Spider-Man, which I watched maybe a hundred times with Natalie, then nine, when it came out in 2002, is about how important it is for ordinary boys to view their own bodies as instruments of power—which, incidentally, or not so incidentally, is what has allowed nation-states to go to war from Mesopotamia until now. The names of the main characters in the movie are aggressively average, parodies of Mayberry R.F.D. ordinariness: Aunt May, Uncle Ben, Norman Osborn (who’s both normal and born of Oz), Peter Parker, who has a crush on literally the girl next door, Mary Jane Watson. The words “average,” “ordinary,” and “normal” recur throughout the film, whose very first lines are, “Who am I? You sure you wanna know? The story of my life is not for the faint of heart. If somebody said it was a happy little tale, if somebody told you I was just your average, ordinary guy, not a care in the world, somebody lied.” While Peter says this, a yellow school bus climbs a hill in Queens, belying his assertion.
It’s high school; peer pressure is the state religion. Peter has two choices: try to do what he tells his friend, Harry, spiders do—“change color to blend into their environment; it’s a defense mechanism”—or he can stand out, which is terrifying: “You’re taller than you look,” MJ tells him. “I hunch.” “Don’t.” Even when he punches out the bully Flash, another kid calls Peter a freak. “Don’t ever be ashamed of who you are,” Norman/Green Goblin tells his son, Harry. And as the Goblin more Nietzscheanly tells Peter/Spider-Man, “There are eight million people in this city, and those teeming masses exist for the sole purpose of lifting a few exceptional people onto their shoulders.” Gobby crashes World Unity Day, killing dozens, whereas when he forces Spider-Man to choose between rescuing the woman he loves or a tram full of children, Spider-Man, of course, manages to rescue both MJ and the children. “You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us,” a guy on a bridge informs Gobby. The movie thus figures out a way to deliver an immensely reassuring message to its predominantly male and teenage audience: the transformation of your body from a boy into a man will make you not into a monster who despises the crowd but into the kind of creature the crowd idolizes.
When Peter gets bitten by a spider and begins turning into Spider-Man, Uncle Ben tells him, “You’re not the same guy lately: fights in school, shirking your chores. You barely say a word to me or your aunt—what’s the story?” “There’s no story.” “You’re changing, and that’s normal,” Ben responds. “This is the age when a man becomes the man he’s going to be for the rest of his life. Just be careful who you change into, okay?” Peter’s change from dweeb to spider is explicitly analogous to his transformation from boy to man. When MJ asks him what he imagines his future will be, he says, “I don’t know. It feels like something I never felt before, whatever it is,” alluding to becoming Spider-Man but also to his feeling of falling in love with her. Before he becomes Spider-Man, he wears his shirt tucked in—dork style; afterward, he wears his undershirt and shirt hanging out. He can’t be contained. Neither can his chest, which is newly ripped, and his eyesight is now 20/20. The screenplay phrases male sexual maturation as the equivalent of stealing fire from the gods: “I feel all this power,” Peter says, “but I don’t know what it means, or how to control it, or what I’m supposed to do with it even.” Asked by Mary Jane what he told Spider-Man about her, Peter says he said, “The great thing about MJ is when you look in her eyes and she’s looking back in yours and smiling, well, everything feels not quite normal, because you feel stronger and weaker at the same time, and you feel excited and at the same time terrified.” Teenage boys want to believe that the sex instinct trumps and transfigures the day-to-day world.
Which it does and doesn’t. The first time Spider-Man rescues MJ, she says to her boyfriend, Harry, that it was “incredible.” “What do you mean ‘incredible’?” he keeps asking her. The second time Spider-Man rescues MJ, she asks him, “Do I get to say thank you this time?” and, pulling down his mask past his lips, passionately kisses him, sending both of them into rain-drenched ecstasy. The script makes emphatically clear that Peter’s newfound Spider-Man prowess is onanistic transcendence: “He wiggles his wrist, tries to get the goop to spray out, but it doesn’t come. He makes a fist. Nothing. He closes his thumb and little finger together. Nothing. He rotates his hand so the palm faces up, extends all five fingers, and brings his ring and middle fingers toward his palm, together. Thwip. A single strand of webbing shoots out from his wrist. The webbing flies across the alley and sticks to the side of the other building. Peter tugs on it. It’s tough. He pulls harder. Can’t break it. He wraps one hand around it, closes his eyes, jumps off the roof. He sails through the air.” All three times Spider-Man rescues MJ, they’re wrapped in a pose that looks very much like missionary sex—Spider-Man on a mission. As Peter Parker, his peter is parked; as Spider-Man, he gets to have the mythic carnival ride of sex-flight without any of the messy, emotional cleanup afterward (“No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, the ones I love are always the ones who pay”).
Spider-Man is about the concomitance of your ordinary self, which is asexual, and your Big Boy self, which is sex-driven. Virtually every male character in the film worries this division. Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Norman Osborn/Green Goblin, of course. But also, when Uncle Ben changes the lightbulb, he says, “Let there be light.” When Peter fails to show up to help him paint the dining room, Ben writes a teasing note to Peter and addresses him as “Michelangelo.” The testosterone-intensive announcer at the New York Wrestling Foundation has a surprisingly understated side: “ ‘The Human Spider’?” he asks Peter. “That’s it? That’s the best you got? Nah, you gotta jazz it up a little.” Even the “squirrelly-looking” burglar who steals the New York Wrestling Foundation’s money, and who later winds up killing Ben in a carjacking, mouths, “Thanks,” and flashes a sweet smile when Peter unwisely lets him pass by into the elevator.
On a Saturday afternoon several years ago, at Seattle’s Green Lake Pool, in the locker room, a ten-year-old kid hummed, at first quite quietly, to himself, the Batman theme. In less than a minute, the tune had made its way through the locker room—about a dozen pubescent boys humming the song. Some sang seriously; others joked around. Some stood on benches; others whapped their towels at one another’s asses. Some danced around buck naked; others continued getting dressed. It was surprising and mysterious and confusing and beautiful and ridiculous and thrilling.
At the end of Ann Beattie’s story “The Burning House,” a husband and wife (the story’s narrator) confront each other. She speaks first:
“I want to know if you’re staying or going.”
He takes a deep breath, lets it out, and continues to lie very still.
“Everything you’ve done is commendable,” he says. “You did the right thing to go back to school. You tried to do the right thing by finding yourself a normal friend like Marilyn. But your whole life you’ve made one mistake—you’ve surrounded yourself with men. Let me tell you something. All men—if they’re crazy, like Tucker, if they’re gay as the Queen of May, like Reddy Fox, even if they’re just six years old—I’m going to tell you something about them. Men think they’re Spider-Man and Buck Rogers and Superman. You know what we all feel inside that you don’t feel? That we’re going to the stars.”
He takes my hand. “I’m looking down on all this from space,” he whispers. “I’m already gone.”
Our cat, Zoomer, is exceedingly centripetal and social. The moment I spread out my papers on the dining room table, he lies on top of them. He greets most visitors by crawling onto their laps. His favorite activity is lying in front of the fire for hours while Laurie, Natalie, and I sit near him, reading. His second-favorite activity is to lie between the three of us while we’re watching a movie; he eats ice cream from our bowls while we pretend not to notice. At night, he sleeps in the crook of Laurie’s neck, his paws wrapped around her forehead. And yet if we indulge him by petting him for too long, he inevitably reacts to this overdomestication by biting or scratching us. He loves to hide behind a bookcase and swat unsuspecting passersby or lie across the bookcase, one paw hanging in the air, and look out across the room—a lion surveying the savanna, scoping antelope. He wants to convince himself and us that, thoroughly pampered though he is, at heart he’s still a killer.
From room to room he drags “his” teddy bear—what Natalie used to call his girlfriend—and, despite his supposedly having been fixed years ago, dry-humps it day and night, howling with a conqueror’s fury. He’ll spend hours scratching the window at his neighborhood nemesis, Fireball, but when presented with the opportunity to confront Fireball nose-to-nose, he always settles, pseudo-disappointedly, for the safety of imprisonment. On the rare occasions when he does go outside, he hisses, terrified, at all provocations and scoots inside on the flimsiest pretext. He needs to convince himself that he’s a tough guy, but really Zoomy’s a pussy.