In "Spider-Man 3" the superhero's frightening dreams become reality.
Always in the public eye, your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) must display his good side everyday to the adoring masses. Not allowed to have any human weaknesses – despite the fact that he is indeed human, merely bitten by a radioactive spider – he keeps his darker side hidden in order to uphold his place as a crime-fighting superhero. The only exception is in his dreams, where he relives the terror of fighting enemies and losing those he loves.
An Evil Alien Force
In Spider-Man 3, Peter Parker (a.k.a. Spider-Man) goes to sleep in his red and blue superhero costume, but awakens wearing a different costume after a fitful night of dreams about his uncle’s murder. The new black costume symbolizes the evil alien force that has taken over his personality, exhibiting his hidden dark side with feelings of rage, resentment, and revenge – all the aggressive tendencies he normally represses.
As Peter drops his guard only while sleeping, it’s the most logical time for the alien force to invade his body and mind. Spider-Man awakens to find himself in an unfamiliar place wearing an unfamiliar costume, which make him unsure what is real and what is a dream. Waking up on the side of a building, he exclaims, “Where am I? This feels good. This is something else!”
Something else indeed. In Spider-Man 2, his girlfriend, actress Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), describes Peter as an empty seat in the theater. Only we, the audience, have glimpsed the real man behind the spider as revealed through Peter’s dreams in the first installment. Like thousands of other films, the Spider-Man series uses dreams and fantasies to provide us with privileged knowledge of the characters. In the first Spider-Man, Peter endures nightmares of his painful transformation into an arachnid. In Spider-Man 2, however, he becomes more contemplative, questioning his seemingly inescapable destiny during a fantasy sequence in which he communicates with his dead uncle.
An Unexpected Insight
In the second film, the fabricated dream that Peter tells his physician delivers an unexpected insight: When necessary, Spider-Man will manipulate others to get what he wants. He symbolizes the hero within each of us, but there’s a little something of the villain there, too. Peter visits his doctor when his super powers begin to short circuit. In keeping with his penchant for disguises, he converts his real-life dilemma into a fictitious dream for the doctor to interpret. In the dream, Peter is Spider-Man, but inexplicably can no longer climb walls. The doctor says maybe he wasn’t meant to climb walls. Maybe he wasn’t meant to be Spider-Man.
When Peter presents his literal truth as a figurative truth, he tricks the doctor into giving him advice. This narrated “dream sequence” reveals a darker side of the superhero. Relating real dreams makes him vulnerable; relating fraudulent dreams lets him stay in control. In Spider-Man 3, we see how troubled our superhero behind the mask has become.
Since the beginning of moviemaking in the late 1800’s, dream sequences have been popular devices because of the shared belief that every dream is packed with psychological significance. We’ve come to expect those foggy, match-dissolved, slow-motion, blue-tinted dream sequences as soon as characters close their eyes. When a movie dream is described rather than shown, it’s usually a fabrication meant to deceive and manipulate.
In Spider-Man, Peter’s dreams are revealed as he hides the truth. In Spider-Man 2, he hides his dreams as he reveals the truth. In Spider-Man 3, we see that Peter has run out of places to hide. Until he takes off all his masks and balances his good side with his dark side during his waking hours, Peter will remain an empty seat in Mary Jane’s theater.
For more information about dreams on film, read Dream Images in Paprika and Films of Ingmar Bergman.
