When the history of 21st century cinema is written, Sam Raimi’s take on Spider-Man will sit alongside will sit alongside such iconic titles as Double Indemnity and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The former may not have been the very first film noir, but it set the standard for what a film noir is. The latter may not have been the first “buddy movie” but it also set a template. Certainly, Spider-Man was not the first superhero megahit in Hollywood history. In fact, it was not even the first comic book movie megahit of the new millennium, having been beaten to the punch by the first entry in The X-Men series. Those mutants, however, worked as a team and carried varied amounts of baggage as ambiguous in terms of being good or bad. Especially Wolverine.
Spider-Man was the first superhero blockbuster of the post-9/11 world, however, and therein lies all the difference. They say that the world for those living at the time can be evenly divided between the time before the attacks of September 11, 2001 and everything afterward. That may be hyperbole, but in terms of superhero cinema it is absolutely true. Ever since Christopher Reeve put on the cape to play Superman in the late 1970’s, comic book superhero movies have been hitting movie theaters every summer. Many were hits, most were misses and some were disasters. Since the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, however, comic book superhero movies have essentially dominate Hollywood. They are to the first two decades of the 21st century what westerns were from 1939 to 1970 and what Biblical epics and glossy musicals were in the 1950’s and what gritty paranoid fantasies were in the 1970’s.
Superhero movies are what define this generation’s cinema in the way that screwball comedies defined the Great Depression. The lives of Americans during the Great Depression were as far removed from the realities of rich people beset by absurdly unlikely comedic circumstances as the ambiguous world of good and evil in 21st century is removed from the black and white world of superheroes. The difference is that whereas the American government did not try to convince moviegoers that the reel world and the real world were one and the same, in the early days of superhero dominance at the box office, American politicians tried to do exactly that. To paraphrase Pres. George W. Bush, if you were not with him, then you were against America.
The world has never been so quaintly delineated and the American people knew this even if they did allow themselves to be momentarily distracted by the revelation that not all the bad guys wore sheets and beards; some even wore Brooks Brothers suits and pins of the American flag on their lapels. The rush of being able to identify with ease who the bad guys were and who the good guys were in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001 was already beginning to wear away by the spring of 2002. But, oh how nice it was!
Enter Peter Parker. Just by looking at the kid, you knew he was good. A clean-cut teenager who loved from afar because he dare not betray his best friend who also just so happened to be a straight-A student. And he worked hard and loved his aunt and uncle. Peter Parker was a guy you just knew you didn’t have to worry about being ambiguous. Nor, for that matter, was Spider-Man. Even as a superhero suddenly endowed with ridiculous power just aching to be used irresponsibly, Peter maintained his integrity. This guy didn’t seem equally dangerous and liable to go rogue like that Wolverine. Or Jean Grey, for that matter. Or even like Superman did once a long time ago in a movie where he briefly broke bad to the point of blowing out the Olympic torch just because he could.
What Americans desperately wanted in the post-9/11 world—easily identifiable good guys and bad guys—has never really existed and is, to a large degree, what made movies popular. The western solidified the idea of good versus evil in the most axiomatic manner possible: the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black hats. The ambiguous morality of film noir leapt across genres rarely and it is notable that the one film genre aside from the crime movie where it prospered most was the western films of the 1950’s. Even John Wayne’s morality is decidedly ambiguous in The Searchers.
The modern day superhero movie which really got its start not from the adventures of mutants, but an everyday high school teenager is the modern day western of the 1930’s and 1940’s. Before film noir got its hands into things. Back in those movies—Stagecoach, For Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon though Red River not so much—Wayne’s moral standing was never in doubt. The Ringo Kid may have escaped from prison, but he was never anything other than heroic. Nathan Brittles may be a jerk, but he’s the kind of jerk that audiences of 1949 would find as appealing as George Custer. (By contrast, Ethan Edwards is a not just a jerk but a racist psychopath whose one purpose left in his life is to save the girl. If that sounds familiar, The Searchers was the inspiration for Taxi Driver.)
Peter Parker did not introduce the idea of total goodness fighting total badness to the superhero movie. That honor would go to Clark Kent and Lex Luthor, but Superman is, after all, an illegal immigrant and, as noted, he would eventually go rogue. Batman is by definition a fascist and Bruce Wayne is something perhaps even worse: a billionaire. Peter Parker gave American moviegoers what it so very desperately craved in the confusion wrought the collision of an evil attack upon American from without and an evil response to seeking vengeance from within: a world where heroes are not just immediately distinguished from the non-heroic by virtue of what they wear, but distinguished from the bad guys by virtue of acting only out of an instinct for the greater good.
In retrospect, the contractual difficulties which disallowed Spider-Man from taking his rightful place among the Avengers seems perfectly poetic. One of the few elements which sets Spider-Man apart from his Marvel costumed brethren is his status as a lone protector of society. If America has learned anything since September 11, 2001—and it has certainly learned much—it is that the greater the number of “good guys” involved in an operation, the greater the chance of one going rogue. Of course, it has also learned something else equally important: putting faith in just one single hero to save the world only works when that person is really and truly heroic rather than someone who just sells the idea of being a hero as self-promulgating propaganda.
