I will discuss Bruner’s canonicity and breach, as it pertains to the movie Spiderman (2001).
Brief Synopsis of the movie Spiderman:
Spiderman is a live-action adaptation of the popular Marvel comic book story. The movie has spawned two sequels. The first Spiderman movie tells the story of how the main character, Peter Parker, becomes the superhero, Spiderman. The movie begins with Parker, an awkward/nerdy New York City public high school student attending a field trip to the Science Department of Columbia University, where they were creating a super species of spider. Parker of course is accidentally bitten by one of the freak ‘super’ spiders and is fundamentally changed into the superhero, Spiderman. The story progresses with Parker/Spiderman struggling to conceal his alter identities, all while he is between jobs, school, and protecting New York from all sorts of ne’re-do-wells. The antagonist in the movie is the ‘Green Goblin’, who is the father of his best friend, Harry. The movie concludes with Spiderman saving the day and the Goblin unwittingly killing himself.
Analysis:
Canonicity refers to what in a story represents the normal and conventional. Canon represents everything in a story that the reader would expect to see and hear that does not necessarily need to be explained in the story. In this writers opinion a breach in the canonicity represents an event in the narrative that does not conform with what would perceived as normal in the context of the story or canon. The breach in canonicity allows the story to skew away from the normal and conventional while maintaining it’s believability.
In the film Spiderman, the normal world and the characters in the movie would represent canonicity. For the case of this movie, the location is New York City, and the main character is a somewhat normal teen aged boy. In the beginning of the movie, the main character, Peter Parker, lives and goes to school in the present day with all the normal constructs that are based in reality.
In this writer’s opinion, the events that define breach in this movie take place with the two separate events that lead to both the antagonist and protagonist obtaining their super-human abilities.
For Peter/Spiderman, the breach occurs when a genetically manipulated ‘super spider’ bites him on his hand, imparting all of its genetic goodness into the teenaged Parker. After being bitten, Parker transforms overnight, from a nerdy student, into a strapping superhero. In the case of the antagonist, his transformation takes place in the form of an side effect of an experimental performance enhancer that gives him super strength, and unfortunately, alters his personality, creating an alter ego that is ruthless and evil. After both breach events take place in the story, the viewer is taken from the normal world, into the almost unbelievable world of battling superheroes and supervillans.
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