Spider-Man wants to change: Will Hollywood let it?
Sony Animation Studios, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is about Miles Morales, from Earth-42, as he attempts to balance his responsibilities as a superhero with his obligations to his school and family. Should he reach for the potential his parents have fought and sacrificed for, take on the mantle of hero, or struggle to obtain both?
It's also about Spider-Woman Gwen Stacy trying to hide her secret identity from her father. It's about Spider-Punk Hobie navigating an increasingly centralized authority. It's about a more "traditional" Spider-Man raising a child. The Spider-Verse is really about the idea of Spider-Man, as every iteration deals with a meta-thread connecting all of their stories.
A central tension, perhaps the central tension of this movie, is whether Spider-Man can change due to the companies that rule the world. Do we continue rehashing the same stories over and over again, with minor aesthetic tweaks, or do we challenge the core narrative structures underbidding them all?
Can Spider-Man Change?
Across the Spider-Verse is the second film in the Spider-Verse trilogy, a property owned by Sony. It seems almost strange that it's not a product of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the massive media property that has, until very recently, dominated the box office for the last decade. Its presence in media and pop culture has seemed almost inescapable. If there is a superhero story of note, its brand is usually on it — well, until now.
Worse, many modern-day superhero properties are the textbook version of formulaic, usually riffing on Joseph Campbell's Momomyth from The Hero of a Thousand Faces. A hero stumbles into a journey, embraces the call, and then, through a series of trials and tribulations, overcomes a central problem or figure to bring back knowledge to their community.
Take Spider-Man, for example. The story almost always has an inciting incident that gives our hero superpowers, usually being bitten by a radioactive spider. Every Spider-Man has an uncle who dies tragically, followed by a first love and a captain of some sort — though the who and how can be remixed and changed at will. These sacrifices are a core part of what makes Spider-Man, as they learn that they must give up a part of themselves for the greater good. It's this basic framework that has been superimposed on most Spider-Man narratives throughout the last three decades.
That dominance, this new Spider-Verse movie suggests, is part of the problem. Within the movie, it's learned that these narrative beats are what connect every iteration of Spider-People together into one Arachno-Humanoid Poly-Multiverse (aka the Spider-Verse). These "canon events," as they are referred to in-universe (a not-so-subtle reference to the way IP is policed between valid and not-valid stories based on who owns it), are in the story policed by a Spider-Society, iterations of Spider-Man who want to protect this universal fabric. And implicitly, to protect the basic storytelling structure that has dominated Hollywood for decades.
And from what we know, the people in the Spider-Society protecting these canon events have a seemingly good reason for doing so. They are headed by the authoritarian-adjacent Spider-Man Miguel from Nueva York, who learned of the devastating results going against canon can lead to after slipping into a universe where his loved ones didn't die. This led to that universe blinking out of existence.
On a meta-level, we can view Miguel as the Hollywood system's vanguard, afraid to deviate from the Campbellian formula they believe is at the heart of their success. The way some Hollywood executives talk about the Hero's Journey, you might be left thinking that the universe would fall apart if writers try something new. As Disney story analyst Christopher Vogler wrote in an influential internal memo: “The ideas Campbell presents in this and other books are an excellent set of analytical tools. With them you can almost always determine what’s wrong with a story that’s floundering; and you can find a better solution [to] almost any story problem by examining the pattern laid out in the book.”
In the context of this story, the fear of upsetting the cosmic fabric has Miguel wanting to preserve canon at whatever cost, even if that means excluding Miles from the Spider-Society due to him being given powers from a radioactive spider outside his universe. In essence, Miles is a glitch in the very canon Miguel adheres to, whose mere existence challenges the social fabric (side note: I know I am looking at this through the lens of storytelling, but unsurprisingly, race theory would also work quite well here).
As Across the Spider-Verse ends on a cliffhanger, we do not know how this tension will resolve, but we, as the viewers, although empathetic toward Miguel's reasons for preserving the status quo, are ultimately not on his side. The central characters, including Miles, Gwen, and the ever-lovable Hobie, resign from the Spider-Society near the end of the film, believing that the growing authoritarian impulses of Miguel have crossed a line.
Miles is set to face two villains in the third film, both natural reactions to canon. On the one side, we have Miguel, who will fight for everything to return to the status quo. He wants to fix Spider-Man and, on a meta-level, all intellectual property to the canon set by the creators of such works. His conception of storytelling is possessive and rigid, much like the studio executives littering Hollywood.
On the other side, we have The Spot, a sort of anti-canon figure. He is a resentful scientist who was caught in the collider accident from the first movie. He now has the power to travel between dimensions and eat the fabric of reality. He doesn't want to create things as much as tear everything apart, ripping the Spider-Verse to shreds. Unless you want to give doomers on Reddit way too much power, there isn't a real-life analog for him, as he’s more of a metaphor for nihilistic destruction.
I suspect Miles will have to defeat both of these villains, with one or both being converted to the “good” side or receiving a redemption-equals-death trope because both of them have a point, albeit one taken too far in one extreme. Change, to people like Miguel, can feel like the ending of everything, and the status quo to The Spot probably does feel so oppressive that tearing it all down feels like the only option.
The central tension behind Across The Spider-Verse is a good one. The way we think about storytelling needs to change, and in reality, it's not only our storytelling structure that needs to be adjusted but also the forces keeping the Spider-Verse together in the first place.
A Canonical Conclusion
In the real world, it's essential to recognize that there are no world eaters that threaten to swallow our universe if we deviate from the norms of storytelling. The force protecting the Campbellian formula isn't physics but the violence of the law. Canon is as much a legal invention as it is a narrative one. Companies like Disney and Sony jealously guard IP from others' hands, with IP like Spider-Man not likely to enter the public domain until well after many of us enter old age or are dead.
Spider-Man's recent inclusion into the MCU through works like No Way Home is an excellent example of how many of these forces are corporate, not artistic. The character is owned by Sony, which, after the conclusion of Sam Raimi's early 2000s Spider-Man trilogy, attempted to restart a new extended universe in the wake of the MCU's success. These movies never quite hit it off, and the project was scrapped in favor of a financial and legal partnership between Disney and Sony that has allowed the property to be included in the MCU and vice versa for MCU characters in standalone Spider-Man films.
And yet, all of that backstory has more to do with capitalist contracts than it does with the stories behind them because that's how IP is seen by the forces that own it: investment vehicles. The Campbell formula is popular because it allows storytelling to be condensed into, well, a formula, a comforting thought for studio executives when they are pumping millions of dollars into these projects (and expect even more in return).
However, this way of thinking constrains storytelling. Not only because only certain types of stories are seen as profitable but because only certain types of people are allowed to work on these stories at all— i.e., the ones rich people permit to work on them.
In a way, even the Spider-Verse trilogy fits this pattern. Not only is it an officially sanctioned story, but it's not telling a radically new Spider-Man story as much as it's telling a story about the idea of telling a new story. Miles still lost his uncle and has fallen for Gwen, although hopefully, we will see changes by the time the third movie comes to a close. Capitalist imagination has such a stranglehold on what popular stories are being told that the best the Spider-Verse can do now is open a window for the future.
Spider-Man wants to change — to tell new narrative beats and radically different stories, but it's too soon to see if the Spider-Verse trilogy will permit us to walk through that door. Hollywood tends to learn the wrong lessons from its successes (see all the toy movies greenlit in the wake of the feminist movie Barbie's success). And in the meantime, stories in general, not just the Spider-Verse, are becoming as tightly spun and rigid as a spider's web.