Idle Money: Wood on Spider-Man

…Still, the Spider-Man film franchise is so strange that it’s not unpleasant to watch it earn money even while idling. Like the new movie itself, we have our memories, and Tobey Maguire is still with us as Peter Parker, the goofiness wearing a little thin, but the earnestness holding up (in Spider-Man 2 the woman Peter loves appears in a Broadway production of The Importance of Being Earnest), and he does something very few actors can do: deliver portentous and self-pitying lines (‘Spider-Man will always have enemies’) not as if he believes in them but as if he knows that everything means something to somebody. Jonathan Lethem, writing about Spider-Man in these pages, reported on the child in the cinema who murmured, as Peter misses the school bus in the opening scene, ‘It’s always like that for him,’ and this catches precisely the feeling Maguire projects.[*] He is a nerd with supernatural powers but that makes him more nerdy rather than less. We might feel sorry for him if he weren’t so jovially expert at feeling sorry for himself, and we don’t really connect the athletic figure swinging through the city streets at great heights with the abstracted and uncertain Peter Parker on his underpowered motorbike. I mean, we know it’s the same person, but when the second self is so different from the first, it’s definitely more alter than ego. Not a compensation but a kind of joke. It’s always like that for him. Flying through the sky won’t stop you missing the bus….
…Did anyone ever imagine Superman was an enemy of the people? This is what many folks want to believe about Spider-Man, in spite of his relentless good deeds. He is always having to prove his virtue, because like some other creatures from the Marvel Comics nursery, he is the superhero not as ultrahuman but as freak. When he thinks of his mission, as he repeatedly does, adopting a saintly look probably borrowed from some version of Joan of Arc, the people around him are trying to deal with his freakishness. Pretty much the only ones he doesn’t make nervous are those whose life he literally saves – catching them as they drop from a high building, for example.
There is an exception to this response, and it appears in Spider-Man 2, a genuinely affecting and complex moment. Peter is unconscious on the floor of a subway train, having been knocked out in his battle with the wonderful Alfred Molina as Otto Octavius, a mad scientist who has managed to transform himself into a monster with four huge flailing metal arms in addition to his ordinary complement of limbs. Peter is wearing his Spider-Man suit but not his mask, and the train travellers look down at him in amazement. They already know what Spider-Man does, but now they are seeing who he is. ‘He’s just a kid,’ one of them says. Then two boys appear having found the mask. Peter puts it on, and the boys say they will never tell anybody what they have seen. The rest of the crowd assents, effectively taking an oath of silence on this subject. This is loyal of them, and they think they are being loyal to the boy. In reality they are being loyal to the myth. Spider-Man has to be nobody. That’s why he is no real help to Peter Parker. — Michael Wood in the London Review of Books