Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse

Hi, Steve Barnes here with Life Writing Live. Just Saturday morning, I'm gonna do my Life Writing Live. I'm gonna go out and do some Christmas shopping. But I just wanted to talk about a rather phenomenal experience I had last night. And I'm gonna float across the surface of it and then I'm gonna dive deep. So I'll give you a warning. We're gonna be talking about some things that some of you may not want to be thinking about. But at any rate, first of all, let's talk about into the Spider verse. It is a revolutionary piece of cinema. It's a tale of an alternate Earth Spider man, Miles Morales. It's told in CGI animation that ranges from realistic to looney tunny, depending on the mood and tempo of the scene. And what at first seems kind of jarring becomes, as we continue, it's something we've never seen before. It's something. It's like watching a comic book brought to life in the very best sense of the words. It not only matches, in some cases eclipses previous live action animated versions of the character, but it has the astonishing visuals of Yellow submarine crossed with 2001 A Space Odyssey. I mean, the story deals with. With a master criminal, you know, the kingpin, voiced by Liev Schreiber, who unleashes a ripping reality while he's trying to bring his dead family back to life. And in the process, he unleashes spider heroes from multiple timelines. Against this bizarre backdrop is the origin story of a kid named Miles Morales bitten by a radioactive or genetically altered spider. Who knows? And he's given powers he doesn't know how to control. Really. That's all you need to know about the movie, other than it works. It really works. Improbable. Even the most bizarre iterations of the character. And what would that be? Kimoko Glenn as a Japanese peony Parker riding a giant Tamagotchi. Would it be Nicolas Cage as Spider man noir, a black and white version of himself who talks like a Mickey Splain character? Would it be John Mulaney as Spider Hamilton? You know, such a Bugs Bunny variant. They have to discuss whether violating Warner Brothers copyrights. I mean, this is amazing stuff. And each has their own tone, their own look, their own feel. And it isn't just a gimmick. That's what you have to understand. It all comes together thematically. Made visuals so psychedelic, you'd wonder whether or not they were selling hash brownies at the concession stamp. Wow. Just wow. Really amazing. Spider Man. Well done. It's instantly on the upper echelon of superhero films ever made. And if you have any childhood left in your heart, it's one of the best movies of the year. Just. Just go see it. Okay, you might want to turn this off now, because now I'm going to get more serious about some issues that I discuss have to do with culture and consciousness and race and society. Okay, so here we go. Last night, I watched the light go back on in my son Jason's eyes. Allow me to explain. Earlier yesterday, I watched the teaser trailer for Avengers 4 Infinity War Endgame. It looked intense and spectacular, of course, but I felt no thrill at all. I haven't felt a thrill for Marvel trailers since the end of the first Infinity War when I saw the light go out in my son's eyes. Jason has ADHD and a little bit of trouble identifying with characters in movies. I never had that problem personally. Even when I noticed the characters who looked like me tended to die. I still remember clearly the day I first really put a label on that observation. It was the movie damn alley where George Peppard, Jan, Michael Vincent, Paul Winfield were traveling across a nuclear wasteland in Atomic Winnebago. I was watching it with a white friend of mine up in Hollywood, and there's a scene where our heroes come to the ruins of, I think it was Las Vegas. And out of the ashes walks the apparently last woman in the world. And she's white. I remember getting a sinking feeling in my guts and I turned to my friend and I whispered, oh my God, they're going to kill Paul Winfield. Why would you say that? He whispered back, well, they're not going to let him pretend to not be interested in her, and they're not going to let him compete for her. The only option they have is to kill him. Jesus, my friend said, totally disbelieving. Do you have to be so cynical about race all the time? And five minutes later, Winfield got eaten by giant cockroaches. My friend was kind of quiet after that, although he did later insisted it was just a lucky guess on my part. What did I learn from that moment? Well, one that filmmakers will kill off the only white characters in a film, quite blithely. There is no American film in which all white characters die. Any people of color survive at all. But I've listed over 60 movies where all black characters or all male adult black characters die, often to protect white people, often to inspire them to become heroic sob sob. And yes, chances are that I've seen whatever movie you're Thinking of that would disprove this rule. A character is someone with at least one line of dialogue. You've almost certainly forgotten that in whatever movie you think all the white characters die, there was indeed another character. Maybe he wasn't white enough for you, but he was there. 2. That sexual competition is a trigger. This makes sense, as the only human drive as strong as individual survival is species or genetic survival. What you're seeing on screen is an externalization of a fantasy. The natural human urge to believe that you and by extension your tribe are the sexiest, the best, the smartest, the strongest, yada, yada, yada, yada. Yeah, that's how people are. 3. That white filmgoers generally won't notice that this has happened. They don't notice when all the black characters die, or die to protect them or to motivate them to mighty actions. And watching them reel off movie after movie where they thought the opposite happened just to watch me shoot them down used to be amusing. But in the area of Black Lives Matter, it's just sad. Yeah, it happens. And no, it isn't just Hollywood. If the audiences didn't weep and feel ennobled or invigorated by the Green Mile or the Unforgiven or Spartacus or Terminator 2 or any of the other movies in which this happened, the tropes wouldn't exist. People like it. Trust me. Black audiences know this stuff and we don't like it at all. I remember being about Jason's age, about 14, just forming myself image and going to see such movies. Maybe it was the Dirty Dozen, I don't know. When I got back home raving about it, the other black kids in my neighborhood asked me a terrible question. How did they kill the brother this time? Oh, yeah, they'd notice. And I didn't have an answer for them. Didn't even formulate my thoughts on the subject until. Damnation, Allen. It was real. It was a fantasy of extinction and primacy. I've seen a couple of movies in which all the white characters die. They were Asian films. Chinese Connection is a good example. And the death of a Russian karate expert played by Robert Baker at Bruce Lee's hands was clearly an expression of aggression, hostility, resentment for China's occupation by foreign powers. We are not sick men, Bruce snarled. And Hong Kong audiences exploded. They went berserk. Remember, they were still a British colony at the time. That inferiority comp vented itself in an image of throat chopping. Murder, okay. One is tempted to wonder, what fear, what guilt, what pale Inner need drives the need for American audiences to see such things over and over and over again. Or to believe that black people love to die protecting them or to ennoble them. It's a desperate need, one suspects. But that's another subject. Subject for another time. Jason had certainly noticed this about the time he watched his fifth X Man movie. He noticed that all the black men die. Not one black man has survived in the entire X Men series. Frankly, Logan was their last chance with me in that one. They killed an entire family. Why do they always kill the black people? He asked me. That led to a rather painful conversation. The talk, as they say, applied to cinematic experience. I remember loving Spider man as a kid. The most famous sequence in the entire canon just might be the one where Spider Man, Peter Parker, is trying to rescue his dying aunt May by recovering stolen isotopes that were ripped off by eight armed Dr. Octopus in a 007 style underwater lair. Doc Ock has Peter dead to rights, but the enraged Spider man just tears through him and his henchmen as if they're made of butterfly wings. I mean, it was amazing to see what happened when Peter Parker really got angry. But the fight damages the internal supports of the dome of the underwater dome. And Spider man is trapped under a huge piece of machinery as the dome cracks and spills water. The precious isotope canister is just out of his reach. He can't get to it. He tries to lift the machinery and can't. The water grows deeper and the issue ended. That was a cliffhanger. For a month I wondered how Spider man was going to get out of it. What brilliant strategic might he use? What clever solution might he find? I remember biking to the drug store on that fateful day to buy my comics and find out what the hell Peter Parker would do. And I'll never forget what happened. He tried and failed and tried and failed. And was faced with the fact that his aunt May would die because of him. And just as his uncle had died because of him. With great power comes great responsibility. And what did Peter do? Something clever? No. He simply decided that this was the test of his life. This was the moment he had lived for. That if he couldn't do this for the family that he loved, he was unworthy of that gift. And he went deep, deep into his heart. Within my body is the strength of many men, he said. And somehow, against all odds, he hoists that hulk busting weight of machinery onto his shoulders and stood up. It was amazing. It was a full page image of Spider Man. His every Muscle rippling and straining, water cascading over his body because he had to, because there was no one else. Because love. I was stunned. That lesson that if you had enough whys, the hows, became possible. That lesson never left me. And it didn't matter to me that Peter Parker was white. Everyone in the comics world was white. I just accepted. Wasn't until later, when I started pitching in Hollywood, when I started writing professionally and was told in no uncertain terms that white audiences would reject black faces, that I realized that that love and respect was not reciprocated. That there was something so obvious that I hadn't let myself see. That being. The more you can identify with a character as being like you, the easier it is to imagine, to empathize with their struggles and feel their victories as your own. These were images of power, beauty, heroism, intelligence and moral clarity that cultures all over the world understand their children need and give to them in movies and songs and comic books and plays and every other form, 24, 7, 365 days a week. Turn on any television and flip the channels a few times and you'll see those images. When I was a kid, there were no images like that who looked like me. None. It's better now. It's much better. But Jason had still noticed, and it made him blase about movies. Why identify with a black character if that character had increased risk of death? And how do you identify with a white character when deep in your heart, you suspect that that character wouldn't identify with you? There's a scene in Tuskegee Airmen where Laurence Fishburne asks, what do I feel about my country, and how does my country feel about me? I had hoped that if I worked hard enough, long enough, strong enough, smart enough, I could change the world enough that my son wouldn't go through the same existential pain that had been a part of my life. It was painful to realize that filmmakers and audiences apparently enjoyed fantasizing about my death. There were plenty of black characters in early Marvel movies. You know, Nick Fury and Falcon and War Machine and so on. They were fun. I really enjoyed seeing them. But the first time Black Panther appeared in Civil War, something electric happened in the air. This was different. He wasn't in a chain of command, you know, controlled by white people. He hadn't had his ancestral name stripped away. He knew his history, his spirituality. He had sexuality. He didn't follow some white guy's orders. He was a king. And when he kissed his father's ring in Civil War, there was a level of love between two black men. I'd not seen the movie before. Contrast their relationship with the mess Tony Stark had about his father. With half a billion dollars in therapy and the removal of decades, he was still more shattered than t' Challa was, just days after cradling his father's bleeding corpse in his arms. That's power. And it didn't end there. When Flores Cassimba faced down Black Widow, saying, move or be moved, black women in the audience, even if they weren't comic book fans, screamed, yes. Remember the no Man's Land scene in Wonder Woman? Over and over, I heard women saying, I didn't even know I needed to see that. I heard a lot of guys saying, what's the big deal? They didn't get it. Why should they? They'd seen countless images like that to nurture their own inner hero. To them, it was a yawn. It was just one more to understand the impact of Black Panther, you'd have to imagine an entire movie composed of no man's land sequences. There had never been anything like this before. Never. It was something every other group of human beings on the planet has, except possibly black Americans. A creation myth that connects them directly to the divine. We don't have that. We have a creation myth that connects us to our oppressors. Black Panther was mythic. Bless Disney for giving Ryan Coogler the room and the resources to do something no one else ever had. And as Django Unchained producer Reggie Hudlin said to me, black Panther made all the money. Yes, it did. Bless its pointy little ears. Jason saw Black Panther and I saw the light go on in his eyes. The same light I had felt watching Spider man lift that piece of machinery half a century ago. He was excited. And then we went to go see Infinity War and Heimdall. Idris Elba was the first to die. And then they killed Falcon and t' Challa after disgracing the kingdom of Wakanda with the weakest and most unfocused defense I had ever seen. Only the disabled war machine survived. A man who's totally owned by a white guy who didn't create his own technology and frankly, would not be considered sexual competition. Spinal Damage being what it is, and the crowning insult after multiple movie absence, they brought back Nick Fury at the very end of the Stinger, only to kill him so white audiences could cheer a white superhero coming back. Captain Marvel. I was stunned. I mean, I really was. Don't even try to tell me this was random distribution of Thanos, Snap Original and White Avengers survived that movie, Every one of them. Do I have to wonder if the decision makers, all the core producers, writers, directors, were pale that it never even occurred to them how it feels to a boy with few superhero role models to watch that massacre? Of course I know those characters are coming back. Don't insult my intelligence. A number of readers pointed that out to me, and I wonder if they didn't think I knew that. Predictably, most of the people who tried to argue with me about this also have very notably displayed very little sympathy towards Black Lives Matter or the concept of taking a knee or police shootings Trayvon Martin and so forth and so on. They don't show much sympathy for that. I wouldn't expect them to show much sympathy for this either. Their opinions, frankly, don't matter to me. Jason was born into a world of Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin, and he watched those Infinity War images. I watched his face. I saw the light kindled by Black Panther go out in his eyes in the real world. In the real world, his life was not as precious. He was surrounded by people who would judge, jail, fire, exclude, or even kill him in real life or fantasy. And worse, if he said something about it, his white friends would, in essence, tell him, why are you so racially paranoid? Why does everything have to be about race? Not everything. This sure as hell is. I can see how much the world has changed. Jason can't see it. And in sitting down and explaining that, no, it isn't worse than ever, no things really have improved. No, white people aren't evil. They're just people, and people do shit like this. I realized very much I'd hoped I would have to have that conversation with him. You know, like the one to move slowly and keep your hands in plain sight and never argue if you're pulled over by a cop. Yeah, that conversation, it was heartbreaking. And frankly, it broke the magic I'd felt with Marvel films. It was a sense that I couldn't trust them, that I knew and no one could tell me different, that the filmmakers had been diverse. They would have made different choices. They would have kept either t' Challa or Fury alive and had a better defense of Wakanda. I mean, hell, Captain America threw together a better defense of New York in about 30 seconds. And Wakanda had had years to prepare. It was a disgrace. It was contempt. The filmmakers didn't really believe in those people, those characters. Wakanda was just a neat place to stage a nifty massacre. Which brings Me at last to Spider man into the Spider verse Jason broke his ankle nine days ago and he'd been laid up, only leaving the house to go to the hospital. He didn't want to leave yesterday to go back to the movies, but we bribed and cajoled him, renting a wheelchair so that he wouldn't need crutches, and drove him 27 miles to Burbank for a sneak preview. And the instant he saw Miles Morales, a kid as dark as him, with hair like him, with similar hopes and dreams and humor, I watched Jason, who had been in terrible pain for a week, surrender to the fantasy. And when Miles began to discover his powers, Jason was smiling, leaning forward. And when the other Spider men appeared, he laughed and cheered. And when Miles suffered loss, there was a tear in Jason's eye. When Miles finally tapped into his full power, unleashing spider hell on the omnipotent kingpin, Jason was grinning from ear to ear. The light went back on in his eyes for a little while. He wasn't a kid with a broken leg. He was Spider man swinging from the rooftops, a kid just like him. And for a moment he had no limitations. The weight of his pain was off his shoulder. For a moment, the world was right and beautiful. That moment lasted all the drive home till bedtime. Happy smiles, a tiny crack in the armor around his heart. And the final message of the movie was incredibly subversive. In the world that fed Paul Winfield to the roaches, that executed an innocent black man in green Miles so that Tom Hanks could get a better erection, it was you're all heroes. We all can wear the mask. It is what is in our hearts, not on our skin or between our legs. It's what we feel and do, not how others see us. I'm not sure I can tell you how much I would have given to see Black Panther when I was 14, how much it would have changed my life. But into the Spider Verse is another example of what my wife and I call movies from the other world. A world in which people don't have to pretend not to mind when they die for the entertainment of people who do not share it their lives. It is a movie from the future. No, it is a movie of now. We're still haunted by the ghosts of what has been. But increasingly and blessedly, the cycles are moving faster now, such that an Infinity War is followed just months later by a crowd pleasing juggernaut of a film 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. As of today, one that all audiences can cheer that just happens to have a 414 year old black Hispanic kid named Miles Morales at the center. I'll take my victories where I can find him. Today I feel like a hero, and more importantly, so does my son. Thank you Sony. Thank you. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. There's a reason why I've loved Marvel all my life. There's something at the core of that primal dream, the bullpen of the late 60s, early 70s, that led to things like Black Panther and Miles Morales. I've gone on long enough. Go see it. And as Spider Ham would say, that's all folks. Take care. I'll see you later. If you like this talk, please remember to share it. If you'd like to find out more about Afrofuturism and why it's so important to create your own myths, go to www.afrofuturismwebinar.com com. Take care, guys.