When the first Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse teaser dropped, I promised myself I wouldn’t watch another trailer. I was so hopeful, that it worked its way back around to fear. I had been burned before by movies that promised me some kind of ground-breaking representation, only to turn around and yank the rug out from under me (think Tiana, think Finn, think…most of Rogue One, just keep it going). I hadn’t read that many comics, but I knew enough about Miles Morales to know that he was exactly the kind of superhero I didn’t think I would see a movie about for a long time. As plot details swirled around on the internet, I felt an increasing dread that he was going to be a big shiny new Trojan horse for the same old story about the same old Peter Parker.
Then, I went and saw the movie, and had to explain away to a bunch of my little sister’s pre-teen friends why I was crying. “Allergies.”
I wasn’t sure what I was expecting but it definitely was not to be bowled over by so much emotion that I couldn’t help but cry with every repeat viewing. For a while afterward, I couldn’t really explain it. Black Panther made me incredibly excited, sure, but I didn’t weep every time I watched it. There was this tether Spider-Verse created within me that I couldn’t name.
Until one day, in my film class at university, we’d split up in groups to talk about a paper we had to write. Inevitably, we started going off on tangents about movies in general. Our professor was on the other side of the classroom and paid us no mind. My group stumbled upon the topic of “representation.” More specifically, I was trying to defend the radical position that one movie about a black superhero wasn’t really enough to give the entire industry a passing grade. When I brought up Into the Spider-Verse as a recent positive example of growth in that way. The phrase, “Well, Miles Morales is black, but he’s also Puerto Rican” left my mouth — and it hit me then. I had never really seen a superhero who was like me; a black kid throwing Spanish around his house, stunted and stifled in affection with his dad, nagged by his mom, and ebbing and flowing between two languages with his classmates as easily as breathing. It was so simple that, for weeks, it never really struck me that this was why it was so special to me that it made me cry, almost unconsciously.
It’s not just that Miles is Afro-latino; it’s that he feels so specific, so lived-in, so real as an Afro-latin boy. At the beginning of the film, he’s been displaced from his colorful and diverse school in what we understand is a poorer New York neighborhood, and instead attends a prestigious (and gentrified) academy where he has to dorm. He’s already put-off by the environment, claiming he only got in to fill a quota. As we go through his daily life, we see exactly what kind of pressure he’s under. His parents, his teachers, the very environment of the school demands nothing but the best from him: a top-tier A+ performance. But, what do you do when everyone around you is just as smart, just as special? It’s becoming the principal drawback of all the advanced and gifted programs that so many kids get thrust into, myself included.
I want to pause here and say that this isn’t meant to be some “woe is me” about being “smarter” or anything. It’s deeper than that. Miles is never worried about beating other kids to be at the top of his class. He showcases his intelligence throughout the film; it’s not about proving his “giftedness”. Instead, he’s struggling with his identity and everything that entails. Everyone around him is insisting he can be special, that he can grow to be amazing. But, what do they see in him that can’t already be amazing? What version of greatness do they really want out of him?
Miles’s quest is to find the strongest, greatest, the most special version of himself. But, that doesn’t come out of being gifted with spider powers. It comes from understanding that he, just himself, can already be special. When Miles tells us at the end of the film that we— that you, or I, can wear the mask just like he can, it’s because he knows that he’s no longer bound by anyone’s expectations of what a young black boy living in New York can be. And that is something tremendously powerful. I don’t have to be a star athlete, or a towering civil rights figure, or a borderline magical ruler of some far-off land. While all these representations of black characters and heroes are valid and beautiful in all their ways, it means so much to me — me personally, as an Afro-dominican — that a superhero’s greatness is bolstered by his identity, by the people who love him, by the languages he speaks, by the pride he has in himself. Miles’s very identity teaches hundreds of thousands of kids growing up that, like Spider-Man, they can define their own kind of special. No one else has to place a limit, or a preconceived definition of how you can be great.
This is why Miles being a definitive Spider-Man means so much to me. In Miles, I get to see myself. I get to see what it looks like for someone who can get so boxed-in by ideas and authorities and institutions to break out of convention, to be emboldened by nothing more than being themselves. Into the Spider-Verse isn’t the first movie to explore superheroes learning what it means to be “super”, but it’s the first time that “super” looks like Miles: smart and dorky, caring and stubborn, tight curly hair and gleaming brown eyes with rap and reggaeton pushing him along his morning walk, English and Spanish forming the DNA of your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.
