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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