Miles Morales and the Totally Troubling Conservative Cognitive Dissonance Dance (Patreon)

At this point, I feel like I’ve talked about my love for Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse to the point of ad nauseam (I’ve haven't just written about it, I’ve done an entire scene-by-scene breakdown video essay). The film is not just a feat of masterful storytelling and inventive animation, it has this seemingly effortless way of touching on morality, culture, and inclusion, all of which are expressed through the powerful arc of young Miles Morales. As such, the film’s cultural impact is not just centered around the fact that it’s a great movie, but the way it dragged the narrative into social modernity. And as a result, it seemingly changed the entire dialogue around the Spider-man universe for the better.

Take 2018’s Marvel’s Spider-man, a video game which perhaps had the benefit of coming out three months prior to Spider-Verse. I don’t say that as pot shot, mind you. The game is rousing success that gives the player the jaw-dropping, breathless feeling of web slinging around a shockingly-realistic Manhattan with delightful glee. Even the game’s story, largely a remix of past movies, manages to be fun and kinetic. And luckily for us, that game even had the luck and / or foresight to include a younger Miles Morales, who discovers his powers by the games’ end. Thus setting us up for the newly-released sequel: Spider-Man: Miles Morales. But unlike last-time, now they have this wonderful new framework of Spider-Verse to work with. Thus, they can lovingly take so many similar things that film did well and incorporate it into their own game. Which means that Spiderman: Miles Morales should, theoretically-speaking, be a slam dunk…

And don’t worry, in many ways it is!

But medium changes can be tricky things… Especially when they invite in things that are the opposite of our intentions…

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Let’s start with the good. Because Spider-Man: Miles Morales is a very, very good video game. Sure, I could get into the nitty gritty about proper set-ups and the timing of story information (particularly with the Prowler plot), But in the end? It tells a personal story about its main character with verve and loving heart. Heck, unlike other games, it doesn’t drag the main story out indefinitely, but knows to keep it tight and focused. Better yet, the game also creates a remarkable sense of place. While many of us were blown away by the New York setting of the last game, this sequel somehow manages to one up it by making the city feel even more personal and lived in. I’ll say, it’s depiction New York City during the snowy holiday season filled me with such a specific, intense kind of homesick that I can hardly describe. I simply adored it. But even then, I acknowledge that game’s best quality might be on the thematic level, because it is a AAA video game that is unapologetically sincere about its political stances.

Yes, we are talking about a game that literally takes a moment to have Miles proudly stand up before a Black Lives Matter mural. And if you understand the vocal nature of the toxic sub-culture within video games (and many studio’s fear of / silent agreement with that culture), then you understand the importance of such overt visual gestures. It represents a meaningful change. Moreover, the game represents East Harlem this time not just a series of older buildings you have to swing through en route to some mission, but a home; a place full of life and joyful, cross-cultural glee, complete with Puerto Rican flags and our main characters speaking openly in Spanish. This direct emphasis on the importance of community doesn’t just feel nice, but genuine. And even in terms of gameplay, there’s “saving people” sequence on a bridge that is basically everything I’ve ever wanted from these games (and can’t believe there’s not more of).

But you find even more of the creators’ cultural headspace in all the nooks and crannies of the game. Whether it’s the portrayal of a deaf character, or showing the culture of volunteering and political organization, or even in the finding of a book titled “America’s Untold Truth: Seeing Beneath the Veil of Nationalism.” by Ezekiel Pendragon (a seeming nod to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and other works of that ilk). It’s showcasing a modern, healthy awareness that even shows up in the game’s casual dialogues. Because the characters talk about therapy! They talk about Jane Eyre! They talk about work-life balance! Heck, they even talk about the importance of talking. And again, all these things feel like miracles in a triple A video game. And I don’t want to undermine the successes of such gestures one iota.

But it comes with the acknowledgment that “complete storytelling” is a complex endeavor.

Because there are the things we want our stories to be about and then the things the plot actually dramatizes. So the real question is, how much does the game’s story and action actually back these notions up? How much does it thematically support the ideas of these causes? How much of it is posturing? How much is it lip service? Because if the game is actually going to use Black Lives Matter as a rallying cry, then it also invites the possible complications that come in game where its main character fights crime as a vigilante who is trying to uphold the law. More importantly, you can’t help but examine how that same character directly intersects with the police. Simply put? You’re engaging with a loaded context. But that loaded context is also a huge advantage if you’re willing actually to engage it.

To compare approaches, in Spider-Verse, the police commentary isn’t overtly discussed as a political issue or anything, but instead directly ingrained into family dynamics. Miles’ father is a police officer and there’s this inherent distance this position creates, along with a sense of embarrassment and a central disagreement about Spider-man’s very purpose and existence. Yes, his father loves Miles and the narrative is understanding of his character in turn. But crucially, the narrative still makes it clear Miles’ father is the misguided one about a great many thing. Meanwhile, the relationship between the same two characters in Spiderman: Miles Morales could not be more different. Miles’ father was a police officer who was slain in the prior game and his sacrifice hangs over this sequel, directly painting him as the heroic figure of braveness (right down to the ending’s sentimental scavenger hunt). I understand that that this relationship can be quarantined off as a personal one, or a singular, shining example of how it should be. But the completely lack of introspection of this issue is clear. But more worrying is the way this sequel still taps into the prior game’s problems with policing at large.

In case it bears repeating, the central tenet of Black Lives Matter is the protesting of police brutality and racially-motivated attacks against Black people. This is something often coupled with urging the need to defund the police at large, en route to major institutional reform that relies on other governmental resources and departments instead. It bares mentioning because 2018’s Marvel’s Spiderman 100% paints the police as part of the noble institution keeping the world safe from dangerous ex-felons. Hell, there’s entire missions where Peter is basically a “Cop Adjacent” who goes to help restore their stations. Even then it felt unnerving. But in 2020? It feels impossibly naive when many Americans have finally woken up to the staggering depth of corruption within the institution at large. Now, I will say that this sequel game at least understands these optics and as such, there are none of those kinds of missions. But it still directly upholds the troubling sentiment of other half of the policing coin, which the way it portrays criminality at large.

Which brings us to “the goon problem.”

You know? Goons! They’re the heaps of goofy hired criminals who help the villain with their given task. Truthfully, hired goons mostly exist as fodder for the hero to beat up en route to the main villain, but a lot of movies and TV like to have fun with the trope. Whether it’s The Simpsons, this Austin Powers deleted scene, or my all time favorite goon moment in this episode of Batman: The Animated Series. I particularly like the way that Goons have all sort of been codified as these thick-headed old timey New Yorker lunks. Of course, the trope has not come without problems. I can’t tell you how many 80’s movies problematically depicted goons as roving, murderous gangs, who were often minorities that were out there causing trouble for civilized white people! Yeah, Goons are something that can slide right into deplorable, problematic shorthand stereotyping in an instant.

And this is where the difference of medium crucially comes into play.

Because in cinema, you can more specifically craft those smaller moments of Goon use in your depiction. But in video games? You have an inherent problem because they have to maximize the goon quotient to absurd degrees. Suddenly, a handful of bad guys in a villain lair have to become an army of toughs, roving an entire city and actively being predators to invite your fisticuffs. And this has to be happening constantly. On one level, it’s true we’ve sort of come to expect this convention as part of the language of gaming in and of itself, but there are ways it can still be troubling, especially in scenarios where the suspension of disbelief breaks in stark ways. Like when you’re dealing with the “hyper-realistic setting of New York” it suddenly becomes harder to imagine that you are in some stylized fantasy world. Now, this cartoonish evil crashing into your own back yard. And the more that realism seeps into your goon-beating, the more it starts unveiling a troubling gulf.

For whatever it’s worth, I feel like Spider-man: Miles Morales is aware of this problem. For instance, it features the kinds of who goons who fit in the cartoonish silliness. Like, there’s literally the kind of goons who are ACTIVELY STEALING SPIDER-MAN TOYS FROM NEEDY CHILDREN AT CHRISTMAS TIME. But a lot of other times, you feel the narrative go in the other direction, where there’s this constant need to bend over backwards to justify the need for Miles to stop a given crime. For example, there were some bad guys were something or other and we hear Miles discussing it with his friend Genke. Miles despairs with utter incredulity, “Are you serous?” before he then puts on this very serious voice: “They’re putting people in danger.” Which just creates an odd feeling in the player.

You know when someone is trying to justify something to you, but they just start getting overworked about it and really serious in their justifications? Even though you’re not really fighting them on this at all? It’s like their very act of fixating just reveals the more complicated motives behind their own actions or their secret deeper worry about the morality behind it. This honestly feels like that. There’s so many of the crimes and side missions that don’t end up feeling fun and cartoony, they feel stretched to over-justification. Thus, it feels like Miles is going out of his way to paint the portrait of criminality in the city the exact way that conservatives see it. That is a world full of amoral convicts, prowling the streets, looking to do any ill they can. Don’t they know they’re hurting people! How could they do this!?!?

There are two particular moments in the game that stand out.

The first is how there always seems to be a mugging in Central Park every time you go by. Now, before we get into it, yes, I’m very aware that crime in cities exists, even in Central Park. But this is where we come to the problem with “crime hysteria,” because you’ll see The Post freak out about a whole 20 robberies that took place in a year, but that’s happening to the 37.5 million people who used the park (I can’t be certain, but these particular stats indicated you have a 0.0000005% chance of being robbed there). Again, I point out this crippling realism because every time you swing by in this game there’s always a gang of like 8 tough dudes who are all crowding around a woman in order to “beat her up” and it’s your moral duty to swing in and save the day… And it doesn’t take a lot see the problem with this depiction.

Because the scenario in question is a direct holdover from the popular portrait of rampant crime in 1980’s New York, which was in turn part of the conservative fever dream that paints the way so many people STILL look at criminality in this country. It’s a portrait that shows why so many white conservatives cheered on during the Bernhard Goetz “vigilantism” in the 1984 subway shooting (which, of course, turned out to be racially motivated). Just as it’s virtually impossible not to look at this exact mugging scenario and not think about the hysteria and injustice of the Central Park Five. Needless to say, this EXACT SCENARIO has an insanely loaded fucking context. For it is not only a crucial part of how crime exists in the conservative mindset, it is directly antithetical to heart of Black Lives Matter.

But such obvious worries go unaddressed, likely because they crash against the simple needs of superhero gaming. You are supposed to handle your task, get a certain number of air combos for bonus tokens, and feel like you saved the day. Thus, Miles swings in and beats the crap out of them. And in case you were having any misgivings out this scenario, Miles specially tells the woman being attacked, “Don’t worry, those guys were awful.” Yes, it is directly telling us, the player, don’t feel bad about this. Because those are bad guys!

And Miles really has no problem deciding who the bad guys are, huh?

While the main story is a bit more reflective on the nature of criminality (we’ll get to that), it is in these little casual asides where you feel the worry creep in. Which brings me to the second moment that hit me square on, because in one side mission, you have to take pictures of dock workers and use facial recognition with THE POLICE DATABASE to find which ones have a criminal history. Because, clearly, that will identify the bad guy who is responsible! In case it needs to be said, let me state with clarity that facial recognition technology is yet another deeply problematic, racist tool of oppression used against minorities and its removal is yet another tenet of the BLM movement. But the game skates right on by all that. In fact, it’s totally justified because you’re using that database to find the cartoonish villains who stole toys from needy children! Which is just OOF. Because the reason we use mustache twirling villains is to make it pulpy and fun, but when you use that in conjunction with the most problematic of problematic IRL police methods? Then you aren’t creating something silly, you’re just helping reinforce the deluded conservative thinking that propagates that horrific methodology in the first place.

But here’s my question: what would the makers of this game say if I brought this up? Would it be a horrific moment of realization of something that was just overlooked? Were there so many different authors it would be impossible to know how this portrayal came to be? Is it just a moment of incidental error set within a larger more cogent thematic storytelling? Is there something I am missing in the depiction? Or do we have to use cognitive dissonance to just slide on by like the game does, too? If so, should we? I can’t fully answer these questions. All I know is that the further the game’s side missions get away from the fun of goofy goblins on air skateboards and the closer it gets to the realistic issues in society and with they interact with how we depict criminality, the more Spider-Man: Miles Morales can’t seem to unpack its own motives.

The game almost seems trapped in an identity crisis. While it knows the power and importance of certain forms of representation, the rest of its portrayal gets stuck between understanding the need for systemic overhaul vs. the unfortunate modeling of “respectability politics.” The short and messy version of those terms? respectability politics places onus on individuals to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps and be model minorities, etc. While the goal of systematic overhaul is to recognize the corruption and horror of modern institutions that are inherently designed to keep said people down no matter what they actually do, respectable or otherwise. In short, not only does the latter shed light on the ugly purpose of the former, but respectability politics can be regarded as a directly antithetical methodology.

So where Into The Spider-Verse navigated those waters by focusing on messy, nuanced characterization of Miles himself, I can’t help but feel like this game keeps treading right into the respectability quagmire in these little, seemingly tangential ways. Starting with the fact that this Miles Morales isn’t the avoidant kid looking for “no expectations” in his life. He, like Peter, is more the incredible, unflappable science whiz who is taken aback by the gee whiz glory of superhero-dom. Instead of complications with his father’s policing role, there is absolutely lionization. Instead of keeping the small stakes profession of Mrs. Morales being a teacher, she is instead running for office. And instead of really playing with the complex relationship of Uncle Aaron, by game’s end the character recognizes his need to go to jail and pay for his crimes (even though the prison system is it’s own problematic ball of wax).

Please understand: I know these things aren’t problems in and of themselves. Nor is their any problem with modeling positive depictions. I mean, of course not! But when such depictions become omnipresent and ubiquitous, it can’t help but feel like it taps into the trap of respectability politics I.E. the thing that upholds the already-problematic status quo while often ignoring the grander realities of injustice. And I honestly would think less of this were it not for the way Miles keeps upholding the system, particularly as a counterpoint to the game’s depiction of “The Underground.”

First off, I want to make it clear that I think Miles and Phin’s main story is really affecting. Because it meaningfully tells the story of two former best friends, now at odds. She’s driven by revenge and is putting others in danger to achieve those ends, thus he simply has to stop her on ethical principle. But it constantly takes a time to show empathy and dialogue between them. It even unpacks the history of their friendship with love and even lots of important gender-normative role-reversals. But where Phin’s characterization gets weird is where she is, you know, building and training of her own army of super goons I guess??? Where I’d happily play along with her as a rogue villainous agitator, this one reaaaaaaallly feels like a leap for her character. Especially because (through side missions and challenges) we learn they are basically hired goons from the gangs in the last game. And their motivation in all this?

Phin outright tells us “they don’t care as long as the weapons keep coming” and it’s like, uhhhhhh, really that’s their only motivation? Wanton destruction? Weapon fetishizing? And you’re just cool with this, Phin? I mean, are we tapping into the politics of any of these motives? Nor hers? It’s all just an extension of her personal revenge? Yeah, I especially can’t help but worry because I have a question… was anyone else distressed with how it seems like there is maybekindasortatotally Antifa / hacktivist vibes with the group in question? The one which not so subtly equating with violent terrorism? I mean I don’t think I’m crazy here, but rather than taking these two depictions and treating them like the different paths toward justice, each with their own problems, it instead just paints The Underground with the same ugly, deeply-untrue portrait of how conservatism sees the “danger” of progressive movements.

But the truth is I can’t really get hand-wringing about any of this because the narrative never steps directly into any of this in outright fashion. It just keeps being this peripheral issue. A vague feeling of something off. It’s especially hard to criticize because the game knows the importance of making the main villain represent the real villain to Harlem: that is the kind of amoral white corporate greed that doesn’t care about getting people sick (in even makes an outright Chernobyl reference). Just as it knows to highlight the problems of when these kinds of mega-corporations come into neighborhoods to help “revitalize them,” when really they are looking to erase them and bring affluent white people in. Thus, the core metaphor of the story works rather well. But in dramatically expressing Miles’ conflict with Roxxon, it can’t help but also color Phin’s Underground organized rebellion against them as the “too far” brand of violent chaos that runs counter to Miles is the “trust the system” mentality.

It’s a problem that is only exacerbated by the sheer demands of the medium. Because really, Phin only needs an army because the game needs another faction to be like the last game. They’re barely storified otherwise! The Underground is just an extension of “feeding the beast” and it needing a billion bad guys for you to beat up. But in doing that, it can’t help but tap into the ugly conservative stereotype. And it’s one that goes right into the core DNA of the game’s fixation on action. Because in the spectrum of heroism, sometimes you just want to help a guy stuck on a window washer just because he’s stuck. Not because there are 10 ski-masked thugs who are secretly doing something to disrupt the power system. It can be smaller and more human. Hell, the game is at it’s best when it’s doing just that. But this just means there’s the game it wants to be on the surface and the one that constantly getting trapped in the engine of video game mechanics.

There was one moment that captured this torn feeling so succinctly. To bring it all back around, there was a point near the end where I was stopping what felt like the 100th mugging in Central Park that week and Miles suddenly let out a randomized line that I hadn’t heard before: “Can’t you guys stick to robbing evil landlords?” It’s a genuinely great line, one that showcases a deep awareness of the kinds of societal problems that Harlem is really facing… But in the end, it’s just that: a throwaway line. There’s no mission in this game where you are actually taking on landlords (which would feel really revolutionary). Instead, you are just taking on the same dangerously evil ex-cons that fit the profile of the conservative fever dream. It’s the identity crisis made clear.

Now, I understand that somewhere out there, there’s a ton of people who would look at me discussing all this and yell: “Just shut up and enjoy the fun of the game!”

To which I say: “Oh, believe me. I did.”

I played and enjoyed the entire ding dang thing. But we have to accept that escapism always feeds us something whether we like it or not. Just as we have to accept that there’s there’s self-suppression escapism and self-expansion escapism (and there are real things to be gained from the latter). Don’t worry, I’m not going to get into the absurd dialogue about how violent video games are the “cause” of X and Y ills in society. Such arguments are displacing nonsense. But we equally can’t pretend that such depictions aren’t a huge part of the way that media en masse has a cultural influence on us. I mean, I grew up with the same media we all did. it influenced me to embrace so many ways to see “how the world worked.” Of course it did. And within this media reality, a given escapist story will either reinforce a problematic status quo or be one of the pieces of art that helps tears that status quo down.

When I look at Spiderman: Miles Morales? There are all these wonderful moments of self-expanding escapism. Moments of critical representation, therapeutic discussion, and so so so many things it should be proud of. But there are also all these moments in the repetitive, game-y corners that paint a version of policing and criminality that, with every passing day, belies the ugly falseness of the “to protect and serve” popular narrative. One that runs directly contrary to the goals of Black Lives Matter and the values it wishes to purport. And as much as I’d like to do a little dance of cognitive dissonance to let that inherent complication pass on by, I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s like that line from Adam Driver in Blackkklansman: “I never used to think about this stuff, now I think about this stuff all the time.”

Which means there’s an existential question that hovers over all of this: is there any to make a superhero game that actually reflects the real world values of Black Lives Matter?

To reframe the idea, when AOC was discussing the defunding of the police, she was asked: “Yeah, but what does that actually look like?” Her answer: “it looks like a suburb.” It’s an easy, understandable answer that is also happens to be a true answer. Because that suburban peace many of us got to know isn’t built for the superhero criminal stopping fantasy, is it? I know, I know, I know. We all want the fun game. But that shouldn’t mean we always have to fall back to the same, archaic and troubling depictions of crime. To do the cognitive dissonance dance properly, the job is to somehow craft a narrative that creates complete self-expansion and help navigate those tricky waters. And I don’t think such portrayals are impossible with the beat-em-up mechanics of games, I just think it begs for ingenuity and dramatic reversal on gaming (and societal) expectations. Or in the very least, it can take a character like Miles at least reflecting on the contradictions of his position.

But instead, in order to satisfy the heroic fantasy that fits the tropes of conventionality we’ve seen time and time and time again, this game has to literally invent a nefarious world of crime that doesn’t really exist….

And the problem is all the people who do the same in real life.

<3HULK