Propaganda and Representation Across and Beyond the Spider-Verse
This is mostly about copaganda, and just a little bit about queer subtext
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the films being covered here wouldn't exist.
Contemporary mass cultural criticism sometimes asks at the philosophical and political purpose of how certain institutions are depicted in art and media products (i.e., books, movies, TV, videogames, music, and so on), as we’re doing here. When done poorly or inelegantly, this leads to outrage, especially as people’s taste for it seems to have disappeared somewhat over the last three years after the exhaustion of the previous presidential election – a combination of complacency and exasperation which we will not get into at length.[1] What follows grew out of the Across the Spider-Verse review. It was originally around 600 words and led into the section on the multiverse. This was supposed to come out first but requires more exploration and remains befuddling. The question is essentially “What is propaganda in the context of Across the Spider-Verse?” and my persistent uncertainty about whether there is a critique of policing in a plot about two superheroes’ contentious relationships with their fathers.
While the word propaganda has a negative connotation it is essentially morally neutral. We associate it in this country broadly with tyrannical government and so it has an assumption of the sinister and, more precisely, the military. Yet propaganda in and of itself is simply the deliberate spread of information or ideas to help or hurt a person, group, cause, institution, etc. It’s nearly synonymous with advertising. In contemporary parlance regarding film and other mass culture – at least for the last few years – it is associated with a military-worshipping jingoist-nationalist strain of theme and thought floating in mainstream blockbusters. I.e., since September 11, 2001, the sanctity of the American armed forces and related apparatuses – like the CIA and police – is often reiterated. Beyond film, with television we have the multiplicity of police procedurals, including the Law & Order tree. In the context of wide release motion pictures, I think there is something devious, even insidious, to the valorizing ways the military is depicted in film at large, especially because they’re often “all ages” films which therefore produce the feeling of trying to communicate messages to children, such as that the police are not just a social necessity (a debatable perspective) but are also made up primarily of the most morally upright and just members of society. Or, that the connotation holds weight because the American military industrial complex and imperial project are almost always held in a de facto heroic or necessary light.
I find the underhandedness of this to be especially true of superhero movies full of military-based characters because children do not know, are not taught, about the nature of American military ventures, not that the American public is generally well-versed on the material conditions at the heart of the ideological reasons for which wars are pitched to the American people (to say nothing of the undemocratic way wars are authorized). Regardless, I think it contributes to a sense of complacency and romantic notions about the place of the U.S. in the world. Even for the reader completely neutral or apathetic to the consequences of American foreign policy goals, it might feel like a misuse of resources to spend an annual budget approaching $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion dollars) while we have homelessness, a housing crisis, food insecurity, and failing schools and infrastructure. Nonetheless, the valorization in media helps us not to critique or question these institutions. This valorization happens in film most vividly in a movie like Captain Marvel (which launched with a contemporaneous Air Force recruitment campaign) or, outside the MCU, Top Gun: Maverick. This is especially true because these films take money from the government in exchange for script approval. This has been known for years now and still people balk at the idea that it’s propagandistic.
Somewhat more defensibly but no more compellingly, some fans or critics will offhandedly bring about a relativistic argument that seems essentially to stem from the idea that if you like something it isn’t propaganda. “Top Gun: Maverick is no more propaganda than Captain Marvel” doesn’t hold water because Captain Marvel is propaganda.[2] The MCU in general is filled with characters with specific allegiance to the U.S. military, including Captain America, whose costume design is based around an American flag and whose canonical in-universe purpose was propaganda. A film being propagandistic does not preclude its quality as an object of craftwork or piece of art. Propaganda’s effectiveness, and certainly people’s reflex to defend its honor, depends on its quality and its ability to make us react positively – the components that make it up and the attention paid to arranging them is what makes its messages stick. Besides Top Gun and Captain Marvel, I enjoy all the Batman films to greater or lesser degrees, and yet have written at length how part of their audiovisual language is in service to lionizing police and policing. Across the Spider-Verse has an interesting relationship with the depiction of police, as well.
Across the Spider-Verse notably was not obviously funded by the DoD in exchange for script approval. Yet, like its predecessor and the PlayStation games that followed it, it is pro-police. While the cuddly depiction of Miles Morales’s dad (Jefferson Morales, formerly Jefferson Davis) did annoy me, I didn’t sit down to watch this film expecting revolutionary art. Nonetheless, it is somewhat incurious of the film to focus on an Afro-Latinx kid’s search for identity in the shadow of his policeman father without ever considering the implications of him, for instance, having a “#BLM” button on his backpack. I was surprised to see the pin and, as it illuminates something about Miles’s personal (albeit teenaged) politics, the inclusion is not a simple thing. Perhaps it is a symbol of rebellion, coming as it does atop a graffiti “Hello My Name Is” sticker. It’s entirely possible his understanding of the concept is basic (e.g. “We have to say Black Lives Matter because our society is inured to the death of African-Americans”), but in the real world it came from, it would be a complicated thing to have in a police household. The “Blue Lives Matter” slogan and “Thin Blue Line” rhetoric surged in this country as a direct and counter response to the Black Lives Matter movement from whence that hashtag sprung. These Black Lives Matter protests were against racism, discrimination, and police brutality in the wake of police and vigilante killings of black people (and other people of color, generally overlapping with a persistent ideology throughout the country that some lives, like those of people of color, people with disabilities, and poor people, are worth less). The headlines around these issues frequently feature young black men like Miles.
“All Lives Matter”, “Blue Lives Matter”, and the “Thin Blue Line” were and are invoked to quiet the critiques intrinsic to Black Lives Matter and other calls for police accountability, from reform to abolition. These slogans exist, in short, to say that police should not be questioned, that they are above reproach, even when police kill unarmed black people. (These could be called the antiblack character, components, or intersections of the class-based violence of policing. Put another way, it’s easy to conflate the class-based application of state violence with race-based violence because of the class connotations that are part and parcel of the creation and maintenance of race as a social construct, because white supremacy is a tool of capital to divide and oppress labor, and because of the intertwining histories of police violence, racist lawmaking, and racial terrorism.)
There remain black and Latinx police officers (and military and government officials, and so forth) but I could imagine that being a sense of conflict in the Morales household. Yet that is beyond the film’s purview except for, in echoing its predecessor, contrasting Miles’s father with his criminal uncle. It’s easy enough to say that in movies for children they shouldn’t be confronted with or investigating these issues, but then why is assurance for those children that our status quo is the best of all possible worlds acceptable? How important is children’s media if its overt and covert messages are beneath critique? They’re certainly not above it. There is a brief comical moment after Sgt. Morales (née Davis, as esteemed comics writer Brian Michael Bendis, and perhaps co-creator artist Sara Pichelli, decided naming Miles’s father after the president of the Confederacy was witty or something) is trying to keep some other police onside during a Spider-Man-villain chase, where Jeff says “this is why people don’t like us.” The obvious critique here is that, no, people don’t like police because of the cultural memory of a historical relationship between police and strike breaking, slave catching, and beating up poor people to protect rich people’s property, as well as present memory of killing unarmed children, standing by as children are killed at schools, and rampant graft and corruption. Stepping aside from that, it’s interesting that the film raises the idea at all that people don’t like police.
I am not asking why the default expressive mode for a big studio like Sony to not be critical of police in their movie (major corporations are protected by the status quo and their media properties tend to uphold it, and wide commercial appeal rests, at least hypothetically, on not challenging audience worldviews too much) but rather proposing we consider that this is a propagandistic aspect regardless of intent. The default reaction to prop-up the status quo is in effect a sort of propaganda, broader allusions to the necessity of strongmen and extra-legal means supporting legal structures (i.e., superheroes as a stand-in for the necessity of state violence or global police) aside. Of course, one of the central conflicts of the film stems out of the idea that it is a critical “canon event” for Spider-People to have to watch a police officer they care about die. As with everything else in the film, it is about the parroting of story-beats throughout the publication history of Spider-Man and applying that as guidance of or a plan by an unspeaking universe. It works in effect as inevitable continued honoring of police, connecting Miles’s quest for individuality with his relationship to his family. This is part of Spider-Man even though Spider-Man is routinely hounded by the police. There’s also something to be explored in how certain heroes (Spider-Man and Batman among them) sometimes have contentious relationships with the police and what it says (intentionally or otherwise) that the official good guys of the story and the official good guys of the domestic security state are often at odds despite the singular officers they connect with.
Away from Miles, Spider-Gwen has a contentious relationship with her father (Captain George Stacy, a character from Spider-Man’s earliest years). Early on, she asks him to be her dad and not a cop for a minute because he comes across her in costume and tries to arrest her at gunpoint. Late in the film, Gwen has a conversation with her dad where she relates superheroism to policing. She says that he told her he puts on the badge because if he doesn’t someone worse will. There’s a lot unsaid there, a dissertation’s worth of silent implications in a charitable one-line defense of policing. It hints at but cannot bring itself to explore what’s underneath (again, I understand that it’s a corporate family action-comedy about superhero fights); the idea that if no one with a moral compass is involved in police work, the system is left to be populated by bullies and con-artists immune to the law because they act as its executors. The film doesn’t have the time or the space to explore what happens when these institutions become so corrupt that the only people that make rank – and therefore policy and shape culture – are those involved in abuse and extortion. What’s interesting there is that he’s left the police force in her absence, as if he’s seen the moral limitations to that sort of work. That’s fair enough, but it’s part of a larger trend within the film to glance at but not unpack serious issues that would be part of its characters’ lives in service of the tense but sometimes unstructured story it wants to tell.
As far as social movements the protagonists associate themselves with, punk rocker Gwen also has “Protect Trans Kids” sticker in her locker. I love that; other people have pointed out her father has a trans flag over his badge. Many transgender audience members have decided to read Gwen as trans, others see that as seeking and lauding representation where it does not exist. If we want to talk about diversity and representation in the film, as far as we see any of the Spider-People’s faces, there are major black and brown characters, women, depictions of pregnancy and child-rearing. Inclusion is prioritized in some ways. Queerness is not explicit here. Irrespective of necessity, if the insistence in the advertising and adoration of all-ages corporate art is to claim that it’s representing the masses to make us all feel safe and acceptable for the multitudes, it fails here. Much like a same-sex victory kiss at the end of The Rise of Skywalker or a male pronoun in an anecdote about a dinner date in Endgame, this is easily glossed over or removed for global release in places where censorship would be deemed necessary. Her color palate is less likely to be swapped out; and I’m not in the business of telling people their interpretations aren’t valid simply because they’re not my own (or my initial interpretation; trans Spider-Gwen is a great idea). It stands to reason that blatant representation of queerness is without the scope of the film’s goals (though this also invites questions of the meaning and uses of representation in kid’s films, especially living as we do in a country and wider world where queerness is under legislative and judicial attack). This is, after all, a relatively straightforward goal-oriented superhero plot wrapped up in the trappings of the multiverse, the current favorite hobby horse of superhero films (and Oscar-winners) as our society collectively reels at how we’ve done-in the planet and what alternate options there were or are. That’s forgivable, but it feels only passably laudable. It’s a nod in the direction of real-world problems that gives their sticking points a real wide berth.
There are other philosophical and political underpinnings regarding surveillance and intervention, free choice and fate: what is the role of the superhero in their society? How does it reflect the responsibility of power in ours? The film raises these questions, but the nature of the ending precludes their answering. I don’t find myself complaining too much about that because it didn’t bother me in Dune: Part 1 and it didn’t bother me in Empire Strikes Back.
It is likely that the plot of Beyond the Spider-Verse erases the ideas of a multiverse as having canon events, or rather culminates in refuting their necessity. It is, after all, an antihero-antagonist that has created the Spider-policing organization that holds that as a truth. And it will thusly tie that into the fate of Miles’s dad, as it did here. However, if it holds to it, that means Miles’s dad has to die.
As part three of a story about hopping between universes, it is unlikely to develop much of a critique about policing. But it isn’t foretold or written in stone yet. It’s entirely possible that, in trying to detach Miles’s story from “canon events” and trying to prove wrong that the thesis that there a trajectory that Spider-People’s lives must follow, the third part of the Sony Miles Morales Spider-Man trilogy reorients its relationship to police. But I wouldn’t bet on it. I don’t expect it to dig deeper into queer themes or conversations about the contested space of policing in conversations about racism, security, or social structure. If we’re lucky, it won’t lean any further into Easter Eggs, cameos, and crossovers. Whatever it does, whether it tells a tighter story or draws further into multiverses, I don’t think Beyond the Spider-Verse will be able to avoid police and – inadvertently, incidentally, or intentionally – endorsing and rehabilitating the embattled but seemingly omnipotent institution.
[1] Editor’s note: this sentence was written before a similar section in my late summer series on criticism
[2] Editor’s note: again, most of this was written before the series on criticism