Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

After church today, I treated myself to two movies, back-to-back: The Terminal with Tom Hanks, and Spiderman 2.

I guess I had to ease into seeing Spiderman -- or warm up to seeing it, might be more accurate. I just haven't been all that eager to see it, and (in spite of all the critical acclaim suggesting that Spidey 1 was better than X-Men and praising my often-beloved Sam Raimi) I wasn't particularly thrilled by the first movie.

But while IM-ing missmurchison a few minutes ago, I tried to explain why I have no problems identifying with the very youthful characters on BtVS (especially Buffy herself, who looks and sometimes acts very young in the early seasons) but have a lot of trouble looking up to Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker/Spiderman as a tortured hero. I had THOUGHT it was the baby-faced youth of Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst in the first film that put me off, made me want to keep them at arm's length rather than whole-heartedly invest myself in their story. However, I've just realized that it's not the youth of Spiderman that put me off, but rather his solitariness in the first movie and most of the second.

From the pilot episode on, Buffy had Giles and Xander and Willow with whom to share her secret and from whom to receive moral and tactile support in her endeavors, both heroic and mundane. As Spike notes in School Hard and in Fool for Love, Buffy's close association with family and friends is what sets her apart from other Slayers and seems to make her much harder to kill.

The X-Men have each other and Prof. X -- a dysfunctional family, perhaps, but still a family and a support network of people who are all in this together. Clark Kent has his parents and Pete on Smallville, and what sold me on Lois and Clark from the first episode was the fact that (in that variation on the Superman mythos) Ma and Pa Kent were very much alive and kicking and in their adopted son's corner, come what may. Heck, even Batman at his darkest and loneliest had ALFRED, for crying out loud.

[Spoilers for The Terminal]

And in The Terminal, Tom Hanks starts out as the loneliest and most isolated of people (all alone in a crowded airport, speaking no English, and condemned to a limbo-existence as a non-person from a non-country), but he soon begins to make connections to the people around him, becoming part of the community of those who work behind the scenes or behind passport stamps at the airport. When he sticks his neck out to help a stranger from Russia, even at the cost of losing what he most desires (permission to visit New York), the "little people" who clean the floors and run the cash registers soon pass the story around, hailing him as the champion of those who have no-one on their side and are in danger of being ground up by the bureaucratic machinery, as he himself has often been. Though he doesn't exactly get the girl of his dreams, by the end of the film, he belongs to a community of relatively powerless people who will not let him be sent away empty.

[Spoilers for Spidey 2]

All of which is a long prelude to saying that I liked Spidey 2 much better than the first movie, even in spite of the fact that Peter Parker's life sucks even more profoundly in this movie than when he was still in High School -- hard as that may be to believe! [I hate paying good money to see lives on the screen that remind me too much of the suckiest parts of my own life; just a little quirk, I guess.]

What literally redeemed the film for me (in terms of emotional uplift and spiritual encouragement -- I could see that it was very well made from the first scenes, but that didn't make me feel any better) was the turn-around close to the end, when (after saving the adorable baby girl from the fire and being told by his Aunt May that everyone needs heroes like Spiderman to pattern themselves after and find the courage to hold on just a little longer) Peter/Spidey saves a train-load of people while not wearing his mask.

After he's utterly spent himself to save them and would have fallen, all those ordinary human hands reach out and catch and hold him and gently pass his limp body to a safe spot on the train. One man softly marvels that the hero is 'just a kid, no older than my son,' and when Peter opens his eyes and realizes he'd lost his mask, everyone present assures him that they'll keep his secret and a couple of little boys give him his mask back. When Doc Ock comes for him, every person present attempts to stand between the wounded hero and harm.

[The hopefulness I derived from this scene reminded me forcibly of the scene at the Prom, when Buffy was given the class-protector award -- an unexpected evidence of solidarity with and appreciation for the usually unsung hero.]

Later, having Mary Jane find out his secret and decide for herself whether or not to risk her life as Spiderman's beloved, completed the turn-around, for me. It was no longer up to Peter to decide for everyone he cared about, protecting them, in essence, from their own right to decide and to be heroic in their own way. Having finally cleared the air with Aunt May about his guilt over Uncle Ben's death, giving her the chance to decide to forgive him and tell him she still loved him and was proud of him, seemed to put him in a relationship to his aunt which was slightly analogous to Buffy's relationship with Joyce at the end of School Hard -- the mother or mother-figure still doesn't know her kid's whole heroic secret identity, but she does know that this young person has courage and integrity, and can be trusted to make good choices when things get really bad. Now, with Mary Jane in on the whole thing, Peter actually has someone with whom he can share his whole self and all the worlds he inhabits.

Interestingly enough, what 'saves the day' (and at least half of New York City) in Doc Ock's lair isn't Spiderman's super-powers (though they come in handy in electrocuting Doc Ock into a more receptive frame of mind), but rather Peter Parker's human connections: his previous connection with Otto Octavius, reminding the human genius within the metal mind-meld of his own words about using his gifts to help humanity, and his Aunt May's words about giving up even a cherished dream in order to do what's right. That's what allows Otto to re-assert his personality and will the metal limbs to obey him, one last time, because he refuses to die a monster ('monster' being defined by his actions in either killing or saving millions of lives, rather than by whether or not he has metal tentacles permanently bonded to his nervous system).

I don't know what it all means, but I do know that there's something about the lone hero which -- in spite of that hero's supposed popularity in Westerns and in Western culture and popular mythology generally -- I find ultimately depressing.

When I think back on all those re-runs of the old George Reeves Superman series that I used to watch so avidly and which always ended with Superman triumphant (and with anyone who had learned his secret accidentally dying), I remember feeling a little sad. And that was many years before I learned of the tragic end suffered by Reeves himself. Clark Kent had a community, a cirle of friends and co-workers (who sometimes regarded him with contempt), but Superman was alone, once the cape was on.

Maybe it's even connected to something I read in a course I was T.A.-ing, in a book called The Essential Other, pointing out that many of the most influential and formative figures in psychology through the first half of the 20th century emphasized the idea of self-reliance and autonomy as the marks of emotional maturity and health -- and that they may have done so because so many of those thinkers had come through traumatic experiences in which they'd had to stand alone and not be dependent on anyone else simply in order to survive. So, their tragic necessity and defense against intolerable losses became the standard by which all human development was to be measured. Forget "People Who Need People Are the Luckiest People in the World." What the psychological experts offered as the pinnacle of development and health was "People Who Don't Need Anyone Else At ALL."

As the title of the book (The Essential Other) should suggest, the course I was working on focused instead on the theories stemming from Kohut's Self Psychology and from the Object Relations school, emphasizing the importance of having essential others, self-objects to mirror our own existence or give us someone to identify with and try to be like, at every stage of human development, from infancy to old age.

I gotta say, from my own experience as someone who has often tried to get along without anyone else at all (that being the implicit role my parents assigned me, as the non-problem-child and family-achiever/redeemer) and from my reactions to the various superhero sagas, I agree with the Essential Other folks: you can certainly get along without letting anyone else get too close or know you too well, but it's terribly exhausting and very depressing, and it may not be a way of life you want to model for anyone else. Loneliness may not kill you -- at least, not right away -- but it certainly sucks a lot of the joy and hopefulness out of your life.

Give me heroes who have at least one other person completely on their side and in their corner, please.