https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=EEYpdrOgmhg
Hello everybody. I am here with Thomas Winant von Rizant. Did I get your name right this time? Yeah. I practiced. I’ve actually practiced. So I’m sitting here with Thomas from the Storytellers channel. A lot of people appreciated our last video we did on Bird Box where we kind of discussed the symbolism in Bird Box and so we thought we’d try it again. And this time we’re going to discuss the symbolism of Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. So maybe Thomas you can start us off and give us maybe a very quick, let’s say, resume of the story for people who haven’t seen it and want to be spoiled. Give a kind of basic resume of the story and then we can jump into the symbolism. Right. Okay. So I mean, technically this is another origin story like we’ve seen before in Spider-Man, but it’s with a bit of a twist or like a big twist actually. So I think the best way that we can describe the story is a coming-of-age story of this kid. He’s called Miles Morales and he’s a teen who sort of needs to find his place in the world. He doesn’t really have an identity and he feels out of place in school and in life in general. And so he gets bitten by the radioactive spider and then shortly after he comes across the Spider-Man of his universe and Spider-Man is fighting the villain Kingpin who is opening up a portal that opens up different dimensions or like opens up this doorway for different dimensions to come into their universe. And so when this fight is going on, Spider-Man dies and then Miles all of a sudden has to take up the torch and basically become Spider-Man for his universe and he has to go through that journey of becoming Spider-Man and finding his identity. But then there’s a big surprise in the sense that he thinks he’s alone, but now because this portal has been opened, all these various spider people from other universes have come into the universe and now they have to sort of find out, have to fight the villain together, but also have to find out sort of what makes Spider-Man Spider-Man and have to go with Miles through his journey. And that’s sort of the I think the main synopsis of the story without getting too many spoilers. Yeah, no, I think you definitely gave the right definition of what the movie was about. And I think one of the things that really hit me as I was watching it is the movie really is about identity and coming into an identity. At first it’s about obviously Miles entering into this identity of Spider-Man, somehow finding his own place in that identity, both being himself, you know, not just having his own particularities, but also participating in that pattern of Spider-Man, whatever it is as we try to figure out in the movie. But then also I think the movie is also much about identity itself and what is, first of all, it’s really about multiplicity in the sense that you get this idea of diverse Spider-Man. And so it’s suggested there’s an infinite number of Spider-Man. You see that especially in this credit scene at the end where you just see like these thousands and thousands of Spider-Man kind of coming at you in different colors, different variations. So there really is this idea of kind of multiplicity exploded where there’s an infinite amount of Spider-Man. And so it seems at first glance to play up the postmodern notions of identity, fragmented identity, and the idea of diversity and multiplicity, all the speaking points that we hear in politics. But what’s interesting about it is that it doesn’t just play it in a political way, but it also, while it’s affirming this diversity, it’s also in a certain manner reaffirming this idea of identity. That is, all of these different Spider-People are somehow participating in the pattern of Spider-Man, you could say. Whatever, you know, like this story of Spider-Man and all the characters are somehow attached to it like a web. And I think, I kind of think of identity as a web and so it’s a perfect image for a Spider-Man movie. This notion that there’s something, there’s a logos in the center, you have an identity, an essence, something which transcends your particularities. And it’s hard to, you can’t quantify it completely because that’s what it’s not quantifiable. It’s beyond quantity. It’s a quality, it’s an essence. And then you have all the particularities which kind of flow out of that main pattern. And so in the story, you see it right away as the movie starts. It’s interesting, it plays off almost like, you know, it has almost a mythological structure where it starts and it says, All right, let’s do this one last time. And then they tell you us the basic story of Spider-Man, which we know to be the story of Spider-Man. And then from then on, it starts to tell you, Okay, well, what if there’s this variation on Spider-Man? What if there’s this variation on Spider-Man? Would you still recognize it as Spider-Man? And it just keeps pushing you further and further until there are some characters like the manga, there’s one character that’s a manga girl from the year 3000. And she’s actually doesn’t have any powers, but her robot has the radioactive spider inside and it’s controlling it to have Spider-Man powers. It’s like that’s pushing it really, really far. But somehow, because also it’s participating in this story of Spider-Man, we’re capable of recognizing it as being part of that web, you could say. So that’s one of the interesting things that I saw in that. I don’t know if you noticed something similar. I think so. I mean, to me, it seemed like especially when Kingpin, he opens up that portal, and then you see all these various dimensions sort of coming into the world and all these sort of strange forms start to take shape and sort of the whole world is in a way sort of flipped upside down as this portal was open. And they make a little joke as well about modern art where one character is like, oh, this is a Banksy. I know. I thought that was so funny. I thought, are they really knocking at modern art? Because obviously it’s all these modern art shapes and they’re suggesting that this appearance of all these kind of fragmented, almost cubist and and multicolored images are actually that which will destroy the world. I thought it was hilarious. There’s no way that they did that on purpose. Maybe that wasn’t really intentional. Maybe it was just like a little joke, but that was what I got out of it as well. I thought it was really funny. So in my sense, it’s like that image of the world that becomes sort of this meaningless or incoherent blob is sort of what’s going on for Miles as well at the beginning of the story because he doesn’t know his identity and he’s being pulled between his dad and his uncle who are in their own sense polar opposites. His dad is a police officer and he’s really like sort of strict and he wants to basically form Miles into sort of his own image and within what he wants him to do. And then his uncle is like, you know, we find out later that he’s actually a super villain and he lets Miles do illegal things and he lets him do like the spray painting and like restricted parts of the metro. And so he’s being pulled between these two poles and he doesn’t really know who he is and he’s coming from two different cultures as well. So that’s all going on and that’s reflected in the world, I think. And then that’s even increased even more when these spider people show up. And so it’s like finding like, okay, so who am I and what is Spider-Man? And then it’s by communicating or like with these other spider people and then with himself that there’s this sort of where they learn from each other and then eventually they find that essence or like he finds that essence and he finds himself in the center and becomes Spider-Man. And yeah, I think that was really the powerful aspect, the story that comes up to this point where he has to take this leap of faith. And I think you were talking about it before, so maybe you can elaborate a little bit. No, I think that it’s very, what’s interesting in the story is that there’s this strange religious overtone. In some of my videos, I’ve been talking about the problem of, in relating to John Brevecky as well, some of you have been following John Brevecky, the problem of a story in which you can participate because religious stories, for example, Christianity is a story in which you can enter into the story and you can participate in the story. And the superhero story has been trying to have, let’s say, mythological structures. It has certain mythological structure, but the problem with the superhero story is that we really can’t participate in the story, you know, because we don’t have, and what’s funny about this movie is that it’s somehow suggesting that we should, that we could, that there’s a few places in the movie where it says something like, everybody can wear the mask. And there’s also an image of Stan Lee where Miles asks Stan Lee, does the costume fit? And then Stan Lee looks at him and says, it fits eventually, as if everybody can become a superhero. But obviously, it’s kind of a silly, it becomes a kind of silly parody of a religious story. But it’s interesting because you can see in the story that Miles has a kind of convergent experience, right? So Miles is, he has a fragmented identity. He doesn’t know who he is. Like you said, he’s kind of shifting between his father that’s a policeman, doesn’t like Spider-Man. And then his uncle who’s kind of like a player, he seems to have a kind of bachelor player lifestyle, but he’s also ends up not only that, but actually being a criminal. And so then he has this convergent experience, something reaches out to him, right? This Spider-Man identity comes, it’s like almost like, it’s almost, the whole movie is very Protestant in the sense that here’s this grace that comes in, something that he can’t, that he didn’t ask for, that comes in and touches him. He gets touched by Spider-Man. And so then he starts to discover that he’s somehow weirdly connected to this Spider-Man identity. And somehow this Spider-Man identity is what’s going to show him his path. And so the whole thing, and now he tries to do things, he can’t do it, he can’t do it. He tries to be Spider-Man, he can’t be Spider-Man. And then finally they tell him, you have to make a leap of faith. Like you have to make this leap of faith and then you make the leap of faith and you enter into the, see you’re born again as Spider-Man. It’s really hilarious. I was always like, look at John 3.16 for Spider-Man, you know? If you believe, then you can participate in the story. So that was a kind of funny little thing, but it also does show the, let’s say the problem of that, of how it is that we participate in our stories, right? And so what he’s able to do, different from the other Spider-Men, Spider-People in the story, is that they are already Spider-People, right? By virtue. But he kind of becomes Spider-Man as we’re watching the story. And so he starts as Miles Morales and then he moves towards becoming his own branch of the Spider-Man pattern. And he does that interestingly enough by reading Spider-Man comics. And so in the whole story, there’s a meta thing going on where it’s not just that you have all these Spider-People happening, but you also have this different aspects of how to tell stories, which also come into the story. So he’s reading Spider-Man comic books and the images you see in the Spider-Man comics are the original 1960s images of Spider-Man. So like the actual origin of Spider-Man in the Spider-Man comic. He’s reading and he’s like, okay, so what do I do next, right? I’m reading the Spider-Man comics. So he goes up at the building and he’s wanting to swing across because that’s what Peter Parker does in the comic books. And so as he’s learning about the Spider-Man story, he’s slowly entering into the story of Spider-Man, into the pattern of Spider-Man. And then there’s a meta thing going on, which is really fascinating to me, which is that the whole movie is also about stories or about cultural representation, you could say. And so the fact that the animation style is also so shifty is part of the story. So the animation style keeps shifting between different styles. Even within the same scene, you have different styles of animation sometimes where you have a very caricatural animation or a very almost video game animation, and then you’ll have a very realistic backdrop or something like that. So there’s this disjuncture in the animation style, but you also have different types of stories. So you have a comic book, you have the film noir style storytelling, the manga style storytelling, and then you have the Warner Brothers cartoon, Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig type storytelling. And then so it’s like all these types of stories that are coming in and that are trying to manifest the Spider-Man pattern. It’s like, what would Spider-Man be like in a Warner Brothers cartoon? Like what would Spider-Man be like if it was in a manga universe? And so it’s not just in the multiverse in a scientific sense, but the multiverse in the sense of all the different ways in which we tell stories are showing us what Spider-Man would look like in that story. So I thought that was a really smart and fascinating way to kind of approach it. Yeah, I think they actually hired a number of visual artists who sort of one person would then sketch out their style and then the other person would then build on and then the other person would build on and it sort of became this mesh of all these various styles that come together into the Spider-Verse. Eventually it looks really cool. And yeah, I think it definitely adds to the story that they’re trying to tell in that. And as well, I think to go back to what you said about Miles’s journey, he goes to the Stan Lee merchandise shop for Spider-Man and then he buys his first Spider-Man costume or outfit, right? And then it doesn’t fit. He says something like it’s no need the homeless Spider-Man or like a burned out millennial Spider-Man tells him that Hey, listen, you don’t look so hot either kid. Most superheroes don’t wear their own merch. He doesn’t have his own identity yet. And then eventually he actually gets his own costume at the very end or his outfit. And he mixes it as well. Like it’s the Spider-Man, the original Spider-Man costume. But then he gives his own sort of ornament, his own touch to it. His own style or his own… Yeah, right. This little spray paint he boots on. And so I thought that was a nice touch to sort of show that he has become a center in a way and he’s become in line. He’s retraced the steps of Spider-Man and he’s now become… He’s become a Spider-Man. Like he’s actively engaged in the story. He has his own art to play in the pattern. And I think that that’s really in terms of trying to understand kind of how identity works. I think that this movie really does show us how identity works even in terms of a person. So you could take the whole story of Spider-Man and you could bring it into a person, right? A human being. And so you have an identity. You have something which is you, which is… It actually kind of transcends your particularities. You don’t totally have access to that central person. The Christians would say something like, it’s Christ in you. Or the Hindus have this idea that you have this divine spark or that you are somehow… You have something that’s an identity which participates in this kind of universal thing. But then the question is, when you go through life, there are all these possibilities which appear in front of you. And those possibilities are kind of asking you. They’re saying, can I participate in your identity? Am I able to participate in Jonathan? And you have to kind of answer that. And once you answer that, then your identity is going to apply itself to that sphere. So this is very… Sounds very abstract. But imagine you could say, all of a sudden you have this someone brings the possibility in front of you that maybe you could learn a musical instrument. It’s like, oh, really? Is that a possibility for me? Is that something that I could join to and that could participate in my… Become a branch of myself? And for some people, the answer is no. You’re never going to play an instrument. It’s just not going to happen, right? Some people, it’s yes a little bit. And then for some people, it’s yes a lot. And then once you enter into that, then you will learn to play an instrument. You’ll learn music. And it’s going to be a place for your identity to manifest itself. So you’re going to end up playing music in a certain manner, which is going to, while being universal, also be particularly yourself, right? It’s going to be you playing music. And that’s true of any aspect of identity. And it’s also true of any identity that we participate in, right? So, of course, in this movie, it’s the pattern of Spider-Man, which is a little bit of a silly thing. Although it’s trying to be universal, which layers, because it’s like anybody can be Spider-Man. It’s like, no, not everybody can be Spider-Man. Not everybody gets bitten by a radioactive spider. It seems like the radioactive spider seems to be one essential part of the Spider-Man pattern. At least all the Spider-Men that we saw have some radioactive something. But the idea is that, you know, if you, any identity will do. So obviously, I talked about participating in the Christian identity. How am I a Christian? Well, that’s going to be particular to you. Even though it’s participating in the universal structure, it also will maintain your particularity. So you won’t be a carbon copy of every other Christian, just like all these different Spider-People have their own, you know, have their own flair. And Miles, the way that Miles ends up being truly Spider-Man is at the moment where he kind of is able to have a balance between the two. Between fully being Spider-Man, but also being Miles. Not being something else, right? So he has, you know, he finds that interesting balance because his father is, you know, the super order character and then his uncle is the chaotic character. And so his Spider-Man ends up being a kind of gangster Spider-Man with spray paint on it. So he kind of finds his own balance, which would be different for other people, but he finds his own balance to the matter in which he can participate in that story. Yeah, I think you’re right. And I think to add one thing to it is that in his story as he progresses, like I think at the start, maybe towards the midpoint as well, he’s starting to sort of move further away from his dad because his connection with his dad isn’t that good. And then eventually there’s this point where he actually, I think he tries to call his dad, but then he hangs up and then he decides to go to his uncle’s place because he feels like he has more of a connection to his uncle. So he’s being more attracted to his side. Yes, exactly. He pulls to his side and he doesn’t know, of course, that he is the proud lord of the super villain criminal at that point. And then eventually he obviously finds out and then he confronts him about it when the proud lord almost kills him. And then he has his own sort of moment and he obviously dies. And then I think the sadness is a part of the fact that obviously his uncle died, but also it’s that he’s moving in that direction that in the sense that this person that he thought that was a good person is actually a criminal. And so I think the lesson that he learns is that one of the Spider-Man lessons is that with great power comes great responsibility. And so his uncle did the opposite of that. And so that’s one of the things that he learns to then become Spider-Man. And then it’s what you said, that moment when he finally sort of accepts that, or has that centeredness is that when he’s tied to Karen and his dad tells him that he sees that spark in him and then he finally lets go of his fear and goes into that identity. So yeah, I thought he goes for all these sort of trials where he’s pulled towards different identities and for some of them he learns and the other is like it’s more of a cautionary tale. So I think how they handled it with the other characters is well done as well. Yeah and there’s also a whole aspect where he’s, you see these spider people almost as a community or as people who participate in the same identity and can you imagine like that’s a basketball team, right? So they’re a basketball team and then Miles is like I want to be part of your team and they say well no you need to go through this initiation. You know if you fail the initiation then you can’t be part of our teams. Like that’s we don’t like you and so they kind of test them a few times. They test them, they test them, they test them. It’s like oh you know it’s like you know maybe later maybe in the future you could be part of our identity but now you can’t. And so I thought that was a really interesting idea. You really see this group of spider people really and he’s trying to break into their group, participate in their story you could say like I’m always talking about. And then finally he makes that leap of faith and then he finds his way into the community and everybody celebrates him and everybody like every American movie, everybody applauds him for finally coming in to who he is. And so yeah I thought that that was a very interesting way to show so many aspects of how you become something. Like you said especially in terms of this uncle. It seems like the other spider people are suggesting that part of the spider man pattern has to be that you lose someone in your story. Like they confirm that. Like if you’re going to be a spider person you have to have lost someone. And that kind of brings me to the last point which I found the most interesting and one of the most interesting in the story is how obvious we take identity to be. Even though we question it in our culture, even though we question it in our narratives right now especially in the postmodern world, we take for granted identity so much. And in the story you see the same thing. When Spider-Man enters into this multi-dimensional machine, he gets pushed into this multi-dimensional machine and that’s what calls for all the spider people into this dimension and kind of brings them in. And so my question right away when I saw that is why do we think it’s normal that it’s these spider people that come back? Because obviously the person who went into that machine, that Peter Parker, has multiple facets of his identity. There’s so many aspects of his identity. He’s Peter Parker, he’s a male, he’s a European descent, he’s a journalist, he’s all kinds of things. He has all these identities. One of his identities is Spider-Man. So why is it that when he goes into the machine it brings back all these spider people? And that’s when you really realize to what extent we take for granted this notion of essence, of a spiritual essence of something. And so he’s actually, it’s the spiritual essence of Spider-Man which is calling forth all these spider people from all these dimensions to come into the world because there’s no other way to say it. Spider-Man is not a thing, it’s not just a measure in the world. It’s an accumulation of aspects which a pattern of being which you recognize. And so the reason why all the Spider-Men come back in the machine is because this is a Spider-Man story. That’s why. It’s amazing. That’s why the Spider-Men come back is because we are watching the story of Spider-Man. If you’re watching a documentary on a dandruff and then he would go in, it’s like people who have dandruff, and if he had dandruff, people they would come. It’s like who knows? There are so many aspects of a person that exist. Why is it that that thing? And that’s when you realize that it is inevitable that we are participating in stories and that we are constantly referring to stories as patterns in, as identities, patterned identities you could say. Right, well yeah. That’s so I feel the Thomas that I’ve been doing all the talking. I am sorry. It doesn’t matter. You had more interesting things to say. I learned a lot here as well. I think I have one thing that I wanted to say that was when I was watching the movie and I was thinking about is like why with all the Spider-People, why is the story focused on why is Miles the main protagonist? Why isn’t it Gwenda the Spider-Girl for instance? Why isn’t it her origin story and then with Miles and all the other guys coming in? It seems like it could have been all of those stories really. It doesn’t really matter. No, it’s very important. It’s very important why it’s not. Yeah, so let me see if I got that right. So I thought about it. It’s like well he is as compared to all the other characters he is the more like the trickster type of character where in the sense that he is you know he’s the odd one out and he’s always trying to sort of trick his way in the beginning as well. You can tell it because he doesn’t want to go to the sort of privileged school that he’s going to and he’s actually very intelligent but he just doesn’t want to go and so he actually tries to consciously flunk his tests so he can seem dumb so he can be thrown out and he’s this type of shape-shifter even in his abilities he becomes invisible and he can shock people when they don’t expect it or at the beginning he likes Gwen and he tries to sort of trick her with some sort of like the weird shoulder things. Get her to like her by just doing that and so he’s doing all these sort of shape-shifter things and I think in that way he’s also the person who can change other people’s minds and their direction of life in the way that he sort of teaches homeless Spider-Man or sort of burned out Spider-Man to sort of revitalize his own being of Spider-Man and the same thing happens in lesser degrees to the other Spider-People and so I feel like he in that sense is the right sort of character for that type of story where he needs to sort of revitalize his world and also come into his own being of Spider-Man so that and especially because the world is sort of turned upside down with Spider-Man dying or sort of the the Spider-Man of the story dying and then this all this confusion all these mixtures of Spider- People coming in that he would be the one to then flip it back. Yeah no I think that that makes total sense and also because unlike all the other Spider-People in his world because they’re always saying there’s one there’s always one only Spider-Man like they keep repeating that in the story and in the end it actually returns to that right it actually it actually returns to a place where each each Spider-Man is one in their universe right but in this story that’s probably one of the reasons also why this story is the one to bring all the chaos is because there’s actually a there’s actually a strange situation where even before the the machine starts bringing in all these multi-dimensional things all of a sudden there are two Spider-People in that story it’s already an anomaly he’s already like this weird anomaly where where he’s at he’s like another Spider-Man and he’s in the in the in the world so there are there are two Spider-Men in the in the same world and so it’s already a strange thing it’s almost as if he the fact that those two Spider- not in terms of the actual story telling me in terms of the symbolism it’s as if that’s already starting to break down the reality because like there’s this weird anomaly of this new Spider-Man that’s not really Spider-Man but is Spider-Man and so it’s like that’s that’s the question it’s like how is he Spider-Man and that opens up the floods of chaos like all this chaos comes in it’s like okay how how is he Spider-Man he’s not he is he’s not he’s an indefinite character and the trickster is part of that and so then we have to figure out how he fits in the pattern so the whole story is about how then does he actually become a Spider-Man but I think that that’s that’s why he’s like this weird anomaly in a world where there are two right away and then one dies and so it’s like you know everything everything’s kind of falling apart so but he’s not Spider-Man yet he’s he’s like a he’s like a Spider-Man in training I guess yeah so I think that that’s part of but it’s also also it’s also because they want to take us on the journey of becoming Spider-Man and so they they they want to kind of take us through this this this journey of him entering into his identity and so they take this character that’s not quite Spider-Man and then learns from the story of Spider-Man to become Spider-Man and it’s different from the other Spider-People because the other Spider-People they they were Spider-Man sure sure but I mean they could have they could have shown their origin story in in in the movie right like not we see their origin stories through like the the comic books but then you could have just done the same thing for Miles and then show the actual sort of origin throughout the entire movie of one of the other characters see what I’m saying Miles Miles learns to be Spider-Man by seeing another Spider-Man whereas all the other Spider-People didn’t learn to be Spider-Man by seeing others does that make sense so it’s like it’s like we’re the ones who are now entering into the story which already exists and we’re we’re shown how to kind of participate it’s like a liturgical it’s like a liturgical Spider-Man movie where it’s like through liturgy through this liturgical act like this like this participative ritual he’s learning to be Spider-Man and then going through the different means and you know making a leap of faith to become Spider-Man to enter into that story so it’s it’s really is it really is trying to create a participative uh capacity to enter into into this story that already exists so it’s it’s he’s different from the others in that sense right right yeah yeah I hope that makes sense no yeah yeah it doesn’t make sense I didn’t think about that well you know what I thought about that before you asked the question and then then I started thinking about it all right Thomas I think I think you’ve gone for quite a while on interpretation of a movie so uh and maybe tell people what you’re up to because I didn’t do that in the last video I know you’re you work on your channel maybe tell me what you’re up to and then we’ll we’ll end with that all right well so um currently I’m I’m I’m busy with a series on on directors really trying to find the essence of certain directors so I recently made a video on Damien Chazelle who uh who came out with his most recent movies first man and I thought it was really good but I got sort of snubbed at the oscar so I’ve been I’ve been trying to sort of listen to hundreds of interviews and sort of pull all those together what what the essence is of what the director’s trying to do uh with with his or her movies uh but right now uh I’m working on I don’t know I’m probably going to do something about Game of Thrones before before it comes out but uh besides that I’m usually just I do a video and then I’ll think about what I’m going to do next but there’s no sort of set plan yeah hey you should keep an eye on the channel people keep asking me to do something about Game of Thrones but I don’t watch it I know and I’m not going to start watching someone has to go for it Thomas do it yeah all right well thanks thanks for for for doing this with me it’s as usual it’s a lot of fun and uh and uh everybody else I will uh say thanks for paying attention and uh I’ll see you soon