Saturday, January 22, 2011

Spiderman 2 - Our calling, our personal life

Spiderman 2 shows the matured spiderman, no longer a kid thinking he has a responsibility to use the gift, learning to use it, learning his physical limitations and abilities; he's now well into a ministry or career or profession as spiderman. While he is superb as spiderman, saving lives and keeping criminals off the street, he's miserable as a normal person trying to make a living, a student trying to attend his classes. With his feet in both world, he ends up not doing very well at the normal human world, and that is the world everyone sees. He's starving for attention . . . and love. He has decided he can never be with the love of his life, Mary Jane, lest her life become endangered like his. He's practicing what his Uncle Ben taught him before his death in S 1 - With great power comes great responsibility.

In this movie, Mary Jane indicates to Peter Parker her interest to him more than in the first movie, where they are more like friends and Peter longing for her from afar. This tests his commitment to keep his love a secret to the limit of his ability. In fact, It is clear toward the beginning of the movie that he is acting contrary to his gift. "It is not good for the man to be alone," and it's not good for Spiderman who begins to lose his powers as he begins to lose his chance to be with Mary Jane. Even his weak attempts to keep his friendship alive with Mary Jane get undermined by his calling to "save" people and stop crime. This movie magnificently pictures the tension between the man committed to his calling before God and his obligations to other people. Those obligations, and needs, involve fellowship, honesty, love, etc. As those degrade for Peter, so does his calling.

Peter has a blind spot with respect to Mary Jane. His assumed noble protection of Mary Jane is a self-deceiving cover. Peter Parker is a normal man, and he fears and doubts his own ability to have a deep and intimate relationship with a woman. As with his jobs in his normal world, he's unreliable, and instead of keeping his calling separate from his personal relationship, he uses it as an escape. When he lets her down by failing to show up in time to see Mary Jane's acting part in a play and sees her with her new boyfriend/soon to be fiance, he leaves and becomes spiderman. We are unsure just what motive he had in pursuing Mary Jane (seeking to be just a friend? pursuing her romantically?). This scene is when he begins to lose his calling; his powers fail him. Though Peter doesn't recognize the problem, we know his failure in his calling is a result of his failure with Mary Jane.

His blind spot and why his attempt to protect her is a self-deception is that the Goblin in the first movie figured out fairly easily that Mary Jane was his girlfriend, or desired girlfriend. And in S 2, Octavius figures out the very same thing. They both learn it from Harry, Peter's best friend, before Harry even knows that Peter is spiderman.

No comments:

Post a Comment