Spiderman 3

This weekend I watched Spiderman 3. The movie had a lot of fighting between characters and many great action scenes. Throughout the movie Peter Parker, Harry Osborn, and Flint Marko and constantly fighting and trying to kill each other. However, not all of the movie has physical violence. Many parts of the movie have the characters using other motives to hurt their enemies, mentally and emotionally. This reminded me of how Catullus uses his poems to hurt others like Suffenus and Arrius by ridiculing them.
In the movie, Harry recovers from his amnesia at one point and his father's ghost tells him to get rid of Peter. Instead of meeting Peter in a physical confrontation, Harry decides to hurt him emotionally, which which will be even more painful. He forces Mary Jane to break up with Peter and tell him that she likes someone else. Later, Harry goes to Peter and says that he is the other guy. This crushes Peter and makes him lose all control. This scene reminds me of Catullus, in that after his breakup with Lesbia, his poems seem to show more anger. For example, in carmen 36 he calls Lesbia "pessima puella." This shows how a broken heart can cause anger to build.
Later on near the end of the movie, Venom and the Sandman kidnap M.J. and put her in a giant spiderweb and are about to drop her to her death. They want to hurt Spiderman by putting his girlfriend in danger. They know that he will not be able to stand this and therefore use it as a trap to lure him in.
Spiderman 3 is full of instances where enemies injure each other without the use of physical force. This is similar to how Catullus hurts other in his poems. However, there is one major difference. In his poems, Catullus hurts other people by ridiculing them. In carmen 84 he makes fun of Arrius for using extraneous "h" sounds. In carmen 69 he laughs at Rufus because he smells bad. All of Catullus' poems attempt to hurt his enemies making fun of the them. However, this is not the case in the movie, where the characters try to make each other feel helpless and useless. Nonetheless, both Catullus and the people in Spiderman understand that emotional pain can be stronger than physical pain.