THE MESSIAH?
THE PASSION OF THE SPIDER-MAN
Some folks will tell you that after viewing a flick for maybe the
twenty-third or sixty-eighth time, certain things become apparent
that maybe a man never noticed the first dozen times around. Over-
familiarity with the material lends the skull-globs an
opportunity for to sneak around the farthest reaches of the
frame, like some gung-ho rookie unafraid of heading off into the
greenery for to see what’s to be seen, and maybe get some ganja-
crack and kill a few folks while he’s at it. Sometimes it’s
continuity errors a man notices, like in Taxi Driver, when Travis
and Iris are having the discussion over breakfast, and Jodie
Foster’s hair is over the leg of her glasses in one shot and then
under them the next. Sometimes, though, a whole different take on
the plot can make itself known to the viewer, something you
inexplicably missed all those other times.
To this end, the other night I was re-watching Spider-Man 2, and
enjoying it immensely on account of it’s a motherfucking
masterpiece. But it felt different. For example, bits that I
thought were cringe-inducingly over-sentimental at the cinema, I
now felt touch me in a non-sexual, platonic manner. I had assumed
there to be much less action than first time around, and it turns
out I was fucked in the motherfucking mentals to be ever thinking
such nonsense. I began to question my past, to wonder whether or
not I actually saw the fucking thing in the cinema at all?
The biggest alteration in The Duke’s viewing experience, however,
was this shit right here;
We all know the plot, about how Kirsten Dunst is going out with
this space-man motherfucker and she’s a brilliant actress and
she’'s got this Oscar Wilde play going on and holy shit, it’s
probably the best reading of those lines you ever fucking heard.
In addition to this main plot, however, there’s this whole other
thing all about this motherfucker thinks he’s a spider. For real,
it’s one of those kinda deals like in Star Wars when the
stormtroopers are coming through the doorway and one of em bangs
his head on the roof. Just look to the left of Kirsten, or
sometimes to the right, and sometimes even right up above her,
and there he is, this motherfucker done up in red and blue
hanging about the place. It’s just like the ghost in Three Men
And A Baby, except this cat actually has bearing on the
narrative, rather than just going on to feature in a loada web
pages about Real 100% Ghost Pics except when you click on it it’s
just a loada blue dots over a picture of a graveyard.
Fucking orbs, man. What a curse on the paranormal those
motherfuckers turned out to be.
Anyhow, what The Duke got to noticing, in light of this hitherto
undetected sub-plot, was how similar Spider-Man 2 is to Mel
Gibson’s motherfucking masterpiece, The Passion Of The Christ. I
got to thinking that maybe this was important, that this is
indicative of how filmmakers are dealing with the concept of
heroes in this day and age, this post 9/11, post-Iraq world what
we inhabit.
When folks wanted to make a film about Jesus in the past, what
they would do is have a good looking fella goin’ around doin’
good things. Even The Gospel According To Matthew, Pasolini’s
masterful take on it all, never threatens to undermine the idea
that Christ could just’ve zapped those motherfuckers left and
right had he wished, but chose to accept his fate with an
impenetrable stare and a sigh. The Last Temptation Of Christ has
a fair dose of mental torture lashed upon the messiah, but he’s
still a strong individual. He still races around with that axe
when the need arises.
Gibson’s Christ, though, he’s a whole different kettle of fish
and loaves altogether. There’s a strength there, a refusal to
retaliate, to lash out against these barbaric hordes spitting on
him and such, but there’s also that fact that physically, this
Christ is a whipping doll. There he is, lashed backwards and
forwards, whipped, scourged, made to carry a cross and then fall
over in slow motion, and then get up, and then maybe be spat on,
and so on and so fourth. Gibson’s Christ is a hero, for sure, but
he’s not a hero in the traditional Hollywood mould, or even the
traditional religious epic mould.
Now, over in the land of Spider-Man 2, a fella can see a handful
of distinct parallels between Gibson’s Christ and this
representation of Peter Parker. In Spider-Man 2, Parker spends
his time being tortured both mentally and physically, every
corner he turns leading to yet more humiliation. No matter what
he does, no matter how determined he may appear, the fates
conspire for to ensure that he never gets the pizza delivered on
time, that he falls from a roof and smacks his head on a bin,
that he turns up late to the theatre and Bruce Motherfucking
Campbell breaks his balls ruthlessly.
Even when he does manage to hold it together for a moment, maybe
take down a crook or two, what the fuck thanks does he get? Scorn
is all an arachnid-freak can hope for in this day and age. Just
as Christ was being harangued for healing folks and helping blind
fellas for to see, so Parker is demonised for his own
humanitarian efforts. A man’s a criminal, is the general
consensus, just cause he tried to foil a bank robbery, or maybe
raised a Centurion’s dying daughter.
Peter Parker doesn’t get a freaky androgynous Satan wandering
about the shadows, but he endures those temptations just the
same. Just as Christ could have ended all that torture, that
humiliation, just by giving in and saying “Y’know what, you’re
right, turns out I’m not the messiah after all”, so Parker is
offered respite from all this motherfucking hardship, if only
he'd fling that red and blue ensemble in the nearest trash-can.
For both these icons, adulation, respect, arrives only after
insufferable torment. Compare the scene in The Passion where
Christ is being taken down from the cross to the scene in Spider-
Man 2 when Peter Parker is being passed along the crowd inside
that runaway train. That look of awe, that feeling that holy
shit, man, I can’t believe a man would do something so momentous
just for us folks, that sentiment carries across both pictures.
Also, perhaps even more striking, there’s the fact that both
these reluctant heroes are trying to live up to the wishes of a
heavenly father-figure. Peter Parker is haunted by the words of
his late Uncle Ben. “With great power comes great responsibility”
says Uncle Ben, and then probably went off to make some rice or
curry or whatever the fuck Uncle Ben sells nowadays. The
difference, of course, is that in the world of Spider-Man 2, this
omnipresent being offers advice, actual words for to listen to,
and to bring up in conversation along the lines of “Just like my
Uncle Ben said one time when he was dead a couple years…”. In The
Passion, the Heavenly Father is a silent being, the son doing all
the talking.
From a purely aesthetic point of view, Spider-Man 2 and The
Passion also subvert their own genres (the action blockbuster and
the religious epic, respectively) by incorporating the tricks of
horror cinema. Gibson utilises lashings of gore, creepy fanged
youngsters, gothic atmospherics and even the old blinding-by-crow
carry-on from Omen II. Similarly, Spider-Man 2 frequently,
delightfully, lunges into the realms of the slasher flick, most
notably in the operation scene early on, wherein Doc Ock’s
tentacles carry out a censor-baiting massacre in a hospital ward,
looking for all the world like a less gore-drenched sequence from
Sam Raimi’s earlier Evil Dead pictures, complete with chainsaw
and vertigo-threatening camera acrobatics.
Ultimately, both Gibson’s Jesus and Raimi’s Spider-Man wrestle
with the same old dilemma; the incessant urge for to assist
humanity, coupled with the knowledge that they can never, in
fact, be a part of that humanity. Christ needs to save the world,
to die that ungrateful motherfuckers like you and me can live,
with the flip-side being he can’t get with Mary Magdalene and he
has to endure this devastating physical punishment. Parker, too,
needs to save the world, albeit on a smaller scale, and so Mary-
Jane has to go and get married to some motherfucking astronaut,
and he has to get bags of money flung at him by a motherfucking
squid-beast.
Spider-Man doesn’t appear to be Catholic, unlike, say, your
Daredevils and what have you, and so at least one of his wishes
appears to be granted by the films close. And Christ, too, enjoys
a happy ending of sorts, the trials and torments having ended,
and there he is, clean as a whistle, stepping out to some action
movie drum-beats for to kick some ass, or at least scare folks
shitless in a couple taverns.
“I don’t believe you!”
“Believe this, then, Thomas, look at this right here, on my
wrist. What’s that then? You believe now, I bet.”
Maybe what it all boils down to is that half-way through the
first decade of the 21st century, folks just aren’t about to
accept an onscreen hero who marches through field-loads of
motherfuckers like John Matrix, guns blazing, chopping folks
scalps off even, and sleeping like a baby afterwards. Folks are
waking up to the idea that most likely the real heroes that exist
in society, they suffer a fuck-load for their status. Nowadays,
maybe folks are fed up seeing their own insecurities mocked and
trivialised by shithouse motherfuckers blaring across the screen
with nary a thought in their skulls regarding consequence or
conflict.
Even little Frodo Baggins doesn’t get to save the world for
nothing. He has to make do with not getting a sex and a fisting,
perhaps, from Samwise, and has to carry out his task whilst
hooded representations of foulest evil taunt him from the
sidelines. And then at the end of it all, he has to leave his
beloved friends behind, for to go off into the misty clutches of
some bright celestial shore.
And so instead of, say Cobra or Detective Mason Motherfucking
Storm, we get Spider-Man haunted by his ambitions, we get
Daredevil spitting out his own teeth in the shower, and instead
of a Christ bathed in glowing, radiant light, smiling on the
faithful from the cross, we get a man screaming as he hangs on a
piece of wood awaiting his death.
And none of it would be possible without Kirsten. Thank you
Kirsten.
Thanks folks.
Further Reading –
The Motherfucking Cinema Of Kirsten Dunst
Christ On Camera - The Duke On Religious Cinema
Drop The Duke A Line And Make Him Smile
twenty-third or sixty-eighth time, certain things become apparent
that maybe a man never noticed the first dozen times around. Over-
familiarity with the material lends the skull-globs an
opportunity for to sneak around the farthest reaches of the
frame, like some gung-ho rookie unafraid of heading off into the
greenery for to see what’s to be seen, and maybe get some ganja-
crack and kill a few folks while he’s at it. Sometimes it’s
continuity errors a man notices, like in Taxi Driver, when Travis
and Iris are having the discussion over breakfast, and Jodie
Foster’s hair is over the leg of her glasses in one shot and then
under them the next. Sometimes, though, a whole different take on
the plot can make itself known to the viewer, something you
inexplicably missed all those other times.
To this end, the other night I was re-watching Spider-Man 2, and
enjoying it immensely on account of it’s a motherfucking
masterpiece. But it felt different. For example, bits that I
thought were cringe-inducingly over-sentimental at the cinema, I
now felt touch me in a non-sexual, platonic manner. I had assumed
there to be much less action than first time around, and it turns
out I was fucked in the motherfucking mentals to be ever thinking
such nonsense. I began to question my past, to wonder whether or
not I actually saw the fucking thing in the cinema at all?
The biggest alteration in The Duke’s viewing experience, however,
was this shit right here;
We all know the plot, about how Kirsten Dunst is going out with
this space-man motherfucker and she’s a brilliant actress and
she’'s got this Oscar Wilde play going on and holy shit, it’s
probably the best reading of those lines you ever fucking heard.
In addition to this main plot, however, there’s this whole other
thing all about this motherfucker thinks he’s a spider. For real,
it’s one of those kinda deals like in Star Wars when the
stormtroopers are coming through the doorway and one of em bangs
his head on the roof. Just look to the left of Kirsten, or
sometimes to the right, and sometimes even right up above her,
and there he is, this motherfucker done up in red and blue
hanging about the place. It’s just like the ghost in Three Men
And A Baby, except this cat actually has bearing on the
narrative, rather than just going on to feature in a loada web
pages about Real 100% Ghost Pics except when you click on it it’s
just a loada blue dots over a picture of a graveyard.
Fucking orbs, man. What a curse on the paranormal those
motherfuckers turned out to be.
Anyhow, what The Duke got to noticing, in light of this hitherto
undetected sub-plot, was how similar Spider-Man 2 is to Mel
Gibson’s motherfucking masterpiece, The Passion Of The Christ. I
got to thinking that maybe this was important, that this is
indicative of how filmmakers are dealing with the concept of
heroes in this day and age, this post 9/11, post-Iraq world what
we inhabit.
When folks wanted to make a film about Jesus in the past, what
they would do is have a good looking fella goin’ around doin’
good things. Even The Gospel According To Matthew, Pasolini’s
masterful take on it all, never threatens to undermine the idea
that Christ could just’ve zapped those motherfuckers left and
right had he wished, but chose to accept his fate with an
impenetrable stare and a sigh. The Last Temptation Of Christ has
a fair dose of mental torture lashed upon the messiah, but he’s
still a strong individual. He still races around with that axe
when the need arises.
Gibson’s Christ, though, he’s a whole different kettle of fish
and loaves altogether. There’s a strength there, a refusal to
retaliate, to lash out against these barbaric hordes spitting on
him and such, but there’s also that fact that physically, this
Christ is a whipping doll. There he is, lashed backwards and
forwards, whipped, scourged, made to carry a cross and then fall
over in slow motion, and then get up, and then maybe be spat on,
and so on and so fourth. Gibson’s Christ is a hero, for sure, but
he’s not a hero in the traditional Hollywood mould, or even the
traditional religious epic mould.
Now, over in the land of Spider-Man 2, a fella can see a handful
of distinct parallels between Gibson’s Christ and this
representation of Peter Parker. In Spider-Man 2, Parker spends
his time being tortured both mentally and physically, every
corner he turns leading to yet more humiliation. No matter what
he does, no matter how determined he may appear, the fates
conspire for to ensure that he never gets the pizza delivered on
time, that he falls from a roof and smacks his head on a bin,
that he turns up late to the theatre and Bruce Motherfucking
Campbell breaks his balls ruthlessly.
Even when he does manage to hold it together for a moment, maybe
take down a crook or two, what the fuck thanks does he get? Scorn
is all an arachnid-freak can hope for in this day and age. Just
as Christ was being harangued for healing folks and helping blind
fellas for to see, so Parker is demonised for his own
humanitarian efforts. A man’s a criminal, is the general
consensus, just cause he tried to foil a bank robbery, or maybe
raised a Centurion’s dying daughter.
Peter Parker doesn’t get a freaky androgynous Satan wandering
about the shadows, but he endures those temptations just the
same. Just as Christ could have ended all that torture, that
humiliation, just by giving in and saying “Y’know what, you’re
right, turns out I’m not the messiah after all”, so Parker is
offered respite from all this motherfucking hardship, if only
he'd fling that red and blue ensemble in the nearest trash-can.
For both these icons, adulation, respect, arrives only after
insufferable torment. Compare the scene in The Passion where
Christ is being taken down from the cross to the scene in Spider-
Man 2 when Peter Parker is being passed along the crowd inside
that runaway train. That look of awe, that feeling that holy
shit, man, I can’t believe a man would do something so momentous
just for us folks, that sentiment carries across both pictures.
Also, perhaps even more striking, there’s the fact that both
these reluctant heroes are trying to live up to the wishes of a
heavenly father-figure. Peter Parker is haunted by the words of
his late Uncle Ben. “With great power comes great responsibility”
says Uncle Ben, and then probably went off to make some rice or
curry or whatever the fuck Uncle Ben sells nowadays. The
difference, of course, is that in the world of Spider-Man 2, this
omnipresent being offers advice, actual words for to listen to,
and to bring up in conversation along the lines of “Just like my
Uncle Ben said one time when he was dead a couple years…”. In The
Passion, the Heavenly Father is a silent being, the son doing all
the talking.
From a purely aesthetic point of view, Spider-Man 2 and The
Passion also subvert their own genres (the action blockbuster and
the religious epic, respectively) by incorporating the tricks of
horror cinema. Gibson utilises lashings of gore, creepy fanged
youngsters, gothic atmospherics and even the old blinding-by-crow
carry-on from Omen II. Similarly, Spider-Man 2 frequently,
delightfully, lunges into the realms of the slasher flick, most
notably in the operation scene early on, wherein Doc Ock’s
tentacles carry out a censor-baiting massacre in a hospital ward,
looking for all the world like a less gore-drenched sequence from
Sam Raimi’s earlier Evil Dead pictures, complete with chainsaw
and vertigo-threatening camera acrobatics.
Ultimately, both Gibson’s Jesus and Raimi’s Spider-Man wrestle
with the same old dilemma; the incessant urge for to assist
humanity, coupled with the knowledge that they can never, in
fact, be a part of that humanity. Christ needs to save the world,
to die that ungrateful motherfuckers like you and me can live,
with the flip-side being he can’t get with Mary Magdalene and he
has to endure this devastating physical punishment. Parker, too,
needs to save the world, albeit on a smaller scale, and so Mary-
Jane has to go and get married to some motherfucking astronaut,
and he has to get bags of money flung at him by a motherfucking
squid-beast.
Spider-Man doesn’t appear to be Catholic, unlike, say, your
Daredevils and what have you, and so at least one of his wishes
appears to be granted by the films close. And Christ, too, enjoys
a happy ending of sorts, the trials and torments having ended,
and there he is, clean as a whistle, stepping out to some action
movie drum-beats for to kick some ass, or at least scare folks
shitless in a couple taverns.
“I don’t believe you!”
“Believe this, then, Thomas, look at this right here, on my
wrist. What’s that then? You believe now, I bet.”
Maybe what it all boils down to is that half-way through the
first decade of the 21st century, folks just aren’t about to
accept an onscreen hero who marches through field-loads of
motherfuckers like John Matrix, guns blazing, chopping folks
scalps off even, and sleeping like a baby afterwards. Folks are
waking up to the idea that most likely the real heroes that exist
in society, they suffer a fuck-load for their status. Nowadays,
maybe folks are fed up seeing their own insecurities mocked and
trivialised by shithouse motherfuckers blaring across the screen
with nary a thought in their skulls regarding consequence or
conflict.
Even little Frodo Baggins doesn’t get to save the world for
nothing. He has to make do with not getting a sex and a fisting,
perhaps, from Samwise, and has to carry out his task whilst
hooded representations of foulest evil taunt him from the
sidelines. And then at the end of it all, he has to leave his
beloved friends behind, for to go off into the misty clutches of
some bright celestial shore.
And so instead of, say Cobra or Detective Mason Motherfucking
Storm, we get Spider-Man haunted by his ambitions, we get
Daredevil spitting out his own teeth in the shower, and instead
of a Christ bathed in glowing, radiant light, smiling on the
faithful from the cross, we get a man screaming as he hangs on a
piece of wood awaiting his death.
And none of it would be possible without Kirsten. Thank you
Kirsten.
Thanks folks.
Further Reading –
The Motherfucking Cinema Of Kirsten Dunst
Christ On Camera - The Duke On Religious Cinema
Drop The Duke A Line And Make Him Smile
