One of my favorite characters in The Spectacular Spider-Man is Flint Marko, AKA the Sandman: a small-time crook who gets turned into living sand by an unethical experiment at the behest of the crime boss, Tombstone. What’s interesting about him is that he’s not really a bad man at heart; he’s just a very small man. Marko was a petty thug whose whole life’s ambition was ‘a big score,’ an ambition that not only led to his getting frequently beaten up by Spider-Man, but also meant that he could be easily manipulated by the likes of Hammerhead, Tombstone’s number-two man. Marko is such a nobody in Hammerhead’s eyes, so easily pushed around, that he sometimes gets used as nothing but bait to trap Spider-Man. He’s just a simple, ignorant thug: a ‘mook’ as Hammerhead dismissively calls him.
After his transformation in the Sandman, Marko’s life still doesn’t improve. He’s more powerful than Spider-Man now, but his stupidity means that he still gets regularly defeated as Spider-Man is able to consistently outsmart him. He wins a couple battles, manages some successful robberies, but his ‘big score’ is still constantly out of reach…partially because Tombstone takes hefty cuts out of everything he steals.
It’s never explicitly stated, but the implication is that Tombstone and Hammerhead purposefully shorten Marko’s take to keep him hungry for more. Marko himself has no interest in their crime kingdom, or who rules New York, or even in taking down Spider-Man (which leads to friction between him and his friend, Alex O’Hirn AKA the Rhino).
This last point is interesting: most of the villains in the series have a personal grudge against Spidey, either because they blame him for their present condition (Electro, Vulture, Venom) or are sore from previous defeats (Rhino, Doctor Octopus, Kraven). Sandman has no interest in anything like that. “Revenge is for chumps,” he tells Hammerhead dismissively. “I don’t care about Spider-Man! All I want is a decent score.” Indeed, most of the time when they fight Sandman is content merely to knock Spidey around a little rather than actually try to kill him (though he’s certainly willing to do so if Spider-Man keeps pushing him).
He also is shown to have a softer side. At one point, seeing a little girl on the beach mocked by some bullying teenagers for her failed sandcastle, he uses his powers to turn the entire beach into a full-sized castle to cheer her up…a move that earns him a sneer from Hammerhead.
Basically, Marko is, for all his powers, a rather pathetic figure: chasing after something that will never make him happy and allowing less powerful men to use him for their own ends. He has no grand schemes, no ambition, and apparently no real thought for his future life: he’s like a dog chasing a fake rabbit while men who otherwise wouldn’t spare him a thought use him to line their own pockets.
In short, Marko is a lot like most of us: squandering our gifts by chasing after pathetic and illusory goals that place us in the power of other men. “Buy this and you’ll be happy…as long as you also get this expansion pack, this upgrade, this newer, better version…” “Take this medication and you’ll be happy…” Like Marko, we don’t see that we’re being had and that what we’re chasing after simply isn’t worth it: it’s not what will make us happy.
In particular, though, I’m thinking about sex. Sex is an amazingly powerful thing: it’s the creation of new life. The most expensive, well-funded laboratory on Earth can’t even do that yet. Not only that, but it’s the creation of a new soul: a new person. As Chesterton noted, every time someone is born, the world is created all over again. And then in addition it’s a unifying act, solidifying the bond between two people as almost nothing else does, to the point where Christ described those committing it as being “no longer two, but one flesh.”
But these days, what do we do with it? We use it to sell stuff and as something to do on a Friday night. We’re kept in a constant state of sexual desire by advertisements, media, and whatever else because, as C.S. Lewis pointed out, people in that state have very little sales resistance. We’ve been taught that sex is the greatest thing in the world, so we dump a hundred bucks to pretend to have it, or pick up a total stranger at a bar to spend an hour or so having a sterile, fun-park version of it.
What a waste. Something is simultaneously the greatest physical pleasure that can be had and among the most staggeringly spiritual actions that can be performed, and we use it as a game or a source of income. We’re chasing after the least part of something at the expense of the greater parts: a little like going to a high-class restaurant and only eating from the bread tray, or like Marko using his literally earth-shaking power to knock off banks.
At one point Spider-Man let’s the Sandman have it, calling him ‘pathetic’ for wasting his time on these stupid, petty jobs when he could be doing some real good with his powers. And he’s clearly right: Sandman is arguably Spider-Man’s most powerful foe (certainly he’s in the top five): if he wanted to he could probably dump half the other villains in the city on the steps of the nearest police station in about five minutes. His potential for doing good is even greater than Spider-Man’s. But he’s so caught in his narrow, ignorant mindset that he can’t see his own potential. A man who literally has no trouble stopping an oil tanker allows himself to be pushed around by a guy whose only power is a steel-plated forehead and doesn't even realize how pathetic that is.
But Marko isn’t completely hopeless. When faced with a crisis, he instinctively steps up to the plate. During the climactic fight of his final episode, the Sandman manages to accidentally trash the oil tanker he was supposed to be robbing. With fires raging and the tanker moments away from exploding (in the middle of the East River, which would presumably kill several hundred people at least), he looks contritely at Spider-Man and says “I was just in it for the bucks. I never meant for this to happen.”
Marko retains a sense of perspective which the other villains, like Tombstone or Hammerhead, lack. He may crave money, but there’s still a part of him that understands that there are more important things. Having endangered so many lives, he works to mitigate the damage, first getting the crew (and Spider-Man) off the ship, then surrounding it and absorbing the explosion, saving the lives of everyone in range at the risk of his own.
I think most of us, no matter how much we buy into the lies we hear about sex, still maintain a sense of perspective: the sense that it really should be more than just a game, just like however much we buy into consumerism we remain aware that there is more to life. Like the Sandman, we don’t always keep it in mind or articulate that knowledge, but it’s still there, and when things reach a crisis point that perspective is what saves us from becoming monsters.
Flint Marko is a fascinating character because I think most of us are more like him than we are Spider-Man: a little cynical, a little petty, convinced that we only need this one thing to make us happy while we squander the opportunities for happiness that actually come our way. We dream about greatness while we actually push aside our chances for greatness…but perhaps, when it matters the most, we'll take the chance to, as Spider-Man says, “score as big as a man can.”
No comments:
Post a Comment