DVD Review: The Amazing Spider-Man

I suppose it was OK. The odd thing about The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) is that I neither really liked it or disliked it.

OK, I liked it. The film was watchable and entertaining. I enjoyed it and would watch it again, but it wasn't "amazing" or "spectacular" or anything like that. It was just another superhero movie. It had its good points and its flaws.

Warning! Warning! Major spoilers ahead. If you're like me and waited for this film to come out in DVD before watching it (and you haven't watched it yet), I will give away a ton of secrets in my review. You have been warned.

I like that there was a mystery. So many superheroes get their powers by accident and I guess Peter did in this film too, but not quite by accident. In a way, his father created him.

When Peter Parker is four-years old, his parents suffer a home break-in. Someone specifically was looking for something in his Dad's office. Fortunately, Richard Parker hid the really secret stuff in a false bottom of his desk drawer (a trick older than Stan Lee, but the thieves still didn't tumble to it). Pawning little Peter off on his Uncle Ben and Aunt May, Richard and Mary Parker disappear into the night, never to be seen again. Later, Peter learns they died in a plane crash, but no one ever talks about it.

Richard Parker's work had something to do with cross-species genetics...and spiders.

It's interesting that teenage Peter Parker was interested in photography before becoming Spider-Man. In the original, silver age version, he started taking news photos as a way to support himself and Aunt May after his uncle's death. I found it particularly confusing though, when Peter webbed his camera to a wall to take shots of Spider-Man's battle with the Lizard, that the film had never established why he did it in the first place. In this movie, he is never shown to have a relationship with the Daily Bugle or making plans to sell his photos to them or anyone else.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Andrew Garfield did a very good job playing the geeky, socially awkward (to put it mildly) teenage Peter Parker. Of course, the audience has to get past the fact that all of the actors depicting high school students are really twenty-somethings, but we should be used to that by now. In fact, Garfield's Parker is so awkward, I found it amazing that the beautiful and quite articulate Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) ever found him attractive in the first place. Sure, Peter had just heroically tried to save some kid from being bullied by "Flash" Thompson (Chris Zylka) and gotten pounded into the pavement for his troubles, but that should have just made him look like a loser to most high school girls.

In some ways, I was more interested in Garfield's Parker than in his Spider-Man. It was very easy to see how Peter, abandoned by his parents over a decade before, was an alienated, malcontented, loner sitting on a lot of rage. He wasn't the "nice kid" that Parker was originally created to be by Lee and Ditko 50 years ago. Yeah, Garfield's Parker will stand up for the underdog, but that's because he is the underdog, not because he's intrinsically a nice guy. After all, at various points in the film, he blows off both his aunt and uncle, humiliates Flash Thompson just because he can, and even ends up on the school principle's "bad boy" list (although performing community service isn't such a "bad boy").

So you take all of that and give it "spider powers." What happens?

Oh, but wait. The mystery.

A water leak in the Parker home's basement leads Peter to discover his father's old briefcase that had been left to gather dust in some forgotten corner. Infinitely curious and desperate to know more about what happened to his parents, he examines the filthy old thing and, perhaps remembering the false bottom of his Dad's desk drawer, discovers a hidden pocket with a "secret formula." He also discovers a photo of Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), his Dad's former lab partner at Oscorp, and he aims himself in that direction to try and learn more.

By amazing coincidence, the day Peter goes to visit Connors at Oscorp, Connors is supposed to be lecturing new interns who are being taken on a tour of the place by (another amazing coincidence) head intern Gwen Stacy. Peter takes another kid's pass to get in (getting that kid subsequently thrown out) and gets his first look at Connors...and impressing Connors with his knowledge of cross-species genetics. It's the first time that the audience sees Peter has a brain built for science. It's never mentioned before this, and Peter might just have been another angry high school kid for the first thirty minutes of the film.

Speaking of amazing coincidences, Peter just happens to run into (literally) Norman Osborne's top henchman Rajit Ratha (Irrfan Khan) and sees that the folder Ratha is carrying contains the same "secret formula" symbols that Pete found in his Dad's briefcase.

Even though Peter has a stolen intern pass and has left the rest of the intern tour, no one seems to question him as he follows Ratha through the corridors of a private corporate building with lots of trade secrets and watches him manipulate a touch pad to open a door to some secret room. Two guys come out and go with Ratha but for whatever reason, Peter decides to stop following Ratha and to get into that room.

I must say that it was lousy security that let Peter gain access. No smartcard, retina scan, or voice recognition software was required to open the door, just a series of finger movements across the pad, which Peter saw briefly and remembered. And what was in that room? Just a bunch of spiders on webs inside some sort of machine. Naturally, Peter decides to touch and spiders fall all over him. He manages to get out of the room again without setting off any alarms but takes an eight-legged hitchhiker with him, which manages to "put the bite" on Peter's neck right before Gwen catches him and kicks him out of the building.

I should mention at this point that Connors later tells Peter that no animal subject of cross-species genetic experiments has survived, yet, once bitten, Peter seems to do OK. (Should I mention that Peter actually gives Connors the secret of his father's formula at their first one-on-one meeting, making the Lizard possible?) But then, Connors also tells Peter that it was his father's breakthrough with the spiders over ten years ago, that enabled the project to survive. Maybe that's why there was a special room with spiders. They were the only ones who could pass on their genetic traits to another species without killing that species. But why were Richard Parker's spiders (or more likely their descendants) still around at Oscorp and if they were such a breakthrough (even if Parker Sr. took all his research with him when he disappeared ... apart from one briefcase), why in over a decade, were no experiments done with those spiders that would have ultimately created another Spider-Man?

The spiders were there for Peter to get spider powers, then that was that. Bad writing.

The film spends a lot of time showing us how Peter develops his powers. He doesn't immediately decide to become a hero or an entertainer or anything else. The fact that he gained new abilities is cool and a terrific clue as to what his father and Connors were up to, but he didn't decide to do anything with them at all (except mercilessly tease Flash Thompson and shatter a basketball backboard) until his Uncle Ben is killed.

And yes, Peter could have stopped the killer and no he didn't and yes, it pisses him off.

But he doesn't become a hero yet, he just becomes a guy looking for revenge. Ironically, he never finds it. He busts a bunch of guys who kind of look like the murderer, but he never finds the actually guy. Maybe the shooter blows town after he blows away Uncle Ben, but we never find out.

In the process of refining his vigilante role, Peter first develops a crude mask and finally the entire costume. Smart as he is, he can't actually create a "spider web formula" as in the original comics, but he "borrows" some from Oscorp after becoming chummy with Curt Connors.

Which brings up the question of what happens when Peter runs out of his supply? The only place he can get more is Oscorp. Once Connors is put away at the end of the film, his only other way in is his girlfriend. Sure, he invents the shooters, but he has no ability to independently create more webbing.

It's little details like this that kind of bugged me (yeah, that's a bad pun).

Peter finally becomes a hero, not while fighting a bad guy, but by rescuing a bunch of people who the Lizard endangers by throwing their cars off a bridge. Peter's webbing is strong enough to suspend the cards from the bridge, but he only rescues one kid from one car. I have no idea how the kid got stuck in the car when his Dad made it out just fine. I have no idea why Peter didn't rescue anyone else from any of the other cars (and if they were all empty, why did he stop them from falling into the water in the first place?).

But in saving the little kid and seeing the father's gratitude, he gives himself a name and a more noble purpose.

Gwen's father Police Captain George Stacy (Denis Leary) was a jerk for most of the film but he was supposed to be. Peter's dinner with the Stacy family was a total disaster, but what teenage boy hasn't been humiliated by his girlfriend's father at one point or another. It was kind of cool to see the face of "Diego" (Ice Age films), though.

And how the heck doesn't Aunt May know Peter is Spider-Man? Her first clue is right after she and Peter watch Captain Stacy issue a warrant for Spider-Man's arrest during a TV press conference, Peter storms out of the house. May looks at him like, "what they heck is that all about." Later, when Peter comes home all banged up after his last battle with the Lizard, she looks at him, doesn't ask why he looks like he went ten rounds in the ring with Mike Tyson, and just hugs him. I tell you, that woman was smart enough to put it all together. She has to know.

By the way, I really liked Martin Sheen's Uncle Ben, especially when he's teasing Peter in front of Gwen and calls himself Peter's probation officer. Everyone needs an uncle like that. I was also pleased that Sally Field's Aunt May wasn't constantly at death's door. In the Lee/Ditko version (and later), May always has one foot in the grave and the other on ice-coated Teflon. At least this Aunt May is a fighter (although I get the impression she's a lousy cook).

Another thing I liked was that Flash wasn't just a two-dimensional bully. After Uncle Ben dies (and everyone at school knows), Flash tries to make amends. Sure, Peter picks him up and slams him against some lockers, but everyone, including Flash, understands why Peter's so angry and hurt. Just a nice little bit of realism.

Another nice bit of realism was Gwen confessing to Peter how afraid she was growing up, watching her Dad leave for work as a police officer each day, and wondering if he'd ever come home that night. How could she stand being with Peter if he insisted on being Spider-Man and going after the Lizard?

This is a nice echo (though the filmmakers probably didn't intend it as such) to Betty Brant, Peter's first girlfriend in the Lee/Ditko comics. They eventually break up because Peter's job as a freelance crime photographer (Betty never finds out Peter is Spider-Man) is so dangerous. Her brother was also some sort of thrill seeker and was ultimately killed because of it (actually, he was in deep with some thugs and couldn't pay them back the money he took and they killed him). Peter finally left Betty because he knew she'd leave him if she ever found out what he really did every night.

Why did Peter put "Property of Peter Parker" on his camera? Who does that? It was a lame way for the Lizard to find out Spider-Man's secret identity.

Connors survives the film, saves Peter's life in the end (after killing George Stacy) and goes to jail. I'd love to see his defense attorney's strategy. Technically, Connors was under the influence of a mind and body altering substance when he committed his crimes, so can the court really convict Curt Connors for what he did when he was the Lizard? Well, probably, since Connors injected himself with that stuff in an attempt to regain his lost arm. If a junkie shoots up and is high when he kills someone, he's still libel for the murder after he stops being high.

Promises you can't keep are the best kind. OK, it would have been a lousy promise to try and keep, and I don't really remember Peter agreeing to stay away from Gwen as her dying father's last request, but Peter just plain blew off the seriousness of a father's genuine love for his daughter and desire to protect her.

Lots of little interesting developments. Stuff for the future. Supposedly Ratha was pressuring Connors to begin human trails on cross-species genetics because Norman Osborne (owner of Oscorp and usually the Green Goblin) is dying...but we get no details on what's killing him and how the Connors experiments are supposed to help.

Does Peter ever go after the guy who killed his uncle again?

If Aunt May knows Peter is Spider-Man, what will she do about?

It's strongly implied that the plane crash that killed Peter's parents was no accident and that it was arranged because Richard Parker refused to start human trails on his formula. Connors is alive at the end of the film and has this knowledge, but will he ever tell Peter? If Peter finds out, what will he do, go after Norman Osborne? If Osborne wanted the secret of Parker's cross-species formula, why kill him? Why not kidnap his wife and son and hold them hostage (or some other equally evil plot) and force Parker to give up the formula?

And if Osborne wants human trials to begin now because he's dying, was he dying ten years ago when Parker also refused to perform human experiments, or was there another reason (like lots and lots of money)?

I understand that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is in pre-production and scheduled for release sometime in 2014.

Maybe we'll find out some answers then, and get a look at Mary Jane Watson...and maybe Electro.

Superhero Role Models, Part I

Today's media superheroes -- including Batman in The Dark Knight and the Hulk in Planet Hulk -- as well as the ''slacker'' characters often portrayed in TV shows and movies offer boys poor role models, says a University of Massachusetts professor who polled hundreds of boys up to age 18 to find out their favorites.

The poll results suggest boys hear two ways to be masculine, says researcher Sharon Lamb, EdD, distinguished professor of mental health at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, who presented the findings Sunday at the American Psychological Association's annual meeting in San Diego.

"One was the superhero image, created as someone who shows their masculinity through power over other people, through exploiting women, showing their wealth, and through sarcasm and superiority," she says.

Superheroes: Bad Role Models for Boys?

Superheroes, in the modern sense, have been around for over 70 years (Superman made his debut in Action Comics in June 1938). Every once in awhile, some expert or authority decides to criticize comic book and movie heroes as bad "role models" for the youth of our country/the world. On the other hand, if they were always good role models, they'd probably be pretty boring and nobody would read their comics or want to make movies about them (the Amazing, Spectacular Dali Lama!).

I thought I'd perform my own analysis because I grew up on comic books and have a love for their classic incarnations. It would be too difficult and time consuming (and my time is precious) to go through all the different permutations the various heroes have endured over the decades, so I'll try to stick as close to their original personas as I can. Remember, nothing's perfect, including heroes and this review.

Superman. I figured I'd start with the superhero. As far as role models go, you'd think he'd be the best. He's basically a boy scout in a cape, paying equal attention to saving the President's plane from crashing and saving a cat stuck up in a tree (citing the 1978 Superman film). He was originally an American role model (..."truth, justice, and the American way"), at least in the 1950s, but political correctness has resulted in expanding his role to be more "universal".

The dark side of this role model is that he isn't that universal. He was created in 1938 to appeal to the likely readership of the day, which were 12 year old white boys. Forget it if you were a girl or a person of color. Even his Jewish origins (Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster were both Jewish and modeled Superman on the concept of the Golem, a large, anthropomorphic being who overwhelmed problems with shear might and had the word "truth", in Hebrew, on his forehead) were obliterated to make him attractive to the majority of American kids in the depression era.

Superman does teach that you can have great power and manage it responsibly, never using it for your own gratification (like most of us would do in real life) by peaking through Lana Lang's bra when she's 15 year old (and what high school guy hasn't thought of the advantages of X-ray vision?) or conquering the world just for giggles.

He loves his mother, married his girlfriend, holds down a steady job and regardless of whether he's Superman or Clark, is always someone you can depend upon. On the role model scale, Superman gets an A+.

Iron Man. Originally, in the early 1960s, Tony Stark was a rich, handsome, millionaire playboy who just happened to make weapons for the military. One day, while strolling through Vietnam, he's injured mortally, captured by the bad guys, and in order to escape, has to invent Iron Man, to free himself and save his life...literally. The film version starring Robert Downey Jr, is pretty close to the original as far as origin stories go, except they make Tony much less clean cut, and more of a spoiled brat. The process of becoming Iron Man tempers him and redeems him from his "lost" image, though he doesn't exactly get a personality transplant.

Tony does learn that, dying with the most toys doesn't mean you win and what life really means is saving those people who you hurt, even if you didn't mean to. He's beat (or is in the continual process of beating) alcoholism and repeatedly puts his life on the line, risking a fatal heart attack every time he puts on the Iron Man armor, in order to help others. Joining the Avengers means he's learned to be a team player. Yeah, he's a thrill seeker and it's an emotional power surge just to be Iron Man, but he's a better person than he was before. No, not perfect by a long shot, but with just enough flaws to keep him interesting.

Iron Man comes in on the role model scale as a C+.

Spider-Man. Originally a shy and very smart teenager who could never make it with the cool kids and was always picked on. He got to live out every kid nerd dream by becoming physically powerful enough to pound the bullies, which is more or less what Peter Parker did back in the early 1960s. No, he didn't beat Flash Thompson to a pulp, but he did tell everyone to go take a flying leap into the toilet and, instead of immediately using his powers to become a hero, became a TV star. He probably would have gone on in that direction, having loyalty only to his aunt and uncle, except that his arrogance cost his uncle his life. That's what turned Peter around, but his life is hardly enviable.

Spider-Man is sort of the comic book world's version of a dog's chew toy. He always has one problem or another to overcome, but his shining virtue is, no matter how much he wants to give up on everyone and everything, he hangs in there, probably more for guilt's sake than anything else, but out of great suffering comes great perseverance, to twist a classic phrase.

As a role model, he gets his revenge on being bullied by beating up the bad guys and sending them to jail. OK, ok, he really does love his aunt, has girlfriends, but they either die or divorce him, gets mad at the world half the time, but manages to recover to do the right thing in the end. In some ways, he's the most "human" guy in this review so far. Stan Lee created a number of superheroes back in the day to break the mold of the "perfect person" hero, and it worked. Spider-Man was the poster child of this new hero...the guy the rest of us could relate to. Role model? Maybe not a perfect one, but Peter is a role model we can understand.

Spider-Man gets a B+ on the role model scale.

Last but not least (for this entry) Green Lantern. Hal Jordan was originally one of the most perfect of the perfect heroes. In fact, to get the power ring, you had to be. The qualifications were to be completely honest and completely fearless. That lets him out of being a politician right from the start. If Superman was the boy scout of heroes, Green Lantern was the police officer, but in the best possible sense. As he develops into the 1970s, we discover that Hal's "cop on the beat" take on life also makes him perfectly inflexible and his sense of "right and wrong" is absolute. Oliver Queen (Green Arrow) buddies up with him for awhile to teach him that life has infinite shades of gray.

Actually, you can't blame Hal too much. His bosses, the Guardians of the Galaxy (Universe...whatever) are just as inflexible and Hal has to teach them a few lessons, too.

Reinvented, Hal was a cocky, self-assured test pilot with a chip on his shoulder, put there by his old man who was even more "perfect". In the reinvented version, Hal gets the power ring but also a DUI and has to work off both, one in jail and the other taking humility lessons from master Green Lantern Sinestro, ultimately having to overcome his obsession over himself in order to take on the corrupt "perfect" Sinestro and take his place (eventually) as the galaxy's greatest ring bearer (OK, this side of Frodo).

As far as "super cop" goes, he makes a great role model, but like Superman, his clean cut white guy image made him pretty dated and unrelatable beyond a certain demographic.

These days, he isn't infinitely honest or fearless, but to use the ring, he does have to become the type of hero the ring demands. He's had his dark moments...like becoming Parallax and destroying everything to try and recreate the perfect world (that seems to be a reoccurring theme in his life), but goes through a series of salvational experiences and eventually is the Green Lantern again.

Green Lantern gets a B- on the role model scale, and given the fact that he's killed a lot of people (like the universe), that's generous.

I could go on and on, but this is an analysis that could be taken through a series of blog posts. My ratings are pretty arbitrary, but are superheroes really meant to be role models or are they strictly entertainment? Do kids really try to become like the people they read about in comic books or maybe the comic book heroes are becoming more like us?

Super Cowards

This isn't to put superheroes down, but don't you find it interesting that everyone who just happens to get superpowers turns out to be a hero or a villain? Good guys and bad guys...or gals. What if the person who got powers wasn't particularly courageous. Does getting powers automatically mean you have to do something either good or bad with them? What if you got superpowers?

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "If I got superpowers, I'd become a great superhero." Sure you would. I suppose if you became Superman or Superwoman or something, and your powers meant that nothing could hurt you short of kryptonite (and assuming you were the only superpowered being in the world, which means no serious challengers), it would be easy to have "courage".

You could dive into a burning building, rescue a bunch of people, and not risk getting burned or choking on the smoke. You could stop a bank robbery cold and if someone shot at you, the bullets would just bounce off your chest (sorry about the innocent bystanders who got hit by the ricochets). But what about other, less "perfect" powers?

Say, if you were bitten by a radioactive spider. Sure, Peter (in the origin story) went into entertainment and didn't think a thing about helping other people, until a bad guy he could have stopped but didn't ended up killing his Uncle Ben. If you suddenly had the proportional strength, speed, and climbing ability of a spider, what would you do with it? No, seriously. Not what would you fantasize doing with such powers, but what would you really do?

Would you make a costume and patrol the city by night? Chances are, you don't have the science and engineering skill to make web shooters, so unless you came by web spinning "naturally", as part of the process (like the Spider-Man films), you'd be out of luck there. Would you really dive into a burning building to save some kid, risking burns, smoke inhalation, and even death? Maybe you would. Most people wouldn't.

What if you were hiking alone on some nature trail and you happened to see an alien spaceship crash nearby. If you found a dying alien inside the ship and he gave you a green ring and a lantern to charge it with, then explained what they were and how to use them, would you really become Green Lantern and fight evil and injustice and dance on the ends of the Guardians' strings? Maybe so, maybe not. After all, you didn't ask for the responsibility. You didn't want the job. Why should you risk your neck?

Let's take a look at power rings for a second. You can't just activate one with a casual thought. It takes will power and lots of it. The original Hal Jordan GL had loads of will power but not a lot of imagination. He'd hit bad guys with giant boxing glove, made of green energy. He could fly. He could do anything...as long as he focused all of his will and told the ring what to do. It must have taken a lot of practice.

When Kyle Rayner took up the ring, the rules were different. No more 24 hour time limit on a charge. No more vulnerability to yellow. No requirement to be really honest or brave, which is why Kyle was chosen in the first place, but he grew into being a hero (and good thing he had a lot of imagination). Would that always happen with everyone, or would you toss the ring and the battery in the back of your closet the first time you got your butt kicked? Would you even try to go up against a bad guy or rescue people from a burning building in the first place?

Most people are OK to fly in an airplane, but if you really had the power to fly all by your little lonesome, would it freak you out? If you had spider powers, would jumping off a 50 story high building be even a little scary (this isn't the Matrix jump program...if you splat on the street, you really splat)?

Comic books are unrealistic because people can do impossible things in the comics. We overlook that because it's fun and it's entertaining. However, another piece of the unrealistic we never even think about is that, whenever anyone gets superpowers, no matter who they are or where they're from, they always make the decision, at least eventually, to become a hero or a villain. There's no in between. There's no one who decides it would be too dangerous. There's no one who even considers not making a costume, which always looks OK in comic books but almost always looks ridiculous in real life (put one on, go out in public, and see how people react, if you don't believe me).

One of the reasons superheroes don't exist in the real world is that various natural laws prevent people from getting a spider's natural abilities by being bitten by a radioactive arachnid. As far as we know, no aliens have visited our planet, especially ones with magic green rings to give away to the casual passerby. As far as we know, no alien from another planet has grown up on Earth and gets incredible superpowers just by working on his tan.

Another reason why there are no superheroes is, even if we severely bend the laws of physical reality, no one, or almost no one, who got superpowers would really do what we see people in comic books do...decide they have a moral responsibility to the rest of humanity to use those powers to help. I guess we'll never know if I'm right or not but consider one more point.

We do have heroes. A hero is someone without special powers who dives into a freezing river to help a Dad pull a kid out of a car that drove off the side of the road a minute ago. A hero is a firefighter who runs into a burning building, risking getting burned, choking on smoke, and even killed, to pull out someone who would otherwise die. A hero is someone who joins a group of passengers on a hijacked aircraft to stop the hijackers from crashing the plane into a populated area, dying in the attempt. These heroes are ordinary people. These heroes are your neighbors, co-workers, family, and friends. One of these heroes could even be you. What made them heroes wasn't any special power. What made them heroes was that, when the circumstances called for it, they put whatever fears they may have had aside and made a decision to make a difference.

I could be wrong. Maybe getting superpowers would be like one of those circumstances, but the situation wouldn't be comic book nice and neat. Your life and the people whose lives are in danger aren't just two-dimensional characters on the printed page. They're real. You're real. Powers or not, you may face a situation where you have to decide if you can make a difference. Your name won't be Clark Kent or Diana Prince. They're just examples of what the best of us could be. We're the real life expressions of who we are and the hero we could possibly become.

What if you got superpowers? You probably never will. But that doesn't mean you won't ever have a chance to be a hero. When your chance comes, what will you do?

Don't Let the Blues Make You Bad

Times when I know
you'll be lonesome
Times when I know you'll be sad
Don't let
temptation surround
you
Don't let the blues make you bad
-From the Song "We'll be Together Again"
by Carl Fischer and Frankie Laine

I've been thinking about how sadness, grief, and depression can sometimes be expressed as anger, rage, and vengence. It seems almost justifiable to commit any sort of violent act and blame it on some tragedy in our lives. How many people have been injured or killed by some university student not happy with his grades or some employee who had just been fired? We see it expressed in our fiction and fantasy and it even seems sort of acceptable.

Bruce Wayne's parents were gunned down during a robbery. Their young son Bruce was allowed to live, but had to watch his parents be executed, right before his eyes. Over the long years between a mournful childhood and becoming an adult, vengence and justice waged a battle for Wayne's soul and the result twisted sideways to become Batman.

Peter Parker was a tortured high school student, brilliant, but shy and unathletic, the target for bullies. Having few friends, and with his parents having died years before, he was only loved by his Aunt May and Uncle Ben. When Peter was accidently gifted with extraordinary abilities from the bite of a radioactive spider, he used his newfound powers to become an entertainer for profit and to thumb his nose at the rest of the world. When he discovered that his own arrogance resulted in his Uncle's death, he changed his mission to one very similar to Wayne's, though not quite as dark. Still, he's perpetually driven by guilt and remorse, and can never put down the mantle of the spider for as long as he lives.

Frank Castle's family was also murdered, in this case, by "the mob" to eliminate their testimony as witnesses to a gangland killing in New York's Central Park. In some ways, he's the most brutal example of how personal disaster can turn someone into a terrifying vigilante. Coercion, extortion, kidnapping, and even murder are not beyond the man who became the Punisher. Need I go on?

Everybody experiences some shadow of these feelings, at least briefly. The kid who is punched by the school bully on the playground feels momentary rage at the pain before fear takes over. Secretly, he nurses fantasies of pummelling and humiliating his tormentor, but as the months and years pass, the fantasies fade away and the kid eventually finds his own competancy and validation, and no longer needs to dream of punishing those who hurt him.

It seems to hinge on the level of pain and the ability to let it go. Grief never completely vanishes, but it manages to allow itself to drift into one of the back closets of our consciousness, only making a reappearence on an anniversary or the experience of a similar event. Most people can live with that process. Some people can't...or won't, as we see in the film Batman Begins.

No, *this* is your mask. Your real face is the one that criminals now fear. The man I loved - the man who vanished - he never came back at all. But maybe he's still out there, somewhere. Maybe some day, when Gotham no longer needs Batman, I'll see him again. -Rachel Dawes

At first, Batman was an instrument of Bruce's need to retaliate against the force of evil that killed his parents. Even though (in the film version) Joe Chill had died years before, the process that created Chill and victimized the innocent still thrived. Batman was the expression of Bruce's response to that process. At least at first.

In the sequel The Dark Knight, Bruce pins all his hopes for putting down the mantle of the bat and leading a "normal" life on District Attorney Harvey Dent. Dent was the White Knight to Batman's Dark Crusader. If Dent could be as effective at quelling the tide of crime in Gotham in the courts as Batman was in the shadows, Bruce could finally give up his mask (or his "face"), and journey from darkness into light.

But when the moment came, Bruce found that he couldn't do it. He couldn't give up the Bat. It had worked its way into his soul years ago without Bruce really noticing. Of course Dent gave Bruce the "out" when he "confessed" to being Batman, but that's because both men told themselves they could never surrender to a murder's extortion plot. But was that really the truth?

It seems that once grief and pain drive our anti-heroes into the vengeful identity of a costumed warrior, there is no turning back. Many times even death doesn't stop them. In the comic book version, while Bruce Wayne wasn't actually killed, Darkseid sent him so far back into the past, that no one could reasonably believe he'd ever return. Now, we are about to see the 6 issue saga of The Return of Bruce Wayne across the long millennium, from the era of prehistoric man to Pilgrim-era to western to pulp detective, as Bruce struggles to regain the present.

The mask asks so much of all these people. There will always be one more villain to defeat. There will always be one more injustice to fight. There will always be one more victim to avenge. When is it enough? How long will rage and guilt continue to erode the soul and spirit until you can put down the costume forever, one day die at the hands of some criminal, great or small, or turn into this:

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. -Bruce Wayne

Wayne never considered that, after the night Dent died (assuming he did die and isn't being held secretly in some locked and hidden cell in Arkham), he could just give up being Batman. Let Batman be the villain Gotham needs and let Batman "die" so Bruce Wayne could finally live.

All the times Peter has tried to give up being Spider-Man, circumstances or fate dictated otherwise. Would the Punisher ever consider that his job was ultimately complete, and let others take over the role? I suppose they'd give up if all crime were ended but unlike any individual war, where your goal is to get the enemy to lose hope and surrender, there seems no end to crime, terror, and evil.

What makes one person give up hate and blind pain and another person surrender his or her soul to the abyss? The title of this article and the lyrics I quoted are from a song called We'll be Together Again. While Billie Holiday may be more associated with this song, many famous vocalists have sang it over the years. This morning, I heard a version sung by Lena Horne as rendered during a 1994 performance at New York's The Supper Club.

The final lines of the song probably make the difference:

Some day
Some way
We both have a
lifetime before us
For parting is not goodbye
We'll be together again.

If you have hope that there's something beyond the pain and loss, you can go on. If hope eludes you, or you refuse it, then you remain in the shadow of your pain, continuing to serve its dark desires. Lena Horne had a similar period but she finally came out of the shadow:

Her father, her son and Hayton all died in 1970 and 1971, and the grief-stricken singer secluded herself, refusing to perform or even see anyone but her closest friends. One of them, comedian Alan King, took months persuading her to return to the stage, with results that surprised her.

"I looked out and saw a family of brothers and sisters," she said. "It was a long time, but when it came I truly began to live."

-From Ms Horne's obituary

Ms. Horne overcame not only the shadow of death, but of racism and injustice as well. In many ways, she's a greater hero than Batman or Spider-Man, because she put away the mask and went on to walk in the sunlight.

How long you or I continue to walk in the shadows may be a matter of choice, too. Not that it's easy to overcome.

Vengeance blackens the soul, Bruce. I've always feared that you would become that which you fought against. You walk the edge of that abyss every night, but you haven't fallen in and I thank heaven for that.
-Alfred Pennyworth
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm

While Bruce, Peter, and even Frank walk the edge of the abyss and even occasionally fall in, we sometimes walk the same line. Our lives are likely not as dramatic and certainly not as adventurous or dangerous as theirs, but the damage to our souls can be just as severe if we allow it. Without hope, we are slaves to the shadow, battling for justice and for ourselves every day and night. With the hope "that we'll be together again", we can find the courage to put away the mask, and the faith to live and to trust that whatever we need to do, we can do it without hiding.