LOS ANGELES – Lois Lane is in constant need of rescue by Superman. Batman’s various girlfriends always require saving.
In “Spider-Man 3,” girl-next-door Mary Jane once again is used by villains as bait for the web-slinging superhero, who also has to rescue another damsel in distress with whom he has a flirtation.
Forget Kryptonite. Are women the real Achilles’ heel for superheroes? Would these caped and masked crusaders be better off as loveless loners?
“Absolutely,” said Sam Raimi, director of the three “Spider-Man” movies featuring Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane and Tobey Maguire as Spidey.
“In fact, that’s the path that Tobey’s character, Peter Parker, chose at the end of the first picture,” when Peter decided that with his Spider-Man alter ego, he had to avoid personal intimacy to protect those he loved and to do his job well, Raimi said. “Unfortunately, it’s hard to live up to that ideal, and in the second picture, he weakened and wanted a life with her.”
Laura Ziskin, one of the producers of the “Spider-Man” movies, said Peter ultimately found he could not live without Mary Jane.
And Raimi found something he could not live without in a “Spider-Man” movie, Ziskin said.
In the first movie, Raimi had Mary Jane dangling from a bridge for Spidey to come and save her. In the second film, she’s tied to a pole and being sucked into a red-hot miniature sun. In the third one, two of the movie’s villains suspend her from a giant web to lure Spider-Man into their trap.
“Sam loves putting a sexy girl in a tight-fitting outfit, hanging from something,” Ziskin said.
They may be easy on the eyes, but these women in peril certainly make for a harder day at the office for superheroes.
Their jobs would be easier without such emotional ties, said Bryce Dallas Howard, who plays Gwen Stacy, a competitor for Spider-Man’s affections, in the new film.
“It’s heartbreaking for that reason,” Howard said. “He’s always having to go and save the girl, then everybody’s always kidnapping the girl. When my husband saw the movie with me a few days ago, he turned to me and said, ‘Mary Jane’s been through a lot.’ “
But if Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and their superhero brethren were just invincible loners, without friends or other connections to the real world as they went about the business of rounding up bad guys, who would care about them?
“In the comics, the easiest way to bring real life into the life of the hero is to give him a spouse,” said Avi Arad, another producer on the “Spider-Man” franchise.
“In the comic books, the woman is the other world that represents all of us, and she is there to support, she is there to demand, she is there to observe and to make you think of her as an ambassador of the rest of us,” said Arad. “Otherwise, there is never a personal story to bring all of us into the room.”
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