This morning between midnight and 02:00 Eastern, I saw Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3. 1 The film weaves together storylines from the Spider-Man comic book and graphic novel sagas (both largely unfamiliar to me).2

One story arc in the Spider-Man saga involves an extra-terrestrial symbiote that insinuates itself into one of Peter Parker’s Spider-Man suits. The symbiote magnifies the darker aspects of Parker’s personality and in the film this magnification takes the form of 80s-era Gothic dress and an urban kinaesthetic style which at times is fully within the realm of blackface. Parker’s skin becomes noticeably paler, his hair darker and hung over his eyes. Parker also seems to wear hair-thin strokes of eyeliner on his lower lids. His clothes and appearance are playful references to Robert Smith’s look in the early 80s. However, Parker’s mannerisms and bodily comportment are pure blackface.

He dances with his hips in a manner more characteristic of jazz and swing dance than the upright postures more closely associated with European kinaesthetic forms.3 He swaggers down the street, shooting at the women he passes with a thumb-and-forefinger gun. Parker struts, preens, ogles, and spins, pimpin’ for the pretty mamas of midtown. He thrusts his pelvis in the air, hand up to his head. A black extraterrestrial has darkened Parker’s looks, dress, and style chromatically and racially, and the spectacle is funny (or nauseating) in the way blackface can sometimes be in mainstream media (think, for example, of Dr. Evil’s and Mini-Me’s jailhouse dance routine in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.) But this is the “happy” side of blackface.

In an article currently under review (if those editors will ever get back to me!), I refer to Lisa Nakumara’s analysis of the racialization of computer interfaces in The Matrix Reloaded. Nakamura applies Sander Gilman’s methodology for analyzing race in European painting to study how race is used in the cinematic representation of computer interfaces. Nakamura comments on the docking of the Nebuchadnezzar, where viewers see “a transparent screen, from which [they] peer at the absorbed and enrapt white user, while a marginal black figure who looks in a different direction lingers on its margin” (135). Nakamura reads the representation of virtual interfaces in frames that foreground white actors and relegate non-whites to the edges as “visual anchors of darkness that symbolically [fix] white interface users in real reality versus virtual reality” (134). An entirely different racial logic informs a cinematic technique used in Spider-Man 3 which I will call subliminal blackface horror.

For a film derived from a comic franchise, Spider-Man 3 takes pains to develop the emotional range of the narrative, sometimes with anomalous results.4 In one scene, Harry Osborn emotionally manipulates Parker and Parker abruptly leaves the coffee shop. Parker crosses the street and looks back to Osborn inside. Osborn turns and (in slow motion) gives Parker a leering grin and a disingenuous wink. A truck sweeps from frame right, obscuring Osborn. Once the truck has passed, Osborn is gone and replaced in the screen’s center by a dreadlocked black man in a business suit.5

The audience in this moment is emotionally identified with Parker who has just witnessed his best friend express sadistic pleasure in betraying him. The cinematic frame then erases the perpetrator of the black-hearted act and replaces it with a figure who is literally and racially black. My argument is that the frame swap not only draws upon viewers’ negative associations of blacks to emphasize the anxiety produced by their identification with Parker, but also that the swap forges an unconscious association between (in this scene) betrayal, heartbreak and blackness. In other words, this scene cinematically engenders unconscious racism in its audience.

It will be a few months before I can acquire a copy of this film, which I recall having perhaps half a dozen such scenes where negative emotional outcomes between white characters are immediately followed by frames that have black people at their centers. This is not to say that the representation of blacks (the most prevelant non-whites in the film) in Spider-Man 3 is limited to moments of subliminal blackface horror. There are many scenes in which blacks seem to be portrayed neutrally and even positively. However, my intuition and memory lead me to believe that a significant number of scenes which depict emotional trauma in the film make use of this technique, and I can’t stop wondering what frame-by-frame analyses of the representation of non-whites in the film will reveal.