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certaininequitiesI don't even know how to preface this, I just have a lot of thoughts about how Norman and the Goblin break down and what that means for how I play him and also what it means to me, so uh. Here goes.
I've already noted in my post about Norman's canon history that his father, Amberson Osborn, was an abusive jerk, but I really want to break that down a bit more here and talk about how that trauma shaped Norman - and created the Goblin long before the CX-00000009 performance enhancer was even a concept.
Amberson was a half-shod inventor who lost all the Osborn family fortune by investing it in a failed project. That failure was what drove him to drink, and lash out at his wife and son (source). When young Norman expressed a fear of the dark, this was Amberson's solution.... (Panel One | Panel Two. source)
Never mind how traumatizing it would be as a CHILD to be thrown alone into an empty, abandoned home. At night. In the rain. With a fear of the dark. Norman's aware of the ghosts of the past, but it's the thing fully from his own imagination - that "goblin-like creature" - that he's afraid of. A thing that wants to devour him... which he eventually accepts as a part of himself.
Clearly the first thing the Goblin represents? Self-destructive tendencies. Maybe Norman's already afraid of inheriting them from his father at that point, but either way, that's a pretty clear metaphor.
Now, this is just conjecture and headcanon, but given that Willem/Norman was 47 in 2002 when Spider-Man was released, that would make Norman 12 in 1968 ... a time when Men Were Men, and an aggressive guy like Amberson was probably the very picture of toxic masculinity. Which means that things like healthy emotional expression, sharing thoughts, being creative, being vulnerable ... all of these were Not To Be Done if you were a twelve-year-old boy. In this context, the remarks Norman makes to Harry about MJ and his ex-wife track remarkably well, as horrible as they are:
That's ... some pretty deep-seated misogyny, and the only thing we know about Caroline Mulder-Osborn (other than what she looks like) is that she was an artist. Even that's buried in a newspaper article we only see onscreen for a second. AND YET Norman still keeps her portrait hanging in his bedroom. It's almost as if he really did love her, but when things went sour because of his workaholic tendencies, he didn't know how to handle his feelings, so he just ... transformed them into the only thing he was familiar with thanks to his father. Just a little conjecture.
This toxic masculinity clearly plays back into the Goblin, since it's very much HIM leering at Mary Jane during Thanksgiving dinner. Not to mention the cringeworthy line "MJ and I? We're gonna have a hell of a time." Yikes, Goblin, just YIKES. Someone asked me recently in a Plurk meme if the Goblin was capable of rape, and I would absolutely have to say yes. Please note that I would NEVER EVER EVER play out that sort of scenario or even imply it in an RP setting - it's just the sort of really disgusting, misogynistic, anger-fueled thing that would occur to him under the right (wrong) circumstances.
Now.... in that particular era, what went hand in hand with sexism? Say it with me: HOMOPHOBIA. The Goblin is classically queer-coded in ways a LOT of villains from the 60s were! There's an excellent video about the Joker's queer-coding here, and a lot of the same points apply to either Norman or the Goblin...
Exhibit A.
The queercoding was only mildly evident in the 2002 film, but ... can we talk about the No Way Home moment that launched a thousand ship-Tumblrs?. It's been turned up to 11 at this point, and it's pretty hard to deny even the possibility that Norman's having a little bit of a bi crisis at this point. What this really ties in to is the fact that he's just plain starved for positive emotional interaction and he'll take that in whatever form he can get it.
Would you like some receipts for that? Peter Parker. Norman sees what he wants to be in Peter, and courts his favor hardcore all throughout the 2002 movie: complimenting his intelligence, offering him a job, getting him (and Harry) an apartment. Harry, however, is The Actual Osborn Son, which means he's tied to The Legacy, which means that he represents everything Norman doesn't like about himself. Harry, your father doesn't hate you, he's just stuck in a trauma cycle. (The Osborns are just Encanto with green chemicals instead of powers, tell me I'm wrong.) BUT Norman is starting to realize by the end of the movie that the Goblin is a Very Bad Thing and he needs to focus on what matters ... hence the scene where he admits to Harry he hasn't always been there. Part of it is the Goblin manipulating Harry because he can get information about Peter/Spider-man, yes, but ... thanks to Dafoe's acting, you can plainly see that Norman is allowing himself to be emotional about Harry, and that's ... new. He manages to get out one penultimate moment of vulnerability before the Goblin takes over again.
Emotional vulnerability is, to the Goblin, a weakness, and a tool to be exploited. He only lets Norman "back out" when it's advantageous: the conversation with Harry, and then again in the hospital ruins when he needs to distract Peter/Spider-man long enough to get the glider in position for the deadly trap he wants to set. He uses the same tactic again in No Way Home, to even more disastrous effect. And he makes a point of telling (Tom Holland's) Peter Parker that kindness is the greatest sign of weakness there can be, that it is a disease. But when Norman is in control, he IS kind: grateful and humble to May at the FEAST shelter, and extremely complimentary to Peter when they're working on the projects in Happy's apartment. His joy at the results of Peter's work for Otto is genuine, as is the opportunity to see his old colleague again. He volunteers to help Peter because he wants to do the right thing. But this is, again, weakness: looking out for other people is not Looking Out For Number One. Looking out for other people costs you things, according to his father.
So, let's sum up so far. What's Norman repressing or internalizing that manifests in the Goblin?
- Temper/anger that he doesn't want to "inherit" from his father
- Misogyny / toxic masculinity
- Selfishness/ego
- Lust/desire likely of a bisexual nature
- Self-destructive tendencies
- Thirst for power/control
- Concepts of vulnerability & kindness as weakness
- Toxic concepts of self-sufficiency
Yep, that's a mess. So what does Norman look like WITHOUT the Goblin? How does that even play? Well, maybe a little like this:
- Acceptance of EVERY emotion
- Healthy expression of guilt and shame
- Ability to relinquish control/trust
- Seeking out support, help, connection, and validation
- Healthy displays of anger or frustration
- Honest assessment and exploration of personal preferences, romantic or otherwise
- Self-care/self-soothing in times of stress or fear, rather than shame/repression thereof
Basically ... the same steps most people take for trauma recovery. Dissociative disorder IS, after all, caused by trauma in the real world... not by a test tube full of green chemicals. On the surface, the Green Goblin is a comic book supervillain full of bombast and cackling mad violence, but strip Dafoe's portrayal down to the bones, and Norman Osborn is a survivor of trauma looking to heal.
Here's where I move on to the next section and make this personal: my parents were nowhere near as bad as Amberson Osborn. Neither were alcoholics or addicts of any stripe, and they were happily married until my father passed away. But they were both extremely emotionally restrained, due to their own upbringings. My father would always berate me for crying and say things like "you women are always so emotional". Both my parents were very strict about gender roles: I got Barbies and tea sets, and only got Transformers and Ninja Turtles when my AMAB friends came over to play. When my cousin came out as gay, I got The Talk and was told it was Strange. When a college friend came out as trans, I was told that was "just wrong" and that said friend was not welcome at the house. In college, I was free from the emotional and social restraints I'd grown up under. I was starting to figure myself out. I was RIGHT on the edge of realizing I was a transgender male... but I was too afraid of my truth and swerved sideways into "must just be lesbian". And a part of me knew I was denying myself. A part of me was PISSED. I was a lot angrier at the world than I had any right to be, and I kept losing my temper. I was a little self-destructive sometimes. Friends would say sometimes that I wasn't "acting like me". I'd apologize. I'd shove down the anger. I'd go back to being the me they knew.
Did I mention that the year I figured all of this out was 2002, The Year Of Our Osborn? Mmm. Yep.
Fast forward to December of 2021. I've finally realized who I really am. I've started doing the hard mental work of healing myself and correcting old habits and patterns. Trying not to self-sabotage. I'm finding I'm a lot less angry now. I'm a lot less prone to fits of guilt, shame, depression.
Oh. Hey. Look who's back and also canonically lost HIS demon.
Norman and I are off sabbatical, and with a little help from our friends, we're both gonna be okay.
I've already noted in my post about Norman's canon history that his father, Amberson Osborn, was an abusive jerk, but I really want to break that down a bit more here and talk about how that trauma shaped Norman - and created the Goblin long before the CX-00000009 performance enhancer was even a concept.
Amberson was a half-shod inventor who lost all the Osborn family fortune by investing it in a failed project. That failure was what drove him to drink, and lash out at his wife and son (source). When young Norman expressed a fear of the dark, this was Amberson's solution.... (Panel One | Panel Two. source)
Never mind how traumatizing it would be as a CHILD to be thrown alone into an empty, abandoned home. At night. In the rain. With a fear of the dark. Norman's aware of the ghosts of the past, but it's the thing fully from his own imagination - that "goblin-like creature" - that he's afraid of. A thing that wants to devour him... which he eventually accepts as a part of himself.
Clearly the first thing the Goblin represents? Self-destructive tendencies. Maybe Norman's already afraid of inheriting them from his father at that point, but either way, that's a pretty clear metaphor.
Now, this is just conjecture and headcanon, but given that Willem/Norman was 47 in 2002 when Spider-Man was released, that would make Norman 12 in 1968 ... a time when Men Were Men, and an aggressive guy like Amberson was probably the very picture of toxic masculinity. Which means that things like healthy emotional expression, sharing thoughts, being creative, being vulnerable ... all of these were Not To Be Done if you were a twelve-year-old boy. In this context, the remarks Norman makes to Harry about MJ and his ex-wife track remarkably well, as horrible as they are:
Your mother was beautiful, too. They're all beautiful, until they're snarling after your trust fund like a pack of ravening wolves. A word to the not so wise about your little girlfriend: do what you need to with her, then broom her fast.
That's ... some pretty deep-seated misogyny, and the only thing we know about Caroline Mulder-Osborn (other than what she looks like) is that she was an artist. Even that's buried in a newspaper article we only see onscreen for a second. AND YET Norman still keeps her portrait hanging in his bedroom. It's almost as if he really did love her, but when things went sour because of his workaholic tendencies, he didn't know how to handle his feelings, so he just ... transformed them into the only thing he was familiar with thanks to his father. Just a little conjecture.
This toxic masculinity clearly plays back into the Goblin, since it's very much HIM leering at Mary Jane during Thanksgiving dinner. Not to mention the cringeworthy line "MJ and I? We're gonna have a hell of a time." Yikes, Goblin, just YIKES. Someone asked me recently in a Plurk meme if the Goblin was capable of rape, and I would absolutely have to say yes. Please note that I would NEVER EVER EVER play out that sort of scenario or even imply it in an RP setting - it's just the sort of really disgusting, misogynistic, anger-fueled thing that would occur to him under the right (wrong) circumstances.
Now.... in that particular era, what went hand in hand with sexism? Say it with me: HOMOPHOBIA. The Goblin is classically queer-coded in ways a LOT of villains from the 60s were! There's an excellent video about the Joker's queer-coding here, and a lot of the same points apply to either Norman or the Goblin...
Even traits that have become tropes for villains (being well-dressed; having feminine mannerisms or manner of speech; being aristocratic in manner, wealth and appearance; being a smooth talker; having flamboyant hand gestures, manners of dress, and decor in their homes/lairs; having little to no interest in women; being conniving or catty etc etc etc) show how deeply embedded queer coding as been to the point where queer qualities are associated with evil. (Many of those traits are associated with men, but women too are often queer coded as mannish, thuggish, brutish, beastly, bulky, violent, overly ambitious or aggressive, cruel, uninterested in men, etc). (source)
Exhibit A.
The queercoding was only mildly evident in the 2002 film, but ... can we talk about the No Way Home moment that launched a thousand ship-Tumblrs?. It's been turned up to 11 at this point, and it's pretty hard to deny even the possibility that Norman's having a little bit of a bi crisis at this point. What this really ties in to is the fact that he's just plain starved for positive emotional interaction and he'll take that in whatever form he can get it.
Would you like some receipts for that? Peter Parker. Norman sees what he wants to be in Peter, and courts his favor hardcore all throughout the 2002 movie: complimenting his intelligence, offering him a job, getting him (and Harry) an apartment. Harry, however, is The Actual Osborn Son, which means he's tied to The Legacy, which means that he represents everything Norman doesn't like about himself. Harry, your father doesn't hate you, he's just stuck in a trauma cycle. (The Osborns are just Encanto with green chemicals instead of powers, tell me I'm wrong.) BUT Norman is starting to realize by the end of the movie that the Goblin is a Very Bad Thing and he needs to focus on what matters ... hence the scene where he admits to Harry he hasn't always been there. Part of it is the Goblin manipulating Harry because he can get information about Peter/Spider-man, yes, but ... thanks to Dafoe's acting, you can plainly see that Norman is allowing himself to be emotional about Harry, and that's ... new. He manages to get out one penultimate moment of vulnerability before the Goblin takes over again.
Emotional vulnerability is, to the Goblin, a weakness, and a tool to be exploited. He only lets Norman "back out" when it's advantageous: the conversation with Harry, and then again in the hospital ruins when he needs to distract Peter/Spider-man long enough to get the glider in position for the deadly trap he wants to set. He uses the same tactic again in No Way Home, to even more disastrous effect. And he makes a point of telling (Tom Holland's) Peter Parker that kindness is the greatest sign of weakness there can be, that it is a disease. But when Norman is in control, he IS kind: grateful and humble to May at the FEAST shelter, and extremely complimentary to Peter when they're working on the projects in Happy's apartment. His joy at the results of Peter's work for Otto is genuine, as is the opportunity to see his old colleague again. He volunteers to help Peter because he wants to do the right thing. But this is, again, weakness: looking out for other people is not Looking Out For Number One. Looking out for other people costs you things, according to his father.
So, let's sum up so far. What's Norman repressing or internalizing that manifests in the Goblin?
- Temper/anger that he doesn't want to "inherit" from his father
- Misogyny / toxic masculinity
- Selfishness/ego
- Lust/desire likely of a bisexual nature
- Self-destructive tendencies
- Thirst for power/control
- Concepts of vulnerability & kindness as weakness
- Toxic concepts of self-sufficiency
Yep, that's a mess. So what does Norman look like WITHOUT the Goblin? How does that even play? Well, maybe a little like this:
- Acceptance of EVERY emotion
- Healthy expression of guilt and shame
- Ability to relinquish control/trust
- Seeking out support, help, connection, and validation
- Healthy displays of anger or frustration
- Honest assessment and exploration of personal preferences, romantic or otherwise
- Self-care/self-soothing in times of stress or fear, rather than shame/repression thereof
Basically ... the same steps most people take for trauma recovery. Dissociative disorder IS, after all, caused by trauma in the real world... not by a test tube full of green chemicals. On the surface, the Green Goblin is a comic book supervillain full of bombast and cackling mad violence, but strip Dafoe's portrayal down to the bones, and Norman Osborn is a survivor of trauma looking to heal.
Here's where I move on to the next section and make this personal: my parents were nowhere near as bad as Amberson Osborn. Neither were alcoholics or addicts of any stripe, and they were happily married until my father passed away. But they were both extremely emotionally restrained, due to their own upbringings. My father would always berate me for crying and say things like "you women are always so emotional". Both my parents were very strict about gender roles: I got Barbies and tea sets, and only got Transformers and Ninja Turtles when my AMAB friends came over to play. When my cousin came out as gay, I got The Talk and was told it was Strange. When a college friend came out as trans, I was told that was "just wrong" and that said friend was not welcome at the house. In college, I was free from the emotional and social restraints I'd grown up under. I was starting to figure myself out. I was RIGHT on the edge of realizing I was a transgender male... but I was too afraid of my truth and swerved sideways into "must just be lesbian". And a part of me knew I was denying myself. A part of me was PISSED. I was a lot angrier at the world than I had any right to be, and I kept losing my temper. I was a little self-destructive sometimes. Friends would say sometimes that I wasn't "acting like me". I'd apologize. I'd shove down the anger. I'd go back to being the me they knew.
Did I mention that the year I figured all of this out was 2002, The Year Of Our Osborn? Mmm. Yep.
Fast forward to December of 2021. I've finally realized who I really am. I've started doing the hard mental work of healing myself and correcting old habits and patterns. Trying not to self-sabotage. I'm finding I'm a lot less angry now. I'm a lot less prone to fits of guilt, shame, depression.
Oh. Hey. Look who's back and also canonically lost HIS demon.
Norman and I are off sabbatical, and with a little help from our friends, we're both gonna be okay.