David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

He’s not very knowledgeable about the world. He has trouble pronouncing the names of foreign leaders. He’s obsessed with losing those last ten pounds. He’s remarkably tongue-tied in public but supposedly relatively smart in private. He had a lower SAT score than most of his Ivy League classmates; so did I. He wildly overvalues the poetry in motion of athletes. He once said he couldn’t imagine what it’s like to be poor; I have trouble reading books by people whose sensibility is wildly divergent from my own. He wasted his youth in a fog of alcohol and drugs; I didn’t do this, but sometimes I pretend I did. He reads a newspaper by glancing at the headlines—more or less what I do. He loves to get summaries of things rather than reading the thing itself. He’s never happier than in the box seat of a ballpark. He takes way too much pride in throwing the ceremonial first pitch over the plate for a strike. He’s slightly under six feet tall but pretends he’s six feet. I’m barely six feet and claim to be six one. He’s scared to death of dying.

He was too easily seduced by Tony Blair’s patter, as was I. His wife is smarter than he is, by a lot. Asked by the White House press corps what he was going to give Laura for her birthday, he tilted his head and raised his eyebrows, conveying, unmistakably, “I’m going to give it to her.” (My wife’s name is Laurie .) He’s intimidated by his father’s friends. He can express his affection most easily to dogs. He finds the metallics of war erotic. His knees are no damn good anymore, so he can’t jog and has taken up another sport: biking (for me, swimming). He loves nicknames. He’s not a good administrator. He has a speech disorder. He views politics as a sporting event. He resents The New York Times ’s (declining but still undeniable) role in national life as pseudo-impartial arbiter. In a crisis, he freezes up, has no idea what to do, thinks first of his own safety; note how I responded to the 2001 Nisqually earthquake.

He just wants to be secure and taken care of and left alone—pretty much my impulses. Asked what he was most proud of during his presidency, he said catching a seven-pound bass. Asked in 2011 what’s on George’s mind now, Laura said, “He’s always worried about our small lake—whether it’s stocked with bass—because he loves to fish. There’s always some concern. It’s too hot. It’s too cold. Are the fish not getting enough feed? That’s what he worries about.” He’s lazy (it goes without saying). He hates to admit he’s wrong.

Every quality I despise in George Bush is a quality I despise in myself. He is my worst self realized. Asked what’s wrong with the world, G. K. Chesterton said, “I am.”

Negotiating against ourselves

Spider-Man , which I watched maybe a hundred times with my daughter, Natalie, then nine, when it came out in 2002, is about how important it is for ordinary boys to view their own bodies as instruments of power—which, incidentally, or not so incidentally, is what has allowed nation-states to go to war from the beginning of time. The names of the main characters in the movie are aggressively average, parodies of Mayberry R.F.D . ordinariness: Aunt May, Uncle Ben, Norman Osborn (who’s both normal and born of Oz), Peter Parker (who literally has a crush on the girl next door, Mary Jane Watson). The words “average,” “ordinary,” and “normal” recur throughout the film.

It’s high school and peer pressure is the state religion, so Peter has two choices: try to do what he tells his friend, Harry, spiders do—blend in—or he can stand out, which is terrifying. Even when he punches out the bully Flash, another kid calls Peter a freak. But as Norman/Green Goblin Nietzscheanly tells Peter/Spider-Man, “There are eight million people in this city, and those teeming masses exist for the sole purpose of lifting a few exceptional people onto their shoulders.” The Goblin crashes World Unity Day, killing dozens, whereas when he forces Spider-Man to choose between rescuing the woman he loves or a tram full of children, Spider-Man, of course, manages to rescue both MJ and the children. “You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us,” a Yo-Vinnie type informs Gobby. The movie thus figures out a way to deliver an immensely reassuring message to its predominantly male and teenage audience: the metamorphosis of your body from a boy into a man will make you not into a monster who despises the crowd but into the kind of creature whom the crowd idolizes.

When Peter gets bitten by a spider and begins turning into Spider-Man, Uncle Ben tells him, “You’re not the same guy lately: fights in school, shirking your chores. This is the age when a man becomes the man he’s going to be for the rest of his life. Just be careful who you change into, okay?” Peter’s flip from dweeb to spider is explicitly analogous to his conversion from boy to man. When MJ asks him what he imagines his future will be, he says, “It feels like something I never felt before,” alluding to becoming Spider-Man but also to his feeling of falling in love with her. Before he becomes Spider-Man, he wears his shirt tucked in—dork style. Afterward, he wears his undershirt and shirt hanging out. He can’t be contained. Neither can his chest, which is newly ripped, and his eyesight is now 20/20. The screenplay phrases male sexual maturation as the equivalent of stealing fire from the gods: “I feel all this power, but I don’t know what it means, or how to control it, or what I’m supposed to do with it even.” Asked by Mary Jane what he told Spider-Man about her, Peter says he said, “The great thing about MJ is when you look in her eyes and she’s looking back in yours and smiling—well, everything feels not quite normal, because you feel stronger and weaker at the same time, and you feel excited and at the same time terrified.” Teenage boys want to believe that the sex instinct trumps and transfigures the day-to-day world.

Which it does and doesn’t. The second time Spider-Man rescues MJ, she asks him, “Do I get to say thank you this time?” and, pulling his mask down past his lips, passionately kisses him, sending both of them into rain-drenched ecstasy. The script makes emphatically clear that Peter’s newfound Spider-Man prowess is onanistic transcendence: “He wiggles his wrist, tries to get the goop to spray out, but it doesn’t come.” He changes the position of his fingers. “ Thwip . A single strand of webbing shoots out from his wrist.” The webbing flies across the alley and sticks to the side of the other building. Peter tugs on it. It’s tough. He pulls harder. Can’t break it. He wraps one hand around it, closes his eyes, jumps off the roof. He sails through the air.” All three times Spider-Man rescues MJ, they’re wrapped in a pose that looks very much like missionary sex—Spider-Man on a mission. As Peter Parker, his peter is parked. As Spider-Man, he gets to have the mythic carnival ride of sex flight without any of the messy, emotional cleanup afterward.

Spider-Man is about the concomitance of your ordinary self, which is asexual, and your Big Boy self, which is sex-driven. Virtually every male character in the film worries this division. Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Norman Osborn/Green Goblin, of course. But also, when Uncle Ben changes the lightbulb, he says, “Let there be light.” When Peter fails to show up to help him paint the dining room, Ben writes a teasing note to Peter and addresses him as “Michelangelo.” The testosterone-intensive announcer at the New York Wrestling Foundation has a surprisingly understated side: “The Human Spider?” he asks Peter. “That’s it? That’s the best you got? Nah, you gotta jazz it up a little.” Even the “squirrelly-faced” burglar who steals the foundation’s money, and who later winds up killing Ben in a carjacking, mouths “Thanks” and flashes a sweet smile when Peter unwisely lets him by into the elevator.