2002’s biggest movies were about great power and great responsibility—but there was only one Spider-Man

https://film.avclub.com/2002-s-biggest-movies-were-about-great-power-and-great-1845997358

The bus is a carnival of humiliation. The driver won’t stop, so Peter Parker has to run alongside, banging on the window, begging to be let in. When he boards, the other kids laugh and jeer and snarl. Nobody ignores Peter Parker. Only one person on the bus, future love interest Mary Jane Watson, looks at him with anything resembling humanity. Everyone else is a baying ghoul, a slavering hyena. Other than Mary Jane, everyone on that bus, the driver included, sees Peter Parker as prey.

In real life, a school bus is not exactly a fun place to be. But I’ve never seen a kid have a bus ride as bad as the one that Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker has in the opening scene of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, the biggest box office hit of 2002. In real life, if memory serves, high school nerds are ignored at worst, pitied at best. They find their own little packs of peers with their own social politics. Real high school nerdery looks a whole lot more like Tom Holland and Jacob Batalon, in 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, discussing plans to put together a Lego Death Star after school. But Raimi’s film isn’t interested in realism. It’s interested in something else.

In that opening scene, Raimi’s Spider-Man tips its hand. In every version of the Spider-Man story, Peter Parker is an outsider, an awkward and sheepish kid who doesn’t come into his own until he begins to deal with great power and great responsibility. In his version of that story, Raimi is more interested in depicting how outsiderdom feels than how an observer might see it. Raimi’s Spider-Man tells Peter Parker’s version of the Peter Parker story. When we watch Raimi’s movie, we see Parker through his own eyes.

By 2002, the Spider-Man property had been bouncing around among studios and screenwriters for more than a decade. James Cameron had come close to making the Spider-Man movie. Tobe Hooper had been attached to an absurd horror version of it. David Fincher had pitched an adaptation of the story of Gwen Stacy’s death. But Sam Raimi, a comic book fan who was also an energetic, inventive, low-budget visionary, got the job. I would dearly love to see the Cameron or Fincher versions, but Raimi was the best choice for all involved.

Raimi understood fundamental things about the Spider-Man character. He understood the sense of motion so important to the comics—the sheer thrill of bodies whipping through the skyscraper canyons of Manhattan. He got that Parker had to be a clueless kid, a smart but socially incapable chump. And he grasped the great thing about the Spider-Man costume. Spider-Man’s outfit covers him head-to-toe, presenting a challenge for any actor to convey emotion without the aid of facial expressions. But because of that blankness, it becomes a whole lot easier for people in the audience to project themselves onto Spider-Man, to see themselves in this kid. Raimi figured that out, and he abetted the process. He made Spider-Man an empty canvas.

Raimi had already made a superhero movie before Spider-Man: Darkman, the extremely fun 1990 romp that starred future Batman Begins villain Liam Neeson as a face-melting circus-freak vigilante. Raimi had also brought that same sense of vivid, operatic comic book silliness to just about everything he’d made: The slapstick gore of Evil Dead II, the swashbuckling Old West gunfights of The Quick And The Dead, the twisty thriller machinations of A Simple Plan. Raimi had never made a real blockbuster before Spider-Man, and his most obvious attempt to go mainstream, the 1999 Kevin Costner baseball romance For The Love Of The Game, had been a miserable failure. But Raimi knew the version of Spider-Man that audiences in 2002 wanted to see.

Raimi’s Spider-Man fit the zeitgeist of its moment. The last time I wrote about Spider-Man, considering the movie in the grand lineage of superhero cinema, I talked about how Rami’s film happened to click with audiences, in America and around the world, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Raimi had played up the New York setting of Spider-Man, and he’d added in fluttering flags and courageous mobs of New Yorkers rushing to protect their own. Nobody could plan that kind of resonance, and it definitely helped Spider-Man feel like something other than a silly kids’ movie on the level of the Joel Schumacher Batman sequels that had scared executives away from the superhero genre in the years before Spider-Man. But outside of the way Raimi’s picture surfed on post-9/11 sentiment, it fit nicely with the kind of story that was filling theaters.

As it happens, the four biggest movies of 2002 are all about nervous, vulnerable young men who discover hidden powers that set them apart and who then wrestle with the weight of those powers.