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by Erin ORiordan
Mainstream, 5 pages.
Originally Published in The Erotic Woman, 2007
(1) Rate this Story First, a confession: When I was three years old, I carried a Spiderman doll around with me everywhere I went. When I ate, Spidey had to sit at the table with me. The little Spidey outfit came off, and when I took a bath, Spiderman had to take one, too.
I haven’t had much interest in Spiderman since then. He seemed to fall outside my girly world. I didn’t plan on seeing the first film, and did so only thanks to the enthusiasm of my comic-book-crazed younger brother. I was a bit more willing to sit down and watch the second one, if only because of Alfred Molina. (I’ve had a slight crush on him ever since watching him try to seduce his wife by eating yogurt on the sitcom Ladies’ Man. Chocolat only sealed the deal.) To get me to the theater to see Spiderman 3 once again took the intervention of my brother.
Spiderman 3 was directed by Sam Raimi and written by Sam Raimi, Ivan Raimi and Alvin Sargent. The plot involves Peter Parker/Spiderman (Tobey Maguire) deciding to ask his girlfriend, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), to marry him. Naturally, obstacles of the supervillainish variety stand in his way: there’s the thief who killed Parker’s Uncle Ben, Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church), whose body has somehow become made out of sand; and an alien symbiote that takes the form of a black suit. The black suit first makes Parker do bad things, then changes hands and makes Parker’s rival Eddie Brock (Topher Grace) do bad things. Oh, and Parker’s best friend, Harry Osborn (James Franco) sometimes mistakenly believes that Parker killed his father, and tries to kill Parker.
Throughout all this chaos, one figure remains the wise, stable moral authority. She is the archetypical crone, the goddess of wisdom. That figure is Peter Parker’s Aunt May.
Played by Rosemary Harris, she is (or should be) the face of elderly feminine beauty, with her flawless skin and pretty hazel eyes. She gives Parker two important clues as his makes his way through the maze of his life. First, she tells him that if he wants to get married, he has to be willing to put his wife before himself. Again and again, we watch Parker do stupid, selfish things to his girlfriend Mary Jane. His plans to propose in a French restaurant come at a woefully bad time. He kisses another woman in front of her. He turns down her offer of help in a fit of anger. Only at the end of the film does he master Aunt May’s lesson of respect for marriage.
Parker does the same stupid, selfish things to his “best friend” Harry Osborn. When Osborn loses his memory, Parker withholds the truth. Later, under the influence of the black suit, which makes him more aggressive, Parker delights in attacking and seriously wounding Osborn. We watch as Aunt May’s truth about marriage stretches to include friendship: to be a friend, Parker must learn to put his friend first.
When Parker reports (wrongly) that the man who killed Aunt May’s husband Ben has been killed by Spiderman, he expects Aunt May to be happy, or at least to feel relieved. She doesn’t. Instead, she dispenses her second clue to the maze: revenge is destructive. “Spiderman doesn’t kill,” she says. Power is to be used to protect the innocent, not to punish the guilty.
With these insights, Aunt May Parker fits either of these definitions of the crone:
“ As the crone, the woman represents the Goddess of wisdom and prophecy... [and] contribute[s] invaluable insight and -- [End of Preview.]