The Amazing Spider-Man 2 · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A hand comes down through the dark of a clock tower, and a line of web goes with it. You have seen that shot your whole life. You know exactly what it is for.

Watch what it does here.

Nearly every superhero film runs on one circuit: someone perceives a danger, someone acts, the danger resolves. Deleuze called this the movement-image, and he meant more by it than "action movie." He meant a way of organizing cinema in which time is never felt for itself, only used as the ruler you measure movement with. Everything is before-the-save or after-the-save, and the cutting exists to serve that chain. Its grandest version, what Deleuze called the large form, sets an enormous situation pressing down on a hero until one decisive act transforms it. The power-station climax of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is that form drawn in primary colours: the grid of Manhattan goes black, one man in a suit goes up against the thing that blacked it out, the lights come back on. Marc Webb and Daniel Mindel shot the city on 35mm, bright and saturated and emphatically vertical, a New York legible enough to be swung through. The movement-image needs a readable world. This one is built to be read at speed.

Then there is the web.

Deleuze has a small, very usable pair of terms for objects like it. A mark is a thing that carries meaning because of the chain it always belongs to: when you see this, expect that. The web-line may be the cleanest mark the blockbuster has. Spider-Man fires it at a falling body and the falling body stops falling. Superman: The Movie wrote the parent version of that contract in 1978, where the hero reverses the catastrophe, the woman comes back alive, and the film's entire moral universe rests on the reversal being available. Webb's film knows that contract from the inside. It has spent two pictures teaching you the gesture.

A demark is what happens when the chain breaks: an anomaly that stops you anticipating and forces you to interpret. In the clock tower the gesture arrives on time. The reach is made. Gwen Stacy dies anyway.

That costs the film far more than a sad ending. What fails is the machine. Deleuze located the crisis of the action-image in post-war Europe, in characters who could see their situation perfectly well and could no longer do anything adequate about it. Rossellini's ruins, then Antonioni's boredom. The link between perceiving and acting goes slack, and what floods into the gap is time, unmeasured, simply there. What is startling here is that a nine-figure Sony tentpole stages that break literally, inside its own genre, using its own signature move, in front of the largest possible audience. Peter does the right thing at the right instant and it does not work. For the length of that sequence he is what Deleuze calls a seer: someone who can only look and endure, with no action left to take. There is nothing to punch. Pietro Scalia and Elliot Graham cut the sequence with a deliberate, slowing precision, and the staging makes the argument without stating it. Exposed gears, the machinery of a clock, an apparatus of time still turning behind a man to whom time has just done something that cannot be taken back. That tower is the film's symbol in Deleuze's narrow sense, the object that condenses the whole organizing relation, and the film keeps rhyming it: hands, gears, the wristwatch that returns as a memento of a life running out.

Hitchcock is standing right behind this. Vertigo's fatal plunge from a tower and the man's failed downward reach are restaged here almost shot for gesture, apparatus of time included. Deleuze made Hitchcock the end point of the movement-image, the director who turned the relation itself into the real object of the shot, with the audience installed as a knowing third party. ASM2 inherits that in a peculiar modern form. Its dread comes from nothing visible in the frame. It comes from a relation the viewer brings in with them, since readers of the 1973 comics know where Gwen's story ends, and the film courts that foreknowledge deliberately. The relation-image here is crowdsourced. Half the audience is watching a suspense sequence and the other half is attending a funeral.

The film's other half is a study in wanting to be looked at. Max Dillon is a technician nobody sees, and his interiority is delivered as sound: whispered accusations braided into the Zimmer score, electrical crackle bleeding across the line between the grid's hum and the music. That trick is learned directly from The Dark Knight, where a villain's psyche was compressed into a single sonic signature. Deleuze's impulse-image describes people like Max, driven by an appetite that consumes whoever carries it, and Max's appetite is simply to be noticed. He gets it. Sony Imageworks rendered him as a translucent body with musculature lit like circuitry, and the electric blue he throws off swallows every scene he enters, in Times Square and again at the substation. That is a colour-image, colour absorbing a situation and its feeling, and it is close kin to what Deleuze admired in German expressionism, where gradients of light give objects a life that is not organic. Electro is not lit. Electro is the light.

Now the honest part. Deleuze's crisis came with companion symptoms, and this film has all of them: a dispersive situation of weakly linked characters, connective tissue that jumps or compresses, and a diffuse plot behind the plot — the Oscorp vault, the special projects, the conspiracy around Peter's parents — none of which resolves, because none of it was ever meant to resolve here. In post-war Europe those symptoms came from a filmmaker's exhaustion with the old dramaturgy. In 2014 they came from a release calendar. Sony needed a Sinister Six and a Venom, and the screenplay was carrying the freight. Same fracture, entirely different cause, and it is worth noticing that commercial pressure produced a formal result the theory can name.

It is also why the film cannot hold what it opened. Having broken its own circuit in the tower, it patches the circuit back together and sends in a rhinoceros. The seer lasts a few minutes; then the action-image resumes, cartoonishly.

Still, it happened. This is the blockbuster that let the rescue fail and refused to undo it. The Sinister Six never came, Venom stalled, and this picture's reception pushed Sony toward the 2015 deal that handed the character to Marvel. What it seeded was not a universe but a wound, and the wound paid out seven years later when Garfield's Peter returned in Spider-Man: No Way Home and was handed a second falling woman to catch. That is the strangest lineage in modern franchise cinema. A film's most disliked moment became the emotional principal on which a later film drew interest.

So rewatch it for the hands. Notice how often Webb frames a reach, and how patiently the film trains you to believe a reach is bound to a save. Then watch the one time the reach is perfect and the binding is simply not there.