It's Complicated: Spider‐Man 2's Reinscription of “Good” and “Evil” in Post‐9/11 America

Abstract

Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.-President George W. Bush, September 20, 2001 address to a joint session of CongressWhen it opened on June 30, 2004, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 took the box office record for biggest opening day ever, a record previously held by its predecessor, Spider-Man (2002); by the end of 2004 at the close of its domestic run, Spider-Man 2 was the fifth highest grossing picture in history with $403.7 million in box office earnings (Spider-Man 2 Trivia). first blockbuster to enact a nuanced, indirect engagement with 9/11, Spider-Man deals with national trauma through an allegorical narrative.1 July 2004, Frank Rich was one of the very few critics who picked up on the film's symbolic resonance:Unlike the sunnier first Spider-Man, which was released two summers ago, but conceived before the terrorist attacks, the new one carries the shadow of 9/ 11. As the story shifts from Queens into Manhattan, the city becomes a much more vivid presence. director, Sam Raimi, dotes on both the old (the Empire State Building in silvery mode) and the new (the Hayden Planetarium), on both the dreamily nostalgic (a fairy-book Broadway theater seemingly resurrected from an Edwardian past) and the neighborhood of our freshest wound (the canyons of Lower Manhattan). movie is suffused with a nocturnal glow of melancholy that casts its comic-book action in an unexpected poignant light.In summer 2004, as Bush ran for reelection and the Republican National Convention planned for its August gathering in Madison Square Garden, Rich advised Washington insiders who were busy misreading the electoral tea leaves of Fahrenheit 9/1 Vs box office receipts to pay attention to Spider- Man, which, he argued, might give a more accurate reading of the national pulse.2 Critic Peter Sheridan similarly added, In a reflective, post-9/11 America questioning its global power and responsibilities, Spider-Man is an everyman hero for the age (54).As a means for dealing with any cultural upheaval, Americans have long turned to films for answers. As H. R. Greenberg notes, When reality - or what passes for it - becomes too much to bear, the siren song of cinema is likely to prove irresistible (qtd. in Butler & Palesh 4). Sitting in the dark and experiencing the film alongside other viewers would seem to be an experience well structured to help alleviate individual and collective post-traumatic stress.3However, a lengthy delay occurs between the time of a national trauma and the moment when movies address the issue. Peter Rainer, past president of the National Society of Film Critics spoke to Vincent Bzedek of the Washington Post about this phenomenon.4 Bzdek paraphrases Rainer by noting that Hollywood has always been evasive about portraying what's going on in the real world - in real time - when it's grim news. Hardly any movies during Vietnam were directly about Vietnam. Instead, movies deal with the violence and anxiety of such periods in code.5The delayed production of such films reflects Hollywood's implicit awareness of a central feature of trauma: belatedness. After trauma, as Freud explain, there is a period of incubation or latency where time elapses between the horrific and the first appearance of symptoms (Moses and Monotheism 84). As one of the leading contemporary scholars in trauma studies explains, The pathology of trauma consists, rather, solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event (Caruth 4-5, italics in original). this statement, Caruth recapitulates Freud's emphasis on repetition compulsion as central to post-traumatic experience. …