Soms heb je van die films die een diepere betekenis hebben, zoals The Matrix (1999) of Inception (2010). De website Cracked.com heeft dit ook goed in de gaten, en heeft vandaag deze top zes online gezet. Daar op staat The Shining (1980), Iron Man 2 (2010) en Robocop (1987), maar ook deze superheld:

#6.Spider-Man: Peter Parker's Man Juice


What You Think You're Watching

Another superhero movie. This time, it's about a shy teenager named Peter Parker who discovers that a genetically engineered spider bite has given him superpowers.

The Subtext

We have jokingly alluded to this before, but Spider-Man really is all about semen. Or puberty. Whatever.

We tend to find Spider-Man easier to identify with than other superheroes. He's not an alien, like Superman, or the son of a major Norse god, like Thor, or a Canadian, like Wolverine. But that's not all we have in common with Peter Parker: His superhero birth-trauma story is one with which we're all painfully familiar -- puberty.

At the beginning of the 2002 Spider-Man movie, Peter Parker is timid, puny and closer to his aunt and uncle than to girls his age. That is until one day, when Peter is taking a picture of a pretty classmate, Mary Jane Watson. While gazing, enchanted, at her beauty, he's bitten by a spider. Peter reacts to this event by running home and staring at his bare torso in the mirror, confused.

The next day, Peter's body has changed, and he has developed muscles in new places. But that's just the beginning. Peter's body starts producing, uh, sticky white stuff.

The audience watches with vague feelings of discomfort as this teenage boy spends a long time trying to figure out exactly how to produce the newly discovered fluid, nervously telling his aunt to go away when she knocks on the door.

If the superpowers-as-puberty message wasn't intentional in the recent movies, it sure was back when they were being developed. For most of Spider-Man's 49-year history, Peter Parker lacked the ability to shoot webs out of his own body (heh), instead relying on a pair of mechanical shooters that he built himself and attached to his wrists.