We had to get here eventually. People liken the popularity of the superhero genre to the Western genre in the 1950s, and one of the things they ask is: When will we start to see revisionist superhero films? They ask that because the revisionist Westerns have become the most popular. They are on the other side of the genre’s heyday—hay-day?—and so are we, so we tend to be emotionally and societally-aligned with the revisionist vision rather than that of the more straightforward original films. Revisions Westerns came out of a post-Western era. People wonder when we’ll enter a post-superhero time. They look forward to it.
I don’t. Not yet anyway. As long as we are getting movies as good as Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, we can stay in superhero land for as long as filmmakers like. Then again, most superhero movies aren’t as good as this Spider-Verse movie or its predecessor. Very few movies in general are as good as these films though, so maybe that’s being too tough on the genre. Still, I do feel like all the quantumanias and self-destructive squads were worth it to get this web-slinging franchise. Some people probably feel similarly about The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
But Spider-Verse is a revisionist film. It’s just not the kind of revisionism people were expecting. They thought they’d see things that, like the revisionist Westerns, questioned the moral superiority of the original films, but questioning the morality of superheroes has been part or the genre since Marvel’s first big heroes went to the presses. No, superhero revisionism has to take a different form. It has to reconsider what is broken about the genre. That’s what the revisionist Westerns did. The unquestioned moral absolutism was broken, so the revisers revised it. What’s broken about superheroes?
Surprisingly, Across the Spider-Verse points its webslingers squarely at the fans. Not all fans, just the kinds of fans who cry “Canon!” whenever a creator tries to do something new with a superhero. In our franchise-heavy, participatory culture, there are a lot of fans in that bucket, and they are loud. They’re the kind of people who don’t like seeing a mermaid portrayed by a person who isn’t white, who think only men can bust ghosts, who think a man deserves to be told every aspect of a woman’s plan even though she is an Admiral and he is an X-wing pilot on disciplinary probation. Humorously, Across the Spider-Verse casts the actor who played that X-Wing pilot as the avatar of that kind of toxic fandom. Maybe that’s a coincidence, but this movie is so magnificently constructed, I doubt that was unintentional.
Seriously though, I haven’t heard “canon” claimed this much since I time traveled to the Council of Rome.
I get it though. It would be frustrating to give your life to a story only to have the corporation that owns that story come in every few years and contradict or wipe away everything that brought meaning to your life. I mean this genuinely – that would feel like a significant loss, and I sympathize with that.
What Spider-Verse implies is, maybe don’t give your life to a story someone else controls. What it states outright is, it’s not okay to hold a story so closely that there isn’t room in it for people who are different than what you’ve seen before. A good story, a story worth your devotion, is one that is flexible enough to morph to fit the times, a story that is alive as we are. We change. The world changes. We learn new things that blow open our assumptions about how people and the world work. If the story can’t shift to accommodate the present, it’s as dead as the past. If you want the story to speak to the next generation like it spoke and speaks to you, you have to let it speak new tongues.
If you love the story, trust the story. We’ll see if all the Spider-Mans can get there in the final entry in this Spider-Verse trilogy when we get to finish this journey in an other year. I can hardly wait. I’d go watch it immediately if I hadn’t used up all my time-travel juice on that trip to the Council of Rome.
We had to get here eventually. People liken the popularity of the superhero genre to the Western genre in the 1950s, and one of the things they ask is: When will we start to see revisionist superhero films? They ask that because the revisionist Westerns have become the most popular. They are on the other side of the genre’s heyday—hay-day?—and so are we, so we tend to be emotionally and societally-aligned with the revisionist vision rather than that of the more straightforward original films. Revisions Westerns came out of a post-Western era. People wonder when we’ll enter a post-superhero time. They look forward to it.
I don’t. Not yet anyway. As long as we are getting movies as good as Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, we can stay in superhero land for as long as filmmakers like. Then again, most superhero movies aren’t as good as this Spider-Verse movie or its predecessor. Very few movies in general are as good as these films though, so maybe that’s being too tough on the genre. Still, I do feel like all the quantumanias and self-destructive squads were worth it to get this web-slinging franchise. Some people probably feel similarly about The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
But Spider-Verse is a revisionist film. It’s just not the kind of revisionism people were expecting. They thought they’d see things that, like the revisionist Westerns, questioned the moral superiority of the original films, but questioning the morality of superheroes has been part or the genre since Marvel’s first big heroes went to the presses. No, superhero revisionism has to take a different form. It has to reconsider what is broken about the genre. That’s what the revisionist Westerns did. The unquestioned moral absolutism was broken, so the revisers revised it. What’s broken about superheroes?
Surprisingly, Across the Spider-Verse points its webslingers squarely at the fans. Not all fans, just the kinds of fans who cry “Canon!” whenever a creator tries to do something new with a superhero. In our franchise-heavy, participatory culture, there are a lot of fans in that bucket, and they are loud. They’re the kind of people who don’t like seeing a mermaid portrayed by a person who isn’t white, who think only men can bust ghosts, who think a man deserves to be told every aspect of a woman’s plan even though she is an Admiral and he is an X-wing pilot on disciplinary probation. Humorously, Across the Spider-Verse casts the actor who played that X-Wing pilot as the avatar of that kind of toxic fandom. Maybe that’s a coincidence, but this movie is so magnificently constructed, I doubt that was unintentional.
Seriously though, I haven’t heard “canon” claimed this much since I time traveled to the Council of Rome.
I get it though. It would be frustrating to give your life to a story only to have the corporation that owns that story come in every few years and contradict or wipe away everything that brought meaning to your life. I mean this genuinely – that would feel like a significant loss, and I sympathize with that.
What Spider-Verse implies is, maybe don’t give your life to a story someone else controls. What it states outright is, it’s not okay to hold a story so closely that there isn’t room in it for people who are different than what you’ve seen before. A good story, a story worth your devotion, is one that is flexible enough to morph to fit the times, a story that is alive as we are. We change. The world changes. We learn new things that blow open our assumptions about how people and the world work. If the story can’t shift to accommodate the present, it’s as dead as the past. If you want the story to speak to the next generation like it spoke and speaks to you, you have to let it speak new tongues.
If you love the story, trust the story. We’ll see if all the Spider-Mans can get there in the final entry in this Spider-Verse trilogy when we get to finish this journey in an other year. I can hardly wait. I’d go watch it immediately if I hadn’t used up all my time-travel juice on that trip to the Council of Rome.
Elijah Davidson is Co-Director of Brehm Film and Senior Film Critic. Subscribe to Come & See, his weekly newsletter that guides you through the greatest films ever made, and find more of his work at elijahdavidson.com.
We may like to imagine the life of an artist as lived in the clouds, responsible only to the winds of their artistic process, caught in the ebb and flow of inspiration. Showing Up disabuses us of that idea almost instantly.
