The Post-Racial Vision of “Across the Spider-verse”

The most ubiquitous and increasingly meaningless phrase in modern movie discourse is “racial representation.” This is unfortunate, because a lot of good has been done in its name, but, as the industry and its productions have begun to reflect more of the country’s demographics, diversity has become an end unto itself. Progress is measured through box-office success—“Crazy Rich Asians” and “Black Panther” were celebrated as landmark films, in large part, because they made a lot of money, thereby proving the American public would support films made by minority filmmakers, and starring minority actors. This line of thinking has always been a peculiar one to me, not because I think it’s false, but more because it seems almost anti-political in nature. It does seem true that a significant number of Americans are willing to shell out their own money to watch these movies. But what does one do with that information, other than just make more movies for a public that is apparently less racist than we thought?

“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” the animated box-office-crushing sequel to 2018’s “Into the Spider-Verse,” draws upon a comforting, post-racial vision of America that reflects the liberal hope that meritocracy and integration can produce the harmonious society we all desire. Miles Morales, the Afro-Latino teen-ager who gets bitten by a radioactive spider in the first film, comes from a stable middle-class family. His parents host parties with just the right touch of ethnic flavor. Miles attends Brooklyn Visions Academy, a high school that’s clearly been inspired by the test-in specialized high schools in New York City, such as Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, or Brooklyn Tech. As what is now called an “underrepresented minority,” Miles’s existence at one of these schools is implicitly political, but it is cut with just the right amount of hand-holding from the film’s writers. When Miles attends a meeting with his parents with a college counsellor at his school, the counsellor suggests that Miles, who wants to study physics at Princeton, write an essay playing up his status as a bootstrapping immigrant from a proud but impoverished family. Miles’s parents seem confused by the request. His mother, Rio, points out that she is from Puerto Rico, which is part of the United States. His father, Jefferson, says they own a floor of a building in Brooklyn, implying that they aren’t exactly poor. This is a funny and heartening scene that reminds the viewer that minorities are not a monolith, and allows the movie a little self-applause—a golf clap, more than anything—for defying the Hollywood impulses that might otherwise turn a Brooklyn-born character named Miles Morales into Bernardo from “West Side Story.”

“Into the Spider-Verse,” the first Miles Morales movie, starts with a similar reversal of expectations. In the introductory scenes, we see Morales before he’s bitten by the radioactive spider. After passing by his old classmates in front of the public school he’s leaving for his prestigious new academy, he trips on a curb and falls in front of a police car. We next see him in the back of the car, looking exasperated. Our first suspicion is that Miles has been racially profiled and is about to be needlessly harassed by a police officer. But we are quickly reassured—the police officer who picked up Morales is his father.

Over the two films, all of these gestures have turned Morales into a Barack Obama-esque figure in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (When Morales first appeared in comic books back in 2011, Marvel’s then editor-in-chief said he had been partially inspired by the election of the former President.) As the first Afro-Latino Spider-Man, Morales is a pioneer, but he wears the label lightly, and without much of the thorny or tedious baggage that often accompanies such distinctions. “Across the Spider-Verse” features no lengthy conversations about the burden of being the first minority Spider-Man, no meditations on superhero representation, no “vibrant” scenes filled with Puerto Rican cultural signifiers in which Morales realizes that his real superpower, all along, was his “authentic identity.” Instead, Morales wants to be celebrated for his unfailing desire to do good and achieve excellence. He gets along with everyone, and, while never denying his heritage, he also projects a type of post-racial hope in his relationships, which include his crush on a blond, punk-lite Spider-Woman.

The appeal is so universal—or, some might say, neutral—that even right-wing pundits who have dedicated the past few years to getting mad at every superhero or children’s film with a minority lead seem to have mostly given Miles Morales a pass. In what must have come as a surprise to its readers, “Worth It or Woke?,” a Web site that disapprovingly assesses the wokeness of Hollywood releases, recently gave “Across the Spider-Verse” a positive eighty-one-per-cent rating. Though it determined that the film took a “beloved character” and “race-swapped in the name of Leftist virtue signaling,” it briefly included the movie in its list of films that were “worth it.” (The recommendation was ultimately pulled when the author of the review noticed that one of the characters had a “Protect Trans Kids” sign in her bedroom.)

The hesitation to decry “Across the Spider-Verse” for wokeness, at first glance, seemed a bit odd to me. (I imagine part of it comes from the fact that both films in the series have been incredibly enjoyable.) There are times during the film’s two-hour-and-twenty-minute run time where you almost feel like the plot was specifically written to create what amounts to a Benetton ad of Spider-Men. It does this by veering into multiverse territory, which allows the writers to introduce a host of other heroes from other dimensions. There’s Pavitr Prabhakar, the Peter Parker of an India-coded metropolis called Mumbattan; Peni Parker, a Japanese Spider-Woman who has been rendered in a distinctive anime style, and Jessica Drew, a Black Spider-Woman voiced by Issa Rae. This is by now a familiar formula in Hollywood films: characters of different backgrounds band together, each of them summoning stereotypical quality, to triumph in a moment of crisis. (See, for example, the “Fast and Furious” series.) But “Across the Spider-Verse” treats its fantastical multiethnic team of superheroes and their forays into cultural determinism with Obama-like breeziness and tact. We are supposed to just have a little bit of knowing fun at the jokes about white people saying “chai tea” when “chai” means “tea”—which means they’re saying they’d like a cup of “tea tea”—before we zoom off into the next dimension.

If there were an award for “the most universally enjoyable and palatable vision of race in a blockbuster film,” “Across the Spider-Verse” would win going away. You won’t find any particularly compelling commentary about identity or racism in the film, but you will get a sense of how the broader, diverse American public has updated its ideals over the past seven years, which have seen both Donald Trump as President and the George Floyd protests as well as a concerted effort by right-wing media to turn every “woke” casting decision into a new front in an ongoing, stupid culture war, which is to say, they haven’t really updated much at all. The Obama figure—“diverse,” frictionless, and occasionally inspiring—still wins most of us over. ♦