi-lookalike Eddie Brock, becoming Venom. (I suppose that you could say that in the movie, Peter in the black costume was the first Venom, and Brock in black is the second.) Peter’s internal struggle against his dark side, which ended with his rearing off the costume, is succeeded by an external struggle against his dark side, as metaphorically incarnated by Brock as Venom. Separated from Peter, the “dark side” embodied by Venom is now free of his conscience. Brock, the symbiote’s new host, is portrayed throughout the film as having a shallower personality than Parker. This makes Brock less interesting and developed as a character, but it fits his role in the movie. Whether as Venom or as his normal human self, the movie’s Brock is less a person than a representation of Peter Parker without his strong moral sense.

Since Peter, in the black costume, wreaked emotional harm on Mary Jane and finally physically struck her, it makes sense that his dark side, now represented by Brock/Venom, endangers her very life. Ultimately, using the church bells’ sounds again, Spider-Man performs a further “exorcism,” this time utterly destroying Venom, who is literally blown into nothingness.

In the comics of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Venom became a hero of sorts, reflecting the depressed moral standards of the Grim and Gritty era. In contrast, Spider-Man 3 introduces Venom in order to exorcise him. Peter Parker descends into the hell within his own psyche, represented by the black costume, only to reemerge and win redemption. That potential for redemption is what keeps Spider-Man 3 firmly in the neo-Silver movement, just like the previous two Spider-films.

In the previously quoted interview, Raimi states that he and his brother Ivan, who collaborated on Spider-Man 3‘s story, wanted their protagonist to learn that “he himself might have some sin within him and that other human beings, the ones he calls criminals, have some humanity within them”. In Spider-Man 3 the black costume brings out the “sin” within Peter Parker.

But why would this be a new discovery for Peter? In the comics Peter Parker has recognized the “sin” within himself since the end of Amazing Fantasy #15, as I shall explain next time.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

I will be appearing at the Big Apple Con (www.bigapplecon.com) at Manhattan’s Penn Plaza Pavilion on Saturday, June 23, where I will be interviewing comics writer/artist Walter Simonson (Thor, Elric, Hawkgirl, Fantastic Four and more) and possibly artist Paul Gulacy (Master of Kung Fu, Catwoman, Sabre, Squadron Supreme, and others). Big Apple attendees will be able to take a shuttle bus down to the annual MoCCA Art Fest (www.moccany.org) at the Puck Building. Fest attendees, in turn, can walk two blocks to MOCCA itself, where the Fest’s panels will be held, and can look in on the exhibit I co-curated there, “Stan Lee: A Retrospective.” (I will probably drop in there myself!)

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson