Multiversal Issues: Across the Spider-Verse and Beyond
Feels too early to be running out of ideas based on the concept of the infinite
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn't exist.
Multiverses are an interesting concept to me because they spin out of quantum physics but have been applied to fiction I’ve been watching since I was a wee lad. Of course, before I was born even it was used to reconcile continuity issues across commercial comic books, but it was applied to my childhood through dimension and time travel in shows on Disney and Nickelodeon, as well as my exposure to things like Back to the Future. So, I’m broadly familiar with it and was excited when it began being incorporated into the biggest film franchises. Without exploring all the possibilities of alternate universes, the several studios involved in making superhero movies seem to have exhausted all their ideas. Because limitless possibility is antithetical to morality tale action-comedies.
Across the Spider-Verse does not require an audience member to have seen thirty other movies and shows to understand it at all. It does, nonetheless, utilize nostalgia for its spiritual and commercial predecessors, familiarity with its studio mates, and pay homage to fan casting. As aforementioned, it goes further than Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in showing what other forms of the Marvel Universe feel like. Cutely, this includes a Lego world. For the sake of Sony advertising, it also includes a brief crossover with the world from ongoing Venom films. For the sake of our collective nostalgia, it includes clips of Tobey Maguire’s and Andrew Garfield’s respective Peters Parker crying over their dying uncles. It also references the shenanigans Spider-Man and Doctor Strange got up to in No Way Home and The Multiverse of Madness in passing, a verbal Easter Egg and unfortunate inevitability.
This couldn’t be helped in two fashions: (1) Sony produced the Sam Raimi-Tobey Maguire and the Sam Webb-Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies and collaborate with Disney’s Marvel Studios for the new Spider-Man movies; (2) if the old Spider-Men are in the same wider multiverse as the MCU, of course so is this universe, or the many universes it encompasses. (There’s also a cameo by late ‘60s cartoon Spider-Man, which is innocuous for nostalgia bait)
The problem comes from the fact that there’s already several established groups in that MCU universe dealing with timeline pruning (the Kang-created Time Variance Authority from Loki most notably) and already existing contradictions there (perhaps not owing to the fact that the two writers of Infinity War and Endgame had different ideas about how time travel worked in their movies, but which nonetheless was not a good omen). Anyway, the Time Variance Authority’s job is broadly similar to that of the council of Spider-People or whatever have you, but more extreme; they prune timelines at the point of anomaly to maintain one ‘sacred’ timeline. Of course, their efforts were confounded at the end of Loki, perhaps contemporaneous with the start of No Way Home. In Multiverse of Madness, it’s established that the trans-dimensional technology of the Illuminati have allowed them to figure out that Doctor Strange is the big problem in all the multiverses, a concept also explored in the Marvel: What If? anthology cartoon, which maybe I’ll finish someday.
While the TVA can pick specific points along the timeline to travel to, the Spider-folks seem locked along parallel time although they can pick each universe (otherwise, any mistakes would be easily erasable because they could just go back in time before the issue happened). That doesn’t make much sense, but it expedites the plot. Underneath all this is the problem inherent to the multiple realities interpretation of quantum physics, but which you can also just infer if you’ve ever watched one of these movies – there’s an *infinite* number of timelines/universes/dimensions/etc. That’s core to the Rick and Morty ethos that brought multiverses into the mainstream – you can’t fix, or not-fix “everything” because “everything” is beyond comprehension or capture. It is infinite, endless, beautiful for that, but meaningless for an adventure story plot in its inability to be quantified.
I saw someone say that, rather than represent audiences’ willingness to see non-comic book movies, Everything Everywhere All at Once showed that audiences will watch comic book movies in a non-comic book shell. I don’t know what I make of that. I think comic books and comic book movies draw from so many places that they’re bursting with interesting ideas about the world – while their serial nature precludes real formalistic conclusion, the many incarnations of the hundreds (thousands?) of major characters have had dramatic, emotional, and meaningful character arcs and besides all the expensively-made cheaply-felt events. Demonstrating alternate realities isn’t unique to comics either – from A Christmas Carol to The Family Man, for instance (in fact it comes up in holiday stories a lot, now that I think about it) – but it really feels like the way they’re being applied to comic book-inspired superhero movies show a lack of creativity. It’s all shortcuts to cashing-in on nostalgia.
Because Into the Spider-Verse and Across the Spider-Verse utilize animation, we get a more brilliant audiovisual experience. But the story’s core tension and conflicts require the same sort of selective-remembrance that the MCU does at large – your familiarity with preexisting stories is necessary for the sake of getting the references but knowing where these stories has gone lately builds-in internal contradictions. To the Spider-Verse films’ credit, these contradictions were pre-existent in the other IP franchises. To its detriment, it chose to include them. It didn’t have to. The first Spider-Verse nods and winks at the Raimi movies through the Chris Pine Spider-Man; it doesn’t interpolate clips.
It stands to reason that, when Across the Spider-Verse Part 2 (or whatever they call it) comes out, the story will resolve in a way that does not necessarily uphold the “one true path” of Spider-Man. This seems obvious, as the person championing the concept of a singular way things are supposed to go according to “canon” is one of the film’s major antagonists, if not a villain. But it can’t solve the fact that it necessarily invites comparison and criticism to its broader franchise counterparts because it draws from them not subtly but directly. It is inescapably intertwined with them, and that’s the problem with how corporate canon has deployed the idea of alternate realities to continuously tell the same stories.
This piece was developed out of parts cut out of my review of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. After that, it was originally envisioned to include thoughts on The Flash, but I instead spoke at length about multiverses in my review of that film.