the back burner

from sm3 to deep reflection in 60 seconds

Today I saw the third Spiderman movie, SM3. Really flashy. Loads of thrills. Instant international blockbuster. They even sell spidey-burgers at the local fast-food establishment, these days. You can understand if I went in with the highest of expectations.

I’m not sure if I have a take, yet, but here are my preliminary thoughts. As my fellow spider-watcher observed, the movie made a big shift from the smart action of the first two movies to heavy drama. I wasn’t ready for that, but the more I think about it, this kind of tele-novella-esque intensity seems normal in all the comic books, maybe even requisite. Main character has just evaded certain death... major conflict has been only temporarily postponed... hero spends time being emotionally dysfunctional with others or self-destructive when alone...

I mean, it always seemed to work for Wolverine.

While all the drama with MJ and best-friend-worst-enemy Harry was unfolding onscreen, I found myself covering the movie-makers’ collective tails by citing this kind of comic-book excuse. (“Of course they’re not behaving like normal people would; we’re in an illustrated world.”) As a cinematic endeavor, then, I’m not sure what to think of SM3. Motivation, character development, plot, and photography all left something to be desired. But as a comic book, I’d buy it. It’s got that certain air of we-know-life-isn’t-this-way-but-we-want-to-tell-it-like-this-because-it’s-more-fun.

The whole idea of people with super-powers is based on that feeling, I think. Super-powered individuals sure don’t make good boyfriends, as we find out in SM3, but they sure are likable. (Hence my excitement upon seeing the HP&TOOTP preview for the very first time. Ah, the inexpressible shrieks of delight and anticipation!) They’re also people with whom we find it astonishingly easy to relate, based I’m sure on our own dreams of pushing past the boundaries life gives us. They can climb buildings! They can throw cars! And they sure can take a good beating and get right back up.

This might seem like a non-sequitur, but at the moment I’m working my way through Reading Lolita in Tehran. The author Azar Nafisi deals with the problem of liking brutal novels by categorizing them as fairy tales, as did Lolita’s author, Vladimir Nabokov, before her. Despite the sometimes weak and cruel elements of great novels, she and her students read them with relish. Like fairy tales, their reading list was full of cruel stepmother figures and twists of fate, but also magical moments of individuals pushing past their situations. In many instances, this individual magician is the author herself or himself, describing cruelty in ways that belligerently highlight compassion or a belief in justice for the truly revolutionary acts that they are.

Call me crazy, but I see this idea of revolutionary acts (or “the push,” as I like to think of it) in the Spiderman movies, as well. Any story about a super-hero has access to this powerful idea of pushing against fate, even the simplest stories like the comic books we read (and are now able to watch). The idea that individuals are not required to accept what life hands them has been so deeply ingrained in my own culture of origin as to become practically an assumption. When set in bas-relief against a totalitarian regime, a persecuted minority, or cycles of institutional poverty, however, the idea becomes more stark, something between a slap in the face and a short fall into very cold water. People can push back? Is it possible?

But now I have to stop feeling good for oppressed people and put the question to myself, in my own context: can people change? The truth is that, if we’re going to be honest, they can’t. Not really. Nothing I’ve seen in my brief experience of the human condition supports that idea. We’re bound by the things we own, the people whose approval we crave, the things we feel like we owe to God, the expectations we need to meet, or the stuff others say about us. Trying to extract ourselves from this bondage is just like flailing about in quicksand: it only makes things worse.

This is what makes us all wish that we could shoot spiderweb from our wrists or fly or run really fast or at least have celebrity status in the media. This is what also makes us pick over the lives of movie stars and rock stars, simultaneously wanting to worship them as super-people and hating them for being what we could never be. We are seriously stuck in patterns of self-delusion and meaninglessness, unable to know or articulate either truth or meaning but feeling all the same that such things ought to be.

Let’s make a movie about THAT. And let’s call it the power of the gospel in my life, turning me from a slave that takes his beating into a son who inherits the earth. I recently had to write out a personal definition of faith. Here’s part of it: “I can do all things through Christ, because I believe he has taken my sinful record and given me a spotless one; he has taken my stony heart and given me a heart of flesh; and he has taken death and given me life. This strengthens me [to push back against the world]. These things convince me that I do not have to live in slavery. They convince me that God is at work in deeply caring and profoundly powerful ways.”

Posted by nickles at May 7, 2007 02:29 AM | TrackBack