Masked Desire

Super sex. That's what it's all about. A recent column from Neil Pollack in Nerve Magazine maintains that our earliest sexual thoughts can have a profound effect on our later lives.

The fine Mr. Pollack recounts: "I remember going to someone's house with my parents when I was six. Wonder Woman was on.… I stood there, agape, as a ball of light bloomed in Diana's chest and gradually enveloped her. She emerged from the haze as Wonder Woman. At that moment, something inside of me awoke -- something dark, raw and primal.

"'Um,' I said. 'Why does her hair change first?' No one had an answer, and the moment passed. But I've never forgotten that flash, that ritual dance of transformation. Whether I want it to or not, it forms the core of my sexual being."

Yes, a man in a mask does it for me every time. A little black Zorro number, a Jason Voorhees-style hockey mask, and the ultimate: a face full of black and-white kabuki-style makeup a la Peter Criss from KISS. So hot, so very stinking, crazy hot. The whole secret appeal of the super hero isn't so much their buffed up bods and superpowers, although those are nice too. It's the mask, man.

Think about Russell Crowe's thousand-yard stare through his full Gladiatorial headgear. Think Ken Dryden, standing alone at the far end of the ice, leaning on his goal stick, a lone solitary figure, not wholly human. Even Toronto netminder Eddie Belfour, with his drooping eyes and surly manner, looking like a poor man's Russell. That mask, those pads, uuuhhh. As a famous man between the pipes (and that can be taken more than one way), Gerry Cheevers, once observed: "We goaltenders, alone and unloved, tend to be very proud bastards."

I love you masked man!!!

In the new version of Spiderman, there is still something of that nascent childhood sense of sexiness. Like the first Spiderman, the film starts off on a note of yearning. Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) has it bad for Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), but since he's sworn to protect her, he can't do much about it. Being Spiderman doesn't help him get the girl, keep a job or get good grades. Rather it has the opposite effect, everyone thinks he's a no-good-nik, perpetually late, disorganized and dirt poor, sneaking past his landlord's apartment, begging for work from J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) at the Daily Bugle.

Watch out kids: kissing

Being a super hero is kind of a super drag. It's also a celibate existence; no sexy stuff for Spiderman. Even his webbing is not working properly. He's got those mean ass can't-win-for-losing-can't-even-get-a canape-at-the-big-party-spidey-sense blues. After he's disappointed everybody, seen his beloved MJ move on to an astronaut, been ill-treated by the very city he's sworn to serve, Peter Parker has had enough. He throws in the suit and quits. Spiderman no more. Crime goes up 75 percent and Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) is planning to blow up the city, but it's his beloved MJ that really gets him going.

Spiderman 2 is has got a little bit of everything: angst, explosions, tight suits, bad guys, good guys, more explosions. It's tubs of fun, but it's not really a kids movie, as there's also plenty of kissing. You may have to cover your eyes if you're under age 10 either physically or mentally.

It is also Sam Raimi's movie. You can see his gonzo movie-making personality come through in the scene where Doc Ock's mechanical arms first go berserk and kill everyone, and in smaller grace notes like the presence of Bruce Campbell as an irritating usher. Even "the classic," Raimi's '73 Oldsmobile Delta Royale, is there. Although some of his past films have reined in his more gleefully manic sensibilities, in Spiderman (both 1 & 2) they are given full throttle. The capering little mad monkey moviemaker's POV shots and frenetic camera keep popping out in odd places, which gives the film a bit of unpredictability.

It is the smaller moments in the film that give clues to the mind behind the mask. When Spiderman loses his powers and has to take a conventional route down from the rooftop, he shares the elevator with an actor from Queer as Folk, and they talk about how his suit rides up in the crotch; an apparent nod to the homoerotic qualities of that skin-tight suit.

In a recent interview, Raimi explained that he wanted the film to be like Melrose Place, but with super heroes. And this makes perfect sense, because sex and superheroes go very well together.

Are comic books dirty?

Comic books are full of sex. The best kind -- entirely sublimated. They're like soap operas for little kids and often they're where we first learn about romance. I still remember my crushes on Namor the Submariner (soon to be a feature film), but I even had a thing for Doctor Doom -- there was something about the metal mask and the green cape that just spoke to me. Every child who came of age during the heyday of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman secretly pondered their sex life. Was it super duper?! Was it better, stronger, FASTER?!?

Spiderman is a natural fetish object. After all, this is a man who shoots out white ropey strands of stuff all the time. The hysteria that greeted Fredric Wertham's 1953 Seduction of the Innocent is hard to imagine now, but Wertham's book with its insistence that comics were filled with lurid sex stuff initiated the Comics Code, which stated among other things: "Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at or portrayed. Violent love scenes as well as sexual abnormalities are unacceptable. A sympathetic understanding of the problems of love is not a license for moral distortion."

But Wertham's argument that "the muscular male supertype, whose primary sex characteristics are usually well emphasized, is, in ... certain stories, the object of homoerotic sexual curiosity and stimulation" seems pretty self evident. He also cited the homoeroticism inherent between "the mature 'Batman' and his younger friend 'Robin'."

Love, actually

But Raimi's version of Spiderman is more than a mere sex toy. The scene where he saves a train full of people, swoons and is gently caught and carried Christ-like hand-over-hand over the crowd, is lovely and somehow sexy. His naked face above the Spiderman costume prompts one of the passengers to remark "He's just a kid!" And he is. Tobey Maguire's open and honest face isn't conventionally handsome, and there's more than a whiff of dork about him, but somehow it all works. We all want to supercede our own geekdom and fly through the air. We all want to get the girl or the boy at the end of the story, and Mr. Maguire does it for us.

It's MJ who starts the suds in this soap opera. The scene where she finally sees that Peter Parker and Spiderman are one and the same is sweet beyond measure. It's not just about sex. Sometimes it's actually about love. Awwww…

Dorothy Woodend reviews films for The Tyee.