Spider-Man: Welcome back Willem Dafoe
Why Did You Spill Your Beans? (In other words: Spoilers!)
No doubt many will say that Spider-Man: No Way Home was a good movie. Possibly a great movie…well, great by MCU standards which are not normal cinema standards. I mean this not in the way Scorsese says that they are “not cinema”, but in the way that the MCU operates in a way we haven’t seen franchises really operate in a long time. Typically, if a movie had a plot longer than a single film it was still more or less self-contained…unless it was clearly going to be multiple films but even then it’d most likely be a trilogy or a made-for-TV movie. Point is, you knew exactly how many films it would be. In other words, you knew when it would start and when it would end.
The MCU is not like that. It was once, and sometimes it is with certain films, but mostly it operates more akin to how Soap Operas or TV Dramas that are never getting canceled. They have long storylines, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t…but either way, it keeps going. I bring all this up not because it is important to my main argument, but because it is important in terms of context.
Spider-Man No Way Home might be the best movie because it understands something that only Raimi seemed to have gotten right in his first two movies (There is always word about how interference ruined the plans for the third, but we’ll leave that aside). A hero is only as good as his villain. We’ve seen a number of villains in the MCU, and lately, the trend has been the villain does not know they are a villain, rather they are making the right points, but their tactics or what they feel they need to do to go about this point is what makes them wrong. We saw it with Kilmonger, Ghost, Flag Smashers, and Thanos. That list seems rather small, but then you try to list the other memorable villains and the list is even smaller.
Enter GREEN GOBLIN.
I am going to post another warning, just in case. I AM ABOUT TO DROP SPOILERS! LEAVE IMMEDIATELY IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO READ THEM.
Ok.
So Spider-Man breaks the universe because he wants to be selfish and his ego places a certain demand for him to bend the laws to make it so (In a well-written movie this could be seen as the legacy of Tony Stark). Dr. Strange who is equally ego-centric is only all too happy to break the laws as he does it on the regular, apparently. Because he too is like Tony Stark, but with magic. They try to do the thing and the thing goes bad and villains from other worlds come in. Spider-Man decides that he cannot be the guy whose ego dictates everything. Deep Down Parker is a good guy, so instead of sending the villains back and going on, he wants to help them.
This is where Green Goblin gets so fantastic. The bit where he resurfaces after hiding within Norman’s subconscious, and snarls about the idea of being “fixed” is an amazing subtext. What if, quite simply he wants to choose evil? One can debate if Osborne is truly choosing or not, but the point is made. The very thing that makes him “wrong”, his monstrosity, is also what makes him him. If Peter is going to fix him, he is in a way, going to kill him.
At one point he snarls, “Peter, You’re Struggling To Have Everything You Want While The World Tries To Make You Choose." In this way, Green Goblin who is the wicked alter ego of Osborne (who at this point is the shell of a man, broken and just wanting help) becomes the voice of morality in the movie. Goblin forces Peter to acknowledge he cannot impose his will on the universe and fellow men and still remain a hero.
I don’t want to get all lit nerd here but in a way, Dafoe’s performance evokes Shakespeare from Much ado about Nothing:
…but I am a plain-dealing villain. I am
trusted with a
muzzle and enfranchised with a clog;
therefore I have
decreed not to sing in my cage. If I had my
mouth, I would
bite
And bite he does. Dafoe’s violence and malevolence is less about calculating and a goal as opposed to destroying Peter’s sense of self. This is what makes him so deadly in the story. Before this character, as I said villains had definite motivations, and most of them (the memorable ones anyways) thought themselves to be good. Norman Osborne is the first who embraces being a “plain-dealing villain” and just causes chaos and inflicts harm for the sake of it. He recognizes in the morality of Parker’s vision that he cannot coexist with this “goodness” and there is nothing to fix within him. He is right, this is not his universe and so his view of being a God, of power and the will to seize what is his…has no place in this world. He is not of it. What this changes for Peter in the MCU is he encounters a man who does not want anything other than to destroy for he has nothing to gain.
And you could argue he succeeds. He kills Aunt May, which drives Peter to unconsolable rage to the point where Peter is actually unable to stop himself from attempting to kill Osborne (all the while he maniacally laughs). He is only stopped by Tobey Maguire who having confronted Osborne and triumphed, understands this morality. But he too is stabbed. Peter then “cures” Osborne of the Green Goblin but the damage is done. Peter succumbed to temptation and though he was saved from the longer effects of it, knows what it means to indulge the hatred in his heart.
I know Disney logic will not let this stand, and you could argue Peter is still “pure”. But I prefer my interpretation that the Green Goblin wins, which is further continued when Parker has to give up his identity in a spell to undo his mistake. The Goblin wins. Parker is no more, no name of him remains and he has broken his own vows. Yes, he saved the world, and yes technically good triumphed. But the Goblin suggested from the beginning that he knew he was going to die no matter what, and so if he was going down he was going to take a hero with him.
I don’t want to inflate the Disney storytelling I feel much of this is implied by the gravitas and manic energy and acting chops of Dafoe, which is my whole point. From his perspective, this is the story of Paradise Lost. The MCU is forever tainted by this loss of innocence and while Disney might pretend otherwise…this is the first time we’ve seen the hero lose, and in many ways, that’s what makes this film better than its predecessors.
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