"How are Heroes and Villains represented in films, with special reference to the movie Spiderman"

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“How are Heroes and Villains represented in films, with special reference to the movie Spiderman”

Spiderman 2 is a Hollywood film directed by Sam Raimi, depicting the lives of Peter Parker with his alter ego Spiderman (Tobey Maguire), Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) and Peter Parker’s professor Dr. Octopus (Alfred Molina). Peter Parker the protagonist of the film illustrates the drawbacks of the duties that he must achieve to ensure innocent people remain in sound health. Although the writer (Stan Lee) of Spiderman uses a linear narrative he also introduces a “love triangle” between the three characters and represents realistic scenarios in the narrative. Spiderman portrays real life situations that the audience can relate to, while also including unrealistic properties of the protagonist that the audience aspire to; this covers a broad audience of potential viewers.

Each character in Spiderman reflects a different view of life from an individual prospective. Spiderman, represented as a consistent, confident and bold figure who is shown to have set aims and targets, these characteristics go hand in hand with his duties to save people and the audience aspire to be like Spiderman however Peter Parker owns a parallel life, and lives insecurely as a student who divides his own life between people he considers to be important, thus unable to complete tasks and results in his life becoming unorganized. Mary Jane, is represented as the damsel in distress, she is a helpless figure portrayed as a weak, vulnerable female in a patriarchal society that is used as a token woman to be saved by Spiderman. Dr. Octopus a character who is represented as a professor of science, he is shown to have created a revolutionary invention, and exposed in a ‘Hitler’ like fashion.

Spiderman the movie is rated 12+, this instantly shows that the movie involves sexual content, bad language and violence. This certificate immediately sets the standard of the audience that it can be shown to; this film obviously targets itself to a male audience due to the masculine nature that the film consists of. Because of this certificate Spiderman can be represented as a scholar’s movie, although its historical reputation has given Spiderman a huge advantage with the target audience, as they are now able to target older generations of Marvel fans who are dedicated to the institution and will watch the movie due to this fact.

The Marvel institution represents ongoing binary oppositions between heroes and villains, they have used this repertoire of elements through out, along with other films such as X-Men. X-Men have a narrative structure to depict the lives of mutants (heroes) and humans (villains) and shows the backlash of which the mutants strike against their opponents. Thus like Spiderman, Peter Parker has a backlash against the sincerity of his heroism.

The Marvel institution which focused on fantasy characters in the 1940’s only established characters such as Spiderman in the past 20 years, therefore Marvel have had to use generic conventions from past narrative structures that had been used. Because of the huge success of Spiderman, this was one of the first films to be produced by Marvel based on a fantasy character; consequently conventions had to be compromised with those used in comics that were published by Marvel. This represents where the director Sam Raimi had to extract his ideas from for the religious Marvel enthusiasts to feel comfortable with.

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The heroes and villains in the film Spiderman follow basic conventions of ideas that cause friction between them both although, the film uses different aspects of the protagonist, Spiderman, to ensure the audience is able to relate with the character individually. This is done by introducing Spiderman’s alter ego, Peter Parker. Peter Parker is represented as an insecure, student with low self esteem, through out the film he is portrayed as a simple individual who causes no harm to others and premeditates a daily routine to stick by for which his insecurity is protected. In the first scene Peter ...

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