Oh come on! Spider Man 3 as a vehicle for class warfare?

You guys did this for Casino Royale and Superman Returns as well. Why is the Mises Institute trying to ruin all my trips to the movies?

The broken doorknob is there for one reason and one reason alone: So that we can see Peter Parker freak out over it as a vehicle to display the influence the “black suit” is having over him.

The reason we are made to be sympathetic with Sandman is because the theme of the movie is forgiveness (Mary Jane and Peter Parker forgive one another, Spiderman forgives Sandman, Harry forgives Peter, Venom is destroyed by his inability to forgive Spidey/Peter). It has nothing to do with “class conflict”.

And lets not try to pretend for a minute that J. Jonah Jameson is anything but comic relief. What about the scene where Peter utilizes his market power to get the staff job?

Finally, both Norman and Harry Osborn are portrayed as initially good and admirable people, who are driven insane, Norman by an undue chemical intake, and Harry by some sort of lingering presence that hasn’t fully been revealed to the viewer yet. Neither is shown to be evil in connection with their wealth. What about Harry’s loving friendship with his butler?

I love capitalism, and I loved Spider Man 3. There is no conflict between the two.

Ben-T, your note is funny, thank you. The film is pure entertainment, and the essential socialism of the Spider-man genre is not dogmatic. It is just a leftover, and barely audible. For a contrast, Batman is capitalistic. I’m not arguing anything that is not already standard fare in literary departments; I’m only reversing the judgment.

Yes, I thought of mentioning the choice theme at the end. It struck me as perfunctory coda, an artifice that had no bearing on the rest.

Sometimes I don’t know what to make of Mises.org articles. Yes, Capitalism is a very good thing. Yes, all economic stratas are better off then they were a generation ago, and much more so when one goes just a few generations back.

But then again, we have not lived in a Capitalist system. We’ve lived in a Socialist system where the “prosperity” seems to have more to do with slippery notions as to what equity is, the average citizen spending beyond their means because they assume that ultimately the social safety net will catch them (the $50 Trillion accrual basis must have some impact on the average psyche as people regard it as an asset). The current prosperity has been bought via a glut of debt and unfunded promises that can’t hope to be paid off. Granted Capitalism certainly would have provided a greater over all wealth, allocating resources toward their best use as filtered through the dynamics of uncoerced individual choice. But could it ever provide the hysterical consumption we have (I’m not a kneejerk anti-consumerist, just the fact that people are overspending on short term instead of a balance between current spending and saving)? Socialism necessarily creates a misallocation of resources which we see all around us.

How does this come about? Because people think they deserve all the toys they want today, and tomorrow’s expenses will ultimately come from the cornucopia of D.C. Class resentment has been balmed with hard reallocations and soft promises, the middle class is now at the trough of entitlement, savings as at an all time low, people can’t measure just how much house they can afford, it seems very few people are building any real equity, and the government is up to its eyeballs in debt as well. Given the huge amount of debt and unfunded promises, any equity one has built up is really nothing more than a loan callable at any time.

So, it would seem that Socialism is alive and well, justifying all sorts of interventions and handouts, keeping the wolves at bay, and bureaucrats are living high, and those who desire to build real equity are chased into a corner. And the appearance of fabulous wealth is only being bought by the misconception that one productive “pie” can be served up twice. And when it can’t, we’ll be at crossroads, either we truly allow the market to perform, or we’ll have a much more hard-line Statism than we have today. I doubt very highly it will be the former.

So, in reality, I see a world of class resentments still flourishing. The average person doesn’t give a healthy crap about what Capitalism has done for them, they see the handouts and the ledger book of future promises due them, and we are only an economic shock away from hardline Statism. That’s what I see. I see a stunted form of Capitalism, if it can be called that at all, and a dire misallocation of resources. Leftism is not a dying notion, it is alive and well and getting stronger. When the Republicans/Rightists are about where Kennedy was 40 years ago, and the likes of Ron Paul are marginal candidates that no one will ever really know, I’d say the purveyors of Classism, Statism, and Socialism have all but won.

Basically I can’t call the Bacchanalia of Socialist Misallocation the fruits of Capitalism.

Simply put, people like Spider Man so much because Peter Parker IS so weak and powerless. He could be any of us, but hes also a high-flying daredevil crime-fighter. That makes the character more interesting and more appealing.

This is a theme as ancient as myths themselves, and a lot older than the Old Left.

what’s funny is that this ideology is being expressed in a blockbuster with a huge corporately funded budget. But i guess you could say that about pretty much any left leaning hollywood movie

I’d like to see a review of Jackie Chan’s movies please …

The apparent difficulties of Peter Parker in the comics seem written to appeal to less socially skilled kids who could identify with the main character’s weaknesses and who had a strong sense of “justice” (possibly revenge) being on the short-end of the stick because they were shy. One the one hand is the fantasy of breaking free, on the other, the reality of continuous failure: identification from both sides of the fence.

Peter Parker is in fact more successful in these movies early on, as they are supposed to have broader appeal than comic books and there’s a lot less sequels …

Interesting article, although you could point out how Spider-Man tells Sandman at the end about how we all have a choice or how Harry Osborn ended up saying to hell with “class consciousness” when he helped save Spider-Man at the end or even his own butler/servant who even admits to having loved his father and him the same way that his friends love him. Also don’t forget that one of the villains was Venom, a member of the proletariat too. Being a huge fan of both Spider-Man and Murray N. Rothbard, I feel as if I’ve got to come to a defense somehow.

>But he gets not justice: he still lives in a dingy, dumpy, broken-down apartment >and can barely pay his rent. Whatever job he happens to find, he loses rather quickly. Bosses are arbitrary and uncaring.

That’s not socialist propaganda, that’s pretty normal for entry level journalists.

>He complains that the door on his apartment doesn’t work right, but he doesn’t think to hop over to Home Depot and pick up a new knob.

The knob doesn’t break until late in the movie, until then, the door gets stuck in the door jamb. It needs to be rehung. That’s a bigger job than just changing the knob.

>He has to use a payphone to make calls when he could just Skype (actually, it is rather interesting: I can’t recall any computers in the film at all).

If he doesn’t make very many calls, it may be more cost effective in the short term. Maybe he can’t afford a few hundred for a computer and $50/month for broadband. Maybe it’s boring to watch people sit at the computer in a movie, so that’s glossed over.

>He keeps selling his photos at below market rates, without thinking to offer them to a newspaper besides the Daily Bugle.

Again, a pretty normal experience for an entry level creative worker. Not to mention, it seems only the tabloid rags want superhero pictures that badly.

>His girlfriend can’t get a break either. She lands a singing job on Broadway but (we saw it coming) she loses it rather quickly. Even though she is beautiful and talented, she ends up having to wait tables in a jazz club.

That’s not socialist proaganda, that’s a pretty normal experience for an actress.

>Spidey’s Aunt is in a similar situation, always on the verge of some economic disaster. None of this makes any sense unless you are willing to buy into the old socialist view that the capital owners are running everyone else into the ground via some kind of logic of history.

What world are you living in where you think a retired housewife, a photographer, and an actress aren’t going to have trouble with money?

>The Sandman might steal, kill, and destroy with impunity but if you focus too much on these facts, you are blaming the victim!

Or maybe… the writers were just trying to make him a more complex, believeable character, instead of a mustache-twirling, cookie-cutter villain.

>Tellingly, Spider-Man 3 has a period in which Harry and Peter are genuinely >friends. In this period, Harry is sincere, charming, and truth telling. How does >this come about? Harry has lost his memory, enough such that his class >consciousness is changed. His is temporarily freed from his attachment to wealth >and class. Once he recovers his memory by looking at an image of his father, his >nastiness comes back again.

I guess you could look for far-fetched subtexts, but though the movie sets up their class difference, there really is no class conflict. The audience can draw their own conclusions. They get along fine. I think the real issue behind their struggle is the Osborn family history of schizophrenia. The mind-altering mutagen gas doesn’t help either.

>Not that any regular viewer would recognize any of the underlying ideological dynamics at work here.

Am I a regular viewer? I have a degree in art, working on a degree in anthropology. I’ve taken many film study classes. I see the subtexts you are talking about, but I don’t think pointing out real class differences is the same as socialist propaganda.

>Peter Parker is never shown shopping at Wal-Mart for example.

There’s no Wal-Mart in New York City.

>What should concern us is the destruction of the environment, the exploitation of cultural minorities, the hidden costs of industrialization, and even such bogeymen as warm weather.

All of which are largely caused or ignored by the pro business libertarians that mises.org is written for.

Jeremy,

Venom attempted to exploit peter parker in order to rise out of the proletariat and join the bourgeois.

Strange that people have so internalized the elements Jeffrey Tucker describes that they are unable to understand the significance.

I think you’re conflating the loser with the socialist. Not all losers are socialists, but all socialists are losers. Given that Parker is a total loser (except for his sense of humor?) who gains super powers, it’s easy to make the mistake.

Lol what a great article. I didn’t see the allegory of the old left in the theater, but I thought of the same economic discrepancies while watching it. I mean, seriously, Peter Parker could open up his own Spidey-newspaper (and pay someone else manage to it to not arouse suspicion) with the kind of pictures he has and make a killing against his competitors. Mary Jane could run advertisements of her shows in that paper, have enough investment power from all they profit they save so she can take acting classes to get really good. Knowing Parker he would give a bulk of his profit to Aunt May, who would have so much to build a few Churches and preach forgiveness and love. I should send this blog to the producers before they begin spiderman 4.

ahh, if I only I was bitten by a radioactive spider….

Yes, Capitalism would be nice, it we tried it. But even a cursory examination of D.C. politics and the Federal Reserve should dispel any notion that what we practice is truly Capitalism.

This and many recent Mises Daily Articles commit the rather embarrassing error of conflating American “democracy” and “capitalism” with the ideals, thus confusing many issues just as badly as socialist or communist thinkers often do.

Hazlitt’s critique of Keynes was very clear that economic theories are like scientific hypotheses in that they can only model a simplified reality. Many of your recent authors have completely forgotten this crucial distinction.

For a young non-jewish white male in New York City whose family is working-class, Parker has only this chance: either become a male prostitute or marry into a wealthy family. Tucker seems naive about the fascist structure of today’s economy and the imminent economic disaster most people face: the very fact that Parker is able to survive in New York City at all, is as wildly fictional as TV’s “Friends” being able to afford that apartment (in the 10 years of that show I believe rent control was never mentioned once), but Tucker thinks he’s doing inexplicably poorly.

But what about his webs, daring, superpowers, etc.? In today’s world, he might be able to struggle on the professional skateboarding circuit. Might (assuming he successfully ingratiates himself with the right people over the course of about 8 or 9 years). Even assuming an “overnight success” (which do not occur), he would blow everyone else away so egregiously, it would not be merely envy he inspires, but determined efforts to positively exclude him as bad for the sport (unless the owners figured out a way to replicate the spider bite that gave him his superpowers, and these powers went on sale like steroids). Not to mention what the government would like to do to him, in terms of experiments etc., once it had his social security number from the skateboarding gig.

I find the movie very economically realistic. Actually, like most Hollywood movies, it is *over*glamorous in its portrayal of people’s economic struggles. There is no WalMart in New York City, Jeff, and replacing a doorknob yourself in a rented apartment is frowned upon.

This article did not convince me of the benefits of capitalism, but it did impress me with the triviality and naivety of this site.

I’ve been preaching “Liberal” season for a decade so don’t take me for one.

But I saw the movie, and yes it was at times hokey, even embarrassingly silly, it was still entertaining, like a comic book. No I don’t read them anymore and was never a big spiderman fan anyway. He was alright but I preferred superman and Kamandi, my favorite. Probably don’t remember him do ya?

Anyway, usually I’m into analysing stuff I watch, but when I watched spidey’s latest I just didn’t read all that much into it. It was pretty much vintage as you said. Butttt….. as Jesus Christ said, “The poor you shall always have with you.”

I asked my grandmother once what the great depression was like. She just looked at me like I was crazy and answered: “Depression, what depression? We were already poor.” She did talk about ‘that dry year’ on occasion.

The point being that as much as I despise the authoritarianism of socialism et al neither do I have blind love for the capitalists so-called.

Yeah, capitalism has improved society, but the bottom line reason the commies in whatever form, and they’re still out there by the gazillions as evidenced by the copy of the weekly world news or whatever I picked up in “Liberal”ville the other day, is that most or at least many of the capitalists don’t care if the rest of us live or die as long as enough of us show up to work on time, do what we’re told and never ask inappropriate questions.

I drove a truck for several months last year, as a kind of last ditch effort to find a way to maintain my rural home without having to be a wage slave to the local 8-10 buck an hour shit jobs we have around here in podunk because of, you guessed it, NAFTA. The only way to make ‘the good money’ driving a truck is to do stupid illegal shit. By that I mean put in 11 hours or more a day behind the wheel, with little exercise or recreational time to be had.

I didn’t do that, I’m not someone’s truck part or ‘human resource,’ a term that should be outlawed by the way. So my checks ranged from 400 plus to around 700 a week after uncle sugar and the other vampires stole their share. A friend drives old school. He clears 1000 a week but often goes sleep deprived, gets a shower every other day or so and gets no exercise.

Yeah, we’re luckier than the truck drivers in Africa, who don’t have interstates, truck stops, sleepers, and who have to dodge militias, wars, etc. But the point is that after watching my mother go to the factory for nearly 20 years 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year to sew t-shirt sleeves I thought things would get better just as they had for her generation, who left the farms with their long days in the hot sun for the factories.

(Oh, and my mother died of cancer in 1976 or she would probably have still been at the factory when it shut down and moved to mexico about 10 years ago.)

But it doesn’t seem to be working that way. Maybe I’m just not mindless enough to do what I overheard a woman in a neighborhood bar tell a friend last year, that she had worked 20 years in a local factory and had never gone anywhere on vacation.

Sometimes the “Libertarian” attitude seems to forget, or ignore, that their ideals are kind of like the articles the mainstream press does on the costs of child rearing/education. They usually quote astronomical figures that only apply to the upper middle class or rich and ignore that most kids are raised on bologna and trips to the swimmin’ hole.

Maybe you can help me out here?

I’d like to know how after Wal Mart puts it’s super centers in all three neighboring towns we’re going to manage if something happens to Wal Mart and it’s delivery systems?

Right now I’m just trying to find a part-time job that pays me enough to show up. But most employers want to own their ‘human resources.’ They have to ‘provide coverage’ and keep that truck on the road with no consideration for the personal dreams, lives of their ‘human resources.’

And the sheeple put up with it, even encourage it. My driver trainer, a retired engineer, got home less than 20 days a year, a generous estimate, to his wife, 5 kids and grandkids. But then I got the feeling that they were glad he was absent so much, as he was an admitted workaholic.

He complained to me that he was mal treated in the corporate world. He said that if he had been in charge he would have been able to ‘make their employees enjoy coming to work each day.’

What a joke. Only a tiny percentage of people have employment that is anything beyond a ‘job,’ a place where they go to waste their time in exchange for money. Very few have work that they gain any satisfaction from other than a paycheck.

For some it becomes an addiction. I saw that out on the road. Some drivers live for ‘the load.’ Gotta get ‘this load’ or ‘the next load.’

My 50ish cousin did 30 plus years for a fan belt factory in a town 30 miles away, spending his vacations cutting firewood and digging ginseing for extra money while raising two kids. Now he works in the Toyota plant in the neighboring town as an assembly line part. I hear they are very insconsiderate of their workers. One position almost guarantees that their forearms have burns on them.

Maybe I’m drifting here. But I don’t see how it’s necessarily better for a global corporation to own the local grocery store than a local family. No, neither may really care if I live or die, but at least I can go get in the local guy’s face and give him a piece of my mind.

I can get on Walmart.com and leave them a message I guess, which I’ve done, after a local manager in training had the audacity to call me at 10:30 at night at tell me it’s against their ‘corporate policy’ for me to hand someone a business card in their store. I had made the mistake of mentioning to their photo lab ‘associate’ that I do wedding photograpy.

I won’t repeat what I told the manager I spoke to. But I did call her back after she hung up and called her some more cute names for being stupid enough to repeat such corporate bullshit to me.

As far as I know they haven’t changed their policy, which goes against all common sense.

And treating people like ‘human resources’ goes against all common sense as well. That’s how the commies gain ground. It’s easy to tell poor people they’re being abused when they really are.

And please don’t tell me I need to develop a ‘more positive attitude.’ That plus two quarters won’t get me a cup of coffee now a days.

let me know.

A poor Peter Parker is poor only by lack of imagination. In the comics, Parker perfects his fathers formula to make the web material, a formula which itself would be highly valuable, and could make the Parker’s rich. Movie Spiderman is in an even more enviable spot. The webbing comes exclusivly from his own forearms, a natural monopoly in the purest sense. Parker could just spin raw web everyday in a empty warehouse space and sell the material to textile companies who should be able to develop tons of uses for the cheap, lightweight, remarkable strong material. If he wanted it to be known that this was Spiderman’s own webbing, he could probably charge a premium.

Spiderman/Peter Parker is poor by choice.

Ben-T, the story of Sandman is presented in loving detail in the film, precisely to make the viewer sympathetic to him. Venom shares the class interest of Sandman, so of course he repeats the story.

I realize this is way late for a comment on this article, but I missed the article when it first ran and I happened to see Spider-Man 3 this weekend, so…

I believe Ben-T’s response pointing out that forgiveness is the major theme, rather than class warfare, is absolutely correct. I’d just like to add that, in the case of Peter Parker forgiving Flint Marko, it is total forgiveness, in the Christian sense of loving one’s enemies, that is being portrayed. The film clearly shows that forgiveness is not just for the benefit of the forgiven, but for the forgiver – notice how happy Peter is when he finally forgives Marko? This is not just Christian, but rational – why waste your limited time on earth wallowing in hatred and making yourself mentally ill? This film is a breath of fresh air among an endless parade of action films that glorify revenge.

And in no way did I ever get the feeling that telling the story of Sandman’s origin was an attempt to justify the murder of Uncle Ben. In the same way, I never got the feeling that Ron Paul was trying to justify he murder of 3,000 people on 9/11 when he mentioned during the South Carolina debates that years of violent intervention in the Middle East was a contributing factor. Examining the influences on someone’s life can help explain why a choice was made without justfiying that choice as morally correct.