Sumith Prasad
Hanuš the Spider is a mysterious figure in Netflix’s science fiction film ‘Spaceman.’ The creature shows up one day randomly inside Jan Hus 1, the spaceship that carries Jakub Procházka to the outskirts of Jupiter. After introducing himself as someone who lived on a planet that got invaded by the Gorompeds, a group of parasitic extraterrestrial creatures, Hanuš starts to share his wisdom concerning the universe and life in general. The anecdotes Hanuš offers to Jakub eventually change his life for good as the cosmonaut realizes that there’s more to life than what he has been chasing! SPOILERS AHEAD.
The Age of Hanuš
Hanuš the Spider is as old as the universe, which indicates that his age is at least 13.7 billion years. The creature lived on his planet for billions of years, only to disappear from the same after it was invaded by the Gorompeds. He then traveled through several galaxies and ended up in the solar system, only to encounter Earth. He learned the human beings’ languages and culture while staying in Earth’s orbit. When he spotted a lonely human, traveling further and further away from his home planet, Hanuš wanted to form a companionship with him, which led the creature to Jakub.
Hanuš, in many ways, reminds us of characters such as HAL from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and Yoda from the ‘Star Wars’ universe. “HAL and Hanuš come from the same well, you know what I mean? As does Yoda […]. And to some extent, it is like it’s almost inevitable that you will find certain similarities because in my mind, if you have a 14-billion-year-old character, you would assume that there’s almost a pitch-perfect Zen in that character. Somebody who’s lived since the origin of the universe, whose approach to the universe is like the universe is as it should be, to just understand the concept of that requires a perfect Zen-ness,” director Johan Renck told Looper.
Even though HAL and Yoda are not as old as Hanuš, they share immense wisdom and/or intelligence that changes the lives of people around them.
The Ambiguous Appearance of Hanuš
Hanuš ends up inside Jan Hus 1 mysteriously, without opening or closing any doors. The spider is able to leave the spaceship in a matter of seconds, without going through the airlock chamber. Since there aren’t any other openings in the spaceship for Hanuš to enter or leave the vessel, the most plausible explanation behind his appearance is that he only does so inside the mind of Jakub. The spider can be a creation of the cosmonaut’s imagination. A while before Hanuš shows up in a chamber inside the spaceship, Jakub dreams of a spider that crawls through his body.
The imaginary spider that unsettles him through a nightmare must have gotten stuck inside his subconscious, only to grow enough in his mind to become Hanuš. If that’s the case, he doesn’t physically exist in the spaceship, which explains why he hasn’t destroyed the vessel by repeatedly entering and exiting it in outer space. The spider is in the vessel in the same way as Jakub is on an Earth-like planet where he sees his wife Lenka as a rusalka, a water nymph. After half a year of isolation, Jakub’s mind must have gotten severely affected for him to start hallucinating the creature.
In ‘Spaceman of Bohemia,’ the source text of the film, Jaroslav Kalfař does not reveal how Hanuš enters the spaceship. The creature first appears as a shadow out of nowhere in the novel. “A shadow of hairy, arachnid legs peeked from beneath the Lounge counter. […] As I [Jakub] exited the lab, shirtless, again I spotted the shadow. […] The legs quivered, hesitated, then skittered around the corner. I pushed on. I heard the legs scratching along the ceiling, as if tree branches were scraping the vessel’s windshield. Behind Corridor 4, the shadow rested. There was nowhere else to escape. I was unafraid, which frightened me. I swam forward,” reads the book.
Jakub, the protagonist in the novel, initially considers Hanuš as an “illusion.” Even though the cosmonaut eventually starts to believe otherwise, the creature’s mysterious appearance leads one to believe he is far from real.
Read More: When and Where Does Spaceman Take Place?
