A Lenten Meditation on Bully Maguire
Something light for a serious time.
I often resort to humor in serious moments. Over the past few days, I’ve felt my silliness bubbling up amidst all the solemn Lenten think pieces.
If a tongue-in-cheek piece on Lent isn’t your cup of tea, you should stop reading now. But if something goofy sounds good, read on!
It’s Lent, and many fine thinkers are offering wise reflections —
wrote on fasting and St. Thomas Aquinas and shared 10 quotes from saints and elders of the Church and an analysis of the Prayer of St. Ephraim.I would like to offer something a little sillier though hopefully instructive nonetheless. I want to tell you about Bully Maguire.
If you don’t know, “Bully Maguire” is a meme based on Spider-Man 3, which starred Tobey Maguire. In that film, sentient black space goop slams into earth and bonds to Peter Parker, amplifying his aggression and lowering his inhibitions. This transforms our “friendly neighborhood Spider-Man” into an emo-punk “black suit” Spider-Man who was later dubbed “Bully Maguire.”
Bully Maguire was so ridiculous that he became a viral meme, and now you can find his goofy dance moves and cringe disses superimposed on everything from Family Feud to Avengers.
To fill in Bully Maguire’s backstory a bit: Spider-Man 3 opens when all is well in Peter’s life. He plans to marry the girls of his dreams, MJ. He has integrated his Superhero and Daily Bugle identities. He’s at the top of his class. In other words, he’s looking to improve on a life that’s largely in place.
Now that I’m a husband and father, I relate less to Peter Parker in the first two movies: the guy trying to get the girl, the guy figuring out who he is. Many of those questions, at least in my life, are now asked and answered.
But Peter Parker in Spider-Man 3, the guy who’s trying to hold on to the life he’s built? That’s a story I care about.
I suppose that’s why he’s been on my mind. Lent comes on the same schedule for all of us, implying that we all have growing edges. Even if our lives have some order and forward motion, we must contend with temptations to abandon that slow progress for sinful diversions.
Oftentimes, the hard part isn’t knowing what to do but how to do it, and stories have a special power in forming our moral imagination.
Thus, I offer you Bully Maguire as a cautionary tale for this penitential season.
We have no shortage of anti-heroes in pop culture, but they’re often borderline admirable. According to
, The male mind cannot comprehend the allure of Tony Soprano. Yes, Walter White’s transformation was disturbing at times, but there’s something electrifying about the “I am the one who knocks” speech. And the Joker has now won an Oscar for both of his (serious) iterations.They make evil seem thrilling.
By contrast, Bully Maguire is completely repulsive. The premise of the film is: Tobey Maguire, dweeb-turned-superhero, is given magical goop that removes all his inhibitions. So now we have a dweeb unleashed on New York City, free to punish his rivals and flirt with EVERY girl he talks to.
The year after Spider-Man 3 was released, Iron Man made its debut, ushering in an era of quippy, cynical Superhero films. But Bully Maguire belongs to a more sincere time when a good man turning cruel was in no way glamorous.
Bully Maguire effectively believes his actions to be invisible — since the black suit strips him of all self-consciousness — yet we witness the repercussions of evil on both the man himself and on his community.
It’s a brutal dramatic irony.
Nowadays, it’s easy to hide our vices through the anonymity of the internet. No one sees us enter the adult theater. We don’t need to seek out a grubby bookie. We can troll under pseudonyms. But our vices have not disappeared, they’ve merely gone underground.
In reality, we’re often suffering from what Dr. Anna Lembke calls a “diffuse addiction to the internet”: “People will have their drug of choice, whether it’s shopping or social media or video games or pornography. But if that’s not available, they’ll switch to something else.”
Online, we can feel insulated from the shame of our shameful acts. We have the illusion that our sin is consequence-free.
Thankfully, Bully Maguire reminds us how truly debasing it is to indulge our worst impulses. It’s fun to fantasize about the perfect comeback. It’s less fun to think about the cycle of bitterness it would engender.
Rather than giving evil gravitas, Bully just makes it seem laughable and immature. Time after time, Bully explores a category of sin we may be tempted by and then totally embarrasses himself.
This raises an uncomfortable question for the viewer: if the difference between your fantasies and Bully’s actions is one of degree, not kind, do you really want to keep nursing those grievances?
He’s just so genuinely, awkwardly, earnestly evil, it’s really a sight to behold. To explore some of the posthumous fame of Bully Maguire, I’ll include the original quotes from the movie along with some accompanying memes.
A feud with his co-worker escalates until Bully vows: “I’m gonna put some dirt in your eye.”
A friendship deteriorates until Bully pummels his friend and crows: “Look at little Goblin Jr…Gonna cry?”
A landlord dispute boils over and Bully shouts: “You’ll get your rent when you fix this damn door!”
All the while his haircut is so painfully bad, you in no way want to emulate him.
Then he goes completely down the rabbit hole of hyper-macho dude Rizmaxxing
Leveling up his wardrobe (and his dance moves)…
Pointing at every woman on the street…
Demanding a raise (with strong eye contact and a hair flip for emphasis)…
Making suggestive comments to every woman he talks to…
Of course, the viewer sees this all differently. The suits are advertised as on super sale. Dumping MJ for your cute lab partner (to spite your rival co-worker) is transparently petty. The benefits of this hyper-macho approach — a raise at work, the admiration of insecure women — we recognize as Pyrrhic victories, not some proof of concept.
This culminates when he brings his lab partner on a date to the jazz club Mary Jane now works at. He upstages MJ with a wild song and dance number that includes a piano solo and the unforgettable injunction: “Now dig on this.”
It is hard to watch but impossible to look away.
This moment that he sees as his ultimate triumph — Peter Parker, cool guy with hot girl pwning clingy, naggy ex — we see as his utmost humiliation. The scene ends with his date storming off and Peter hitting MJ during an altercation with the bouncer.
His turn to macho-ness is a complete disaster. The jerk finishes last.
In the end, he apologizes to MJ, saves the day, and reconciles with those he’d wronged. But it’s sobering to see all that came out with the pressure of the “black suit.” The seemingly stable, noble Spider-Man transformed into Bully Maguire with just a tiny push.
Which brings us back to Lent.
Lenten fasting can be a little push, too. The discomfort of missing a favorite food or activity can bring out some ugliness you didn’t realize was lurking. Typically, I like to reframe my ugliness as a cutting wit, well-deserved vengeance, or some other self-aggrandizement.
But that’s not reality. Bully Maguire is reality.
Sinning greatly might make for a dramatic testimony, but it is always evil and its pleasure can only ever be a cheap trick and perversion of the real thing. Bully Maguire reminds us what the true wages of sin are, and his eventual repentance reminds us of how simple yet hard the Christian life is.
In a time like Lent when our spiritual life is more of an explicit focus, there is often a corresponding increase in temptation. It may be covert, as in the case of the forgetful monk who would sit down to pray and then immediately remember all the tasks he’d left undone.
Or it may be more overt and feel closer to black goop taking hold of you and bringing out your worst. In either case, I’m grateful for the structure of this church season reminding me that repentance is the incremental work of a lifetime. There are no shortcuts to sainthood, and true freedom is self-mastery not subjugation of others.
The narrow way often consists of mundane commitments, so we must remain diligent and vigilant. As the theologian Frederica Mathewes-Green explains:
When we're suffocated by the world's distractions, it can be easy to avoid God. But we're also quite capable of spending our time pondering the great questions instead of dealing with God. Thinking and talking about God is not communion with God. Only prayer is prayer. Both worldly distractions and theoretical cogitating can be used to avoid the challenge that ultimately faces each of us: that we are called to enter a direct, personal relationship with God.
God bless you this Lenten season and give you strength to fight the good fight!