Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

The Anomaly and the Algorithm: On Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

There is a moment, somewhere in the deranged second hour of Across the Spider-Verse, when the film's true antagonist finally tips his hand. Miguel O'Hara—the brooding, fang-flashing chief of the Spider-Society—doesn't want to capture Miles Morales because Miles has done anything wrong. He wants to imprison him because Miles refuses to do something wrong. Specifically: he refuses to stand aside while his father dies in the prescribed manner, on the prescribed day, in service of what Miguel calls a "canon event." The kid has been informed that his very existence is a mistake, that he was never supposed to be Spider-Man, that the multiverse itself is straining under the weight of his unscripted being—and his response is a shrug, a smirk, a stride: Nah, I'mma do my own thing.

It is, I would submit, among the most thrilling four words spoken in American cinema in years. Because what Miles is rejecting, with the casual conviction of a Brooklyn teenager who has been told one too many times what he can't do, is nothing less than the ancient and lucrative doctrine that essence precedes existence. The Spider-Society has decreed that to be a Spider-Person means to suffer a specific catalog of losses; that the script came before the actor; that the Spider-Man precedes any particular Spider-Man. Miles, gloriously, calls bullshit.

It is hard to overstate how strange and welcome this is in a contemporary blockbuster, particularly one nested inside the industrial superhero apparatus. The Marvel Cinematic Universe and its competitors have spent the better part of fifteen years training audiences to revere the canon—to feel, when a hero finally adopts the "correct" costume or utters the line from the comics, a Pavlovian shudder of recognition. This is who they were always meant to be. The films function as essence-delivery devices. Their pleasures are the pleasures of foreordained becoming: of watching characters consent at last to be what they have always already been. Across the Spider-Verse takes this entire apparatus and identifies it, accurately, as a form of theological coercion. Miguel O'Hara is what you get when fandom acquires teeth and a five-year plan.

Consider the logic of the canon event. A mentor must be lost early. A captain who loves the Spider must die saving a child. The bad faith here—the philosophical sleight by which freedom is converted into role—operates on multiple levels. First, individual: every Spider-Person is asked to interpret their grief not as the contingent catastrophe of a finite life but as the necessary correlate of a vocation. You did not lose your father; you became Spider-Man. The pain is converted, instantly, into purpose. Second, institutional: the Spider-Society itself, with its glass towers and its biometric surveillance and its bureaucratic clipboards—essentially an HR department for trauma—exists to ensure no one notices the slippage. The whole organization is dedicated to the proposition that Spider-People are not free agents who happen to share a costume but instances of a metaphysical type. They are not making choices. They are filling roles.

This is bad faith industrialized, scaled, given a logo. And it is recognizable, immediately, as the structure of our moment. We live inside canon events. The algorithm has already determined, more or less, who you are, what you'll buy, which grief is appropriate to your demographic. Brand identities calcify around us; politics becomes a question of authenticating one's pre-assigned tribe; the very language of "your truth" smuggles in the assumption that the truth in question was waiting for you all along, like a uniform in a locker with your name on it. The Spider-Society would have a comfortable home in the analytics division of any contemporary platform. What it sells is the relief of essence: the comfort of knowing that the script has been written, that suffering means something, that one's choices were always going to land where they landed.

What makes Miles's rebellion philosophically serious—rather than merely cool, though it is also that—is the film's refusal to let him off the hook. The animators understand that freedom, the real article, comes with weight. To say no to the canon is to accept that your father might die anyway, on a Tuesday, for no reason at all, with no cosmic ledger crediting the loss to your becoming. It is to forfeit the consolation of necessity. The devastating final act drops Miles into precisely this anguish: he has rejected the script, and now he must live with the possibility that the script's predictions will come true regardless, except now without the alibi of fate. He has converted necessity into accident, and accident is heavier to carry. Every adolescent who has ever insisted on choosing their own path understands this in their bones—the moment you claim authorship is the moment every consequence becomes yours.

Gwen Stacy's parallel arc deepens the argument. She moves through the film as a study in the strain of facticity: the past will not stay past, the father is still the father, the rules of her home universe demand her capture. She has already lived through her "canon event"—the loss of her own Peter Parker—and the question the film puts to her is whether that loss is a definition or a wound. Miguel offers definition. Miles offers wound. Definition is cleaner; it tells you who you are. Wounds are open; they require continuous response. By the time Gwen is assembling her ragtag dissident crew in the closing minutes, she has chosen, like Miles, the harder labor of being undefined. There is no Platonic Spider-Woman she is finally consenting to become. There is only the person she is making, in real time, out of contingent and irrecoverable materials.

The film performs this rejection of essence at the level of its own surface. To watch Across the Spider-Verse is to be immersed in a visual heterogeneity so aggressive that no single style can claim to be the "real" one. Gwen's universe arrives in weeping watercolors that respond to her emotions; Hobie Brown, the Spider-Punk, is a literal collage, his body frames slipping in and out of registration like a flyer Xeroxed too many times; Pavitr Prabhakar's Mumbattan throbs with line work that refuses to settle. There is no master aesthetic, no canonical Spider-look from which the others are deviations. The movie is formally committed to the proposition it argues thematically: that the variations are the thing. Essence is a story told by power; existence is what each particular Spider-Person does on a Tuesday afternoon.

I confess I find the cultural significance of this slightly thrilling and slightly terrifying, in the way only a genuinely live idea can be. American children are going to see this film in numbers that academic philosophy could not dream of. They are going to absorb, in their pre-articulate way, the proposition that the official story of who they are is not binding. That being told you were supposed to be X is the beginning of an argument, not its conclusion. That the appropriate response to receiving one's destiny is to examine the credentials of the entity issuing it. The political content of this is significant and, I suspect, not entirely intended by the corporation distributing the film—which is itself, of course, an essence-manufacturing operation of some scale.

But that is the trouble with making art about freedom: even when the studio wants only a sequel hook, the form can outrun the intention. Miles, at the end of the picture, is trapped in the wrong universe, with the wrong family wearing the faces of his right family, racing toward a confrontation we cannot yet see. He has rejected the canon and has not yet learned what costs that rejection will exact. He is, in the truest and oldest sense, condemned to be free. We will not find out until the next installment whether the film has the nerve to let him stay that way—whether his refusal of essence will be honored, or whether the multiverse, like every studio system, will quietly reassert its demand that the boy become what he was always meant to be.

I hope they let him do his own thing. I really do.