Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Spider-Man 2
2004 · Sam Raimi · Spider-Man 2 on Sightlines
Two pizzas going cold on the back of a scooter. That is the image the whole movie hangs on. A young man who can stop a car with one hand cannot get a pizza across Manhattan in under thirty minutes, he is going to lose the job over it, and the rent is already late. Raimi puts that in a superhero picture and plays it completely straight, for laughs and for real.
Start with what the genre is, mechanically. A superhero movie is the cleanest surviving example of what Deleuze called the movement-image: somebody perceives a situation, feels something about it, and acts to change it. The act resolves the situation, and the cutting exists to serve that chain. Deleuze's name for the grand version is the large form. An encompassing world bears down on a hero (he calls that pressing world the synsign, the encompasser) until the hero is forced into a duel with a force that matches him (the binomial), and the duel changes the world. Spider-Man 2 has both, unmistakably. New York under the carnage Doc Ock leaves is the encompasser. Spider-Man against Octavius is the duel. The template comes straight from Superman: The Movie, whose sincere mythic register and catching-falling-civilians rescue Raimi takes without a flinch of irony, and the plot shape from Superman II, down to the beat where the hero gives up his powers for the woman and has to reclaim them.
Then Raimi does the thing the genre had never done. He breaks the circuit.
Peter's powers fail. Not from kryptonite, not from a curse. They fail because he is unhappy. The dossier's phrase is exact: sputtering under psychosomatic strain. Deleuze has a name for the bond in the large form where hero and situation mark each other, the imprint. Usually it is moral, the hero made adequate to the crisis. Raimi makes it medical. Peter's body keeps the books on his life, and when the books do not balance the webs do not come.
What follows is what Deleuze called the crisis of the action-image: a character who perceives perfectly well and can no longer act adequately on what he sees. That crisis belongs, in Deleuze's account, to postwar European cinema, the bombed street and the person who can only stand and look at it. Here it arrives inside a summer blockbuster, and it brings its cinema with it. Rent. Laundry. Late pizzas. Deleuze's temps mort, dead time: stretches where nothing advances the plot and the ordinary is simply held. Meanwhile the city takes the damage. The film lets you watch what a man not acting costs other people, which is a strange and brave thing to ask of an audience that paid for webs.
Raimi is not Antonioni and never pretends to be. His way of holding the crisis is comic. Deleuze, describing the hinge where action turns into figure rather than deed, talks about the sublime hero and his feeble inversion, the uncanny everyday. That is the engine of every joke in this film. The god flipped into the tenant. The inversion is not decoration, it is the argument: you are made to feel the weight of the powers by watching them subtracted.
Otto Octavius is not built like a supervillain. He is built like a Universal monster, which is a different machine entirely. Bride of Frankenstein supplies the mold, a decent man deformed by his own science into something he cannot control. Deleuze's category for this is the impulse-image, a world where drives erupt through the social surface and behavior reads as appetite rather than plan. The arms are the proof. They are what he calls a fetish, a part-object charged with a force of its own, feeding on the man wearing them. And the operating room, the buzz-saws, the Grand Guignol Raimi imports whole from Evil Dead II along with the possessed-limb slapstick: that sequence is the impulse-image's signature move. A derived milieu, an ordinary social setting, is peeled back to show an originary world underneath, savage and older than the rules of the room. An operating theater is where instruments serve care. For ninety seconds it is a den. That scene is not a stunt. It tells you what Octavius has become before he says a word about it.
The camera is the other inheritance. The first Evil Dead is where the web-swinging comes from: an untethered, low-mounted rush charging unbroken through space, built to be a thing without a body, a vision belonging to no one. Deleuze would call that acentered perception, the camera-eye as matter rather than as anyone's eye. Raimi's invention, and it is genuinely his, was to hand that inhuman camera to a sympathetic kid. The most exhilarating point of view in the superhero movie is on loan from a demon in the woods. Darkman was the dry run for the other half, turning comic-book pathos into unembarrassed pulp opera.
Which brings you to the elevated train, and why it still works. The dossier calls it legible, weighty, emotionally motivated. Those three words are the entire method. Action is restored, but it is routed through a body we have watched fail for an hour. Deleuze's late idea of a cinema of the body, where a body carries duration instead of executing a plan, is not usually pointed at blockbusters and should be pointed at this one. Peter does not win the train by deciding to. He holds on, and the holding takes time, and the time is the point.
What it did to the form is simple to state and hard to overstate. Before this, the question of what heroism costs the hero was a line of dialogue. After this it was the plot. Every burned-out hero arc since runs on machinery this film built, and two decades of multiverses later it is still the entry filmmakers name when asked how these movies ought to feel: handmade, sincere, a little screwball, unafraid of corn. It proved a genre made entirely of the action-image could let the crisis of the action-image all the way in and survive the visit.
Watch it again and time it. Count how much of the running time is a man who cannot do the thing. Then ask whether the last act really repairs the break or only postpones it. The anger brewing in Harry never discharges. The film knows the circuit it just fixed is fragile, and that is exactly why the corn lands. It is earned against the live possibility of losing it.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Peter perceives the city suffering under Doc Ock's carnage and cannot act on it: powers 'sputtering under psychosomatic strain', the alter ego shelved. The film stages the postwar European break inside the most action-driven genre there is.
- action-image (large form) — Global situation (New York under Ock's carnage) presses until the decisive act transforms it; the elevated-train setpiece, 'legible, weighty, emotionally motivated', is the SAS structure paying off, inherited from Superman: The Movie's catching-falling-civilians rescue template.
- the encompasser — The city itself as the encompassing milieu that calls forth the act: 'leaves the city suffering in the wake of carnage left by the evil Doc Ock'.
- binomial (the duel) — Force against force, Spider-Man versus Octavius, doubled by the facets 'Identity & doubles' and 'Twins & dual lives': two scientists, one deformed by his own science.
- empreinte (the imprint) — The bond by which situation and hero mark each other is made literal and medical: the powers fail from 'psychosomatic strain', so Peter's body registers the state of his life.
- temps mort — Rent overdue, pizzas delivered late: stretches of held ordinary life that advance no action, dropped into a summer blockbuster.
- inversion-image — Raimi's 'genuine slapstick sympathy for a hero whose life is falling apart': the sublime hero continually flipped into his feeble everyday double, which is where every joke in the film lives.
- impulse-image — Otto Octavius as tragic Universal monster in the Bride of Frankenstein mold, 'a decent man deformed by his own science into a rampaging creature he cannot control': behavior driven by appetite rather than plan.
- fetish (part-object) — The animatronic arms, inheriting Evil Dead II's possessed-limb slapstick: part-objects with a compulsive force of their own, feeding on the man wearing them.
- originary world beneath the derived milieu — The operating-room sequence, 'pure Grand Guignol' with the buzz-saw attack, peels the hospital (a social setting of instruments and care) back into a savage appetitive world underneath.
- engramme / acentered camera-eye — The web-swinging first-person rushes come directly from The Evil Dead's 'untethered, low-mounted camera charging unbroken through space', a vision built to belong to no human center, which Raimi re-centers on a sympathetic hero.
- cinema of the body — The train setpiece routes restored action through a body whose failure we have watched for an hour; the dossier's 'weighty' names duration borne by a body rather than a plan executed.