Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Spider-Man
2002 · Sam Raimi · Spider-Man on Sightlines
Rain in an alley, and a man hanging upside down from a thread. Mary Jane rolls the red mask up over his nose and stops at his lip. The film stops with her. No cutaway, no orchestral swell into rescue. Just a mouth in the rain and a long beat in which nothing happens.
That held beat is made of the same stuff as the movie's superpower.
Deleuze's history of cinema turns on a gap he took from Bergson. A rock receives a blow and passes it straight along. A living thing receives a shock and hesitates: a sliver of delay between what arrives through the senses and what leaves through the muscles. Bergson called that hesitating thing a center of indetermination, and Deleuze made the delay the motor of cinema's first great form. In the movement-image, someone perceives a situation, feels it press, and acts to change it. Perception in, action out, gap closed, continuity editing carrying the current. Deleuze's famous claim is that this machine broke after 1945 — that characters stopped being able to answer what they saw, and cinema filled up with people who could only watch.
Raimi rebuilds the machine. His invention is to put the gap on screen.
Spider-sense is the interval given a sound and a duration. It is a warning that arrives before the danger, which means it is nothing but the delay itself, promoted from invisible hinge to headline attraction. The origin montage — Peter discovering and testing what his body can now do — is a comic sequence about reflexes that outrun their owner's intentions. The joke is Bergsonian. He has more gap than he knows what to do with.
And then Uncle Ben. Peter sees a robber, and does nothing, and the situation completes itself without him. It is the one time in the film the circuit stays open, and it kills the person he loves. Deleuze has a word for the bond by which a situation and a character stamp themselves into each other: the imprint. Ben's death is Peter's. "With great power comes great responsibility" gets delivered like scripture, and most films of this kind treat that line as a motto. Raimi treats it as physics. Power is the widening of the interval — you can do more, and you have longer in which to do it. Responsibility is the obligation to close it. Every time. Forever.
On that foundation the film runs Deleuze's large form at full power: an encompassing situation presses until a decisive act transforms it. New York is the encompasser, an idealized vertical city that exists to be answered. The Goblin's ultimatum — Mary Jane or a tram car of children — is Griffith's last-minute rescue doubled, convergent parallel montage played entirely straight in 2002, when straight was not the fashion. And when ordinary Manhattanites on the bridge start throwing things at the Goblin, the crowd stops being a crowd and becomes what Deleuze calls a dividual: a collective rendered as one affective unit, feeling as a single body. The film's teaser had used the World Trade Center and had to be pulled. Months later, that crowd was not a plot device.
Norman Osborn is the counter-case, and he belongs to a different Deleuzian image entirely. The impulse-image is naturalism: beneath a polished social milieu lies an originary world of raw appetite, and characters act out drives rather than decisions. Oscorp is the sleek surface; the serum opens the trapdoor. What the Goblin actually is, mechanically, is a body with the delay removed — pure reflex, no hesitation, appetite discharged instantly into act. Two speeds of fast. Peter must learn to hold the gap open long enough to choose; Norman has none left to hold. Dafoe's mirror monologue is the film's one true crystal, a hyalosign in Deleuze's sense: a man and his reflection arguing, with no way to say which is the actual person and which the image. The staging debt runs straight back to the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and its divided self conversing across a glass.
Here is the cost the film pays, and it is worth naming. Both leads spend the climax with their faces covered. Dafoe's rigid Goblin mask was criticized on release for muting his best instrument, and the critics were right — but it is also structural. This is an action picture that removes the face exactly where Deleuze says the close-up would carry the feeling. So the affect goes somewhere else: into Elfman's brass, working the leitmotif idiom he invented for Burton's Batman in 1989, and into the sound of bodies against glass. Which is why the kiss is the image everyone kept. It is the film restoring the affection-image by hand. That inverted mouth is a potisign in Deleuze's finer vocabulary — not a face settled into one quality, but a face at a threshold, micro-movements gathering toward something not yet done, with the rain running the wrong way over it.
The web-swings come from horror. The hurtling ground-level camera of Evil Dead II, the thing rushing at you through the trees, gets turned inside out into elation. What makes it possible is new: digital doubles and virtual camera moves performing motion no stunt performer could survive. Deleuze, writing about Vertov, prized the camera-eye that sees from no human position — perception cut loose from any body, what the taxonomy calls the gramme. These shots are a strange 2002 hybrid. They carry a boy's exhilaration and simultaneously belong to nobody, a viewpoint with no possible occupant. Bazin's old dream of "total cinema" mutates here into total motion. Some of it reads weightless now, video-game-like, and that weightlessness is precisely the inheritance: a decade of blockbusters took the freed camera and forgot the body it was supposed to belong to.
What did it do to the art? Blade and X-Men had proved Marvel could be filmed seriously; Superman (1978) had established the earnest origin-first register, which Raimi adopts wholesale instead of winking at it. His contribution was to make the origin a form — a whole film whose plot is a person discovering what they are for — and to prove that sincerity outsold irony, a tonal verdict the industry has been living inside ever since, through Spider-Man 2 and the machine Marvel industrialized from 2008. Read against Deleuze, its significance is sharper still. The postwar break can sound like a one-way door. This film is evidence that the movement-image did not die; it moved into the blockbuster and was rebuilt with better tools. The price of the rebuild was that the reason for acting could no longer be assumed. It had to be argued from scratch, over two hours, with a dead man on a sidewalk in Queens, because after 1945 no audience simply grants it.
Watch it again for the gaps. Count the moments where the film slows to the width of a decision: before the punch, before the mask comes up, before Norman answers himself in the glass. The action isn't what this movie is made of. The action is what the pauses cost.
Concepts in play
- the interval (center of indetermination) — The "spider-sense" — a warning that arrives before the danger — plus the origin montage of Peter discovering and testing powers whose reflexes outrun his intentions: the Bergsonian delay between perception and action turned into the film's central attraction.
- action-image, large form (SAS') — New York as encompassing situation pressing on the hero until a decisive act transforms it; the Goblin's ultimatum forcing a choice between Mary Jane and a tram car of children — the sensory-motor circuit restored at full power in 2002.
- imprint (empreinte) — Uncle Ben's death as "the direct consequence of Peter's selfish inaction" — the one interval Peter leaves open — converting wish-fulfillment into obligation, with "with great power comes great responsibility" as the bond stamped into him by the situation.
- organic (American) montage — The Goblin's ultimatum staged as convergent parallel montage and a doubled last-minute rescue — Griffith's grammar played without irony as the film's climax.
- the dividual — "Ordinary Manhattanites rallying to the hero's aid" on the bridge — the crowd rendered as one affective body, read in spring 2002 as civic affirmation after the towers came down and the WTC teaser was pulled.
- impulse-image (naturalism) — Norman Osborn's performance-enhancing serum splitting him into the Goblin; the "sleek corporate menace of Oscorp" as the polished surface over an originary world of appetite — a body with the delay between drive and act removed.
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — Dafoe's bravura mirror monologue between his two selves — one actor arguing with a reflection that argues back, actual and virtual indiscernible — a debt to the Jekyll/Hyde divided-self staging of the 1931 film.
- potisign (icon of power / threshold face) — The upside-down rain-soaked kiss, the mask rolled to the lip — the film restoring the face by hand in a picture whose two leads (and Dafoe's criticized rigid Goblin mask) are masked through the action.
- gramme (camera-eye freed from a human center) — Digital doubles and virtual camera moves achieving "motion no stunt performer could execute" in the POV web-swing sequences — descended from the hurtling force camera of Evil Dead II, and read by some as weightless precisely because the viewpoint has no possible occupant.