It is not Slaughterhouse 5, or Catch-22; it is not even The Magnificent Seven. It is neither Zuckerman, nor Everyman. It is Spider-Man 3, and no more. There is a film, in which there appears a man, who is also a spider, and he has appeared three times. That is all.
Twenty years ago this film and its kin — the special-effects soap-opera, grinding unstoppably past two hours as the director disappears into that world of solipsistic indulgence shared by little boys murdering ants with magnifying glasses — would have got the audience it deserved.
Thirteen-year-olds would have gaped in the front row; 16-year-olds would have groped in the back; and a solitary reviewer, the only adult in the room, would have gapped and stretched, trying to decide whether his first paragraph should be dismissive or simply crude and incendiary.
But that was then, and this — an avalanche of talk-show psychoanalysis and undergraduate insecurity, grafted onto the proto-heroic yearnings of invisible teenagers — is now. Perhaps the consciousness of Lax Americana has reached the limits of what the bored, atrophied, disappointed middle-class mind can reasonably survive, and has become inquisitive about therapy. Maybe six years of armour-plated evangelical foreign policy has turned moviegoers inwards. But whether they go inside on a couch or in a cinema seat, what they will find is not pretty; and the current infatuation with injecting suburban ordinariness into epic fantasy is not helping.
It is a curious preoccupation, this desire to force banal human psychology onto post-human demigods; to hobble fantastical brains — born to duel with evil incarnate in the outer atmosphere — with concerns about virility and belonging and whether or not the stove was left on. In the end, it seems, the middle class’s fear of being found out as ordinary, unremarkable, forgettable, outweighs its latent ambitions of greatness.
It makes sense, then, that Superman has lagged behind his scuttling and fluttering colleagues of late: of all the superheroes, the Kryptonian is the most distant, the least ruffled by earthly concerns; and who, in this bitter, competitive, petty world wants to see a school prefect tossing a bus over a hill when we can’t do a push-up?
But watching these films, in which Jungian tracts have been stapled onto one-page character-sketches, one recalls that it was not always so. Once, American directors made real films. And as Spider-Man frets about a stretch-mark on his bicep, and Batman tweezes his eyebrows, and Superman tries on a new pair of reinforced erection-concealing red undies as Lois shaves her legs in the bathroom next door, one wonders: why couldn’t these films have been made in the golden age of American cinema, 30 years ago?
Oh, Michael Cimino! Ah, Francis Ford Coppola! Oi, Woody Allen! Save us from the war-cry of a million digital orcs with a minute of clumsy, wondrous conversation!
One can only imagine the endless silences, the unspoken grief, of Robert de Niro and Christopher Walken in Cimino’s Harry Potter and the End of American Innocence. Drafted to Hogwarts, the friends must abandon their small Pennsylvania steel town and their gentle rivalry for the affections of Meryl Streep’s Hermione, a subtly beautiful girl-wizard whose powers include great cheekbones and the ability to do any Eastern European accent.
Coppola’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, shot as a single 9-hour feature, would have been entirely more grubby. Frodo, lying sweating on elven linen, looking up at butterflies whop-whop-whopping around the linden roof-beams overhead: ‘Rivendell. Shit. I’m still only in Rivendell.”
A long, slow journey into the heart of Mordor’s darkness; Dennis Hopper as Gollum, inarticulate and obsessed: ‘Is it a ring, man? One ring? The ring, man? One ring to bring them all in the darkness, lay some deep dark shit on their consciousness, man? Ring-a-ding ding?”
The slow, balletic approach with the orc-blade; Brando lost in satanic soliloquies; ‘My boy— my witch-king— look what they did to my boy. He coulda been someone— coulda been a contender—”; wiping beads of sweat from his scalp. The horror— the horror—
And when the resonance boomed louder than a migraine-pulse, and truth was scraped too raw, it would have been the turn of Woody Allen, to breathe those last, and most missed, sparks of humanity into the whole damned mess: humour and adult anxiety. Allen wouldn’t have putzed around with half-baked nods at psychotherapy; he would have lunged for the analyst’s couch like a rocket-tiger-vagina-moth on a Rorschach test. Forget Spider-Man, or even Superman: Allen would have given us Weltschmertzman, asthmatically stalking the same Manhattan streets patrolled by the macho Wasp crime-fighters of the comics; but his would have been a city of infinite lightness. The trailer alone would have been worth the price of admission—
‘You’ll know him by his name. (‘Hi, I’m Weltschmertzman. Actually it’s Alvie, but, ah, no that’s fine, I break them all the time, I got 10 more.’). But you won’t see him. (‘I think I might have become literally invisible to women.’) A sound in the shadows. (‘Is that pollen? Oh Jesus, I can’t be near pollen, it’s, it’s, it’s like Kryptonite for me.’) A scent on the breeze. (‘What’s not to love, ma? Old Spice, geez, it’s, it’s my favourite.’) This summer, a new breed of crime fighter is bringing justice to the mean streets of the Big Apple. Where denial meets self-loathing, you’ll find him. When he throws the book at you, it’s Wittgenstein. This summer, Weltschmertzman isn’t gonna make you say uncle. He’s gonna make you wear a sweater—”
If only.