The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  His first shocking encounters with Le Petit Mort, who presented himself to The Epiphany as a boon companion, a long-lost brother—only to discover that time spent in Le Petit Mort’s company gave way to staggering sensations of emptiness, self-loathing, and doubt, days when he couldn’t even crawl from beneath the bedcovers let alone fumble his way to the chest of drawers where his costumes lay folded or balled, waiting for him to resume his Heroism, to reassert himself, where they indeed lay in drawers smelling of mustiness and mothballs, probably he should take them all to the Chinese Laundromat and have them fumigated, or then again possibly instead build a bonfire in his backyard and quietly incinerate the costumes and scatter the ashes, his whole superheroic career a momentary whim taken seriously for far too long—but no! The infernal and insidious Le Petit Mort had snuck up on him again!

  And above all, his Origin Story, still an artifact of wonder and mystery even to himself. Other superheroes find their points of origin in outward action and reaction, colorful tales of being irradiated in space or bitten by an animal or experimented upon by some government or villain, bright anecdotes easily distilled into legend and swapped around as keepsakes: Superheroes aren’t born, they’re made! Not so for The Epiphany. He, apparently, was born, though unknown to himself, mistaking his life for ordinary until that moment in late adolescence when, awake at night in bed watching headlights flicker long across the ceiling plaster, his parents having quit murmuring through the wall beside him, alone awake in that ordinary house in the ordinary suburbs in which he’d to this point taken himself to be an ordinary child within a perfectly ordinary family, he’d with a sensation of ineffable unquantifiable yet unmistakable intensity discovered himself, hidden up to that point in plain sight. Felt the powers in him all at once go from inchoate to manifest, with a thrill of self-understanding as complete and all-encompassing as it was quick to shudder from him and vanish: These were the very first moments of the existence of The Epiphany, facing no villain yet apart from doubt and fear and time itself hurtling so precipitously into the future. Tasting that which would bring him so much joy and sorrow through his lifetime, the ineluctable inception and quick termination of his recurring Interludes of Power. And it was this that he most feared his enemies discovering: It was only during the Interludes that The Epiphany was any kind of superhero at all. In the long stretches between he was as vulnerable as any hostage or bystander, as some extra face tucked into a crowded comic-book panel pointing to the skies and crying for help from some costumed Person of Wonder.

  It is at this exact instant of self-recollection that The Epiphany knows that he has fallen again into the oldest and simplest trap of all; that the life flashing before his eyes is a premonition of the future, not a vision of the past; that The Chair of Death is only the chair in his breakfast nook, where he sits at the start of each day; that he has survived another brush with Le Petit Mort and stands on the verge of his whole life, again or for the first time, impossible to say which. For The Epiphany the beginning is always also the end, every villain ahead of and behind him at once, the day starting anew. This is precisely the nature of his powers: life always flashing before him, life always waiting for him to resume in its interrupted course. He has only to get out of his chair. In fact, The Epiphany is already wearing his costume, rather than his civilian clothes (not that anyone besides The Epiphany would notice the difference between the two, his costume is so subtle, so slight). He must have put it on without thinking, when he first got out of bed.

  —Playboy, 2009

  Right around when I began regularly boasting of my interest in them, superheroes took over the world. These weren’t my grubby, self-loathing, thwarted friends, though. They were full of sparkly vicarious juice, and they packed theaters. I weighed in twice: at the start, when I could still be a little proud of Spider-Man’s ascension, and seven years later, when The Dark Knight struck me as the wretched emblem of a bankrupt civilization. Maybe I was just having a bad September. In the years between, though, I’d quit even trying to explain what you see me intuit in “Izations”: that not only are superhero movies no genre at all, not, at least, in the sense that a devotee of Westerns, screwball, or film noir might find such definitions splendid, but that the mysterious “reading protocols”—the panels and gutters, the disjunctive gaps and leaps and silences, the shifts from verbal to visual, the static assertion of motion—that made comics a real medium were instantly and uncannily destroyed by adaptation to film. What’s left doesn’t strike me as much.

  Izations

  An overnight success in the making for nearly forty years, Spider-Man had been in the making in the mind of the child seated behind me (at an eleven o’clock show at a multiplex in Brooklyn on May 3, the earliest possible viewing as a member of the general public) for several months before the film’s opening, at least. Perhaps six years old, the child’s murmured comments showed a burnished precognition of the film’s various plot points, key character arcs, and, at least once, with a precise line of dialogue. I guess these had been gleaned and rehearsed from advertising sources, but also from some highly accurate comic-book- or picture-book-ization of the movie—an advertising source in an only slightly subtler sense. “It’s always like that for him,” the child mused when, in the film’s opening sequence, Peter Parker, Spider-Man’s “real” teenage self, missed the bus for school. In that one remark the child encapsulated instantly what the director and producers had gotten so right in casting Tobey Maguire as the misfit character, and in their overall gentle, persistent faithfulness to the homely tone of the ’60s Spider-Man comics. “I can’t wait until Aunt May says, ‘You’re not Superman, you know,’ ” the child stage-whispered a bit later (Aunt May being the parentless Peter Parker’s sweetly feeble guardian, who speaks this admonitory line in ignorance of Parker’s superheroic secret), and again it was evident how deeply programmed the “Marvel Style” had been into the advertising campaign.

  I couldn’t begrudge this flow of ingenuous utterances, for the child seated behind me was one of the silentest in a very boisterous room. The audience alternated compulsive chatter with breathless silence, and with three or four midfilm bouts of spontaneous, delighted applause. Myself, I shed an awkward tear at several points, mourning my own lost innocence as glimpsed through the double lens of the film and the crowd’s response to it, and overwhelmed by the simple power of an overwhelming collective experience you’ve anticipated for decades, as when one’s mostly losing local sports team nails a championship. I was completely beguiled from my cynicism. You may now safely consider me to have overrated the movie.

  But spontaneous applause by an auditorium full of children is not a thing to be cynical about—especially, I must risk saying, when that audience is eighty percent inner-city blacks, as this one was. That they knew that Spider-Man was for them—the film was free of black faces—probably speaks to many things. At least one of these is a key element of Spider-Man’s myth: No matter how blandly central and popular this character becomes, and no matter how whitewashed of ethnicity the name “Parker” has always been, Parker-Spider-Man is always an “other.” Spider-Man’s official creator (more on authorship controversies below) Stan Lee (typically, for his generation of showmen, a de-Judaized “Stanley Lieber”) has boasted, “Spider-Man’s costume covers every inch of his body … any reader, of any race, in any part of the world, can imagine himself under that costume …” But, quite satisfyingly, Parker doesn’t don that costume until after sixty-five minutes of the film’s running time (my own informal measure, by wristwatch). His white skin is thoroughly on view. No, it’s the preexisting backdrop of Superman’s and Batman’s deep whiteness which establishes Spider-Man’s metaphoric blackness. Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne live in palaces of privilege and operate from fantasy cities, Gotham and Metropolis, while working-class Spider-Man is a bridge-and-tunnel person, from Queens, in the real New York. Spider-Man’s good intentions get misrepresented in the media, and he gnaws over this injustice, wonderin
g why he ought to help anyone when he’s never been given a hand up himself. Spider-Man is always short of a buck, Spider-Man don’t get no respect, etcetera. (“It’s always like that for him.”) Furthermore, Spider-Man, as a dashiki-wearing instructor at a Brooklyn day-care center once explained to me and a group of other (multihued) children, wasn’t actually invented by white people at all, but in fact derived from an African legend of a spider-demon of the jungle, a trickster figure. Everyone knew this, it was as basic as Elvis Presley’s music having originated in black sources. I listened, that day, and believed. It may have been nonsense, or only coincidence, but the fact that it needed to be claimed was poignant. It is also perhaps instructive in understanding why, for such an apparently simple and popular character, Spider-Man (“the original wall-crawling, web-slinging white nigger,” Jeff Winbush proclaimed in the Comics Journal in 1995) took so long to be given a flattened and universalized Hollywood rendering. Or why, now that he has been given that treatment, so many forty- or thirtysomething men of a certain type (I mean, like myself) are bearing down with such emotional intensity on the results. Like Colin Wilson’s Outsider or A. E. van Vogt’s Slan, Spider-Man was a wunderkind-outcast identification available to anyone who’d mixed teenage grandiosity with even the mildest persecution complex, let alone real persecution. Matt Groening once proposed a magazine called “Sullen Teen.” Long before trench-coat mafia, The Amazing Spider-Man was that magazine.

  Spider-Man was also the first superhero whose civilian identity would be a likely reader of comic books. The truth, though, is that when, at age twelve, we began seriously reading them (Marvel’s were the only good ones, unmistakably), my friend Karl and I disliked and distrusted the omnipresent Spider-Man. This was in 1976, three or four years since the lecture from the day-care instructor, and Spider-Man, African trickster or not, was resting on his laurels. Even in the ’60s, The Amazing Spider-Man wasn’t the most interesting of the Marvel titles (that would have been The Fantastic Four), just the most archetypally non-archetypal, and the one with which the company as a whole was most identified. By the mid-’70s Spider-Man’s great plotlines—the Death of Gwen Stacy (Peter Parker’s ethereal blond girlfriend, who would haunt him like Kim Novak in Vertigo); the Unmasking of Green Goblins #1, #2, and #3 (a shock each time); the Marriage of Aunt May to Doctor Octopus (an odious villain)—were well behind him. And Peter Parker had settled for what seemed to us a second-best girlfriend, the dark-haired “girl next door,” Mary Jane Watson, a mere glass of beer—the champagne of Gwen Stacy was not for the likes of us. So Karl and I resented Spider-Man like we resented the Beatles, for being such lavish evidence we’d been born too late. The ’70s adventures were full of clues to the great history we’d missed. Worse, the character had developed an irritating tendency to invade other stories—Marvel had discovered that Spider-Man’s presence on a front cover jacked up sales, so he’d guest-star in weaker-selling books.

  Spider-Man had become a logo, in other words, like Superman before him. Karl and I were more interested in the mysterious depth of newer and less popular characters: the Vision, Black Bolt, Omega the Unknown, Warlock, Ghost Rider, Son of Satan, all of whom were brooding, tormented antiheroes, unattractive to young children. We’d caught the outsiderish, sulky Marvel scent, and wanted our own share. In these cases, it was precisely those humdrum guest appearances of the dull old web-slinger (or the Hulk, who served the same purpose) which provided the least interesting tales—and often signaled the final issue of a commercially foundering title. Ironically, in gravitating toward those Marvel characters who were not yet (nor would ever be) logos, Karl and I were recapitulating that rejection of icons in favor of darker, more amorphous figures which had been the essence of Spider-Man’s earlier ascension over Superman and Batman. We were on a quest for Ever-More-Spidery-Man.

  The prototype wouldn’t leave us alone, however. This was mostly due to the relentless cheerleading of Stan Lee, in a venue called “Marvel Bullpen Bulletins”: a page of Marvel gossip and advertising featured in every issue of every comic, written in a style which might be characterized as high hipster—two parts Lord Buckley, one part Austin Powers. Stan Lee was a writer gone Barnum, who’d abandoned new work in favor of rah-rah moguldom. He was Marvel’s media liaison and their own biggest in-house fan, a schmoozer. Picture an Orson Welles who’d never bothered to direct films again after The Lady from Shanghai, just bullshitted on talk shows, reliving his great moments. Like Welles’s, Stan Lee’s great moments were beset by authorship disputes. Lee’s particular emphasis on Spider-Man as Marvel’s signature creation may have had something to do with that character being the only one of the company’s greatest and most popular early inventions—the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, Doctor Doom, and Silver Surfer—not largely attributable, according to almost every account, to Jack “King” Kirby. Kirby is the artist and auteur understood by cognoscenti to be the “real” creator: Keith to Stan Lee’s Mick. Lee has been alleged to be a mere dialogue writer who filled in word balloons in otherwise finished pages, and to have made off like a bandit with all the official credit, the dough, and, final insult, Kirby’s original artwork. Lee’s “I just wanna be loved” persona has weathered decades of abuse on these grounds in fan magazines, on panels at conventions, and probably right this minute on the Internet. Kirby, by any measure a visionary, the greatest inventor in comics history, in fact subsequently showed himself to be rather icy and remote without Lee’s goofy, humanizing touch, and a writer of execrable dialogue: Keith needed his Mick. But breakups are a tender subject.

  Kirby didn’t draw Spider-Man. The man who did is Steve Ditko, Marvel’s great mystery man—a “reclusive, lifelong bachelor,” according to a recent profile in the L.A. Times. He’s also described as “heavily influenced by Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism.” I myself remember once finding an outré, off-brand comic, featuring a character called the Blue Beetle, which was drawn and written by Ditko: The story was a screed against modern art and beatnik nihilism, disguised as a beautifully illustrated superhero adventure. Ditko has been belatedly credited in the new film, a vindication he reportedly accepts grudgingly. He likely has as profound a creative claim on the early Spider-Man as Kirby had on the bulk of the Marvel characters, but “the J. D. Salinger of comics” has been no obstacle to Lee’s attention-hogging claims of authorship in the thirty-five years since Ditko quit Marvel in a silent, Objectivist huff.

  So the icon sank into our brains. As with the Beatles, bonding could occur in retrospect. We ’70s kids listened to Revolver and The White Album and Abbey Road and fell in love, however sheepishly, with the great progression we’d just missed. Marvel reprinted their famous ’60s plotlines in digests called Marvel Tales and Marvel’s Greatest Comics and in a trade paperback called Origins (the cover of which showed Lee’s hairy knuckles at a typewriter, while the best-known characters flew, fully costumed, from the platen), so we late-born could catch up. In 1980, at John Lennon’s slaying, my entire high school was in mourning for “our hero”; similarly my old resentment of Spider-Man was sublimated beneath a surge of proprietary feeling when I first heard, maybe two years ago, that “my Spidey” was finally getting his fifteen minutes. In fact, I’d sentimentally rewritten my personal history, according to the dictums of the “Bullpen Bulletin,” so that until my research into the movie disproved it, I could claim (in Bookforum, two years ago) that “the first romantic loss for a lot of guys my age was Gwen Stacy’s death.” This was a retrospective fiction, I now see. Gwen Stacy was dead before I met her, which imparts a gnostic eeriness to our sundered love.

  I’ve probably given full enough account of the auditorium of self that was me, inside that larger auditorium of rooting children. Director Sam Raimi was wise sticking to the 1963–64 version of the comic book, rather than being tempted by the later recursions, and this Spider-Man is fully naïve, fully Ditko. Each loss he suffers, each sacrifice he makes, is his first. The key innovation, it turns out, is how slightly Marvel dark
ened and sophisticated the superhero myths of an earlier era. In his job as freelance newspaper photographer of Spider-Man’s heroics, Peter Parker parodies Clark Kent’s special press access to the doings of Superman, but with an emphasis on fetish and spectatorship—there’s something sexual in setting up remote cameras to document your gymnastics. Slightly. There’s also something adolescent-masturbatory in Parker’s closed-door explorations of his new web-goo-shooting prowess—slightly. Raimi never allows any heavy symbolism or camp opportunism to spoil the simpler pleasures. The emphasis is on a sweet bungler’s coping attempts to live up to great power, great responsibility. The early comics, and this movie, are loaded with Dickensian family drama—missing fathers, vulnerable fathers, fathers gone bad. You’d better grow up quick, kid. The biggest deviation is that Mary Jane Watson is now the ur-girlfriend, with no sign of Gwen Stacy around. But the halcyon past is not always what it is cracked up to be. My researches unearthed this horrible fact—the Marvel scripters who followed Lee on the job killed off Gwen Stacy because they found the character unworkably dull, a cold fish. Red-haired Mary Jane was more approachable, sexier, all along. If I’d known sooner I might have been spared some pining.

  Tobey Maguire brings to the film a tenderness and also a watchfulness not unlike that of Montgomery Clift in Red River. In that film Clift seemed, in his hesitancy and alertness, to be simultaneously in character and in a seat in the theater beside us, considering both the cattle drive and John Wayne as the great natural phenomena they were. Similarly, Maguire plays audience surrogate, regarding the Green Goblin and even Spider-Man with a degree of noncommittal fascination. His ability to endow lines like “Goblin, what have you done?” with introspective echoes carries the film to a deeper place in that effortless way of an actor, which no director or screenwriter can offer. A slightly deeper place. The most unlikely cheer from my crowd was at Spider-Man/Parker’s (his mask is half off) long-delayed first kiss with Mary Jane. Maguire’s vulnerability had persuaded them that he really might not get the girl, so it was a triumph. A slicker actor would have cued revulsion in children, but here the icky inevitability of movie clinches had been thwarted.