Guidance Through Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
There is an early scene in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse that I feel is worth taking a closer look at. This isn’t one of the big action scenes, or a piece that gets into all the lore. No, just a small quieter scene, that breaks down the thematic metaphors this movie is working with.
Let’s talk about the scene where Miles and his parents are talking to Ms. Weber, the guidance counselor at his school.
To take this one step further, I’m going to use this scene as a Rosetta Stone in working through how three major characters, Spot, Miguel, and Gwen, give us a deeper understanding of what Miles’s story truly is.
Guidance for the Multiverse
When the movie first switches over from following Gwen to following Miles, we begin to cut between two situations: Rio and Jefferson (Miles’s parents) sitting in front of Ms. Weber, waiting for Miles to arrive; and Miles running late because he gets into a fight with a new villain, Spot. This continues until Miles thinks he has the Spot situation under control. When Miles finally arrives at the meeting, he’s questioned about who he is and what he wants to do with his life.
But with that overview of the situation, let’s get into some specifics, like this dialogue from right before Miles shows arrives:
Ms. Weber: “You see, every person is a universe, and my job is to capture your person’s universe on this piece of paper.”
Jefferson: “That’s blank.”
Ms. Weber: “Exactly. I have no idea who this kid is. I don’t know if he knows. And he’s gotta decide if he’s going to commit himself to his future, or whatever he’s doing instead of being here.”
“Every person is a universe”. This idea bears repeating because this is an especially important thought within the larger piece. This is a movie about a multiverse and is immediately establishing this idea that a Spider’s universe – be they a Spider-Man, a Spider-Woman, or a Spider of any other kind – is symbolic of their personhood, their identity.
And in this metaphor, we’re told Miles’s universe is blank… huh… put a pin in that thought until the next section.
Skipping ahead for a moment, let’s look at how Ms. Weber tries to describe what Miles’s story could be:
Ms. Weber: “Miles has a great story to tell.”
Miles: “Having a story at all seems gross.”
Ms. Weber: “Your name is Miles Morales.”
Miles: “Correct.”
Ms. Weber: “You grew up in a struggling immigrant family.”
Rio: “I’m from Puerta Rico. Puerta Rico is part of America.”
Jefferson: “We own a floor in Brooklyn. Struggling? (mumbles protests)”
Ms. Weber: “Doesn’t matter. You’re all struggling.”
Jefferson: “I make captain next week.”
Ms. Weber is arguing for leaning into stereotypes, regardless of if they are true to Miles’s experience. She’s saying that because Miles is someone who holds this specific identity, the story people want to hear about that identity plays out this specific way.
To jump back to the earlier dialogue, Ms. Weber is saying that the blank page that describes his universe should be filled with moments that people expect from someone like him.
While Rio and Jefferson are arguing against these stereotypes, they still aren’t fully on the side of Miles doing things exactly the way he wants:
Ms. Weber: “And now, his dream is to attend the top physics program in the nation...”
Rio: “Whatever it takes, we’ll do it.”
Ms. Weber: “… Princeton University.”
Rio: “In New Jersey? No, no, no, no. That’s too far.”
Miles: “New Jersey is too far from New York?”
Rio: “There’s great schools in Brooklyn.”
Miles: “Mom, Princeton has the best quantum researchers in the country.”
There is a fun bit of nuance created in this moment. We’re seeing two, sometimes competing, pressures weighing on Miles: what society says his identity should mean, and what his parents want for him.
But by this point Miles has already demonstrated that he isn’t interested in just living a life that’s been outlined by someone else. When he arrives at the meeting, he has this exchange:
Ms. Weber: “Can’t have your cake and eat it too.”
Miles [enters]: “Unless you make two cakes.”
Miles is showing he isn’t someone that hears that he needs to behave one way and takes that at face value. If it makes more sense to him, he’ll find his own way to do things.
It’s also telling that while Rio argues with Miles for a short time, ultimately Miles’s passion for what he’s saying appears to win over both of his parents. Rio and Jefferson silently share a look, they’re sad about it, but they can’t take away this thing that means so much to him.
Before either of Miles’s parents can say anything more, Ms. Weber comes in with, “That’s your story! Now, just stick to the script.” We’re back on this idea that, whatever Miles chooses to do, there is a specific way he must do things in order to be the person he’s aiming to be.
At this point, Miles sees Spot has gotten out of his webs and has to run off to stop him, and Jefferson gets a call from the police dispatch for the same situation. But that’s okay, because the scene has already told us everything that we need to know to better understand the entire movie.
A universe = a person
Miles’s story is currently blank
Outside pressures from society and parents can influence identity
I think it’s time to use this as a lens through which to look at a few characters, beginning with the antagonists.
Spot’s Holes
Spot is a character covered in holes. He can remove these holes, and at first, he uses them kind of like small portals to each other (hand goes in one, comes out another somewhere else). But it’s not long before he gains the ability to use them to travel the multiverse.
Soon after the guidance counselor scene, Spot explains his origin as:
“I was in this collider room when you blew it up. Because of you… I lost my job, my life, my face. My family won’t even look at me. I made you into a hero. You made me into this! Look at me! You did this to me!”
When Ms. Weber is trying to tell Miles’s story, she takes one element of who he is, his family, and tells the story that she believes connects to it. While Ms. Weber could latch onto that part of who Miles is, Spot doesn’t have that option. Spot no longer has the common external factors people might use to shorthand who they are. Work, family, even his own appearance is gone.
After Spot learns that he can use his holes to take him to different universes, we next see him in Mumbattan (an alternate universe cross between Mumbai and Manhattan) where he is looking to gain more power. When Miles fights him here, Spot says, “You made me feel empty, like I had a hole inside of me. We all have holes. But now I found out what to fill that hole up with. More holes!”
Spot’s actions here lead to a giant hole sucking in part of Mumbattan. If Ms. Weber says a person is a universe, we can Spot destroying a universe, and his goal is to create more holes, as Spot is metaphorically destroying the identity of the Spiders.
Miles is facing off against, essentially, the blank page Ms. Weber held up.
At the start of the movie, Miles calls Spot a “villain of the week”. He’s a bit of a joke. He’s just this idea nagging at Miles, not a serious threat. But Spot insists he’s Miles’s nemesis, and by the end of the movie, Miles agrees. Miles is put into a position where his identity is called into question, and his biggest struggle is facing off against the idea that he might just be a blank page. But to get into how he loses confidence in who he is, we have to look at our next antagonist.
Miguel’s Canon
Miguel O’Hara has put together the Spider-Society, a multiversal group of Spiders that protect the integrity of what he calls “the canon”. With the canon being so integral to everything Miguel is doing, we should take a look at what it is.
Miguel shows Miles how every Spider is connected in a “web of life and destiny”. This web is, well, a web. It’s a series of lines intersecting at various points throughout. When Miles asks about these points, Miguel explains:
“They are the canon. Chapters that are a part of every Spider’s story every time. Some good. Some bad. Some very bad. […] That’s how the story is supposed to go. Canon events are the connections that bind our lives together. But those connections can be broken. That’s why anomalies are so dangerous.”
The canon is a series of events that, if you’re Spider, it is believed that you must have gone through or you will go through. Does this sound familiar?
When Ms. Weber was making claims about Miles’s story based off who his parents are, it felt kind of crazy, right? She’s deciding his story must be one of struggle, because that is how she thinks his kind of story should go. Everything Miguel says here is the same sort of thing as Ms. Weber, only swapping ideas about race with his identity as a Spider.
Of course, Miguel does have a justification for his belief that every Spider should follow the canon, and we should probably look at that too:
“I found a world where I had a family. Where I was happy. At least a version of me was. And that version of myself was killed. So, I replaced him. I thought it was harmless. But I was wrong.”
After spending time in another universe, that universe is destroyed. Miguel believes it’s because he broke the canon. But is that what happened? Let’s use Ms. Weber’s metaphors again. Miguel went to another universe to take over another Miguel’s life. If a person is a universe, and Miguel went to someone else’s universe to be them, Miguel stopped being true to himself and put on the façade of someone else’s identity. The destruction wasn’t because he broke some preordained rule of how he has to live his life, it was because he was making himself be someone else.
After these events, Miguel takes it upon himself to make sure every single person who holds the same identity that he does follows the story that they are “supposed to”. Or to pull another piece from Ms. Weber, Miguel is making sure every Spider stick to the script. He has become a symbol for that societal pressure placed on an identity.
As a quick aside: Here is a point where the next movie can have a big effect on how bad we’re supposed to think Miguel actually is. His flashback story is short and vague. It leaves it up to interpretation whether he knows the canon isn’t why that universe was destroyed, or if he came to the wrong conclusion and can still change upon learning the truth. In the former, he’s forcing everyone to be miserable because he is miserable, in the latter, societal pressure on him tricked him, and he’ll probably get a degree of redemption.
Looking at the pair of antagonists, we have a lack of identity, and societal pressure created by an identity. Miles doesn’t think Spot is a real threat, until Miguel pressures him to be a Spider in a very specific way, while also telling him he isn’t meant to be one at all.
And he’s not the only one.
Gwen goes through many of the same problems, but through her we see another perspective.
Gwen’s Revelation
As Gwen and Miles sit on the top of the Williamsburg Bank Building, they have this exchange:
Gwen: “You and me, it’s…”
Miles: “We’re the same.”
Their similarities are core to both of their arcs in this movie. These two aren’t just Spiders, tons of characters have that in common, they are also Spiders at very similar points in their lives – or, to phrase it more like Ms. Weber might, similar points in their stories.
But their differences are just as important to look at as their similarities. By the time Gwen and Miles see each other in this movie, Gwen has already confessed who she is to her father, where Miles is still trying to work up the courage to do the same with his parents. There’s also the way in which Miguel accepts Gwen as a Spider, while rejecting Miles.
Especially with the latter point, we see how Gwen has already started to take everything about the canon at face value. This also comes up in the Williamsburg Bank Building scene:
Gwen: “In every other universe, Gwen Stacy falls for Spider-Man. And in every other universe, it doesn’t end well.”
Miles: “Well, there’s a first time for everything, right?”
This small exchange tells us where each of them are at this point in the movie. Gwen has already resigned herself to the fact that her story has to go the way of the canon, where Miles still believes his story can play out however he wants. This is just like how Miles heard that you can’t have your cake and eat it too, and responded with, “unless you make two cakes.”
Miguel and Jess take on the roles of surrogate parents to Gwen in this movie. When Gwen is rejected by her father because of who she is, these two older characters take her in. To make sure we get this connection, both Miguel and Jess are presented as literal parents as well. Miguel took over the life of the other universe version of himself to help raise a child, and Jess being pregnant.
Because of this, Miguel and Jess swap from how they take the place from societal pressure on Miles, to being more comparable to pressure from parents for Gwen.
When looking at Miguel and Jess as these surrogate parents to Gwen, we have this fun reflection created by the choice to use a different race for Jess Drew over her comic book counterpart, Jessica Drew. This change means that Gwen’s surrogate parents for the movie are a Latino man and a Black woman, where Miles’s parents are a Latina woman and a Black man. This choice makes the comparison to Miles’s parents that much more evident.
With this parental connection, we see the different styles of parenting. Rio does argue about who Miles should be, but gives in because she and Jefferson want him to be happy. Miguel and Jess on the other hand, need her to accept the canon no matter what, and when she wants to go against it, they reject her and send her away.
Gwen spends most of the movie accepting what she is told her life needs to be, including the fact that her real father is going to die because it is a canon event. At the same time, she is watching Miles fight to do what he thinks is right the entire time. By the climax, she watches him fight for even just a chance to break the canon to save his own father. It’s after this that she’s sent back home.
When Gwen returns to her own universe, she speaks to her father. Given time, he’s accepted who she is. And more than that, he’s quit being a cop. His quitting means that he isn’t going to die because of the canon. This means Gwen can be a Spider and not lose her father. She can have her cake and eat it too.
This is the moment that she decides that she isn’t just going to be worried about Miles, she is going to put a team together and actively fight to help him. Canon be damned. He has the right to make choices for himself.
And this feels like the best time to bring in how this movie started. The opening lines are a narration spoken by Gwen, all in the past tense, because she speaking from the perspective of herself at the end of the movie. And she says this:
“Let’s do things differently this time. Like, so differently. His name is Miles Morales. He was bitten by a radioactive spider, and he’s not the only one. He hasn’t always had it easy, and he’s not the only one. Now he’s on his own, and he’s not the only one. You think you know the rest. You don’t. I thought I knew the rest, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to hurt him, but I did, and he’s not the only one.”
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is a movie where one of the core conflicts is fighting against the idea that to hold an identity means you need to live your life a specific way, and the very first line has Gwen saying, “let’s do things differently this time.” As she goes on, as she repeats how Miles isn’t the only one, it’s an acknowledgement of all the people who are hurt by a system that forces someone to be a certain way.
Conclusion
There is a sometimes-unbelievable amount happening on screen in most scenes of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, but it’s the very small scene of 4 people talking in a room that guides us through everything else that happens. No matter how complicated the superpowers and scifi concepts get, everything can be traced back to this scene for an easy explanation as to what it’s all for.
In this end, this is about a teenager struggling with the idea of who he is. He is fighting against the idea of not having any identity to connect to at all, or pressures to be one specific version of what an identity could mean for him. But it’s Miles’s beliefs in being true to who he wants to be, that inspire Gwen to be more herself.
I’ve used Ms. Weber’s scene to talk about the major themes of the movie, and how they interact with its antagonists, and a major secondary character. But ultimately, it is Miles’s movie. So, let’s sum it all up with his own words:
“Everyone keeps telling me how my story is supposed to go. Nah. I’mma do my own thing.”
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