Decipher me or I'll devour you, said the Sphinx to the spider: revisiting Peter Parker in the light of Oedipus and Hamlet

Abstract

It aims to establish a direct line between three fictional characters – namely: Sophocles’ Oedipus, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Lee & Ditko’s Peter Parker – within a “multimedia evolutionary scale”, in which Peter Parker, the Spider-Man of comic books and movies, would be a consequence and accumulation of the characteristics of the other two characters, which provoke identification with the public. Based on the Freudian view of Oedipus and Hamlet, already listed as an evolutionary possibility by Sigmund Freud in his classic The interpretation of dreams, we propose that Peter Parker would be a victim of an “Absent Father Syndrome” and, thanks to this, he dialogues with his reading public in a similar way and with as much depth as his fictional predecessors, establishing points of identification that seduce different audiences, both children and young people and adults who suffer from a certain nostalgia for adolescence. Our main focus will be comics, but we will also discuss the various versions of the character for TV and cinema, pointing out their connections and different developments. To support our proposal, we have listed, in addition to Freud, texts by Eco, Rancière and Bakhtin, which aim to elucidate some aspects of fictional creation and its relationships with the viewing public, whether in literature, theater, TV or cinema.