• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

  • DC Guides
    • DC Events
    • DC New 52
    • DC Rebirth
    • Batman Guide
    • The Sandman Universe
  • Marvel Guides
    • Marvel Events
    • Captain America Guide
    • Iron Man Guide
    • Spider-Man Guide (1963-2018)
    • Spider-Man Guide (2018-Present)
    • Thor Guide
    • X-Men Reading Order
  • Indie & Licensed Comics
    • Spawn
    • Star Wars Guide
      • Expanded Universe Comics (2015 – present)
      • Legends Comics (1977 – 2014)
    • Valiant Guides
  • Drag
    • Canada’s Drag Race
    • Drag Race Belgique
    • Drag Race Down Under
    • Drag Race Sverige (Sweden)
    • Drag Race France
    • Drag Race Philippines
    • Dragula
    • RuPaul’s Drag Race
    • RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars
  • Archive
  • Contact!
You are here: Home / Personal / off-topics / people / elise / In which i attempt to review a movie, but in actuality do no such thing.

In which i attempt to review a movie, but in actuality do no such thing.

July 1, 2004 by krisis

There is a certain romance to a love unrequited. That’s what we are taught, what has been ingrained in our heads since the days of cartoons with their eternal suitors, never suited, and in books and films where the protagonist strives but never to have.

And then there is Spiderman. Spider Man. Stupid red and blue comic hero who, truth be told, i never liked very much. He caught my childhood attention as a cartoon because he was smart, and witty, and had my name, but he never played a favorite in my world of superheroes. I eschewed his toys. I rarely bought his comic. But his movie. How could i resist his movie?

Overwrought, overly animated, amateurishly directly, but oh that acting. Tobey, sweet Tobey who i’ve hated in every role he’s ever played because in reality i suspect i don’t like him at all, he brought poor Peter Parker to life in front of my eyes. Peter, me, that space that we’ve always shared inside of my head.

It wasn’t really Tobey, though, not at all. It was Mary Jane.

Mary Jane, a big-haired, ever-changing cipher in the comics, once upon a time so patterned after a certain Julia that Ms. Roberts seemed all but cast in the role. Yet, times change, and people win Oscars for terrible boring movies with no momentum, and Peter remains eternally youthful. And so, you see, it could not be Julia.

That cipher was rewritten, scripted into the house next to Peter’s with the awful never-seen father yelling from within, eclipsing – nay – supplanting Gwen Stacey to ensure that this re-imagined Mary Jane Watson was and could be the one and only ultimate love of Peter’s life.

This changed the nature of Peter, and Spiderman. He stopped being the underdog – he never let Gwen fall off of that bridge because he saved her (as MJ) in the first movie when she was – by comic book rites – supposed to plummet to her death. And he killed Green Goblin in the process. What a debut.

Really, they had no choice. If they had killed the father-figure and the girl it would have been too punishing and, after all, they weren’t about to bring Uncle Ben back to life. Dead Uncle Ben is the cornerstone of all things Spidey. But, Peter was supposed to have lost so many things, to have lost Gwen and to be afraid to ever love anyone else again. So, to make Peter the eternal underdog, they withheld Mary Jane. Teased us with her adoration, baseless, lacking foundation, but so tangible in the ever-hurt eyes of the estimable Ms. Dunst, and proving her to be ultimately unattainable at the end of the first film in that crushing, crushing scene in the graveyard.

I may have liked Spiderman 2 less than I liked its predecessor. Raimi is a hack, with his horror conventions and his guest stars. It had its comic book moments, but it was also too heavy handed, never funny or fierce enough. Tobey as Peter worked only so much as Tobey as an everyman, and Dunst as MJ was limp. Lifeless. Not the headstrong MJ of the 300s of Amazing Spiderman.

What was perfect, undeniable true, was that longing. That always wanting, never having, delirious joy in seeing, pain in saying goodbye. The tension. The tension was true Spiderman, tearing him and her apart at once, weakening him in its strength and strengthening her in her resolve. It was the dramatic backbone of the first film, and the entire skeletal structure of the second.

It was all in Kirsten’s eyes. She took the girl, the too-perfect blind date oft-pushed by good old Aunt May in the comics, and turned her into something altogether different. Symbolic. Real. There could be no Spiderman without this Mary Jane. She was as instrumental as poor dead Uncle Ben or that nameless robber and ever-suffering May. In the cinematic universe, she had been woven in so tightly, so close to the center, that Spiderman could never exist without her. In her absence, he could do nothing but unravel.

Kirsten brought tears to my eyes in every scene for being that perfect thing – that unrequited, unobtainable love, eternally romanticized and forever untouchable. Only movies show us that touch, thrill us with that perfect kiss or that glimmer of recognition in her eyes, pools of unwavering truth and belief, frightening in their realness in every scene she plays.

I have had a crush on Kirsten ever since she played against Mr. Cruise. I fancy that i look a bit like him sometimes, sans snaggled tooth, i think because that would put me closer to her. The flowergirl in my father’s wedding was perfectly little and blonde, like her, and i juxtaposed the two in my fantasy-life until high school as the girl who played my unrequited love, unsuspecting but strangely dedicated to the eternal leading-on of me.

I feel sometimes that i live to be lead on. Did i get into the right college? Did i get the part? Did i get the job? The thrill was never in the answers, but in the anticipation. This site is about anticipation; it is my endless anxious wanting to know but loving the wanting and the not knowing, the delicious tension therein. My writing, at its finest points, is searching for something just outside its grasp, trying to attain the unattainable, to pen a sketch of an infinitesimal gap between me and something or someone else that at that frozen moment in time i cannot, and will not, ever have.

Kirsten’s eyes drew tears in my own, half drunk and staring at the screen, because in Spiderman she is it. She is my crush. She is the juxtaposition, the wanted but never had, the just two steps away. Maybe i should have acted. Maybe i should be in film. We are the same age, Kirsten and i. I could be her leading man.

We all aspire to have the perfect, filmic ideal, but we so rarely do. Now, staring into my twenties, i see joy in the successes more modest, and the achievements actually had rather than those merely anticipated. I suspect, nay, predict, that my lips will never touch Kirsten’s, in reality or as the wanly beautiful Mary Jane Watson. She, and the woman she played in the movie i did not like but eminently enjoyed, are the perfect representation of that unrequited love.

And then, at that teary wishing-it-was-me-in-the-ripped-up-suit-saving-her moment, i looked beside me, and realized that i have it. Her. That thing, that never attained thing, too perfect so that it can be endlessly redescribed by the imperfections that we call art. I remember the scant days between courting and kissing. I hid them from this website almost presciently, as if i knew that in describing the agony of the indescribable tension that i would eventually have to admit that i had overcome it, turned it from dreamed to dreamt. It’s on another page in a different place, and i rarely hint at it at all to this day. But I love Elise, love our stupid quirky banter from computers across the room more than i could ever imagine loving that unrequited, untouched tiny Kirsten-thing in my head. I reject the imagined perfection. Because, no matter how perfect our imagined life might be, how could it be better than what i am living right now?

I did not like Spiderman 2. You should go see it, and for every contrived moment, or bad shot, you should think about Peter, Peter Parker, and how he wants such simple things but goes to such extraordinary lengths in his not having them. And you should want to be him, swinging high above New York at twenty-four frames per second, twenty-four hours a day for all of your life. And, then, you should realize that like any art, Peter is a glistening imperfection, endlessly torn between want and have so much that we are drawn in droves, record setting droves, to watch him flail between the two, a gossamer moth torn between the Sun and the Moon.

You should go see it, and realize that your life is a higher art than art, because it is crystalline in its perfection, alive instead of celluloid, yours instead of everyone else’s. And you should leave pleased.

Related posts:

  1. Review: Amazing Spider-Man, Vol. 4 – Graveyard Shift, by Slott, Gage, & Ramos
  2. Review: Talking Is Hard – Walk The Moon

Filed Under: elise, essays, flicks, reviews, Year 04

Previous Post: « RE: You Rock
Next Post: Next Post »

Primary Sidebar


Support Crushing Krisis on Patreon
Support CK
on Patreon


Follow me on Twitter Contact me Watch me on Youtube Subscribe to the CK RSS Feed

About CK

About Crushing Krisis
About My Music
About Your Author
Blog Archive
Comics Blogs Only
Contact Krisis
Terms & Conditions

Crushing Comics

Marvel Comics

Marvel Events Guide

Spider-Man Guide

DC Comics

  • New Comics & Collected Editions: Marvel Comics – September 20, 2023
    Catch up on newly-released comic books and collected editions from Marvel Comics September 20 2023, with guides to every title & character! […]
  • New for Patrons: Guide to Monica Rambeau – Photon, Spectrum, & Captain Marvel
    It's time to shine a light on a Guide to Monica Rambeau. She's been Photon, Spectrum, & even Captain Marvel. Read EVERY issue in order. […]
  • Guide to Avengers (1963-1996)Updated: Guide to Avengers (1963-1996)
    Happy Anniversary to Marvel's Avengers! To celebrate I rebuilt my definitive guide to Avengers (1963-1996), including EVERY issue & collection. […]
  • Silver Age X-Men GuideUpdated: Silver Age X-Men Guide
    I've updated my definitive Silver Age X-Men Guide to collected editions of the earliest X-Men comics, including a new Penguin Classics & Taschen editions. […]
  • Guide to Conan the BarbarianUpdated: Guide to Conan The Barbarian
    I've overhauled my Guide to Conan the Barbarian to celebrate the release of Titan Comics' new Conan the Barbarian series written by Jim Zub. […]
  • Avengers Inc. (2023) #1 by Al Ewing & Leonard Kirk, released by Marvel Comics September 13 2023New Comics & Collected Editions: Marvel Comics – September 13, 2023
    Catch up on newly-released comic books and collected editions from Marvel Comics September 13 2023, with guides to every title & character! […]
  • Guide to Birds of PreyNew for Patrons: Guide to Birds of Prey
    Who are the Birds of Prey? Learn what cast members define one of DC's signature team with my Guide to Birds of Prey! […]
  • Fantastic Four (2022) #11 released by Marvel Comics September 6 2023New Comics & Collected Editions: Marvel Comics – September 6, 2023
    Catch up on newly-released comic books and collected editions from Marvel Comics September 6 2023, with guides to every title & character! […]
  • It’s gonna be May! Oh, wait, it’s ALREADY May…
    Hello, friends! Unfortunately, my non-CK life and […]
  • Drax GuideDrax Guide – now available to the public!
    Learn how the MCU merged several incarnations Drax into Dave Bautista's hyper-literal warrior with a vendetta agains Thanos in my Drax Guide! […]
  • Guide to GamoraGamora Guide – now available to the public!
    My Gamora Guide will help you find every Marvel comic starring Thanos's adopted daughter and the most dangerous woman in the galaxy! […]
  • Drag Race España Season 3, Episode 2 – “Drag Vision” Review & Power Rankings
    The queens of Drag Race España Season 3 make a collective stumble in this "Drag Vision" choreography challenge, earning the ire of the judges (though it's the kindest ire you'll ever see). […]
  • Star-Lord GuideStar-Lord Guide – now available to the public!
    Get ready for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 with my Star-Lord Guide, including every comics appearance of Marvel's TWO distinct Star-Lords! […]
  • Drag Race Sverige Season 1, Episode 8 – Sweden Grand Finale, “Queen Delicious” runway, & season retrospective
    It's the Drag Race Sweden Grand Finale! Our final three queens put their spin on an original song and walk a final "Queen Delicious" runway alongside their eliminated peers. […]

Content Copyright ©2000-2023 Krisis Productions

Crushing Krisis participates in affiliate programs including (but not limited to): Amazon Services LLC Associates Program (in the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain), eBay Partner Network, and iTunes Affiliate Program. If you make a qualifying purchase through an affiliate link I may receive a commission.