Love, Inexorably
Why is it so hard to love and be loved?
I may be a bit all over the map. I'll try to stay on track, but if I don't, please forgive me; I really do try to have a destination sometimes.
I liked Spiderman 3... for the most part. It was not nearly as good as Spiderman 2 and not as good as Spiderman 1, but it was decent enough for a superhero movie. But right now my goal is not to examine its good and bad points. Rather, there was a strong theme throughout the movie, and this is it: love is strong enough. No, this is not some cheesy passionate love story about one man fighting his way through an impossible battle in order to rejoin his beloved. Rather, it is the force of a God-like love reaching to the unlovable and bridging the chasms that false loves create. At the end of the movie, when Spiderman forgives Sandman, you could cut the tension at my screening with a chainsaw (and the noise of said chainsaw would have been a welcome distraction).
Plain and simple, the act of forgiveness made people uncomfortable. "Wait, wasn't that guy just the size of a city block? Didn't he kill your uncle? Didn't he try to kill you? He deserves to die." And, granted, the rules in superhero movies hold unswervingly that he should've died (the exception here is in the Batman movies; in those, they just lock them up in an Asylum [because Gotham doesn't really have a prison, anyway]).
But Spiderman lets him escape. Spiderman gives him the opportunity for grace, and Sandman takes it. The love and forgiveness in this movie are not perfect. As my friend pointed out, no one in the movie ever apologizes for their actions; they just assume that everything is taken care of, and we as viewers are to assume the same. (This sort of thinking seems to support the love quote that drives me so crazy, "Love means never having to say you're sorry."
This is one of the most ridiculous love aphorisms I've heard, as love often means saying you're sorry more, and sometimes even when you are not at fault. :/
The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does a woman want?" - Sigmund Freud
