On Spiderman (the movie)
August 16th, 2002 | by Brian |I saw Spiderman, the movie, today on an airplane. A fine pick for an in-flight movie, as I would never have rented it, but I’m glad I saw it. OK, that opening song — I hated it, so I took the headphones off and stared out the window until that ended. Now I want to find out who the artist was so I can uh, complain better? Anyway, William Defoe was great as Green Goblin. I guess I’d heard that he played a villain in this movie, but from the first scene of him in the Rolls Royce, I knew he was bad. Except, I think that was the first scene of the movie after that opening song ended, so I wanted to turn up the volume. Instead, I changed the channel on my headset to an NPR-like interview. So the scene changes to the inside of the Rolls, and I hear this woman explaining how she got into reggae. That was confusing to say the least. Anyway, Defoe just looked evil.
What else…I loved the trite dialog, e.g., when the villain says to the hero: “We’re not so different, you and I.” There were times when I just laughed, but not at the movie, because I felt that the movie makers knew they were being silly. It is based on a comic book, after all, which were not always so silly before they were in effect censored.
There were two distictively post-September 11th scenes: One where the New Yorkers are throwing things at Green Goblin, and one says somethig like “In New York, if you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us!” The other was at the end, when Spiderman was perched at the American Flag.
Of course, as with any Hollywood movie, the power-hungry villian was once again a “businessman”, but in this case in the pockets of the military, and Peter Parker’s uncle says the usual line about corporate down-sizing and lay-offs. Perhaps more people should read Milton Friedman’s article about how corporations are contractually obligated to their share holders and boards of directors to maximize profits. I think that’s what he said. Still, I’m not quite settled on the limited liability issue, and the legal status of corporations. I scanned in the Friedman article, and meant to put it on-line, but it’s not there yet.
Back to the movie, I found it touching how much people do need heros. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing, but clearly in Spiderman there was a sense of how great it was that “someone is coming” to make it all better. That reminds me of two things. One, is what psychologist Nathaniel Branden wrote: “no one is coming to make life right or to ‘fix’ things.” There’s also my favorite Flaming Lips song, “Waitin’ for a Superman”. No one’s coming,…”it�s just too heavy for Superman to lift.”
I’m still wondering about what Green Goblin said about the public’s turning on Spiderman, or any hero. Maybe there’s truth to it, or he’s just trying to bring him to the Dark Side.
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