Wibbly-Wobbly, Creepy-Crawly

(Spoilers for Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse throughout.)



Over New Year it was suggested to me that, as I swing ever further leftwards, my judgement on whether a film is any good depends more and more on whether its politics annoyed me. A corollary was also offered: with so small a proportion of people in general sharing my views, and pretty much none of them in a position to make a film liable to be shown at the local Odeon, my trips to the cinema for the foreseeable future weren't likely to make me happy. It was a stark diagnosis: nothing for me going forward but disappointment in a series of darkened rooms.

To be honest, this probably in large part a fair cop (THERE ARE NO FAIR COPS! THE JUSTICE SYSTEM IS IRREVOCABLY CORRUPT AND REACTIONARY). But it's certainly not the whole story. And Spider Dash Man Into The Spider Dash Verse demonstrates this very well.

We'll start entirely politics-free, I think, and gradually allow it to bleed in. First of all, this is a gorgeous film. It's easily one of the best-looking animated movies I've seen in a long time. In a year in which Disney released the first footage from their towering folly of the Lion King "live action" remake, it's encouraging to see a studio release an animated film that puts some thought into what that actually means. The design aesthetic here is wonderful - a carefully-considered blending of cartoon and comic that retains the best of both worlds. The fact each frame is slightly stippled to recall the earliest comic books is a particular highlight, and the film has the smartest use of on-screen text I've seen since the subtitles to the Night Watch movies.

There's also, again in keeping with the film's comic book origins, a massive abundance of sight gags. The weirdest one is learning Spider-Ham's universe sells hot-dogs, which he's perfectly happy to eat. There's dozens more, though, like the off-kilter movie posters that feature throughout. "From Dusk 'Til Shaun" is the only one I can remember, but there's several more, and I'm quite certain I missed some. I doubt anyone could have managed to pick them all up in a single run through.

But so what? I'm reminded here of Alan Moore's argument that (from memory) says you can never adequately adapt a comic book into a film, because there's an irreconcilable difference between how an eye focuses on a page and how a camera lens is focused on what it's filming. The flow of information can't work the same way - a comic artist can insert details in the margins that a camera would struggle to capture, at least without dumping a lot of the standard rules of good cinematography. This, combined with the fact we all choose the speed we read, whereas a film moves at its own pace, makes it impossible to crowd film frames with as much information as one can a comic book panel, and expect it all to be assimilated.

Zack Snyder famously attempted to disprove Moore by shooting Watchmen in such a way that everything on-screen was equally in focus, which is probably why that film just feels so damn weird to watch. Spider-Verse's intended solution is rather more simple: just make a film so brilliant people will happily watch it more than once.

Objective achieved, then. And not just because of the design work. It's got a damn impressive voice cast, from the unimpeachable Lily Tomlin right on down to Shameik Moore, who I'd not heard of before but absolutely sells the crap out of Miles Morales here. Mahershala Ali is particularly worth mentioning in dispatches - he sells perfectly every beat necessary to complicate and enrich Morales' version of the Uncle Ben myth [1] - but nobody here is being carried by the material or their colleagues. It's A-games all round.

Plus, obviously, Nicholas Cage. I've not actually read Spider-Man Noir, so I don't know how much the film's obvious aping of Steve Ditko's character The Question comes from there. Wherever the idea came from, though, the debt is obvious, and probably a much fairer way to honour Ditko than the film's rather saccharine closing caption.

From Spider-Man to The Question to Alan Moore's Rorschach to Into The Spider-Verse.

And Cage makes it all work superbly. For all the stick he's gotten in recent years for agreeing to star in any old tat so long as it helps him out of his financial hole (and isn't it amazing how happy people are to mock famous people for doing the exact same thing 99% of the rest of the world has to do, i.e. take shitty jobs as an alternative to bankruptcy), he's clearly still got it. His colourless Spider-Man isn't just pitch-perfect and hilarious, it's beautifully understated. Noir Parker is so far from Cage's trademark intensity/mania that it took almost the entire film for me to realise who he was.

But Cage's Spider-Man is remarkable in a more general framework, as well. Consider the fact that of the seven Spider-Sentients we get in this film, only three are white men - those being a fading has-been, a walking monochrome punchline, and the handsome blonde Aryan-type who gets himself killed almost immediately. The only other white man with more than three lines here is a violent brute, willing to destroy an entire city if it gets back the wife and son who died in the act of leaving him for his violent brutishness. There's not a man among them who gets a more unambiguously sympathetic portrayal than the talking pig does.

Which is just as it should be. This isn't a movie about white men, or white people in general. Or I guess it is, a little, but only as a background; a landscape our the mixed race hero has to navigate in order to find his own way.

Coming-of-age tales aren't exactly thin on the ground, naturally, especially in the context of superhero origin stories. They don't tend to play out like this, though. I'm reminded of a tweet I saw a year or two ago arguing that just because white Hollywood had mined every conceivable trope and cliche to the point of exhaustion, that didn't mean creators of colour should feel they'd missed their chance to play with those same ideas. It's certainly an excellent point. After watching Spider-Verse though, I'm wondering whether there's actually a deeper truth here - that the decision to apply old tropes when writing about the marginalised will almost inevitably scrape off the rust they've gathered over decades.

At the very least, it should be clear that watching a child of a black father and a Hispanic mother fight against a wealthy white man the police can't touch is a different and more interesting approach to watching yet another white boy have a crack at it. There's been a lot of talk over the years, especially recently, about how the superhero genre is inherently fascist. Even when the masked vigilantes are perpetrating violence against recognisably bad people, the argument goes, it's still a power fantasy about how the world needs unaccountable street militias to beat up the people they've concluded can't be dealt with in any other way.

Spider-Verse manages to undercut this, though. Outside of the inverted non-realities of overheated right-wing bloviating, there's no sensible parallel one can draw between fascist militias and minority groups banding together for protection, and to demand justice. A white man in a mask almost always disagrees with the state because they don't think it's being oppressive enough, and/or that it's oppressing the right people. If they take on an self-obsessed, dangerous capitalist like Wilson Fisk, it's because they want someone worse in their place, or at least, they want their evil channeled in a direction even more damaging to the oppressed.

That simply doesn't apply here. Like I said above, changing the ethnicity of the hero can't help but change the nature of the story. When Miles Morales fights the oppressor, it's actually on behalf of the oppressed. It's because nothing else has worked, including his own father's attempts to change the system from within. Morales doesn't come from the same world as Parker. In his reality he's constantly either invisible, or hyper-visible, with no control over which he is when (hence the uncontrollable chameleonic power). Where his horrified dismay at attracting a cop's attention makes total sense even before we learn it's his dad driving the panda car. Putting on a mask has different connotations when no-one actually sees you as fully human in the first place.

And then there's Peter B Parker. For much of the film's run-time, it isn't actually Fisk who's Miles' primary antagonist. It's Parker. There isn't a standard student-mentor plot-line here. Parker attempts to block Miles at every turn, refusing to believe that he can possibly do exactly what every other Spider-Person/Pig in the whole damn film did, and learn on-the-job. This failure to accept Morales is fundamentally capable of choosing his own destiny culminates in Parker not only tying him down, but gagging him too, robbing him not just of his capacity to act, but his voice as well. The three white people who share his powers turn out to have more faith in a school girl and an actual fucking pig than they do him. The character with the greatest justification for donning a mask and fighting Fisk [2] is the same one denied the right to.

It's pretty much inevitable given this set-up that Miles is going to prove everyone wrong and save the day. Even within this most obvious conclusion, though, there's still subtlety. Miles remains fallible, even while he's proving himself more than his comrades were willing to accept. The glass still breaks when he leaps from his first skyscraper. He's not perfect. But he never had to be. He just had to be good enough. The film neither lets him be outstripped by his white pseudo-mentor, nor reach a level of super-powered competence porn that would raise him to the level of Magic (half-Hispanic) Negro. His final surge of success is pitched perfectly, even down to the fact that - as someone else pointed out - that his style of web-swinging is much more about the running at which he excels, as oppose to Peter's aerial acrobatics.

About the only criticism I can see in all this is the fact Morales isn't more angry with Parker when they next meet. That certainly bothered me initially. On the other hand, we already know from earlier in the film that Miles puts great value in impressing his teachers (as distinct, importantly, from having respect for schools or the education system) - he puts his hand straight up when the class is asked a question, only panicking when everyone else does the same. He knows the best way to fake a lack of academic understanding is to get 50% on a two-option multiple choice test, and yet still subconsciously shows off by intentionally getting every question wrong [3]. It doesn't seem unreasonable for his pride about proving Papa Bravo Papa wrong to take precedence over his anger about how he was treated. Miles is distinctly a character first, and an avatar of his ethnicity second. As it should be, I think - though as always, what do I know?

Still, white guilt notwithstanding, I'm happy to come out completely in favour of the film. It's a complete joy from start to finish, and one which - fittingly for a movie intended to be watched in 3D - works best when viewed with both eyes wide open.

(One last thing. It's amazingly refreshing to see a plot about a guy who persuades a girl she was wrong to swear off friendships, as oppose to relationships. Miles is clearly into her - "Hey girl" - but the instant he learns that she's struggling to bring herself to even engage in platonic relationships any more, he has absolutely no problem engaging with her emotional needs rather than his own. Also too: "Reassess my personal biases". Just glorious.)

[1] It's maybe something of a shame that Miles' flawed but decent uncle turns out to be an assassin in the pay of an asshole (even beyond the degree to which making him the Prowler stretches credulity). Still, it adds something new to the standard guilt-over-uncle's-death element that Spider-Man stories apparently aren't ever going to get away from. I'm also glad the film didn't go the obvious route and end with Mile's father still convinced the new Spider-Man killed his brother.

[2] One could argue Peni, being also a person of colour and a woman besides, has an equivalent or even superior claim to be the kind of person we should cheer on for going up against Kingpin. I'm not sure how well that argument holds web-fluid, though. Peni's obvious origins in the anime style throws up an additional barrier between her and our reality. She's a cartoon inside a cartoon (much like Spider-Ham), which makes thinking of her as a minority within Miles' reality a little difficult. 

[3] This is easily my favourite small character moment in the whole film. It's not just that it shows Miles can't help seeking approval even while trying to avoid it, it's that he's so overwhelmed by the competing forces in his life that he self-sabotages his self-sabotage. See also his instinct to run from difficult situations whilst also refusing to tie his shoelaces.