Along Came a Spiderverse
It’s true what they say: everything is bigger in Texas, even the movie theaters… ESPECIALLY the movie theaters. I have sat in the seat of opulence, the kind of comfort that can make a body feel guilty simply for having been born into America. The stadium recliner seating is surely outdone only by the likes of billionaire’s private yacht entertainment rooms and the Secret Service protected theater in the White House. Having been nestled in such decadence, I hope my reaction to the movie itself is at least somewhat objective. Many a heinous food has been unduly glorified by the deep fryer, the unsavory thing in the center only serving as a flavor delivery device for the greasy, crunchy, fatty stuff on the outside. Perhaps I was simply in the perfect environment. It’s okay to be honest about it: distraction bias happens.
My brother-in-law-in-law had the fantastic idea of taking the boys to see Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse. It’s too soon to say something too superlative, but it really is not only one of the best superhero films I’ve ever seen, it’s one of the best movies that I’ve ever seen. It might even just be the best superhero film ever. And this is coming from a guy who cut his teeth on Wolverine. Even though it’s not my favorite character ever, the film is just that good, forcing me into a position of sheer enjoyment and unadulterated life-learning.
The genre is difficult to peg down because it is genre-fusing and genre-bending all at once. Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse establishes a new category in movie-making, which is so fitting for a work dealing in the business of a multiverse. In one viewing we get the sci-fi boldness of breaking the 4th dimension and the movie-going fun of breaking the 4th wall.
One remembers Scott Pilgrim vs. the World in all of the hokey, endearing tributes to video games and anime weirdness in its over-the-top imagination of action sequences. However, the similarity ends there. Scott Pilgrim coerced us to watch a vapid deadbeat of a flat-personalitied 20-something freeload off a high-school girl in a dubiously romantic relationship. For all the fantasy-induced fight scenes, he never becomes a hero of any order. The women in his life make all the decisions for him all the way to the very end, so much so that the high school girl pushes him toward the full-grown woman that also happens to be legal.
In stark contrast, in the Spiderverse we have a protagonist worth loving in Miles Morales. Unlike Scott Pilgrim, who never behaves like a man, the Spiderverse gives us a teenager struggling at his best to grow into manhood. What’s more, we have a child teaching a man how to begin behaving like a man again, how to reclaim the fullness of his masculinity. Aside from all that, he’s just a good kid. He’s the perfect balance of coming-of-age angst, parental respect/frustration, innocent mischief and well-meaning foibles.
Truly, there’s not a single thing I would wish out of the movie (one character comes close, but his presence in the storyline justifies itself eventually, bizarre as it is). Yet, of all the laudable achievements of the film, the greatest accomplishment of the work is the prodigious manner in which the movie constantly reminds you that you’re watching a movie, which is to say, it unflinchingly pokes you in your seat in such a way that you cannot forget that you are sitting in a theater looking at a screen rather than finding yourself immersed within the universe about you.
Because that is the very thing most movies mean to accomplish in the first 5-10 minutes. Most of the time, I think that’s the right goal, to baptize us into a world not of our making, suspend our memory of reality, so that perhaps we might see the world anew when we sober up from the daze that a good watch induces. In such works the protagonist has a center of gravity so absorbing that, for a time at least, we see the universe through their eyes, judge it and feel it by their experience. Their stature becomes the metric by which we measure ourselves. And all of this happens because we were chauffeured into a place of forgetting ourselves.
The Spiderverse never allows us to forget ourselves. We are deliberately jostled in our seats so as to remember our place in the theater relative to our companions, all of us watching the construct of a fiction together. The filmmakers somehow keep the process thoroughly enjoyable, even when they force us to suffer the juxtaposition of mismatched genres on the same screen. That they could do this without ever stumbling into the uncanny valley that haunts many a CGI production is worthy of all the technical awards that could be endowed in that industry. We willingly watch the story unfold knowing that something is very wrong, that the rules of the universe have been suspended, and that our own imaginations have been prohibited from being suspended in the fakery of it all.
This works because this is the very nature of life. Evil stole its away into a beautiful creation and sullied it. Murder crept into the 2nd generation of humanity. Two thousand years removed from the Resurrection, we still have pedophilia. The world is not as it should be. Whatever our worldview, we all know this in our bones. All of us feel compelled to do something about it even as we are not always sure what the rules are or when we can even rely on the rules to ever become reliable again. Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse captures the cognitive dissonance of the human experience.
I have been endeared to many a narrator as a character in his own right before. It’s the voice of the narrator in the Hobbit that makes the book feel so different from the tone of the Rings trilogy. In the Hobbit, even for the perils, we feel the comforting presence of a grandfather telling stories by the firelight, whereas the Rings trilogy reads more like a war chronicle. But I cannot recall another work of fiction in which the genre alone was so integral to the story that it effectively becomes its own voice, its own character in the story. Here the medium manages to wink at us as if it has itself become sentient in the telling.
Once again, we have this experience in the waking world, too.
“All creation groans with expectation for the revealing of the sons of God.”
So it is that I most enthusiastically endorse and recommend the movie Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse for the entire family - children and adults alike.