Everybody hated “Spider-Man 3.”
That’s only a tiny exaggeration — as slight as one of those wispy filaments leaping out of Peter Parker’s wrist — because a record number of people bought tickets and then found the film confusing, depressing and dull … except for a single magnificent scene. That scene — in which Sandman (Thomas Haden Church) emerges out of whirling grains of grit — is a perfect metaphor for the cultural mood as we head into the autumn of 2007.
Like “Spider-Man 3,” the world is a mess. It’s bloated, incoherent, threatened by melting glaciers and heating passions — yet from that muddled midst arises something bright: a search for beauty. In literature, in film, in television, in so many of the arts, beauty is back.
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“A fully realized painterly vision that testifies in its fullness to the goodness of life,” writes Mary Gordon in her new memoir, “Circling My Mother” (Pantheon, 2007), “has become for me a repository of faith and hope.” The success of films based on graphic novels, such as “300,” with their richly sumptuous visual feel, and the aesthetically themed reviews of the iPhone and its elegant modularity, reveals a deep longing for beauty.
Yet a distant war still rages. The world seethes and roils. Isn’t all this blather about beauty a bit like admiring the chandeliers on the Titanic while the lifeboats are lowered?
“Ah, but in such an ugly time,” wrote the late folk singer Phil Ochs, “the true protest is beauty.”