The Spirit

It's been awhile since we were discussing Eisner and his works in class, but the film adaptation of Eisner's The Spirit showed up in my mailbox today thanks to Netflix, and I just had to watch it during a break from working on a midterm. Said midterm is driving me a bit nuts, so I apologize if my thoughts seem scattered. Anyway, something in the movie really struck me and so I changed my topic for my second blog for the week.

We briefly discussed the Spirit comic in class, and I did read a pop-up book of The Spirit, as mentioned in a previous blog, but other than this I have no other point of reference for the comic series itself, as I have never read them.  I appreciate that in some ways because usually the film is a disappointment if you love the comic or the book or whatever is being adapted into film. On the other hand though, I felt like the movie was created assuming the viewer was familiar with the comics and the characters, and lacked in good character development. For at least the first half of the movie (or more) I was more often than not confused about who was who and what was going on. With that said, I still enjoyed the movie.

Thanks to this class, even though I was only watching the movie for entertainment purposes, I found myself trying to find Jewish themes in the story and the imagery. Unfortunately my nearly constant state of confusion was making it difficult to focus on the subtle aspects of the movie, but then a symbol showed up that made the subtle irrelevant anyway. The Swastika. I'm not entirely sure if this happened in the original comics or if this scene was an addition for the film, but it was a striking scene none the less.

In the scene The Spirit arrives at the location of The Octopus' hideout after having been lured there by Silken Floss. She injects him and knocks him out. Eventually, The Spirit awakens and we see, as he looks up, a statue with a swastika. Then The Octopus appears, dressed up in Nazi garb and, I believe, invoking the image of Dr. Mengele. Which, for the scene, is a perfect comparison between the two. The Octopus and his medical experiments, carried out on innocents (dogs and cats), is revealed to The Spirit, to be the reason for both of their states of being, that is, The Spirit's re-awakening from death and both of their ability to heal themselves so quickly that they can't easily be killed. Dr. Mengele is of course famous for conducting medical experiments on innocents (Jews) during Nazi Germany. And while The Octopus' achievement with The Spirit and subsequently himself, is impressive, we are also shown other, not so appealing results of his experiments and so we know that while genius for sure, The Octopus is most certainly an evil genius. Like Dr. Mengele, he learned things through his experiments...but at too high a price.

The Octopus has many different themed costumes throughout the movie, but I didn't really think anything of it until this scene. A quick google search on the subject provides enough evidence to suggest that perhaps these costumes were not actually a part of the original comic, but none the less, it seems to me to be a very interesting and thought provoking choice. I'll have to watch it again to think deeper about the other costume choices and their respective scenes, but if it wasn't for this particular choice and reference to the Shoah and Nazi Germany, I probably would have brushed the costumes off altogether.