The elevator doors hiss open and the guy gets in, only to find himself sharing the space with somebody in a funky red and blue suit. So the regular guy says what’s on his mind: The outfit looks cool, oh yeah, but it’s probably not the most comfy thing in the world, now, is it?
“Gets kind of itchy,” concedes Spider-Man in one of the lighter moments in “Spider-Man 2.” “Rides up in the crotch a little bit too.”
Honest words from an honest superhero — and not just because of the crotch reference, which reliably evokes a giggle from audiences. What Spider-Man is really referencing, of course, has nothing to do with a shrinking in-seam and everything to do with his destiny. The burden of being Spider-Man — of saving lives and snaring crooks, when you’d rather be goofing around like a regular guy — indeed gets kind of itchy, hence the dilemma that haunts our hero in the course of this uncommonly entertaining film.
Yet like the best of popular culture, “Spider-Man 2” is more than funny moments and high-flying special effects. It deftly recasts one of the most significant themes in literature: the tension between the possession of a great gift and the yearning for an ordinary life, between a higher calling and a hunger for normalcy, between a noble sacrifice and a not-so-noble desire for simple joy.
Given that “Spider-Man 2” had grossed $192 million in domestic ticket sales by last week, this moral tug-of-war seems to resonate deeply with audiences.
Spider-Man has been granted remarkable powers. But it’s a gift he often wishes he could push away in favor of personal happiness. His anguished perplexity — beautifully enacted by Tobey Maguire — is shared by such fictional luminaries as Captain Ahab in Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” (1851), Adrian Leverkuhn in Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus” (1947) and Samson in John Milton’s “Samson Agonistes” (1671). Ahab, Leverkuhn, Samson and Spider-Man stand at the same painful threshold, asking the same tormenting questions: Will they always be imprisoned by their gifts? Must they be forever exiled by their extraordinary abilities? Will they never know the basic felicities — falling in love, taking a walk, lazing through a summer day, feeling the breeze on an upturned face — because of their amazing gifts?
Thus Ahab, forced to follow his dark obsession with the whale, summarizes the curse of being special: “Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low enjoying power.”
It is a cry that could just as well have been uttered by Peter Parker, Spider-Man’s alter ego. Because Parker, like his counterparts in some of the world’s greatest literature, at times wants nothing more than to be a run-of-the-mill kid. One of the crowd. Not a headline-making hero. Not a daring, mysterious figure. Just a guy. But then again, he knows he’s special — and those astonishing gifts, in the end, may be inextricable from his very selfhood. To kill the gift would be to kill the man. Or would it?
And even if he could escape, even if he could throw off the yoke of his singularity and blend into the mass of humanity — should he? As Peter’s beloved uncle once told him, “You’ve been given a great gift, Peter. With great power comes great responsibility.” Once one is made aware of harboring rare and splendid abilities, the decision about exercising them acquires an inarguable moral dimension.
The dilemma of great gifts amid the yen for ordinary satisfactions is ancient but still compelling. As W.B. Yeats wrote in his 1933 poem “The Choice”: “The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life, or of the work,/And if it take the second must refuse/A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.” Should Spider-Man select the mansion — a life with his true love, Mary Jane Watson — or the prospect of raging in the dark, of fulfilling a lonely destiny patrolling the skyscraper-walled canyons of Manhattan?
The two fates seem mutually exclusive, as Mann chronicled in “Doctor Faustus,” his tale of a brilliant German composer whose towering talents and Everest-like ambitions leave him stranded from the rest of humanity. “For Adrian Leverkuhn,” the narrator muses, “these were years of highly excited and enormous — one is tempted to say monstrous — creative activity . . . and one could not avoid the impression that it was intended as payment, as compensation for having been denied permission to love.” The sentence could have been placed in the script of “Spider-Man 2,” with only a change of names.
Pop culture’s power
That’s the funny, wonderful thing about popular culture. It can echo great themes in classic literature, and it can do so with a refreshing simplicity and forthrightness. What might seem boring or intimidating to some audiences — the thundering renunciation of ordinary domestic life by Captain Ahab, the lugubrious soliloquies about lost promise by Samson — is transformed, in a story about a likable but conflicted superhero, into an accessible and enjoyable yarn.
The best of popular culture — and the Marvel Comics creations of Stan Lee leap with muscular ease into that category — has always done that, functioning as a sort of sidekick to so-called high culture, linking its grand ideas to more familiar concerns. Few of us will ever suffer the exquisite burden of a gift such as that granted to Spider-Man or Leverkuhn; but most of us have been told, at one point or another, that we’re not working up to our potential, that we’re making choices that are unworthy of us. The conflict between duty and desire is a pull we all have felt. Like Peter, we’ve all been tempted to fling away our Spider-Man suit — or whatever entity may symbolize our individual talents and destiny — into the nearest trash can and just be done with it, once and for all.
We’ve all felt a private version of what Milton’s Samson feels: an initial self-pity, finally widening out into a quiet recognition that unmet challenges can ravage the soul.
“Why was my breeding order’d and prescrib’d/As of a person separate of God,/Design’d for great exploits,” Samson broods. In other words, spare me from my specialness — a state of mind grimly familiar to Spider-Man. “Suffices that to me strength is my bane,” Samson adds, “and proves the source of my miseries.” Give me a break: Make me ordinary, for crying out loud.
Danger of `dumbing down’
There is a danger, of course, of oversimplifying literature when trying to jam its wide-horizon themes into the compact spaces of popular culture, of “dumbing it down.” Or, when starting at the pop-culture end, of dumbing it up: Working desperately to find sophistication in even the least promising spheres. Hence academic studies such as “The Semiotics of `Charmed’ and the Regenerative Nuances of the Undead” or “`Lycidas’ and ‘N Sync: Transformative Mourning Rituals of the Vanished Symbiotic Union.” Those are made-up titles — we think — but only just barely.
Still, for many people, the pleasures of “Spider-Man 2” are not only the gravity-eschewing special effects and the knockout performance by Maguire, but also a theme that has resonated through literature for centuries: the tragic implications of our gifts.
The Greeks defined happiness as the employment of one’s abilities along lines of excellence — to be, as the military recruiting slogan reminds us, all that you can be. So the very destiny we often resist with all of our might — living a life commensurate with our unique endowments — turns out, if we trust enough to let it happen, to be the thing that brings us our greatest joy. And the wisdom of “Spider-Man 2,” a morality play by way of a comic book saga, can help us make that leap of faith — even if we can’t leap quite like Spidey.
