Review of Babyxsosa's review of Spider Man (2002)
Sometimes I have the feeling that what takes place is identical to what doesn't take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try […]1
I had planned to try to write a review of Babyxsosa’s review of Spider-Man (2002)2 for a good while—until this morning, when I noticed, to my horror, that the review had disappeared, the screen went to “Page not found,” and the subject of my post was gone, potentially forever; I hadn’t been farsighted enough to even imagine the review going missing, and I had prepared in vain, that is, I had watched Spider-Man (2002) in one attentive run a few days prior.
This sudden disappearance almost made me write a somber post titled Memory of the Archive or The Half-Life of Microblogs, or something with the word liminal in the title. I have to offer flowers and sweets to a god who spared me.
All the posts came back a week later, updated with new entries. The review reappeared, and I was relieved. Nonetheless, I had to make peace with being duped. I had turned dunce, stressing over content lost forever, a scare as old as libraries ablaze. I thought of a network of circuits catching fire, the insulation melting away, and the high temperature soldering all the circuits into one thick cord. The infostructure, a single, million-lane highway. I thought of gummy bears melting into one blob of a bear in the afternoon sun.
I was excited to see the posts again because I love Babyxsosa’s blog. I love the simplicity of it. I love the idea of it. There is a sweet spot for purity in culture—the triad of purity, authenticity, and innocence so often fetishized. We look for a Daniel Johnston to remind us that art comes from the heart, not the brain-wallet circuit. Some, like David Lynch, adore this innocence so much that they write all their characters into Daniel Johnstons. The value of cultural purity comes from a retroactive reading of the intentions of an artist, that the process would have happened in private, even if it were never made public. That there would be songs written and sung, no matter if anyone was listening.
Babyxsosa’s blog has the essence of purity-
Babyxsosa’s blog has a certain raw sincerity: half of its posts are personal and intimate in a way reminiscent of the early blogosphere, where you didn’t have much traffic on your page simply because 1. there weren’t as many people on the Internet, and 2. you were 11 and had, like, two friends. Whether the blog is a curated recreation of this era, a convoluted ad-space for watches and beauty products, a form of merch-and-song-pitch, a private diary of life’s simple pleasures made public, or all of the above—doesn’t really matter, because the idea of it is so pure and gentle that the rest can be forgiven.
The beauty of a concept… Some ideas are aesthetically superior to others. There are no aesthetic judgments in popular, conceptual discourse. The discussion is always pragmatic: Is the idea illustrated properly, vividly? I believe that Kant’s division of ideas into aesthetic and rational categories begs for a super-aesthetic criterion, a measure of beauty applied to ideas of beauty themselves, but also ideas in general. Applying rational ideas to aesthetic ideas is the act of forming interpretation.
Using rational ideas to talk about rational ideas is a debate.
Using aesthetic ideas to talk about aesthetic ideas is poetry, or having an ‘impression.’
Applying aesthetic ideas to rational ideas, then, would introduce a sort of meta-criterion for concepts, for example, the question of overall ‘purity’ again—what matters here is completeness, simplicity, and resonance, essentially the famous razor applied to the tortured domains of the humanities. This could ultimately be summarized as an opposition to ornamentation in the realm of ideas. There surely is beauty at the opposite end of the spectrum—for instance, in absolute complexity, which I adore consuming—but at the core of any tornado, there is a peaceful, quiet eye, and that is the sacred kernel of the story.
Consider this idea:
The novel follows IRS office workers in Peoria who want to modernize their bureaucracy by introducing computers, while another faction within the agency secretly recruits individuals with supernatural abilities to increase efficiency and prevent layoffs.3
Or this one:
The powerful aristocrat Jerónimo tries to father a perfect heir but, when his son is born deformed, he hides him in his estate, surrounding him with equally deformed servants to create an illusion of normalcy.
The first one is the plot of The Pale King by DFW, an unfinished novel, taken from his posthumously attached notes. The second is one of the storylines in The Obscene Bird of Night by José Donoso. Both ideas are beautiful, and the beauty is in my (beholder’s) eye. What I see is the pure modus operandi of artistic, conceptual thinking that they have in common: realizing a problem and undergoing a journey to find a solution that borders on fantasy, or on out-of-the-ordinary. The method of Sophie Calle. And the solution found is rooted in oddly pragmatic thinking, containing the supernatural element within the confines of the mundane. These ideas walk the fine line between reality and fantasy in an unpretentious way; they do not multiply worlds by introducing magic, but allow the reader to step outside the confines of the material. I do have a sweet spot for this, and it speaks to me deeply.
Another important criterion is the impact of an idea, its effect—also the most subjective one—which sparks a glimmer in the eye, renders one speechless, and leaves behind pure admiration and respect; or, like a kōan, leads to a suspension of thought and logic, which, in essence, marks a return to the lobby of a pre-linguistic realm, where nothing makes sense because there is no use for sense. From there, someone else, full of uncertainty, would once again reach for the rational, for opinions, reviews, descriptions, and internalized knowledge. But I say: cherish these moments, respect the mystery.
There is not much to say about the content of Babyxsosa’s review because her post is an aesthetic idea, and I do not wish to rationalize it. Instead of a review, I can provide an impression:
Spider-Man (2002)
The opening sequences pulled me back into teenage angst—the torment of navigating a vast sea with no compass and a thousand lighthouses. A sudden thought pierces my brain like a spade, and I realize: maybe there’s no better time to write a review than while reminiscing about my loserdom, for reasons parallel in shape and size.
I was a loser in middle school and for the first four months of high school, until I got a popular girlfriend. “I know how it feels”. I understand the urge to propel your gloop all over Manhattan. I would have donned a fool’s plumage and taken to the skies if it secured the female gaze.4
The Arachnid Puissance
Like most superhero movies, Spider-Man follows the ‘hero’s journey,’ sailing through the collective unconscious on the ocean of desire. The film opens with a voice telling us that this isn’t his story—it’s about a girl. A girl whom he literally chases after in the very first scene. Mary Jane is desire embodied. Throughout the film, she is persistently emotionally engaged with someone who possesses the traits Peter lacks, whether it’s a jock or a millionaire. She never chases anyone because she is a Platonic symbol, and symbols are eternal and immobile5.
As a symbol, she is
bound by love into one single volume,
That which is scattered throughout the universe.6
She is the unbidden beacon of the romantic gaze, a damsel in distress. A 2K1 diva. Abused at home, she needs a protector. It is safe to say that Mary Jane is drawn to confidence and power; Peter Parker is passive and weak, a loser.
When Peter accidentally shoots out his gloop in school, it is met with disgust, or ‘abject.’ When he does so as Spider-Man, it is recontextualized as an extension of his heroism. The same applies to his use of violence. The issue is not simply about having or lacking power—the issue is Peter Parker himself. He could never be Spider-Man without a mask due to his permanent ties to being a nerd.
This is the core of the superhero costume fantasy: the real way out of loserdom isn’t sudden but gradual. A sudden transformation is freakish by nature, and so it must be masked—hidden beneath fantasy, a spontaneous rise to power, and a silly costume.
Spider-Man is the ultimate loser fantasy—or more precisely, the male-late-bloomer-before-blooming fantasy—about realizing the sad truths of the universe: that women like confidence, that hierarchies exist and friendzones are real. The same truth that, later in life, unfolds in their favor, if they don’t fall into the incel trap of resentment but instead persist in developing their inner lives, making themselves ‘interesting.’ The way to escape losing the lottery of birth is to become exceptionally good at something, whether it’s a sense of humor or a special interest. Honing a craft is often done in solitude. This is why private obsession holds a sacred place for me - and for those who idealize ‘purity’ in culture - as it exists beyond display and performance, arising purely from the heart’s necessity. Babyxsosa’s review carries this private quality.
Since the film is about transformation in the face of desire, it demands a classical Lacanian reading. The master signifier of the movie - Mary Jane - represents the objet petit a, as she is the unattainable object of Peter’s desire, symbolically concealed yet visible behind the glass of the bus window, the camera lens, the garden fence. Putting on the mask allows Peter to be heroic out of character, to close the distance between him and Mary Jane, to actually kiss her! But the fantasy makes him alienated within the perverse scenario of being loved not for who he ‘is,’ but for the occasional display of a persona. Peter undergoes a symbolic transformation: his superpower, initially a vehicle for revenge fantasy, is reframed as social responsibility—one that he ultimately embraces for the sake of the purity of morals. He chooses duty over desire. He renounces Mary Jane’s love at the end of the movie, sacrificing jouissance—the pleasure of being with her—for the symbolic order of remaining a protector. Desire is never fulfilled.
The movie is structured around two kisses. The second is a kiss between two sad adults in sad adult reality (boring). The first is performed upside down—a twisted fantasy of a damsel perpetually rescued by a superhero-stalker, trying to thank him with unsolicited affection. It is the point de capiton of the movie, stitching together the floating signifiers of dual identity, desire, and heroism into a fixed structure of meaning. The iconic stunt, the ‘spider-bae kiss scene’7, where Mary Jane doesn’t lower the mask enough to see who he is, just enough to reach his lips. (Imagine if he took off the rest of the mask himself. How disgusting that would be.)
Mary Jane enjoys the mystery—she doesn’t wonder who Spider-Man is for more than a brief second. Maybe she fears seeing the face of her friendzoned pal. She clearly doesn’t want to know. But what if she has known all along? Imagine they were siblings. Imagine she was playing dumb, letting the story unfold in her favor. Maybe the real question Mary Jane asks herself is not Who is Spider-Man? but How do I keep them both? - Peter Parker as her sweet friend and Spider-Man as her adventurous lover. She cannot be with one, but she might lose him if she chooses the other. If you lose the wife, you lose the mistress scheme. To prolong the mystery. The fear of what happens when the honeymoon ends…
The principal and the most common problem at the beginning of any fairly conventional marriage is that […] you traditionally experience an unpleasant sense of having arrived and, therefore, of having reached an end, or rather, that the time has come to devote yourself to something else. […] I know that what you should do is to overcome that initial feeling and, far from devoting yourself to something else, you should devote yourself to the marriage itself, as if confronted by the most important structure and task of your life, even if you’re tempted to believe that the task has already been completed and the structure built.8
The movie cannot end with a happy marriage—because then there would be no sequels, no more Spider-Man if Peter Parker simply settled down and peacefully developed his photography hobby. Or started hobby-tunneling in his free time. It’s a long journey from being a loser to being with your crush. But if Lana Del Rey had married that bum, there is a hope for all of us...
The hero’s journey demands repeated failures and, most importantly, a major shift in power. To undergo a full transformation, Parker needs to learn how to be the bad guy. The classic spectrum of the bad boy and the nice guy has always been enriched by a secondary axis—the y-axis of appearance—giving us the tough-looking softie and the sensitive crook, the Rick Blaine/Norman Bates continuum, introducing confusion and delusion into the dating game. The final scene of Spider-Man (2002) is well-written in its ambiguity, particularly in how it positions Parker on this spectrum of badness. Does he reject Mary Jane’s love truly for the sake of protecting her, or is this a power-shift revenge scenario? Likewise - does she actually love him? Or is he simply the last resort among her high school friends?
In any case - or the case of all of them at once - the love remains unconsummated, rooted in the phantasmic structure of desire, with a half-pulled mask at its core, a romantic configuration more perverse than real life could provide. They are both victims of playing with love.
I see two people sitting in the backyard on a set of red chairs by a red, round table. She is dressed in a white dress with delicate lace detailing and flowers embroidered in golden thread. The man wears a pastel shirt with a high, stiff collar and a double-breasted waistcoat. They have just fallen in love. He tries to hide his excitement, to remain composed, careful not to overwhelm her with his affection and scare her away, adjusting his passion to the etiquette of the times. The sun rays fall on the backyard ever so fiercely; one could almost hear them make a sound. The sun’s labor is never done. The woman looks at the man with eyes full of affection, imagining a future together yet struggling to focus on the conversation, a task bordering on impossible in the heat of this bright, summer day.
Suddenly, the man stands and apologizes, saying he will fetch some refreshments. He lives on the highest floor and must climb a six-story spiral staircase affixed to the building’s facade to reach his room. The stairs are metallic, gleaming in the purest white. The woman watches him ascend, his movements elegant, and feels love so intense that her heart trembles, her hands clutching the seat of the chair.
When the man reaches the top of the staircase and looks down at her, he is struck by a terrible psychological condition—one he had forgotten he even had. The man, overwhelmed by love, now remembers that he was born without the understanding of perspective, or rather, that he mistakes distortions of perspective for reality, and as he gazes at her, he slowly becomes aware that the person he loves is impossibly small, no taller than a candle’s flicker.
A quiet sob escapes him. He tries to hold it in, but the weight of it all is too much—he breaks down, devastated, knowing that it would be impossible to be with someone so tiny, let alone exchange sweet kisses, as his monstrous lips would crush her instantly. He looks at the love of his life, now minuscule, and weeps, blaming himself for leaving the table and allowing her to shrink—the gorgeous lady, now no more than a speck.
The agony is unbearable. He clutches his fist around his hair, pulling at it with hysterical screams, then he looks at her one last time, and leaps over the railing. He drops to the ground, lifeless.
The woman gasps in terror. The body of her lover lies at the bottom of the stairs, his spirit slipping away. She stands from her chair and approaches his colossal head, a head the size of a house. She stops at his enormous lips, dry and cracked like the red rocks of the South, them she looks up at his vast, empty eye, from which falls a single, monstrous teardrop, a lake of a tear, rolling down his cheek and swallowing the woman.
The titanic droplet crashes on the ground of the backyard and floods it, and the woman screams because she cannot swim, but soon the water enters her lungs and she drowns, right there on the spot, her tiny body floating lifeless next to the body of a giant.
A person overlooking the backyard who might find this situation tragic, but they might also ponder just how queer that was!
My Own, Private Spider-Man
"A Dark Hero Guards You While You Sleep", an eight-hour-long YouTube ASMR fantasy, is set in a cozy bedroom, where a tiny lamp softly glows, a plant hunches over the bed, and large glass windows reveal a city drenched in heavy rain—a city reminiscent of New York. Suddenly, a large, dark figure leaps into the window frame, the figure of the mysterious guardian. He overlooks the neighborhood, his cape flowing in the wind. Once in a while, he disappears to patrol the area, but he always returns to his outpost, making sure that you can safely sleep in peace.
The glass and austerity separating us from The Dark Hero mark the perverse power dynamic between the master of the bedroom and their soaking-wet protector. He cannot join you in bed. He cannot even step inside in his wet-ass clothes, no, thanks. What is clear is the dynamic of ownership and distance. You can sleep in peace because you know The Dark Hero will not abandon his post for anyone else. He is on an invisible leash of devotion—a terrifying creature of the night, stationed at the far-right corner of the bad boy spectrum.
Babyxsosa wonders where her Spider-Man is—but does she know that love flows like a continuous stream?
Your own, private Spider-Man is a daytime fantasy. Someone to bring you coffee as you head out for a date. Spider-Man goes to sleep at 10 PM. Spider-Man puts food scraps in a ziplock bag. He might play a practical joke on you; enraged, you chastise his wrists and introduce days without spider-gunk. You slap his cheeks until they’re nice and red, as he giggles quietly through the mask. Punishment is easy, as he is twink-postured, naturally much smaller than you. Light as a feather, he cannot use his web on a windy day. Loving a Spider-Man is impossible. It’s a cozy situationship, built on equal parts adoration and disrespect.
You don’t want love, you just want the love experience.9
It is impossible to have it all—even to have them both, Spider-Man and Peter Parker. Refusing to settle for less means choosing loneliness, a fate I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Having found myself in a new relationship, the only way to reciprocate the universe is through devotion. I lost big in Vegas, but I got lucky in love. I hastily write this final sentence, pleased, and save the file, before putting on my cape and returning back to the window stoop. The heavy wind slashes through the dark, cold, rainy night. My eyes well up with tears of joy. No one will see me cry into my mask.
Javier Marías, A Heart So White (1992)
blingbling.ceo/spider-man-(2002)
One supernatural ability is the power to achieve absolute focus after reciting a sequence of numbers.
Coincidentally, a week after I finished writing this post, the Nymphet Alumni girls released an episode centered around the aesthetics of a ‘loser’, which is highly recommend listening to.
She is violates this rule once, thrown off a bridge, and falls for eternity, bending the spacetime of a fictional New York with her heavy, symbolic presence.
Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, Canto 33.
After Babyxsosa.
Javier Marías, A Heart So White (1992).
Line from The Knight of Cups by Terrence Malick.