Spiderman -- into the Spider-verse

About two-thirds of the way through the movie Spiderman -- Into the Spider Verse, the young hero's father comes to visit his son in his Brooklyn dormitory room.  Behind a closed door, the youth, Miles Morales, is cocooned in spider-silk, bound to a chair with a wad of spider-web sealing his mouth.  The boy's father is a New York City cop and he's drawn as a massive figure with a pentagonal chest and square-cut shoulders supporting a small head with closely cropped hair -- it's a caricature, although one that is reasonably expressive.  Indeed, all the human figures in this animated picture are, more or less, crudely drawn -- they are, in fact, cartoons in a film that can't really be described in those terms:  the graphics in Spiderman (SpiderVerse) are too vivid, too psychedelic, and too compelling to be described simply as animation or a cartoon.  This is something else -- the manipulation of light as a stream of digitalized tints and textures, a bright, vivid computerized light-show.  As I watched the scene with the cop at the door, I admired the subtle transition from shadows on the left of the image brightening imperceptibly to illumine the policeman and his anxious face and, then, brightening to a lighter, almost translucent color representing the locked door.  In sheer graphic terms, the image made sense -- it provided a spectrum calibrated both in light, texture, and color, a tonal progression from left (dark) to right (brighter).  Then, I asked myself:  what is the color of the door?  Here is where I was baffled:  the door was a vivid color but one that I had never seen before, a color that I couldn't exactly describe except as a aquarelle wash of transparent pale blues, yellows, and purplish-green tints.  The problem that I discovered in describing the hue of that door is a problem that confronts me in general terms as I write about this film:  much of picture is literally indescribable -- the colors are luxurious, brilliant but, also, mixed with a sort of alchemy that we don't find in nature.   These are colors generated by the brain of a computer -- hues that no one has ever really seen before and that don't have established names.  Indeed, the last twenty minutes of the movie, a spectacular light-show involving animated figures battling one another against a void filled with jets and rays of brilliant color, amoeba-like stains spreading and twisting and turning, skyscrapers rising and falling like strange undersea polyps, the Brooklyn Bridge sometimes appearing as a cameo, the familiar network of struts and towers and supporting cable here as fragile as the gossamer of a spider's web, the bridge sometimes tilted upside down or turned on edge, a subway train scuttling like a centipede through this interdimensional abyss with its lights still shining, red blinkers winking at us, a witty reference, I think, to Einstein's trains rattling through the infinity of space-time in his explanation of relativity:  a chaos but one that successfully bears a narrative burden in that we can see, sometimes as silhouettes and other times as statuesque three-dimensional figures the various superheros fighting their foes -- these effects are literally indescribable:  they have to be seen to be imagined and nothing that I can write here will aid you in understanding what all of this looks like.  There are huge spinning machines that cast off rays of floral colors, vast orbs blossoming and withering, parts of a landscape dissected into cubist arrays of cornices and windows and walls held up to our scrutiny like the blossoms in a bouquet of flowers.  And all of this is witty and, even, on its own terms faintly credible. 

Spiderman (Spiderverse) is successful not only as a vast and spectacular light-show but, also, as a story.  A brilliant young man is sent from his home in Brooklyn (his father is a cop and his mother a nurse -- perhaps, the couple is not married because the boy doesn't carry his father's name, Davis.  Of course, this would make him "Miles  Davis", an appellation carrying, I think, too much weight for the character to bear.)  The boy attends a sort of magnet school, some kind of residential academy, also in Brooklyn.  Feeling lonely and out of place in the elite school, the boy seeks out his shady uncle and the two of them paint a glorious mural in an abandoned subway station buried somewhere near the Brooklyn Bridge.  A radioactive spider -- and the beast is an electric neon day-glow arachnid -- bites the kid and he develops super-powers.  Unfortunately, he can't control these powers and his first duels with evil characters result in his defeat.  The principal villain, a huge rectangular black obelisk, equipped with a little belligerent head that's all bald skull and savage jaw, has harnessed an apocalyptic machine that accesses other universes.  According to quantum theory, there are an infinity of universes and, therefore, as it turns out an infinite number of Spidermen.  Peter Parker, Spiderman's feckless alter ego, is killed by the bad guy notwithstanding the hero's efforts.  But, while mourning at the grave of Parker, the space-time continuum ruptures, an effect involving an explosion of jagged multi-colored crystals, and another Peter Parker appears.  This version of Spiderman is overweight and unshaven -- he has brunette hair, is a wise-guy and palpable out-of-shape.  He helps Miles learn how to harness his powers, although he's too cynical to be much of an instructor.  Ultimately, several other versions of Spiderman appear:  one of them is Peter Porker, a nebbish cartoon pig with spider powers; another is Spiderman Noir a black and white figure that appears against a shadowy black and white background with a gale always whipping through his hair (the hero speaks in the jargon of tough-guys in nineteen-thirties crime movies).  There's a spider-girl and another version of Spiderman from Japan -- an anime maiden with huge long-lashed eyes, dressed in the uniform of a Japanese schoolgirl and accompanied by a crab-like robot war-machine.  These different versions of Spiderman all come draped in landscapes appropriate to them -- thus, the Noir spiderman is surrounded by billowy black and white shadows, Peter Porker has Warner Brothers anvils and giant wooden hammers that he deploys and comes equipped with a Roger Rabbit toonville backdrop; the Japanese girl is deployed against the static but beautifully drawn backgrounds used in classical anime, and spider-girl is a white figure often surrounded by a sort of floral halo.  The film's point is that there are an infinite number of spider-man heroes -- one for every race and gender and color and creed.  Indeed, the film expresses the sentiment that ultimately everyone in the audience is potentially a spider-man, a point that is made in a very moving fashion in a final homage to Stan Lee at the end of the movie:  we see Lee's signature glasses lying abandoned in a glowing void and there are words to the effect that "anyone who seeks good as its own reward" is a super-hero.  The various versions of Spiderman, each associated with his or her own texture and style of animation all join forces for the grandiose final battle that takes place in a constantly morphing "spider-verse", an entangled web of multi-verses through which the characters plummet in a sort of infinite and endless fall. 

This is a wonderful movie, exceedingly clever and witty, and spectacular beyond my ability to describe the film's imagery.  It was made by armies of animators over many years -- one of the final titles in the picture lists the number of babies that were born to the people working on the film during its preparation: the list is about 20 or 25 names long.  Make sure you stay for all the closing credits.  First, there are a number of fantastically baroque and ornate stills depicting the notion of an infinity of spider-men.  The final credits are literally wallpapered with them in Pop Art arrays that outdo anything that actual Pop Art ever accomplished.  Then, there are several very funny gags appended to the end of the movie. 

I suppose this film embodies the future of popular entertainment.  I grieve for the absence of anything that seems real or human in an massive endeavor of this kind.  But the recompense is that the movie is also beautiful beyond description.  And, some of the most beautiful images, are the most modest ones --  feathery snow falling on the dark city and its alleyways, the trees in a autumnal forest, the rush and roar of traffic and the sleek, gleaming skyscrapers rearing up over the rivers and bridges.  In one shot, we see above the character a junction box on a utility pole -- a mundane image:  but the pole and box are bathed in preternaturally glorious light, a great sea of radiance that transfigures everything that it touches.