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I really wanted to like the new movie Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. After watching the trailer, with its spectacular sequence of the Human Torch pursuing the Silver Surfer over the Manhattan skyline, I had hopes that this movie might be superior to the disappointingly humdrum previous FF film (see “Comics in Context” #93). Though I still cannot long look at the movies’ version of the Thing without thinking, “This looks like a guy in a monster suit,” the CGI Silver Surfer looks better, more convincing, and more eerily alien than I would have imagined.

The early part of the new movie gave me further reason to hope. The depiction of the F. F. as hot new celebrities fit the team’s co-creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s early work on the Fantastic Four comics. In the opening of Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #1 (1961) the general public does not recognize various team members, but by the start of the second issue the people of New York City treat their new superheroes as stars. The movie F.F.’s misadventures on a commercial air flight weren’t as funny as the filmmakers doubtless had hoped, but again they fit the style of Lee and Kirby’s early issues. In the 1960s Stan Lee, with or without Kirby, loved to bring his new superheroes down to Earth by having them cope with the mundane frustrations of every day life. In Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #9, Lee and Kirby had the FF, suffering from financial trouble, hitchhike cross-country; traveling coach in the new movie is a step up for them! I did wonder why the movie FF didn’t just take the Fantasti-Car, but it turned out that team leader Reed Richards hadn’t finished inventing it yet, and its debut onscreen is one of Rise‘s brighter moments. Similarly, there is a running plot device in which Johnny Storm accidentally and temporarily switches powers with his teammates, usually to comedic effect. That’s a clever idea, with some good funny payoffs, that Lee and Kirby could well have done in the comics had they thought of it first.

But as I continued watching Rise of the Silver Surfer, my hopes for the film faded. To judge from the reviews I’ve read, fewer film critics appear to have read any of Lee and Kirby’s Fantastic Four, including their monumental “Galactus trilogy,” than I would have thought. Indeed, the old argument that comics should know their place, which is to be stupid, has reared its head once more in some reviews of Rise. Justin Chang in Variety contends that “At a time when tortured superheroes like Spider-Man, Superman and Batman would benefit from some serious psychotherapy, it’s almost refreshing to see a comic book caper as blithe, weightless and cheerfully dumb as Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.” (June 14, 2007). Kevin Maher of Britain’s The Times Online doesn’t regard that dumbness as a virtue: “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is everything you’d expect from a movie that began in the pages of a 1960s comic book ““ garish, giddy, emotionally simplistic, boldly idiotic and mercifully short”. Here is yet another reason to doubt the idea that the classics of the comic book medium have become part of mainstream English-speaking culture.

One critic who has read and appreciated Lee and Kirby’s “Galactus trilogy” is online reviewer James Berardinelli, who wrote that “For non comic book fans over the age of 13, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is a tedious, incoherent bore. For comic book fans of any age, it is an atrocity – the cinematic desecration of one of the most storied and beloved of Marvel comic book epics”.

Exactly, except for one thing: Rise actually poorly adapts three of the greatest Lee-Kirby stories, not one.

The film does the least damage to the lead story of Fantastic Four Annual #3 (1965), “Bedlam at the Baxter Building,” better known as the wedding of FF teammates Reed Richards and Sue Storm. It is impossible to adapt this story into a live action FF film for legal reasons. Lee and Kirby’s “Bedlam” story is an unusual sort of wedding party; it is actually a celebration of the imaginative richness of the Marvel Universe that they, along with others such as Steve Ditko, had jointly created within (at that point) only four years. Seeking vengeance on his longtime rival Reed Richards, Doctor Doom uses a machine to compel what amounts to an army of super-villains to attack the Fantastic Four on Reed and Sue’s wedding day; almost all of New York City’s superheroes turn out to resist the invasion. Hence the story turns into a fast-paced series of battle scenes, with surprises for the readers every few panels, as yet another hero or villain from a different Marvel series makes his appearance. Even “girls’ comics” heroines Patsy Walker and Hedy Wolfe turn up as FF fans. In a time when “universe-wide” crossovers involving DC or Marvel’s major heroes and villains have become constant events, it may be difficult for readers to appreciate the impact that “Bedlam” would have had on comics fans in the 1960s, when a company’s characters had never appeared en masse before. Indeed, part of that impact came from the fact that “Bedlam” really was a special, one-time-only event: it wasn’t a multi-part story, and Lee and Kirby did not repeat this stunt of cramming every hero and villain into a single tale.

The Marvel Universe–the interconnectiveness of its various series–is one of Marvel’s strengths. But Marvel has licensed the movie rights to different characters to different Hollywood studios, making it impossible to portray “the Marvel Universe” onscreen. Maybe now that Marvel is producing its own movies, there can be crossovers between the series for which it currently controls the film rights, like Iron Man and Avengers. But right now, you can’t expect Spider-Man, who works for Sony Pictures, to appear in one of Fox’s Fantastic Four movies.

Of course, even apart from the expense, one couldn’t put all the characters from “Bedlam” into a single movie: moviegoers who weren’t staunch Marvel Comics fans wouldn’t know who they were. Moreover, if any other superheroes were in the wedding scene at the beginning of Rise, the film would have to explain why they didn’t help the FF combat the Silver Surfer. Still, wouldn’t it have been great if Fox had persuaded a few of the actors from the X-Men movies and Daredevil film (which were also from Fox) to make cameo appearances at the second wedding scene at the film’s end, even if their characters’ superhero identities were not acknowledged onscreen?

Rise‘s only special guest cameo is by Stan Lee, who once again gets thrown out of Reed and Sue’s wedding, just as he and Jack Kirby were at the end of he wedding story in Fantastic Four Annual #3. This is a wonderful touch by the filmmakers. Stan Lee is such an entertaining showman on stage at conventions (see “Comics in Context” #168, 170–171) that it has been a shame that most of his Hitchcockian cameos in Marvel-based movies have been silent. But they’re getting better. I liked Stan’s cameo in Spider-Man 3, talking to Peter Parker, and his cameos in the FF movies (including playing his own character, Willie Lumpkin, in the first) are by far the cleverest of his cameo roles.

That final page from “Bedlam,” with Reed and Sue being pronounced man and wife, and Stan and Jack getting the boot, is on display “Stan Lee: A Retrospective,” the show I co-curated at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (www.moccany.org). At the exhibit’s opening reception, Stan Lee, delighted to see this page again, told the guests that his cameo in Rise recreated that concluding scene, but swore us to secrecy in order to keep the gag secret until the movie opened. Indeed, for comics aficionados, that may be the high point of an otherwise disappointing film. James Berardinelli pointedly asked, “What does it say about a major motion picture when the Stan Lee cameo is the highlight? (That was the only time when I smiled.)”

So, no, Rise doesn’t do FF Annual #3 right, but I understand why the filmmakers can’t. They incorporate the idea that a menace interrupts the wedding, and Stan Lee’s cameo, as nods to comics aficionados who know the original story. I can easily cut the filmmakers some slack on this.

But not on their evisceration of Lee and Kirby’s “Galactus trilogy” (Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #48-50), the greatest multi-issue story in their entire body of work as collaborators with each other, and therefore one of the greatest storylines in the history of comics. (Their greatest single issue story was “This Man, This Monster” in the very next issue, Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #51).

First, the Galactus trilogy is a story about the end of the world. Of course, there seems to be no end of mediocre superhero or spy or science fiction tales about a threat to all humanity or even to the existence of the planet. But so often these threats are what Alfred Hitchcock called MacGuffins, merely plot devices designed to send the hero into action. In contrast, the Galactus trilogy makes the end of the world a thematic focus.

It starts with the people of New York City panicking at what they perceive as omens in the sky: flames and gigantic boulders. Lee and Kirby concoct science-fictional excuses for these apparitions, but they are obviously meant to evoke Biblical signs of an approaching apocalypse. I went to a Catholic grade school, and I can recall the nuns warning us naive students that the end of the world could come at any time, and that it would be preceded by signs in the heavens. (As a result, sighting unusual meteorological phenomena would shake me up back then.) The early Christians likewise believed that the end of the world could come at any time, quite possibly within their lifetimes, and today there are still those who believe that the “Rapture” may be imminent. In the Galactus trilogy Lee and Kirby depict the end of the world, not at some distant point in the future, but suddenly, unexpectedly, in the here and now.

The end of the world is a recurring theme in Kirby’s work. Consider Lee and Kirby’s forecast of Ragnarok, the twilight of the Norse gods, which can be postponed but not permanently, in Tales of Asgard in Thor #127 (1966). Possibly alluding to Ragnarok, Kirby’s The New Gods begins with the apocalypse that destroyed the “old gods,” and gave rise to the “new gods” and their two worlds, one of which is named Apokolips; in the course of his “Fourth World” series Kirby predicts that his hero Orion will have his final confrontation with his evil father Darkseid on the “plain of Armagetto,” a reference to Armageddon. In Kirby’s Eternals, the Celestials, called the “space gods” descend to Earth, where one of them, Arishem the Judge, is to spend the next fifty years weighing whether or not to destroy humanity. Kirby’s Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth, is postapocalyptic fiction, set in a future in which human civilization has been destroyed, and most humans have reverted to the condition of animals, having lost the use of language.

For that matter the theme of the world’s end has been part of the superhero genre since Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster presented the destruction of Krypton in Superman’s origin.

The final book of the Bible is the Book of Revelation, also known as Apocalypse, the saga of the end of the world, filled with fantastical events, supernatural beings (such as the Four Horsemen) and monsters. Works of fantasy, science fiction and the superhero genre dealing with the world’s end are thus following in the tradition of the Bible’s own book of fantastic literature.

I see that The Last Man (1826), by Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, is considered one of the earliest works of “apocalyptic fiction”: in it a plague wipes out all of humanity except for the title character, who proves to be immune.

H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) conjures a vision of the near destruction of human civilization by extraterrestrial invaders. This apocalypse is averted only by the Martins’ susceptibility to microscopic disease germs, whose presence Wells’s narrator attributes to God’s providence. (Compare this to how Lee and Kirby’s Godlike Watcher guides the Human Torch to the “Ultimate Nullifier” device that, despite its tiny size, proves powerful enough to threaten the mighty Galactus.)

Wells’s novel is considered to be an example of “invasion literature,” in which a nation is invaded by another. Such conquests happen in real life, but Wells’ War ups the ante by depicting events that could lead to the extinction of the entire human race.

Once the atomic bomb gave humanity the capacity to render itself extinct, it is no wonder that apocalyptic fiction took on new relevance; thus, for example, the Cold War produced films in which the world verges towards nuclear war, as in Fail-Safe and Doctor Strangelove (both 1964).

Similarly, in the current period of terrorist threats, in which we are all too aware that someday someone might set off an atomic weapon in New York City or another major city, it makes sense that people would turn to apocalyptic fiction to voice their fears.

It strikes me that even Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006), with its warnings of “tipping points” past which ecological damage cannot be reversed or stopped, and its nightmarish forecasts of major cities being submerged beneath rising seas, is an example of what one might term apocalyptic nonfiction.

But in those films the human race is responsible for its own potential destruction. The Galactus trilogy, like War of the Worlds, removes the responsibility for apocalypse from humanity. They instead posit more frightening scenarios: forces from outside will destroy the human race, and there is nothing that we can do to stop them. In the realm of supernatural fantasy, H P. Lovecraft creates a similar effect with his monstrous “gods” lurking in another reality, waiting to burst through the dimensional barriers to overwhelm our world.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer gets some of the sense of approaching apocalypse. Reed Richards and the U. S. government learn that
each planet that the Silver Surfer has visited has been obliterated. (Just how they know this is a mystery, assuming that the Surfer and Galactus can travel faster than light through hyperspace, as in the comics. We cannot see planets in other solar systems as they are now, since light takes years to travel from there to Earth.) I was especially impressed by the gaping hole that the movie Surfer creates in London’s Thames River bank, an ominous sign of approaching Armageddon, indeed. (And how odd, considering that the FF are based in New York City, that London has a much stronger presence in their new film than New York.)

However, Lee and Kirby made a point of repeatedly showing the general public’s reaction to the growing signs of approaching doom in the Galactus trilogy. This is very important for conveying a sense of the planet in what are potentially its final hours. Now when I think of the panel of Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #49 in which ordinary citizens look up in bewildered fear at Galactus building his doomsday machine atop the Baxter Building, I remember how I and many New Yorkers looked up at the smoking towers on September 11, 2001, wondering what disaster might come next.

In Rise of the Silver Surfer we don’t see enough of the general population’s reaction to the approaching apocalypse; even the Fantastic Four seem to take it no more or less seriously than they would any other threat. The movie does not sufficiently dramatize the notion that this time the FF are really up against the ultimate threat, Doomsday itself.

Another example of apocalyptic invasion fiction is the hugely popular movie Independence Day, a sort of update of The War of the Worlds in which aliens lay waste to much of civilization, but are finally bested by a computer virus, rather than a disease-carrying virus, narrowly avoiding the end of humankind. This movie came out in 1996, long afer the Cold War and before the 9/11 attacks. It was a time when Americans felt safe from war, so why wwere so many moviegoers eager to fantasize about the annihilation of human civilization?

I suspect that the end of the world subconsciously servbes as a metaphor for one’s own death. After all, when you die, as far as you’re concerned, the world comes to an end. And this is a fate you are helpless to prevent.

This brings us to the being who is responsible for bringing about what threatens to be the end of the world in the Galactus trilogy: Galactus himself. It has been frequenly reported that Galactus resulted from Stan Lee’s direction to Jack Kirby to have the Fantastic Four “fight God” (for example, here & here).

The perennials question faced by the religious are, if God exists, why does He permit us to suffer? Beneath his science fiction trappings, Galactus is Lee and Kirby’s possible answer to the question: Galactus represents God as utterly insensitive to the fate of human beings. As Galactus tells the Fantastic Four, to a superior being like himself, they and other humans are comparable to ants. Galactus rhetorically asks, would you hesitate to step on an anthill? Galactus has decreed that all life on Earth, including humankind, must be destroyed, just as God has decreed that all human beings must inevitably die.

Lee and Kirby make Galactus more grotesquely horrifying by making him into a god that actually feeds on humanity. Galactus does so indirectly, by draining the “life energies” of a planet, but the effect is the same: we must perish to satisfy his never-ending hunger. Galactus is a god who demands human sacrifices.

A brilliant creation, Galactus has many aspects. You can regard him as an image of God as mankind’s enemy. But he is also like a fairy tale giant or ogre, who towers above the humans that he devours for his dinner (just as we tower above the ants). Children surely subconsciously associate giants with adults, who tower over them. Thus Galactus is also God as the ultimate cruel parent. Notice that in Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #50, Galactus tells the Watcher that allowing a human to possess the Ultimate Nullifier is like giving a dangerous weapon to a child, whereupon the Watcher observes that this world belongs to these “children.”

Galactus is also Lee and Kirby’s greatest portrayal of the dark side of Friedrich Nietzche’s ubermensch, the superior being who considers himself above human morality, and “beyond good and evil.” Galactus repeatedly and explicitly states in the trilogy that he is not bound by concepts of good and evil.

The superhero archetype represents a taming of the ubermensch figure: the superhero utilizes his superior abilities on behalf of his fellow man. The superhero typically risks his life to save the masses; Galactus will destroy the masses rather than risk his own death.

The ubermensch connection suggests that Galactus might also be a authoritarian ruler blown up to cosmic proportions. Uncaring about the lives or wishes or morality of “lesser” beings, Galactus follows only his own will. He simultaneously regards himself as a superior being far worthier of existence than these human “ants,” and as a victim of his own physical needs, rationalizing genocide in order to temporarily satisfy his endless hunger. It’s appropriate that Lee and Kirby later pitted Galactus against another of their creations, Ego the Living Planet (in Thor #160-162,1969), whose name indicates that, like Galactus, he represents the dangers of egocentrism linked to absolute power. They are two of a kind. The fact that Jack Kirby felt that Galactus should have a “herald,” namely the Silver Surfer, suggests that Kirby thought of Galactus as a kind of monarch.

Though I doubt that Lee and Kirby consciously intended it, you could also regard Galactus as the ultimate ecological threat, laying waste to planets, destroying their biospheres; or as a cosmic imperialist, caring nothing for the “natives” of the worlds he exploits for their resources. He is even like a cosmic vampire, driven by “hunger” to drain the life forces of entire biospheres, addicted to their energies.

But if Galactus regards himself as so superior in kind to the mere mortals of Earth, why does he bother talking to the Fantastic Four? Why does he bother justifying his actions to them? To use Galactus’s own analogy, do we talk to the ants? Methinks the Devourer of Worlds doth protest too much. Whether or not Lee and Kirby intended it, I get the feeling from Galactus’s dialogue in the trilogy that he is a conscious or unconscious hypocrite. He seems to feel obliged to justify his behavior to the Fantastic Four, and perhaps to himself.

The key sign of Galactus’s hypocrisy comes at the end of the trilogy in Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #50, in which he is thwarted for the first time in his long existence. Galactus declares that he bears no malice towards his opponents, but then literally strikes down the Silver Surfer, his herald who betrayed him, with energy beams from his eyes, stripping him of his ability to travel through outer space. Despite Galactus’s denial, this comes across as a brutal act of vengeance.

It makes sense that when Lee and Kirby eventually gave Galactus an origin story (Thor #168-169, 1969), they revealed that he was once a humanoid mortal himself, who “died” in the (what else?) apocalyptic destruction of a previous universe, to be “reborn” in our own as the godlike Devourer of Worlds, a figure of death on a cosmic scale. It is then no wonder that Galactus had to devise rationalizations for his mass slaughters of beings who resemble what he once was.

What an extraordinary creation Galactus is! But Lee and Kirby were able to depict the many sides of Galactus by portraying him as a being who could communicate with the Fantastic Four and the Slver Surfer. Through the dialogue that Stan Lee gave him, Galactus showed the readers his personality and philosophy, his views of himself, of his servant, the Silver Surfer, and of his potential human victims. But as film critic James Berardinelli points out, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer “turns one of the most ominous and dangerous of all villains into an interplanetary storm cloud.”

That might still have worked, if, say, a stentorian voice had issued from the cloud (like the God of the Old Testament speaking from the burning bush), giving the Surfer orders and threatening the world. The Beat suggests that “the image of a vast purple glove coming out of the cloud would have been 10 to the 12th power times cooler than anything else in the movie. But that would also have taken imagination, and there is very little of that on display here”. Nope, this is just a humongous cloud, with no voice, no sign of intelligence (despite the Surfer claiming that it threatened to destroy his homeworld), and no apparent personality. It’s as if the big, dark cloud you see just before a thunderstorm had an agent and got itself a movie deal. Claypool Comics editor/writer/editor Richard Howell suggested to me that the movie Galactus is actually a big puff of smoke from Jack Kirby’s cigar. More likely it’s just a lot of hot air. Maybe the next Fantastic Four movie will depict the Frightful Four as a rock, a table lamp, a #2 pencil, and a turnip.

One of the Beat’s readers e-mailed a comment that stated that the filmmakers intend to reveal what their Galactus really looks like in the projected Silver Surfer spinoff film. If that’s true, then, sorry, it’s still too late. I have no sympathy for doing the Galactus trilogy without giving Galactus a speaking part.

There are actually three “gods” in the Galactus trilogy. The second is Uatu the Watcher, who represents a much more benign vision of God, as well as a different answer to the question of why there is suffering. Uatu is fond of the Fantastic Four and of the people of Earth, but he is bound by an oath of non-interference in human affairs, and merely observes from his post on the moon.

In the Galactus trilogy Uatu intervenes in indirect ways to defend humankind from the threat of Galactus and the end of their world. Uatu never challenges Galactus directly, but initially attempts to hide Earth from Galactus’s herald, the Silver Surfer (through creating the aforementioned “omens” in the sky), and later guides the Human Torch to the key to defeating Galactus, the Ultimate Nullifier.

Uatu is like a God who cares about the human race and watches over them, but for his own reasons does not intervene in their lives Uatu’s aid is confined to helping those who help themselves: he guides the Torch to the Ultimate Nullifier, but it is Johnny who must bring it back to Earth and Reed who must determine how to use it against Galactus. (Similarly, in the comics story of Reed and Sue’s wedding, the Watcher enables Reed to find the machine that ends the threat posed by the army of super-villains, but it is Reed who must figure out how to use it.) Significantly, in Stan Lee and Larry Lieber’s story of the origin of the alien race of Watchers (Tales of Suspense #53, 1964), when the Watchers directly participated in the development of one world’s civilization, they inadvertently brought about the planet’s devastation by nuclear war (another apocalypse). Uatu thus is a Godlike being who does not interfere in human affairs because he is well aware that he is not infallible. That is an intriguing answer to the question of why God does not make His presence more clearly felt in the world.

On the second page of Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #49 Uatu and Galactus confront each other atop the FF’s headquarters, the Baxter Building. It is as if Uatu and Galactus each represent a different aspect of God, one benign and the other destructive, each looking at the other as if in a mirror. Like a futuristic war god, Galactus is garbed in armor and wears an immense helmet which conceals most of his humanoid features. (John Byrne would later establish that every race sees Galactus in its own image, and that he is not truly humanoid.) Uatu, whose garb resembles a Roman toga, does not seem warlike whatsoever, and his features are unmasked and open. Uatu is like a benevolent, paternal God, who informs Galactus that these “children”–the human race–have earned the right to life on their world. Uatu’s non-interference in the world of humans also means that he allows them freedom to govern their own lives.

Uatu’s importance to the Galactus trilogy is generally underrated, but he plays an essential role in it. Uatu does not turn up in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer at all. Perhaps the filmmakers felt that putting three godlike beings in the movie would overshadow the Fantastic Four themselves.
But the FF certainly hold their own as major players in the Galactus trilogy comics.

Moreover, the concept of humans–even super-powered humans–finding themselves in the middle of a conflict between good and evil “gods” is a recurring motif in Jack Kirby’s body of work, whether those “gods” are Thor and Loki, or Uatu and Galactus, or the New Gods of New Genesis and the gods of Apokolips, or the Eternals and the Deviants.

The third “god” in the Galactus trilogy is the Silver Surfer himself. He enters as a science-fictional version of an angel: a shining, literally unearthly figure, who flies through the air, not on wings but on the cosmic “surfboard” that Kirby gave him, which some film reviewers found laughable but which is nonetheless a powerful, iconic image. Like an angel, he is the servant of his God, who in this case is Galactus. At the trilogy’s beginning the Surfer is also an angel of death: he locates a world for his master to consume, and then signals him to come to destroy it. The movie gets this right, masking clear that the Surfer is a harbinger of the end of the world.

By the end of the Galactus trilogy, the Surfer has evolved from angel of death into a Christ figure, seeking to bring salvation to humanity, opposing Galactus, a “god” of wrath. In the comics as the Surfer and Galactus duel with bolts of cosmic energies, they also battle with words, making their clash of philosophies clear. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer cannot come close to tapping the dramatic power of this confrontation in the comics. In the Lee-Kirby trilogy the Surfer passionately argues on behalf of humanity’s worthiness to survive as he wages battle against his former master. How can the movie Surfer inspire and even move us with speeches about his newfound love of the human race when he has no adversary to debate–only a cloud?

Furthermore, the movie stumbles into a dangerous trap: Stan Lee’s and Jack Kirby’s differing interpretations of the Silver Surfer as a character, as we shall investigate next week.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

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