Crisis of meaning, part 3: What lies beyond the Spider-Verse?
[LONGREAD: canon events, anomalies, and “the way the story is supposed to go”]
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | more to come…
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It’s interesting to compare and contrast the TVA with the other Marvel multiverse-policing organization, revealed in last summer’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: the Spider-Society. (A sequel to 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Across the Spider-Verse is the middle movie in a projected trilogy, with a cliffhanger ending to be resolved in part 3, Beyond the Spider-Verse, release date undetermined.)
As the name implies, the Spider-Society is made up of Spider-people from across the multiverse (thus combining a TVA vibe with a lowkey Council of Kangs vibe). Founded and led by a futuristic Spider-Man from 2099, Oscar Isaac’s Miguel O’Hara, the Spider-Society’s stated mission is protecting the integrity of those specific strands of the multiverse that concern the lives of spider-powered people: a “beautiful web of life and destiny” that Miguel inexplicably terms the “arachnohumanoid polymultiverse,” despite the fact that, as our young hero Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) points out, “Spider-Verse” was right there.
Unlike the TVA, the Spider-Society is obviously not worried, by definition, about “variants” as such. What they do police are “anomalies,” which we’re told means people who “wind up in the wrong dimension.” (Like variants, there’s a certain analogy to the idea of undocumented immigrants.) They’re also concerned, in a way very roughly corresponding to the TVA’s attention to “nexus events” in the Sacred Timeline, with multiversal “nodes” that they call “canon events”—a deeply meta term for the deeply meta observation that the lives of Spider-people across Spider-Verse storytelling tend to share recurring narrative patterns. One such pattern, noted in the first Spider-Verse movie, is a traumatic early loss of a loved one: Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben; Miles’s Uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali); for Hailee Steinfeld’s Spider-Gwen, her best friend Peter Parker.
Not unlike the approved outcomes of nexus events in the Sacred Timeline narrative, canon events carry ostensible prescriptive force: They aren’t just patterns that do recur; as Miguel puts it, they’re “how the story is supposed to go”: repeating motifs in a grand design. But, just as nexus events can give rise to unsanctioned outcomes, the connections represented by canon events can be broken—typically, by anomalies, by persons displaced in the Spider-Verse.
“How the story is supposed to go”
At first it seems as if the Spider-Society’s interest in canon events unfolding the way they’re “supposed to” may be simply about getting the best overall results: a kind of cost-benefit analysis. For example, Uncle Ben’s murder is a tragedy, but without that defining experience of loss and regret (as Jake Johnson’s Peter B. Parker points out), most Peter Parker Spider-Man variants wouldn’t do what they do—so think of all the lives saved as a result of Uncle Ben’s murder! Perhaps the Spider-Verse knows what it’s doing, and everything happens for a reason, even if the omelet requires breaking a few eggs.
But no, it’s more than that. The apparent consequences of disrupting a canon event are not just remote and linear. So, for example, when Miles stumbles into the Mumbai-shaded world of a happy-go-lucky Indian Spider-Man—Karan Soni’s Pavitr Prabhakar—and winds up saving the life of a police captain who (following a pattern, for what it’s worth, going back in the comics to 1970) was “supposed to” die, the fallout of this canon-event disruption are not remote and linear (say, lighthearted Pavitr failing to undergo important trauma-related character development needed for more effective super-heroing). The effect is immediate and (for lack of a better term) cosmologically destabilizing. Pavitr’s universe starts “unraveling.” A “quantum hole,” a “hole in the multiverse,” forms at the scene, manifesting as an alarming zone of interdimensional chaos energy, or something.
The Spider-Society seems to have tech to contain the crisis for the moment, and they may be able to patch the hole, but we’re told that thwarted canon events can destroy entire universes. In fact, Miguel explains that he himself caused the annihilation of a universe by trying to take the place of a variant of himself after that variant died.
Lots of unanswered questions here, clearly! What is the actual principle behind in the notion of “how the story is supposed to go”? What causes quantum holes and the unraveling of a universe when a canon event is thwarted? Does it all truly work the way Miguel thinks? Is there really a grand design, a “web of life and destiny” that is not only beautiful but meaningful, ordering not only how we actually live, but how we are meant to live? Are we really meant to let people die for the sake of the greater good or an ostensible cosmic pattern? What power is behind all of this?
Across the Miles-Verse
While definitive answers to these questions will have to wait at least until the third film, Beyond the Spider-Verse, in the meantime we can at least make a few observations and educated guesses.
On the one hand, Across the Spider-Verse hints that Spider-Society founder Miguel O’Hara—not unlike the founder of the TVA, He Who Remains—has dark secrets from the people making up the multiverse-policing organization he founded. “I’m not like the others,” he monologues at one point. “I don’t always like what I have to do. But I know I have to be the one to do it. I’ve given up too much to stop now.” On the other hand, Miguel seems to be a true believer in his cause, not a charlatan with a covert agenda like He Who Remains. He might be wrong, in whole or in part, about the nature of canon events and what should be done about them, but I doubt that “the way the story is supposed to go” is simply a self-serving fiction comparable to the Sacred Timeline.
Certainly the alarming phenomenon of quantum holes supports Miguel’s narrative. Unless it turns out that Miguel is secretly engineering the quantum holes that follow thwarted canon events, something seems to be enforcing the canonical regularity of the Spider-Verse. But what? For the moment Miguel’s narrative appears largely to hang together—not least because of additional revelations about Miles’s origin and what we see with our own eyes about another universe with which Miles’s identity as Spider-Man has become inextricably entangled.
Across the Spider-Verse’s most crushing revelation (a real “No, Luke, I am your father” moment) is that, because the spider that gave Miles spider-powers wasn’t from his universe, Miles has become, even in his own universe, a living anomaly, a cosmic deviation from the “beautiful web of life and destiny”—and that two universes are worse off for it. “You’re not supposed to be Spider-Man,” Miguel growls at Miles in a brutal dressing-down. “You’re a mistake!” Like Luke Skywalker, Miles shouts that this is a lie—which, of course, is a good indication that it isn’t.
I won’t recount in detail the astonishingly elegant way that Across the Spider-Verse weaves together Miles’ established origin story from Into the Spider-Verse, including the Kingpin’s multiverse-spanning collider, with the second film’s multiversal villain (Jason Schwartzman’s the Spot) and the original film’s bagel gag (now serendipitously functioning as an intertextual hat tip to the multiversal “Everything Bagel” metaphor in Everything Everywhere All at Once).
What I will say is that, according to Miguel, two terrible things are true about Miles’s origin: First, because the spider that bit Miles was an anomaly from another universe, that universe now lacks the Spider-Man that it was “supposed” to have. Second, the original Spider-Man of Miles’s world—the first film’s blond, “perfect” Peter Parker voiced by Chris Pine—was not “supposed” to die in battle after saving Miles in the wake of that anomalous spider-bite. In fact, Miguel charges, Miles is the “original anomaly”; it was precisely all the downstream multiversal consequences of Miles’s anomalous origin story (including the Spot) that led to the founding of the Spider-Society in the first place. Additional confirmation arrives when we ultimately wind up in the universe that Miles’s spider traveled from—and, as expected, it’s in bad shape, presumably for lack of its canonically intended Spider-person.
It’s hard to see, then, how Miguel’s narrative can be wrong. But here’s the thing: It also can’t be right. Not completely. If nothing else, Miles’s magnificent moment of defiance—his repudiation of Miguel’s entire program with a monosyllabic “Nah,” followed by “Imma do my own thing”—is just too cool to be wrong. In that moment Miles is as cool as Hobie, Daniel Kaluuya’s anarchic, Camden-Town Londoner Spider-Punk, who opposes everything Miguel represents and actively assists in the formation of a Spider-resistance led by Gwen’s Spider-Woman. Make no mistake: These are the heroes, this Spider-resistance to the Spider-Society. Which means that it can’t be the case that Miguel’s narrative is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
In particular, it can’t be that Miles is wrong for refusing to accept, as a necessary canon event, the imminent murder of the most Spidey-adjacent police captain in his own life—who, as it happens, will be his own father, Brian Tyree Henry’s Officer Jeff Davis, following an expected promotion, and whom the Spot wants to kill in revenge on Miles. Miles, of course, wants to prevent his father’s murder; Miguel is determined not to allow him to thwart another canon event. Whatever actually happens in Beyond the Spider-Verse will presumably tell us a lot about the truth of the Spider-Verse and canon events.
Following the thread
Three possible outcomes in Beyond the Spider-Verse are compatible with Miguel’s worldview:
Jeff might die.
Miles might succeed in saving his father from dying, a thwarted canon event causing another quantum hole and threatening to unravel Miles’s entire universe.
Jeff’s imminent promotion to captain might somehow fall through.
Option 3 is what Across the Spider-Verse did in the end with Gwen’s father, George Stacy, also a police captain and therefore marked for death. In the comics, Gwen Stacy has always been a police captain’s daughter, and it was the original Captain George Stacy who was killed in 1970 by falling rubble during a spider-battle that established the template for this canon event. But in Spider-Gwen’s universe, after discovering his daughter’s secret identity, George Stacy quits the police force—so it would seem that, destiny-wise, he’s off the hook. Canon events are funny things! If Jeff somehow doesn’t make captain, he’d be off the hook too.
But that’s probably not going to happen in Jeff’s case—partly because the filmmakers aren’t going to repeat themselves that way, but also because I doubt that Spider-Verse producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller would have invoked the meta-concept of “canon events” diegetically (that is, written it into the narrative of Across the Spider-Verse) if they didn’t intend to blow it up somehow. I believe Miles’s resistance to “how the story is supposed to go” represents Lord and Miller’s own view. If there’s anything the creators of The Lego Movie, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and The Mitchells vs. The Machines believe in, it’s finding new and unexpected ways to tell stories. Heck, it’s right there in the opening line of Across the Spider-Verse: “Let's do things differently this time. Like, so differently.”
There is, admittedly, an unlikely counterargument to be made. Twice before, in Cloudy with Meatballs and Into the Spider-Verse, Lord and Miller subverted the clichéd Junior Knows Best trope by unexpectedly revealing that … sometimes Dad has a point after all. In The Lego Movie they subverted the maverick “Chosen One” trope when Emmet unexpectedly suggests that a team of wildly creative Master Builders try … following the directions. In that spirit, could it possibly be that the twist at the end of the Spider-Verse is that “the way the story is supposed to go” really must be allowed to unfold as prescribed? That canon events actually are necessary motifs in the grand design? That Miguel is right about everything and Miles and the Spider-resistance is wrong?
Nah. “Everyone keeps telling me how my story is supposed to go” is how Miles prefaces his defiance of Miguel. This is about more than canon events: It’s also about the prescriptive expectations of Miles’s parents and even his guidance counselor at school. Miles wants to be his own person, to do things his own way. However the third Spider-Verse resolves these tensions (and at this point my faith in Lord and Miller is, not quite, but nearly boundless), I can’t believe the message is going to be “Actually, you shouldn’t do your own thing, you should accept how other people tell you your story is supposed to go.” (These are the filmmakers who tracked down a 14-year-old boy who created a Lego animation version of the Across the Spider-Verse trailer and commissioned him to do an actual Lego animation sequence for the movie.) Which means that option 1 probably isn’t on the table either—Jeff probably won’t die—and almost certainly that, whatever comes of saving him, it will not turn out to be the “wrong” decision.
There’s a lovely character moment in which Gwen says to Miles, “In every other universe, Gwen Stacy falls for Spider-Man.” Then she dashes his hopes by adding, “And in every other universe, it doesn’t end well.” Miles’s response, though, is still hopeful and perhaps significant: “Well,” he says, “there’s a first time for everything, right?” Miles is not yet aware of the notion of canon events, but that’s the way Lord and Miller think too: There’s a first time for everything. This is a liberating way to think about multiverses.
Leaving room for God
If Miguel’s narrative isn’t wholly correct, what might be true instead?
Perhaps Miles’s father is a special case. If Miles himself isn’t supposed to be Spider-Man, and the Spot isn’t meant to be the Spot, then perhaps Jeff’s impending murder by the Spot isn’t a proper canon event. It might then be possible to save Jeff without threatening to unravel Miles’s universe.
Perhaps Miles himself is a special case. Perhaps, being a walking anomaly (the “original anomaly”), he is somehow uniquely able to transcend the rules and thwart canon events without triggering quantum holes. (That didn’t happen when Miles saved the police chief in Indian Spider-Man’s world, but perhaps Miles hadn’t yet unlocked his potential in this regard.)
Perhaps Miguel has some significant misunderstanding regarding canon events, quantum holes, and anomalies, in whole or in part. Perhaps it doesn’t really work the way it seems to.
If 1 or 2 are right, Miles’s story is an exception to the general rule that some people are canonically marked for death—but Miguel is still basically right that, normally speaking, those people must be allowed to die. A solution of this type is troubling to me. I can accept the premise that you can’t save everyone, and that the death of a loved one may be part of a grand design that works for good. What strikes me as problematic is the notion that there are people we have the power to save, but who shouldn’t be saved, because the universe wouldn’t like it. That’s not the kind of grand design that interests me.
There is a certain attractiveness, on the other hand, to the idea that what Miguel considers Miles’s deficiency—his anomoly status—could turn out to be a superpower. Going a step further, what if there are no “anomalies,” just like there are no illegal people? At that point we’re into 3 territory, and Miguel’s whole narrative is somehow off. This is where I hope Beyond the Spider-Verse takes us: beyond canon events, beyond rules about who we are allowed to save and who we aren’t. This wouldn’t necessarily mean that there are no rules, no grand design. Rather, the real pattern, the real rules, could be more subtle. Less like a police department manual, perhaps, and more like poetry, like truth and goodness and beauty.
The patterns of the Spider-Verse, like the MCU multiverse, reflect the reality that we are watching stories told by storytellers. The grand design is woven by artists (or cobbled together by committee), and the stories are as meaningful as the creators are able to make them. Our search for meaning in our own lives is ultimately, I believe, the search for the Creator. In part 2 of this series I argued that Tony Stark’s experience of synchronicity, of meaning in his survival when he should have been killed, was undermined by the revelation that MCU history was controlled by the TVA. Before that revelation, Tony may not have explicitly ascribed to God his survival and the meaning he thought it carried, but there was at least room for God in his experience. The TVA makes the idea of God at least more remote and inscrutable, our efforts to discern his will in the circumstances of our lives less plausible or hopeful.
A question worth asking of a story, then, is: “Is there room for God in this story, in this world?” There are plenty of meaningful stories in which God is never mentioned, let alone invoked or affirmed, or in which God’s existence is explicitly doubted or disbelieved. It’s very hard for me to see anything but nihilism in stories that leaves no room for God: a story set in a world that seems to exclude the possibility of the divine, or at least to restrict our potential access to God to such a degree as to make his existence, his nature, and his will unguessable. How much room for God there may be in the Spider-Verse depends very much on how the third film resolves its open questions. We’ve already seen how the TVA relates to this question—but it’s not the only relevant factor in the MCU, as we will see.
Thank you for this post! There is a tension between the facts which are presented in the course of the story - facts which seem to support Miguel's interpretation of things - and the emotional/dramatic impact of the second half of the story, culminating in Miles' "magnificent moment of defiance" as you put it, which makes it impossible for us to simply accept Miguel's version of reality without question. You did a great job of dissecting this aspect of the film.
There's another bit of dialogue in that same scene which also strikes me as significant, the moment when we first (as I remember) see that Gwen is beginning to distance herself from Miguel's view. Gwen says something like "but my gut says..." and Jessica Drew says "then use your head". Now, if that exchange were taken out of context, it would be impossible to say which person is right, just on the basis of those words. After all, both gut feelings and rational considerations have their place. But in context, at that moment in the film, is it possible to doubt that Gwen is right? That was my reaction, anyway.
Another fun and thorough post! I don’t know if it is worth mentioning that there’s a quick black-and-white shot in ATSV of the spider seemingly about to bite a relevant character in its native universe. Perhaps you didn’t feel the need to bring it up since it is likely a detail that will be confirmed or not in BTSV.