retooling at the hands of the commercially savvy director Philip William McKinley, whose successes include stints at the Ringling Brothers Circus. In November 2011, she sued the producers; a countersuit followed, triggering nasty revelations on both sides. (The retooled show has been a box office hit.)
As with the story of Actaeon, there was the unmistakable noise of baying in the air when Taymor went down; after all these centuries, it seems that we still find it hard to resist what looks like a story of hubris finally brought low. As innumerable critics have by now made clear, pretty much everything was wrong with the show—the incoherent, metastasizing plot (which grafts some Greek mythic material onto the iconic comic-book narrative of Spidey’s career); the banalmusic and risible lyrics (by the pop stars Bono and The Edge of U2); and, not least, a series of breathtakingly gratuitous and overcooked production numbers that made “Springtime for Hitler” look like
Die Winterreise
. One such number featured a monstrous female spider being shod with expensive shoes.
But these are merely symptoms. If Taymor’s show is a failure, it fails for interesting reasons—as it were, for genetic reasons. For the show itself is a grotesque hybrid. At the heart of the
Spider-Man
disaster is the essential incompatibility of those two visions of physical transformation—the ancient and the modern, the redemptive and the punitive, visions that Taymor tried, heroically but futilely, to reconcile. As happens so often in both myth and comic books, the attempt to fuse two species resulted in the creation of a monster.
In fact, very little about
Spider-Man
—the original comic or, for that matter, its reincarnation as a series of enormously successful blockbuster films directed by Sam Raimi and released throughout the first decade of the 2000s—suggests an ideal vehicle for Taymor’s talents.
What made Spider-Man unusual among superheroes when he debuted wasn’t so much the arachnid powers he derived from the radioactive spider—an ability to jump great distances, cling to surfaces, and shoot a weblike material from his wrists: not even comparable to, say, Superman’s powers—but his very ordinariness. Bullied at school, worried about girls and money, fussing at and fussed at by his foster parents, the kindly Aunt May and Uncle Ben, Peter Parker is a regular lower-middle-class Joe with pretty average teenager problems. (Batman, by contrast, is really a millionaire playboy named Bruce Wayne who lives alone in a mansion with a British butler and a young ward—a lifestyle that, to the original Depression-era audience,must have seemed as unimaginable as that of a bat.) Given the narrowness of Peter’s horizon of expectations, it’s small wonder that he makes petty use of his newfound powers at first: retaliating at school and making some money as a novelty act.
It’s precisely as a typical teenager that Peter makes a fatal error that effects the greatest transformation in him—not physical but ethical. For in a moment of affected coolness, he allows a petty thief to escape—the very criminal who will go on to rob and murder his Uncle Ben. It’s Ben’s last words to his nephew, at the end of the original comic-book issue—“With great power there must also come—great responsibility”—that finally gives Spidey a moral mission. Much of the ongoing drama of the
Spider-Man
comic books turns on the tension between the teenager’s frustrations and the superhero’s lofty goals.
It’s not hard to see how all this made
Spider-Man
popular among teenage comic-book readers in the 1960s, that decade of the teenager. Indeed, the series marked the beginning of what the comic-book historian Paul Kupperberg, in his 2007 book
The Creation of Spider-Man
, called a “revolution”—a newfound interest on the part of comic-book creators in emphasizing the protagonist’s “everyday problems” rather than the glamour of being a
As with the story of Actaeon, there was the unmistakable noise of baying in the air when Taymor went down; after all these centuries, it seems that we still find it hard to resist what looks like a story of hubris finally brought low. As innumerable critics have by now made clear, pretty much everything was wrong with the show—the incoherent, metastasizing plot (which grafts some Greek mythic material onto the iconic comic-book narrative of Spidey’s career); the banalmusic and risible lyrics (by the pop stars Bono and The Edge of U2); and, not least, a series of breathtakingly gratuitous and overcooked production numbers that made “Springtime for Hitler” look like
Die Winterreise
. One such number featured a monstrous female spider being shod with expensive shoes.
But these are merely symptoms. If Taymor’s show is a failure, it fails for interesting reasons—as it were, for genetic reasons. For the show itself is a grotesque hybrid. At the heart of the
Spider-Man
disaster is the essential incompatibility of those two visions of physical transformation—the ancient and the modern, the redemptive and the punitive, visions that Taymor tried, heroically but futilely, to reconcile. As happens so often in both myth and comic books, the attempt to fuse two species resulted in the creation of a monster.
In fact, very little about
Spider-Man
—the original comic or, for that matter, its reincarnation as a series of enormously successful blockbuster films directed by Sam Raimi and released throughout the first decade of the 2000s—suggests an ideal vehicle for Taymor’s talents.
What made Spider-Man unusual among superheroes when he debuted wasn’t so much the arachnid powers he derived from the radioactive spider—an ability to jump great distances, cling to surfaces, and shoot a weblike material from his wrists: not even comparable to, say, Superman’s powers—but his very ordinariness. Bullied at school, worried about girls and money, fussing at and fussed at by his foster parents, the kindly Aunt May and Uncle Ben, Peter Parker is a regular lower-middle-class Joe with pretty average teenager problems. (Batman, by contrast, is really a millionaire playboy named Bruce Wayne who lives alone in a mansion with a British butler and a young ward—a lifestyle that, to the original Depression-era audience,must have seemed as unimaginable as that of a bat.) Given the narrowness of Peter’s horizon of expectations, it’s small wonder that he makes petty use of his newfound powers at first: retaliating at school and making some money as a novelty act.
It’s precisely as a typical teenager that Peter makes a fatal error that effects the greatest transformation in him—not physical but ethical. For in a moment of affected coolness, he allows a petty thief to escape—the very criminal who will go on to rob and murder his Uncle Ben. It’s Ben’s last words to his nephew, at the end of the original comic-book issue—“With great power there must also come—great responsibility”—that finally gives Spidey a moral mission. Much of the ongoing drama of the
Spider-Man
comic books turns on the tension between the teenager’s frustrations and the superhero’s lofty goals.
It’s not hard to see how all this made
Spider-Man
popular among teenage comic-book readers in the 1960s, that decade of the teenager. Indeed, the series marked the beginning of what the comic-book historian Paul Kupperberg, in his 2007 book
The Creation of Spider-Man
, called a “revolution”—a newfound interest on the part of comic-book creators in emphasizing the protagonist’s “everyday problems” rather than the glamour of being a
Similar Books
