The spider who watched my movie with me

Last night there was a spider on my laptop screen as I was watching a movie.

What an Australian cliché.

It wasn’t a big one, and in fact, it wasn’t the first insect to be on my laptop during the movie. Near the start I had to shoo a cockroach off the upper corner of the screen casing. Not the really repugnant black kind, but a smaller, lighter brown one. You’d think I was sitting outside or something, but nope, I was in my bed. And it has nothing to do with the cleanliness, or lack thereof, of our house; that's just Australia for you.

(The movie was the hilariously titled The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot, which I expected to be a zany Don Coscarelli-type experience, but was actually quite earnest.)

Perhaps because it wasn’t frighteningly big, I did not take any measures to remove it. It didn’t take up residence there until about the last 30 minutes of the movie, at which point I was just trying to keep my eyes open long enough to finish watching. Getting out of bed, taking the laptop outside and shaking it off was the last thing on my mind. As long as it didn’t make any sudden movements, we were cool. 

And it didn’t. What I found interesting was how long the spider stayed on the screen, in the same exact spot for the lion's share of that time. Maybe that spot was particularly warm.

It really was almost as though the spider was watching. I doubt the spider’s eyes were oriented at the screen, and even if so, you can’t make out anything on a screen that’s 200 times as big as you are when you are pressed up flat against it. But the spider was just happy chilling out. In fact, there were a number of times when it was positioned perfectly in a space between the characters, or contributed in some other funny way to the mis-en-scene.

A theme of the movie is non-violence, as the titular “man” regrets the taking of any life, even if it was Hitler or a megavirus-carrying yeti. (Yes, this is all presented in a surprisingly straight-faced fashion.) In keeping with that, I had no instinct to squash my little friend, although I rarely do that with spiders anyway. I make some effort to release them outdoors, squashing them only under the most dire of threats. And even though this is Australia, there was almost zero chance this particular arachnid was poisonous.

So we just sat there, chilled, and watched.

Unfortunately, our little interlude was interrupted before we could finish the movie. My wife came into the bedroom and was horrified to see that there was a spider on my laptop screen. She’s no spider scaredy cat – I mean, she was raised in Australia after all – but neither does she encourage a person’s proximity to a spider if it can be avoided. That’s probably another thing that goes with growing up in Australia.

So she insisted we deal with it, and regretfully, I acquiesced. She got a box and an envelope and shuffled my little friend with one into the other. He carried on his adventures outdoors. Or perhaps she.

And I watched the last ten minutes of the movie just a tad lonelier.