(Probably watch Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse before reading this)
Spider-Man is my favorite Marvel superhero. That’s-
Wait, scratch that. Doesn’t really do it justice, does it?
OK: Spider-Man is my favorite superhero. It’s because-
Hold on. Still something missing. One more time, for real:
Spider-Man is perhaps my favorite character in all of fiction.
Ah, that’s the stuff.
I love Spider-Man to a frankly unhealthy degree, but the root of that adoration has been tough to articulate at times. Was it the mask? Steve Ditko’s design was truly revolutionary when it first appeared, light-years removed from the capes and cowls that dominated superhero comics at the time. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud asserts that the less detail a face has, the easier time an audience will have connecting to that face. Spider-Man’s ‘face’ is essentially an expressive pair of eyes, allowing the audience to project any qualities and values we want onto it. Anybody could be under that mask, and so we see ourselves.
Or maybe it was the origin story, mythic in its simplicity. As conceived by Stan Lee, Peter Parker is so elementally perfect a character that no amount of accumulated baggage can dilute that perfection. And it’s not like there haven’t been terrible Spider-Man stories. There have been awful Spider-Man stories. But crap like the Clone Saga, or that time he sold his marriage to the Devil, or that Andrew Garfield nonsense, these things roll off Spider-Man like water off a duck’s back. And because Spider-Man’s central ethos (“With great power”, etc.) is so all-encompassing in its straightforwardness, virtually any and every story featuring Spider-Man is in some way a reflection on/expansion of that idea, something that is hugely rare in a genre in which characters mutate (sometimes literally) near-constantly to better reflect a mercurial culture and audience.
Or maybe it’s just that Spider-Man was the first one there. Not the first superhero, mind you. Or even the first modern superhero movie. X-Men hit a couple years before Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, and is generally credited with being the flashpoint where Marvel began its current cultural domination (Sidenote: Every single thing that X-Men supposedly pioneered for superhero cinema was done earlier and better in Blade, but that’s another rant for another day). But I remember as a kid discovering that X-Men was a disappointing wet fart of a movie that barely followed through on the promise of super-beings and super-powers suggested by its trailer, too far up its own ass to be any fun whatsoever. The brilliance of hiring Sam Raimi to direct Spider-Man lay in the fact that Raimi’s movies are almost always pitched at an exaggerated level of reality, and it was in this exaggerated, just-shy-of-camp atmosphere that we could accept a red-and-blue spandex’d dude doing acrobatics around skyscrapers. Spider-Man in Spider-Man is the moment I, and I assume a lot of other people, began to believe in superheroes. All these years, and Spider-Mans, later, we still believe.
But watching Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse recently, I was finally able to articulate why this character means so much, why Spider-Man is the end-all, be-all. Spider-Man, more than any other character, embodies one of the most important, most easily-forgotten aspects of being a good person and doing the right thing. And it’s this:
Being a hero is a choice. Being good is a choice.
So often, too often, in our fiction the hero is the hero not because of any qualities inherent to them, or because of any particular belief system or ideology they passionately support. Instead we get endless resuscitations of bargain basement, half-understood Joseph Campbell 101 in which some emotionally blank schmuck gets approached by an old wizard or a hot chick in leather and told that they are destined for greatness because, I don’t know, their Dad was famous, their blood is magic, their name was written on a scroll or something. I’m sure (well, I’m hopeful) that the eugenics-ish connotations of these stories are entirely accidental, but these stories of Chosen Ones reinforce the idea that only certain individuals from exactly perfect circumstances can be special, can do great things.
Spider-Man has not been immune to this sort of silliness, with some writers and filmmakers taking issue with that mythic simplicity I mentioned before and trying to improve upon it by establishing the ‘real’ reason why that spider bit Peter Parker. Sometimes it’s because of quasi-mystic manipulations involving “spider totems”, while in those Andrew Garfield pieces of shit it turned out that his Dad bio-engineered Peter to be Spider-Man for some dumbfuck reason who cares.
All of these retroactive attempts to expand on the spider bite and Peter Parker’s ‘destiny’ seem to come from a place of trying to make Peter Parker more than ‘just’ some random kid at the right place at the right time (or wrong place at the wrong time, given all the woe and worry that has befallen Peter since he got bit) and to reinforce the notion that Peter Parker is the one true Spider-Man. After all, it can’t just be random chance and opportunity that turn a normal person into a super-being, right? There has to be more to it than that, right?
The various variants of Spider-Man that show up in Into the Spider-Verse at first seem to have been selected for the sake of the joke of just how wacky and out-there the innumerable versions of Spider-Man have appeared over the years. “Ha ha, one is a tiny Japanese girl.” “Ha ha, one is a pig.” “Ha ha, one is Nicolas Cage.”
But as the film progresses, and as Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) struggles to come into his own as a Spider-person, the super-powers fitting him as poorly as the too-small, off-the-rack Spider-Man costume he nabbed from a cheerful huckster (yup), this wide variety in gender, age, ethnicity, look, species and temperament stops feeling like a joke.
What unifies these characters, who can’t even agree on a cohesive color scheme (hell, one of them doesn’t even know what colors are), isn’t just a close-encounter with an amped-up super-spider. It’s that each one of them has suffered some kind of tragedy, some kind of loss, and their response to that loss was to turn towards altruism, to use their own pain as a means to help others avoid that same kind of suffering. Into the Spider-Verse juxtaposes this choice with the villainous Wilson “Kingpin” Fisk (Liev Schreiber), who we learn is ripping apart the multiverse not as a get-rich-quick scheme, but as a means to bring back his wife and son who were killed while fleeing from the discovery of his diabolical nature.
What happened to Fisk was unspeakably tragic, and you might even be moved to sympathy for the lumbering lug at times. But what defines Fisk as a villain is his willingness to kill and/or endanger as many people as necessary to undo that mistake, his grief belying a selfishness powerful enough to endanger the world.
We may understand Kingpin’s underlying drive, but the Spider-People illustrate that you don’t have to respond to grief with rage, that you don’t have to punish the world because of the bad turns it has handed you.
The importance of choice is established early on in Spider-Verse, as Miles Morales is described, and describes himself, as having “no choice.” His father Jefferson Davis (Brian Tyree Williams) tells him he has no choice but to do as Davis says. Original flavor Spider-Man (Chris Pine) tells him has no choice but to be super-powered after getting bit. And when Miles insists that he has to assist Dad-Bod Peter Parker (Jake Johnson) in taking down Kingpin and becoming a full-fledged Spider-Man, he does so by saying that he has no choice but to fulfill the promise he made to the other, dead Peter Parker.
And in a lot of heroic fiction, that would be the end of it. Miles made a promise, he has to keep it, the end. He might falter on that road, he might become convinced that he can’t actually pull off the task set before him, but ultimately he would be bound by his vow and follow it linearly towards his destined triumph.
Instead, Into the Spider-Verse gives Miles an out. Dad-Bod Peter relieves Miles of the responsibility of stopping Kingpin and saving the world and takes that weight onto his own shoulders. From this moment on, Miles is no longer under obligation. He can pick up his old life where he left it, no harm, no foul. For all he knows at that point, the day is saved and there is no need for him to do anything except relax and assume that other people are all set to save the day.
But, no. He chooses differently. He chooses to rejoin the fight. And in that choosing, Miles finally becomes a fully-formed hero in his own right. He creates a costume that is truly his own (and that actually fits). He synthesizes lessons and legacies of his family and loved ones. He leaps, and this time he doesn’t trip or hesitate or stumble. Instead, he soars.
If Into the Spider-Verse has a mantra, it’s that “Anyone could wear the mask. You could wear the mask.” The movie isn’t suggesting that all of us need to start opening ourselves up to arachnid-farming and freelance vigilantism, but it is arguing that the qualities that make up Spider-Man, that make up a hero, can be found in anyone, no matter who they are or where they come from.
White, black, male, female, human, porcine. None of that is what defines a person.
It’s the choice, the choice to meet a world full of bad with a drive to be good, that marks Spider-Man as a hero. It’s this example we can follow as we work to make our own world a little better through our actions and our hopes.
It can’t all be fixed. It won’t always (or ever) be easy. But we can choose to be good. We can choose to be heroes. And in that way, we are all Spider-Man.