Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Amazing Spider-Man
2012 · Marc Webb · The Amazing Spider-Man on Sightlines
Two teenagers stand in a school hallway trying to ask each other out, and neither one can finish a sentence. He starts, stops, starts somewhere else. She waits and lets him fail. The camera is handheld and close, the dialogue overlaps and trails away, and for a good while the movie has nowhere to be. Nearly every critic who shrugged at The Amazing Spider-Man stopped to praise those scenes. They were right to. Marc Webb had directed exactly one feature before this — the indie romance (500) Days of Summer — and what a roughly $230-million tentpole was buying when it hired him was that specific skill: someone who can hold a room in which two people say nothing well.
Deleuze had a name for footage like that. Temps mort, dead time: stretches where the plot doesn't advance and the everyday is simply held, so you feel duration instead of measuring it against a goal. It isn't a defect, it's a technique, and in his account of postwar cinema it's one of the tells that a film has come off the old engine — the one where a character perceives a situation and acts to change it. He called that engine the movement-image, and the cinema that replaces it, where time is felt for itself, the time-image. Blockbusters have no use for the second. This one keeps wandering into it and then apologizing.
The rest of the film is the movement-image running at full power, and there's no shame in that. The superhero picture is the last mass genre where Deleuze's large form of the action-image still works unembarrassed: a situation encompasses everybody — a city, a corporation, something spreading through it — the pressure builds, and one decisive act transforms the whole. Force meets counter-force, what he called the binomial, and milieu and man stamp each other. New York makes Spider-Man; Spider-Man rearranges New York. The set pieces are cut for impact and they do exactly what the form asks.
Curt Connors doesn't fit that scheme, which is what makes him worth watching. He's a scientist working on cross-species regeneration, Richard Parker's old partner, and what takes him is less ambition than appetite. Deleuze's impulse-image describes worlds shaped this way: beneath the ordinary social surface — here the glass and signage of Oscorp — lies an originary world, a savage zone of pure drives, and people slide into it down a slope they cannot climb back up. The film gives that structure a literal floor plan. Corporate lab above, sewer below. The reptile isn't a costume, it's what was already under the building. Rhys Ifans plays him with real grief, which is what this mode needs, because the impulse-image was never about evil. It's about degradation, a line running down. The debt here is precise and it's to Ang Lee's Hulk (2003), which had worked out how to hang a father-and-son melodrama on a fully digital creature. Connors is Banner with scales: the mentor who becomes the thing he was studying.
The film's advertised invention was the first-person web-swing, stereoscopic 3D putting you at Spider-Man's own hands. It's worth being precise about why it doesn't quite land. Deleuze, following Bergson, puts a gap at the center of perception: a living body receives far more than it can immediately act on, and hesitates. He calls that hesitation the interval, the centre of indetermination, and it's where affect lives — the reason the close-up exists at all. Spider-Man is almost purely a creature of that interval, a body deciding in mid-air. The POV shot hands you his eyes and removes his body from the frame. You gain velocity and lose the tuck, the recoil, the split second of choosing an anchor point. Richard Donner's Superman (1978) invented this camera so you'd believe a man could fly, but Superman has nothing to hold onto and nothing to miss. Spider-Man's grammar is the arm and the line. The most expensive idea in the film subtracts the thing the character is for.
Which is why the performances carry it. Andrew Garfield's Peter is jittery and physically restless, a body that can't sit still in a chair — Deleuze would say the everyday body is carrying the duration here, not the plot. And Webb cuts the courtship scenes for reaction: a feeling landing on a face and going nowhere yet. That's the affection-image, and it's the film's real special effect.
Now the strange part. Sam Raimi's Spider-Man had come out ten years earlier and its trilogy had ended five years earlier, and this film restages Raimi's beat-sheet almost exactly — the bite, the failed intervention that kills Uncle Ben, the rooftop web-tests — in a colder, handheld, desaturated register. Deleuze has a category for images that mean only through the chain of habit they belong to: the mark, the object you read by custom. When you see the spider, you expect the powers; when you see Ben, you expect the lesson about responsibility. By 2012 those beats were no longer events. They were marks, and no telling of them could be naïve again. That's the film's actual condition, and it's more interesting than the complaint usually made about it. It isn't retelling an origin. It's re-running a chain the audience already holds, in front of an audience that knows it's being re-run.
And the thing it adds — the briefcase, the vanished parents, Richard Parker's work inside Oscorp — never resolves. The dossier's word for it is right: an atmosphere of unfinished business. Across both films of this arc the revelations never arrived. Deleuze, describing the moment American cinema's action machine started to seize up, points to films organized around a diffuse plot behind the plot, a conspiracy that can be sensed and never acted on, leaving characters who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. Peter can beat the Lizard. He cannot touch the thing that actually organizes his life, because that was scheduled for a sequel. It's an accidental crisis of the action-image, produced by a release calendar rather than by conviction — but the effect on screen is real, and it's why the film feels unfinished in a way that has nothing to do with its running time.
One word about its realism, since the reboot sold itself on it. The desaturated, urban, trauma-case-study mode comes straight from Batman Begins (2005), and the underlying wager — justify the do-over by getting closer to the person — from Casino Royale (2006). But Bazin's realism was an argument about duration and depth, about not cutting the world into pieces. What TASM inherits is a color grade laid over a fully digital creature. The film only becomes realist in Bazin's sense in the hallway, where it lets a scene run past its usefulness.
So what did it do to the art? It proved the origin is re-runnable, and the industry took the lesson. Its own descendants then disowned it: James Horner didn't return, his themes didn't become the franchise's signature, the property changed hands and tone quickly. What survived is smaller and better. Webb demonstrated that the strongest asset a $200-million superhero film can have is two people mumbling on a staircase — that indie two-hander time can be imported into a tentpole and will outlast every effect in it.
Watch it once for the interval. Notice where the film stops moving, and how much better it gets. Then ask the question it raises and can't answer: what would this genre look like if the action were as patient as the hallways?
Concepts in play
- temps mort — The Garfield–Stone stairwell/hallway two-handers imported from (500) Days of Summer — handheld, overlapping mumbled dialogue, scenes 'given room to breathe' where nothing advances the plot; singled out as the reboot's best material.
- action-image, large form — The set pieces: an encompassing situation (Oscorp, the city, contagion) pressing until Spider-Man's decisive act transforms it, cut with the fast impact-driven rhythm the genre expects.
- binomial — Spider-Man set on a 'collision course' with the Lizard — force against counter-force, with the city as the milieu that stamps and is stamped by the hero.
- impulse-image — Curt Connors, the mentor-scientist consumed by his own cross-species regeneration research; Rhys Ifans plays him with 'a note of genuine tragedy' rather than villainy — appetite, not ambition.
- originary world — The film's literal vertical plan: the Oscorp lab as the derived milieu of corporate science, the sewer beneath it as the savage zone the Lizard belongs to.
- line of slope / degradation — Connors' irreversible descent from scientist to reptile — the Hulk (2003) template of the humanoid-creature transformation grafted onto father-and-son melodrama.
- perception-image — The heavily marketed first-person stereoscopic web-swinging POV, which converts the camera into Spider-Man's own vantage — the film's advertised differentiator from Raimi.
- the interval — That same POV shot removes the swinging body from the frame; Donner's Superman (1978) aerial subjectivity works because flight is smooth, while Spider-Man's motion is all anchor, recoil and hesitation — the hesitation the shot deletes.
- attitudes and postures — Garfield's Peter as jittery, wounded, physically restless, built on parkour-based physical performance — the adolescent body, not the plot, carrying the duration of the domestic and school scenes.
- affection-image — The courtship editing favors performance and reaction over incident; the Garfield–Stone chemistry is the film's 'emotional center of gravity' — feeling registered on a face and not yet discharged into action.
- mark — TASM restages Raimi's exact origin beat-sheet — the spider bite, the failed intervention that kills Uncle Ben, the rooftop web-test montage — five years after that trilogy ended, so each beat signifies by customary chain rather than as an event.
- crisis of the action-image — Peter can defeat the Lizard but can do nothing about his parents' disappearance; the 'untold story' of Richard Parker functions as an atmosphere of unfinished business and was never paid off across the two-film arc.
- the plot behind the plot — The briefcase, Richard Parker's research and Oscorp form a diffuse corporate conspiracy that organizes Peter's life and is never brought to light — deferred to a sequel that never delivered it.