Family movie night last weekend featured Spider-man 2.
Great movie.
Seriously. Maybe not as in Citizen Kane great, or Casablanca great.
But Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid great. The Apartment great.
Lord of the Rings great.
Fantasy and science fiction movies are usually allowed to be good within the conventions of their genre. The first two Star Wars movies were great science fiction movies.
The same loosening of artistic judgment is applied to westerns, war movies, kids' movies, and thrillers.
But a lot of movies transcend their genres. They are good in and of themselves.
The Maltese Falcon, Rio Bravo, The Wizard of Oz, Rear Window, The Lord of the Rings.
This seems only right when you consider that Shakespeare wrote nothing but genre pieces. The closest he came to a realistic play was The Merry Wives of Windsor, which is preposterous, and Julius Caesar, which he owed to Plutarch the way Joseph L. Mankiewicz owed the film version (with Marlon Brando as Antony) to Shakespeare. King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, even Antony and Cleopatra are fantasies as much as A Midsummer Night's Dream is a fantasy. His histories were the war movies of their day.
Hamlet is a thriller.
So it's odd, then, when you think about it, that intellectual types seem to reflexively insist that the only great novels are works of domestic realism (Sarah Weinman links to a piece in Time Magazine that operates from this assumption. She calls it "the stupidest essay of the week.") and the only great movies are great to the degree they are works of realism.
It's odder when you remember that there's such a thing as poetry and myth.
Without pulling Joseph Campbell into it, novels, short stories, movies, plays, and even TV shows (The Sopranos. Smallville. Star Trek.) can tell their truths poetically or mythologically.
I used to try to teach my students that metaphor was the most accurate way of representing our daily life because it's the only way we have of converying to each other how we feel.
Often the most factual, scientifically rigorous representation of an idea makes no sense, but the same idea presented metaphorically strikes us as absolutely true.
If you're Freud you can write that little boys want to murder their fathers and sleep with their mothers. But if you're Sophocles you write Oedipus Rex and leave it at that.
Spider-man 2 is an excellent work of moviemaking as craftsmanship. It's worth watching for that. Not just the cgi stuff, which is probably less impressive than it appears, but for things like the editing which is so brilliant that we're left with no time to notice the cgi, which is why it's so impressive---it's a trick of the eye. George Lucas could learn a lot from watching this movie. He lets his cameras linger on the computer graphics, expecting us to be awed by the technological achievement. Instead all he does is remind us that what we're watching is a demonstration by a technocrat of his latest toys.
Lucas could also pick up some pointers about writing dialogue and handling actors. Tobey Maguire wins my Christopher Reeve Award for making a character his own. James Franco has some heartbreaking moments as Peter's friend Harry Osborne, the Green Goblin's son who is doomed to follow his father into criminal madness. His best work occurs early in the movie, though, before he has to get all dark and dramatic. The way he plays a 19 year old boy forcing himself into his father's shoes and trying to sound like a hard-headed businessman makes you wince for the kid. And Alfred Molina as Doc Ock and J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson should get Oscar nominations for best actor in a supporting role. They won't. Because Hollywood, though it mostly works in fantasy, accepts that only Realism counts as serious art and rewards directors, writers, and actors accordingly.
Simmons is a riot, to boot, and though comedy is harder than dying, winning an Oscar for a comic performance is harder than both.
But Spider-man 2 is not simply a well-made movie. It's a great one. Because it is poetic.
I'm not going to get into the geek argument that comic books---ahem. Graphic novels---are our myths. I have a limited sympathy with that.
I haven't ever worked out a grand personal theory of what makes something a work of art. I have a less than coherant belief that among the thing that art does is "illuminate the human condition." Sometimes I rephrase it as "Art helps us understand what it is to be human." And other times I'll say "Art makes us feel human."
Realism is not the only method that can produce those effects. Real doesn't equal true. Often because it can get lost in the minutiae of life, realism leaves us cold and feeling detached from life, not inhuman, but un-human. Which is why I'd rather read a book of fairy tales than Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and I'd rather watch Spider-man 2 than Closer.
Spider-man 2 is filled with human moments. My favorite, though, is a visual gag that's presented as a throwaway. Doc Ock is at work in his lab, bent over some piece of gadgetry that requires his complete attention and both his human hands, and as he's working, without taking his concentration off the gadget, he lights a cigar with his mechanical arms.
Sure, superpowered and intelligent mechanical arms are good for tearing bank vault doors off their hinges and mucking about in the ten thousand degree heat being generated inside a fusion chamber, but if you had four extra hands mostly what you'd do with them is exactly what people would do when they say things like If only I had an extra pair of hands. You'd use them to be a slightly more efficient and competent you.
It's a perfect metaphor.
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