(Re)verberations #1: Theorizing Pizza Time
In his first column, our new critic-at-large discusses Sam Raimi's SPIDER-MAN 2 (2004)
As the language of the public subconscious, memes reveal truths we cannot possibly hope to grasp with ordinary syntax. The packaged and well-circulated image becomes the building block of new digital languages, which are both born and exterminated every day around us. As our truncated mediascape becomes evermore mimetic, so do our psyches fracture, revealing epistemic breaks through which an archival process of recovery becomes tangible—desirable even. I slip my hand into such voids expecting a cold nothingness, a material experience of oblivion, only to find something far more disturbingly tactile: greasy cheese.
Pizza Time.
Often hailed, erroneously, as the best of the Sam Raimi trilogy, Spider-Man 2 (2004) is one of the most significant documents of mid-aughts American political culture, engaging with questions of vigilante justice, the collapse of higher education, and the ever-growing intimacy between scientific innovation and the engines of capital. In no scene do these concerns crystallize clearer than the infamous one the internet has dubbed “pizza time,” known as such for the critical line uttered at its climax.
The background is as follows: Peter Parker, continuing to struggle with his bills, takes on a minimum-wage job as a pizza delivery man. Since he is still operating undercover as the titular Spider-Man, he is often late on his deliveries, prompting his boss to threaten him with termination should he continue failing to fulfil orders within the thirty-minute timeframe the restaurant guarantees its customers. Late deliveries spare the customers the burden of payment—and they know this. Peter rushes through the bustling streets of the city, determined to be paid for his labor. The traffic, however, is overwhelming. Desperate to avoid the wrath of his boss, he dons the suit, zipping through the Manhattan skyline with ease, his timely delivery all but assured.
But a disturbance occurs. Two (white) children are chasing a ball by a park when they start running out onto the street, completely unaware of a truck that’s racing towards them. Spider-Man intervenes, swinging the children to safety. He is lauded for his heroism, but there is a cost. He arrives late to the building, and is not even afforded the dignity of a normative entrance through the front door. Instead, he climbs, off camera, through a window and stumbles into a hallway through the janitor’s closet. We see him emerging from the perspective of a concerned, but mostly bored, receptionist: a white woman with aggressively straightened hair. Peter plops the pizzas on her desk, and softy announces, almost whispers: “pizza time.”
The woman is unimpressed. She blankly looks back at him: “yer late,” she bluntly says, shaking her head. “I’m not paying for those.” He nods, acknowledging his shameful defeat, the impossibility of debating her correct assessment of her right to seize the pizza without compensation. He returns to the restaurant and is, predictably, fired swiftly. To add insult to injury, his boss rips the pizza shop’s sticker off his bike helmet.
It, too, reads: pizza time.
We know from Marx that history eventually repeats itself as farce. But what about the endless repetitions of memetic language? What happens when the repetition is precisely the point? The popularity of the pizza time sequence, as a tragicomic narrative, represents the carnivalesque—in the Bakhtinian sense—quality of digital communication. We resonate with Peter’s pathetic announcement because we, too, know what it means to have our words be rebuked, our hardest efforts rejected. Toby McGuire may have been a bad Peter Parker, but he was a superb orator who knew exactly how to capture the Sisyphean flailing quality of the character. By the time he declares “pizza time,” he is already out of time. This is the horror of late capitalism: it is always pizza time, and yet it is never pizza time. It is an all-encompassing liminal temporal space. We are bound by (but also within) pizza time. It is unattainable, yet ever-present. By its very nature, and purpose, pizza time is undefinable. It is neither pepperoni nor pineapple. It is an unthinkable idea.
In a giggified economy that refuses to reckon with imminent climate catastrophe, pizza time has only proven more accurate a framework for our traumatic relationship with temporal disjunctures. It is not so much a form of “deviant chronopolitics” à la Elizabeth Freeman as it is a resistant subjectivity taken on by the modern (white, American) worker. The very notion of pizza time, particularly in the highly charged political context of a post-9/11 New York, reveals, but also revels in, the violence of a decaying metropolitan capitalism. Consider the shape of the New York-style pizza pie: large, perfectly round, sliced—precisely like a clock, the ultimate colonial marker of time. However, unlike the clock, whose lines facilitate the colonization of time through a feeble attempt at precise classification, the pizza pie is meant to be torn apart, destined for fracture. At the kinds of pizza “parties” Peter Parker is likely delivering to, grubby hands rip apart the clock pies, placing the cheese-ridden and marinara soaked “hours” on disposable plates to be ravaged at inhuman speeds. Nothing better represents the plastic consumerism of pizza time than this image.
One cannot begin to comprehend the political, let alone economic, implications of pizza time without centering the Orientalist hysteria of the post-9/11 moment—see Jasbir Puar’s discussion of Oliver Sacks in the preface to Terrorist Assemblages. It is no coincidence that Peter’s overbearing boss, who ultimately fires him for being a poor servant of capitalism, is a belligerent Muslim man named Mr. Aziz. It is noteworthy that he is portrayed by Aasif Mandvi, who is no stranger to racist typecasting. In fact, Mandvi’s first film role was in the 1990 action film No Retreat, No Surrender 3: Blood Brothers, in which he was simply credited as “Terrorist.” Here, too, he plays a kind of terrorist. In the white-American imagination which undergirds the film, his frequently memed scream “Gooo!” is in essence a secular “Allahu-Akbar”—the promise of annihilation for the feeble working-class white American at the hands of the barbaric invading Muslim.
This inversion of power is only possible through pizza time, highlighting the concept’s capacity for a queering of political relationality. The subsequent memefication of the scene is relevant for this subversive form of textual play; the countless “shitposts” that have emerged since the early 2010s indicative of the both the affective and bodily nature of pizza time—you feel it as much as you consume it. This is where pizza time diverts from literal pizza pies, however. The lateral exits our bodies, but the former doesn’t; it merely recreates itself as language and video, expressions we remained tethered to. The rise of the pizza time memes in the early 2010s also shows the circuitous nature of temporal experience in the digital age. Nothing ever fades away. Everything is recycled.
Horatio Fatoushccine is wust el-balad’s critic-at-large. A PhD candidate in Comparative Literature, he studies the temporalities of resistant ruptures to (post)colonial epistemic violence.