Decoding Spider-Man
Rose Curtin started me thinking that superhero movies are a subgenre of action movies; Dave Fiore has me thinking that superhero comics are heirs to the romantic movement. After watching Spider-Man 2, Dave had this to say, in passing:
[…] the overwhelming resources available to an action filmmaker and what that does to the notion of Spider-man as crime-fighting comedian–i.e. all of that Elfman and high-decibel bashing renders the stakes in the fight scenes much too high, as far as I’m concerned–there’s no room for Peter to call anyone “bunkie” (in a film, fight scenes must either be all-out festivals of pain or “camp”–in a comic book they are free to be neither…)
Or both?
I’ve written before that I’d love to see something like the climactic fight from The Death of Superman translated to the post-Matrix big screen, and in the very physical fights of Spider-Man 2 I finally got that unreasonable wish fulfilled. But at the same time the fights are more human than those in The Matrix or X-Men 2… or Die Hard - there are always other participants, spectators, and commentators. And many of those people lend humour to the fights (e.g. Aunt May as a yoyo; the sarky train driver). It’s not like the comic but it’s not quite like other superhero or action films to my mind.
Occasionally it seemed almost structured like an incomplete set of episodes from a TV series rather than a conventional film. And the TV series it reminded me of most was Buffy, which does mix up the kicks with the yuks. But television is as at least as far from cinema as the comic is. The conversation between the three in my mind is interesting. (Picking up Essential Spider-Man 6 soon.)