Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Rodney Rothman, Peter Ramsey, and Bob Persichetti, 2018) (Patreon)

I'm sure this will come as a surprise, but I am not a devotee of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. When a specific film gets good notices, like Black Panther or Shang-Chi, I will give it a look. Since I don't really fuck with Marvel, I can't say anything meaningful regarding the sameness of the films, or the corporate directorial style. I'll leave these complaints to the dutiful professionals who must trudge out to watch these films against their will.

What I will say is, I am not particularly interested in superhero plots of any sort. My reasoning for this will seem so counterintuitive to fans of the genre that they'd probably just say I don't get it, which is probably true. My interest in art tends to focus on actually grappling with the complications of the world we live in. So introducing someone with super-human powers strikes me as a deus ex machina. (World's fucked up? Okay, hear me out . . . assume there's someone who can fix everything. Now we can deal with all the "good stuff.")

My son, on the other hand, is all about Marvel. Talking with him about his fandom has shown me some of the pleasures this work can offer, but it also provides the best argument against this marketing approach. As a fellow autistic, Matt really digs the seriality of the MCU, how everything interlocks and cross-communicates. But at the same time, this has actually produced acute anxiety for him, like when he has to forgo sleep for days to binge-watch all of the latest X-Men or Scarlet Witch series before he can go see the next Ant-Man. Seeing Matt wrestle with this hasn't exactly endeared Marvel to me, the Lacanian Marxist, who is just seeing the latest capitalist iteration of "I can't show my face in public if I'm not using a strong enough mouthwash." This is entertainment?

Anyway, Matt and I have a Fathers’ Day date to see Across the Spider-Verse, so I figured it was time to give Into a look. And I get it. I understand why this film is appreciated as a serious work of animation. Adam Nayman correctly mentioned that these films, in their meta-way, are dealing with the problem of IP-based creation, since they are explicitly about Spider-Man as an endlessly repeatable figure, ostensibly as "the same, but different" as Hong Sang-soo's films or Michael Snow's "Walking Woman." How far can the artists squash and stretch the character-logo while still keeping it recognizable?

Writers Rodney Rothman and Phil Lord make the wise decision to connect this formal problem -- Spidey ad infinitum -- with the politics of representation. Miles (Shameik Moore) is a biracial kid struggling to fit in, a bit stranded between his neighborhood friends and the mostly privileged white folks at his private school. By accidentally becoming a new Spider-Man, he is able to forge a new identity, one that is relatively independent of racial expectations. Wearing the mask is a bit like living online. You could be anyone. That's both the promise and the threat.

Seeing as I don't watch a lot of films of this type, I think the visual and narrative radicalism of Into eluded me. After the hype, I expected more of it to be like the highly abstract, Lichtenstein-meets-Pollock closing credits. It's a reinvented origin story, of course, and so it had to hit certain beats. But then, after Miles' Uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali) dies, the scene with the multi-Spideys listing off their own significant losses ironically underlined the problem with "canon." Myths can be endlessly rewritten, but at a certain point they do outlast their artistic potential and become, well, redundant. Into the Spider-Verse does a fine job of articulating this problem, while suggesting that there's really no escape. It's anarchy that won't frighten the shareholders.