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Spider-Man, Star Wars and the Power of Myth
Like Star Wars, Spider-Man has the classic elements of a successful myth. A typically American story, it's less pretentious and hyped than Star Wars and more accessible to kids and die-hard comic book buffs, who remember the great, golden age of Marvel Comics. I'm one of them, I was there.
The old form still has legs. One film analysts told the Wall Street Journal last week that with the success of Spider-Man, the blockbuster bar has been raised. In fact, he said, this movie has changed Hollywood's perception of what a blockbuster is. That makes it interesting for George Lucas, next up at your local megaplex.
It's tough to explain, in the age of cable, gaming, the Net and the Web, just how central comics were for years to a culture of brainy, nerdy, alienated pre-Net teenage boys. Now, hostile jerks can flame people on the Net. Before, they could only read sci-fi books, build model planes and erector sets, but mostly, feast on comics and dream of becoming more powerful.
In the 21st century, they can download, program and game, but in the 50s and 60s, comic books and rock-and-roll were prominent among the few accessible forms of popular culture for individualists with brain cells, a cheap, simple pleasure that cost a dime, then a quarter. How shockingly primitive when compared to the world of the computer nerd or hacker.
Mainstream culture was dull, religiously appropriate and homogenized. Comic books and rock music were rebellious, subversive and naturally came under murderous fire from parents, teachers and politicians.
Before, they could only read comics and fantasize about becoming more powerful. Elaborate ratings systems and restrictive codes eventually suffocated the comics' angry, biting spirit and made them as bland as network TV -- a cultural loss and free-speech outrage heading soon to a computer near you -- but not before Marvel and other comic creators cranked out some classic yarns, from Spider-Man and Batman to the X-Men and other superheroic tales.
What makes these stories so popular and enduring? Perhaps because they all embody certain themes. There's the split-personality hero, usually a nerd who acquires great powers but at enormous cost, who always gets something and loses something. He gets to zip along past New York City skyscrapers, for instance, but we know he isn't likely to end up with the girl. Or, he lives in a mansion and drives a Batmobile, but he's depressed and lonely. Or he's a mutant wolverine with fingers of steel who can't ever have a casual beer with his pals.
He cherishes his powers, but we know he can't ever be comfortable with his life. Robert Kane's early Batman: The Dark Knight was disturbingly dark and angry before the moralists turned comic books to bland mush. Few people remember that Kane ended his first Batman series with our hero giving up on life and essentially committing suicide by turning himself into the famed Arkham Asylum, where villains from the Joker to the Riddler were being held.
Stories like Spider-Man and Batman also have a uniquely American and, until September 11, old-fashioned sense of civics. Spider-man's motto is "With great power comes great responsibility, " a bizarre notion even to hackers. Wouldn't that have seemed clunky before the terrorist attacks? Now it has a certain resonance.
Batman's Bruce Wayne, along with the Superhero stars and any number of X-Men, never shirk their duty to the public, even though the fickle populace is sure, at some point, to turn on them. No matter how tempted, they are, they do what they're supposed to do.
The late teacher and mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote that myth was still one of the powerful forces in the world. The origins and power of myth are still central, from the comic book lover to the hacker. The success of revived yarns like Stan Lee's Spider-Man, while they rarely seem to take themselves as seriously as their fans take them, is amazing, and proves his point. We seem to constantly be turning backwards to myths for inspiration and entertainment, while we are busy making the myths of tomorrow but don't really know which ones will take.
The Spider-Man story is pretty basic, especially when compared to the lumbering twists and turns of Star Wars: wimpy outer-borough kid contracts enormous powers, learns to use them wisely and well, faces terrible danger, sacrifices much.
Peter Parker isn't as deep as the Skywalker brothers and Uncle Ben is no Obi-Wan. But as the box office receipts demonstrate, the writers at Marvel comics have held their own when it comes to myth-making. Sometimes, simpler is better.
That's a bet I'd take.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
A quick glance over his last 20 stories show an avergae of 370 comments per story, his top three garnering 1021, 713 and 633. This man walks right behind the fury of the anti-MS brigade.
Strange thing is, Katz is universally (face it, Slashdot is our universe) abhorred, belittled and flamed week after week, yet remains gainfully(?) employed by Slashdot, and continues to pull in the page views.
In summation, the perfect troll. ;)
Spider-man's springboard was an comic which has it's glory days in the past (comic sales are lower than decades past, probably due to computers, video games, etc.) and an incredibly inane and plodding newspaper strip. That it's done so well most likely speaks volumes (largely ignored in Hollywood) at the value of producing family entertainment. I'm old enough to remember when 'R' rated films only came through town once in a while, now they're usually 50% of what's showing, if not more. Even PG-13 stuff can be pretty awful, so when the old web slinger hit the screens it was a safe bet that kids would be there, most of the viewers in the lines I saw were of the ankle-biter variety. Lasting power, of course remains to be seen.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Campbell is a dead-white-guy (even while living) who saw everything in terms of other dead-white-guy stories. He attempted to shoe-horn other cultures and their stories into Western style myths, and then pointed out how clever he was.
Anybody why even glibpses a page of Mr. Campbell's PBS-style writings starts seening everything in tems of myth. "The milk being poured into my fruit-loops is like the story of the Hero's of Yore who travel on an Adventure, only to come back to a decimated homeland"
The guy had a cerain nack of getting grants to do his "craft", I'll give him that, but his readers rank up there with readers of and Ayn Rand and Chompsky, they start to see everything in terms of their favorite new book.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
This film didn't shock anybody. The critics pretty much universly loved the film. JonKatz should do just a tad more research before he bases an entire article off of a preposterous claim.
If you just go to RottenTomatoes.com which compiles move reviews into one big list and takes the ratio of good to bad you'd know that SpiderMan got an unusually high 84% positive reviews. Check out the reviews
Offtopic: also check out the review for one of the worst movies of all time: Battlefield Earth. Some of the reviews are so funny it nearly makes me want to cry.
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
***Stories like Spider-Man and Batman also have a uniquely American and, until September 11, old-fashioned sense of civics. Spider-man's motto is "With great power comes great responsibility, " a bizarre notion even to hackers. Wouldn't that have seemed clunky before the terrorist attacks? Now it has a certain resonance.***
Please get off of your drama-queenesque high horse. I normally don't have too large a beef against you, but even though relating everything to September 11th may seem like a higher level of thought, it's just unrealistic. Contrary to your beliefs, most people aren't strongly/directly affected by September 11th, and as such don't change their perception of diction in American language in response to the attack. Just because it happened does not mean that it must pervade every aspect of our lives, especially movie-going, and although it may have connections to our perceptions of evil/good, it does not define them. Although this sense of detachment may seem tragic in the wake of so many senseless deaths, it's the realistic state of American society... Weaving allusions to nonexistant connotations that seem complex and relevant is just a cheap way to impress less knowledgable readers... you should be ashamed.
Salon did a long article where they pointed out the MANY similarities between Doc Smith's Lensmen series, Dune, and Star Wars -- even to the point where both Smith and Lucas described "the Force" in virtually the same words. Lenses, midichlorians; same thing. Lucas may want us to believe he ripped off high art, but there are many more parallls to the Lensmen series -- which Lucas admitted he was reading when he wrote the original Star Wars.
And Salon reported on this a whole lot better than Katz did.
Was Spider-Man release week "we like the MPAA week" and Star Wars release week "we hate the MPAA (and Lucas) week"? This gets so confusing I can't keep track.
Katz likes to go off about myth and the power of a good story rooted in the growing up of a child, but like some of these other posters pointed out, he simply bought into a US $50 million dollar mega-hyped movie and it seems he went head first.
After years of dismal summer movies and realizing that the hype machine keeps getting bigger and bigger (Godzilla, Wild Wild West, Men in Black [we saw the entire film by just watching the commercials!], Tomb Raider, Lost World, A.I., and on and on], and after seeing how the MPAA treats the general public and wants to corrupt technology to keep their coffers spilling over, I have now moved to a skeptical consumer. I don't need to see every over-hyped movie released into the theaters. I'm choosing to skip most of this summer's movies because when it all comes down to it, they pale in comparison to previous works and I feel no need to give the MPAA any more funding.
Go see more indie films, Katz. You want good story telling, some even rooted in myth, you'll find good stuff there.
And I'll bet 10 to 1 that the Matrix 2 will open far better than either of these two movies, and perhaps for the same reasons Katz espouses in this article.
Linux at home
Wow! I completely agree That was my second thought upon leaving Spiderman as I walked into the snowing mountains. My first thought being "Wow! Its snowing! Yuk!" Expecting to walk away from Spiderman pleased by the hollywood flick I expected it to be, but never did I expect to get a deep sense of the thread of Christ in the story line. "What matters is a new creature." Spidey was definantly a new creature. His enlightenment gave him the option to choose and he chose wisely.
believing the big bang requires a certain amount of supernatural faith
Speaking of bets, I'll bet that when and if the Spider-Man franchise has spun its fifth movie, the franchise will be way more "elephantine" and clueless than STAR WARS is now.
Although I am disappointed in some of what Lucas has done with his franchise, let credit be given where due: the rarest achievement in cinema is the preplotted multi-part blockbuster film saga. Arguably THE GODFATHER was first, although Coppola could have quit at any time with honors. Most other series make it up as they go along. STAR WARS was the only prewritten SF saga until Peter Jackson came along with his Tolkien trilogy, and even then Jackson had the advantage of shooting everything at once and releasing at leisure.
I've always remembered it being Gremlins (1984) that brought about the creation of PG-13.
I checked IMDB (second to last item), and they also had the same idea, though, they don't confirm it as fact.
I wonder where we could find a definitive source.