While Fahrenheit 9/11 was the box office hit during its first week out, this summer’s blockbuster smash so far is Spiderman 2. Reviewers laud it, audiences line up to see it, everyone’s singing its praises. ' You’ve got to see this movie' one friend told me, 'it’s so cool! I left with a smile.' Another said, ' I really liked Spiderman; he’s so adorable. He tries so hard, but he just can’t get it right.'

What’s all the fuss?

Part of an answer at least lies in the enormous sums spent on marketing. (If only Fahrenheit 9/11 had the same advertising capital at its disposal). Yet promotion alone doesn’t suffice as a cause. What then is behind the Spiderman phenomenon? What appeals so deeply to the popular imagination?

Let’s face it: Spiderman is a working-class hero. Yes, a working-class hero. The move has a strong populist appeal. Peter Parker, alias Spiderman, is a deeply conflicted and deeply smitten proletarian kid in love with an aspiring young actor. He works two part-time jobs to put himself through school, where he’s fallen behind in his grades. He lives somewhere (the lower-East side of Manhattan?) in a room in a rundown tenement (which, by the way, few working-class kids can afford these days at over $1000.00 a month). His father’s dead (shot by a mugger in the last episode) and his aunt can barely make ends meet and faces foreclosure on the mortgage. The bank’s loan officer is somewhat sympathetic but deep down really doesn’t give a damn. The movie’s strong class edge is further reinforced by the Parker’s snotty nosed uppity Yuppie best friend who’s the front man for the Ozcorp company and by the hateful editor of a daily tabloid, both of whom seem set on destroying Spiderman’s good reputation and name.

It is within these circumstances that Peter Parker’s doubts and dilemmas play themselves out: to be a superhero or resume the life of an ordinary young man: to champion the greater good or pursue his individual needs? It is by means of the conflict engendered by the struggle between these seeming opposites that drama unfolds.

Spiderman is in love. But he forbids himself a relationship for fear of leaving his sweetheart prey to villain’s revenge.

Will he go on playing superhero and the traditional male supremacist protector of weak womanhood and give up on love? (Yes Spiderman appears a bit of a male chauvinist pig.) Or can he commit himself to an equal partnership by recognizing his girlfriend’s right to accept her own risks and make her own decisions? The conflict consumes him as does his struggle to make ends meet; his grades fail, he loses his job, his aunt becomes homeless.

And if that weren’t enough he seems about to lose his love to the astronaut son of the tycoon editor. Our hero can’t get it right. He fumbles and fudges, faltering along when finally his super-powers fail (oh what tangled webs) and he falls into the gutter just when the danger becomes greatest as a scientist pursuing fusion for Ozcorp becomes himself fused with several steel spider legs in an industrial accident and turns into a monster.

While there is some attempt to wrap Spiderman in the false color’s of US corporate culture, a deeper worth is revealed in the web of his most intimate relations and the common folk with whom he interacts. Here devotion, modesty, self-sacrifice, and even a grudging self-criticism are unmistakable (as in perhaps the best scene when he saves the train and its rainbow of riders).

Yet despite these virtues, there is something insidious in this character: Spiderman takes the law into his own hands. He is a vigilante. A police-car and ambulance chaser, his enemy is crime. Not crime in general, but a particular kind of crime. His targets have a strong class bias: the object of his attention is crime in the streets: not crime of the suites. Does it ever occur to him that Ozcorp might be criminally responsible for the fusion explosion? Does it occur to anyone? But it’s doubtful it occurs to anyone, as individual ambition is ever emphasized over corporate greed.

But hey, this is just a fun mindless summer movie. 'It’s just simple bourgeois escapism' as a co-worker recently said. Why not take it at face value and let it be?

It may be tempting to dismiss Spiderman and others like it as a children’s movie or just so much summer escapism (especially since a large part of the audience were adults). But there may be something else going on in these flights of fantasy that one should study if not heed.

At work not only the populist identification with an ordinary character’s day-to-day frailties in corporate America, but also the desire to escape them and flee from the mundane cruelties of life. There is a hope here for something better, a higher striving, another freer existence. As a work of fantasy, Spiderman is popular for the same reason as Harry Potter: its ability to create utopian other world where people whether by magic or superhuman powers can control and shape their destiny.

But power is ever portrayed as individual act or gift rather than as arising from collective purposeful activity, which is the only real hope for the Peter Parkers of the world. Evil can be combated and destiny controlled not by resource to magic but by the largely untapped superpower of labor.

Spiderman is not a great film. It hardly if at all rises above the usual B movie. With few exceptions, the acting is uncompelling and at times even cartoonish, a crude parody of even the comic book. But don’t ignore it, there’s a reason people are seeing it.



--Joe Sims is the editor of Political Affairs. Send your thoughts to joesims@politicalaffairs.net.



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