Script for The Cliffhanger Problem (Across the Spider-verse)

Commentary on the process.

Script Begins

This probably would have been a better topic to cover when I originally meant to cover it, which was right after the movie came out. But…did anybody else walk out of Across the Spiderverse feeling a bit…unsatisfied? Because I definitely did.

If you’re here because you watched a certain Spiderverse video made by a highschooler who thought he knew what Fair Use was but definitely didn’t and that the algorithm randomly decided to shine its favor upon, hello, welcome back. Since last we spoke, I have gained one college degree and one bowel disorder. And yes, I do consider Spiderverse to be partially responsible for that first thing, because it inspired me so much in a time that I needed it. Lemme tell ya, around the time its sequel came out, I could’ve really used another inspirational kick in the butt just like the original gave me. But, Across the Spiderverse ended up being intensely meaningful in a very different way, a way that absolutely deserves examination.

Unfortunately, when I was walking out of the theater, I wasn’t thinking about that, I was thinking about how bullshit that cliffhanger was!

If we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna have to talk about both topics. Let’s do the cliffhanger stuff first and then we’ll talk about the transcendent experience of humanity through art and all that stuff second. Sound good? I sure hope so, because this is a prerecorded, scripted, and edited video. So….so I already did it.

coughing

title card: INTO THE CLIFFHANGER-VERSE

Spider-Man Into the Spiderverse is a movie where two egotistical high schoolers engage in elaborate mind games in an effort to win at romance, a thing that is both normal to want and possible to achieve--wait, this is not the right video- shuffling papers

Spider-Man Into the Spiderverse is a movie about Miles Morales, a teenager who gets bit by a spider with spiderman juice in it even though he wasn’t supposed to (we’ll get to that) and is faced with the stressful task of preventing the multiverse from collapsing.Luckily, he has other spider people from other dimensions here to help him, including Peter B Parker aka Spider Dad and Gwen Stacy aka Miles’s instant crush (we’ll get to that, too).They help him figure out how to be spider man which also helps him figure out his relationship with his dad and his new school, he saves the multiverse, bad guy goes to jail, and… that’s all, folks. A nice, satisfying, complete ending.

Across the Spiderverse is the sequel to Into the Spiderverse, which means that we have to abbreviate them to “Across” and “Into” respectively, or just say the whole title each time, both of which suck. In Across, Miles discovers that there’s a whole society of dimension hopping spider people led by this dude Miguel that his crush is a part of! Yay! Except they don’t really like him…and they also want him to let his dad die, because they think that otherwise, his universe will be in danger of collapse…again. Not yay. Miles isn’t having that shit so he rushes to save his dad, the spider people rush to stop him, and then… the movie ends…you see the difference, right?

But what the hell am I even complaining about? Spiderverse did not invent the concept of splitting a movie in half. From Pirates of the Caribbean to Wizard Bigots to this year’s Mission: Impossible, they’ve been splitting movies in half for a while now, seemingly whenever it’s a sure thing that the studio will be able to sell tickets to halves 1 and 2. But instead of being cynical, let’s assume that the movie was split in half not because of any financial or logistical reasons but because the creators simply had a big story to tell and didn’t want to cram it into a single installment. There’s definitely something to be said for how this movie lets us luxuriate in the Spiderverse. Without two movies for this story, they definitely wouldn’t have had the space in the runtime to do a lot of things, including that whole opening act in Gwen’s beautiful, color splash, bleeding paint, music video dimension.

Which would suck, because that opening act rules. A day in the life of Gwen Stacy that makes the entire Spider Verse more believable by selling us on a reality where she’s the main character, all while highlighting the mix of superhuman heroism and human struggles that has always made Spider Man so special. Plus I think it would have been much harder to empathize with Gwen if we hadn’t seen her struggles before she reentered Miles’s story. As a result, it’s not as tightly paced as the original movie, but that’s not such a bad thing when I’m already cherishing every second I get to spend with these characters and in this vibrant, animated world.

Well, mostly animated. I kinda hate the live action cameos, but that’s a different topic.

I also don’t want to wave away the storytelling potential of going into a full length movie with the momentum of an unresolved previous movie behind it.

Across the Spiderverse set up so much that it’s looking like the next movie will be able to just start, maybe do a little recap, and then GO. That is undoubtedly, coming at the cost of a less complete movie, but hey, it’s not like cliffhangers are some new concept.

There’s a lot of precedent for cliffhangers in fiction, even if there’s an understandable tendency to view cliffhanging as just a marketing technique.

'It’s those darn execs! They want people to come back and spend more money, so they deny the audience a proper ending!'

This works because of a known fact about human psychology: we like when things have satisfying resolutions. There are exceptions, of course, but in general, we like our mysteries explained, our narratives concluded, and our sentences wrapped up in nice little…….

See? Isn’t that annoying?

Even though you probably know where that sentence was going, it still bothers you that it didn’t get there, because you’re a human. I assume. dog watching smartphone

But the thing about marketing is that it’s not just something that evil men in suits do to suck the beauty out of the world and exploit your synaptic behavior, for profit. Marketing is also, like, important. When I try to make a good, clickable thumbnail for this video, I don’t just do it because I want money from views. I don’t make real money from these anyway. This is a hobby. I do it because I want the people who are going to enjoy and get things out of this video to find it. And that’s what a cliffhanger can be for a writer. A way to hold the attention of people who are invested in your narrative, and thus, will probably get something out of continuing to experience it. If we wanna be liberal with our definition of cliffhanger, which I definitely have been thus far, there are little cliffhangers sprinkled all over stories. Classic television structure is about cutting from the A story to the B story at the highest moment of tension. Rotating POV characters between chapters in novels accomplish something similar. Even just the simple act of cutting to something different over the course of a movie is meant to entice you to keep watching with the promise of future resolution.

So there you go, Cliffhangers aren’t just a valid narrative device, they’re also kind of an essential tool on the writers’ toolbelt.

ellipses appears on screen

Unfortunately, none of that means that they feel any less awful.

The groan that carried through the theater when Across rolled credits was the stuff of legend. I groaned too. Being left hanging is simply an unpleasant experience.

And that unpleasantness is amplified more and more the longer the gap is between installments. Waiting for the next scene is one thing, waiting till the next week is another, but multiple years? That just sucks.

Of course, if the people making the art are striking for better treatment or are taking their time so that they don’t have to crunch their asses off to actually get it done, we in the audience should be completely sympathetic and stand in support of the workers. In this video, I’m only talking about the experience of the storytelling, not the politics of the entertainment industry and the endless dangers of capitalism.

airhorns go off, HE SAID CAPITALISM IN A VIDEO ESSAY, TAKE A SHOT

But yeah. From a pure storytelling perspective, having to wait a long time for that resolution is simply unpleasant.

There are ways to mitigate that unpleasantness.

For example, treating a cliffhanger as less of a full on gap where an ending should be and more of a little tease. A lot of stories will tell a satisfying, complete narrative where almost everything gets resolved and then hit you with a twist ending, final reveal, or something otherwise unrelated, so that they can have their cake and eat it too. The satisfaction of a resolution creating a good story AND the cliffhanger drawing in an audience for the next installment.

Across the Spiderverse doesn’t do that super well. Sure, it ends with Miles getting away from Miguel and the Spider People. Temporarily. But it still ends having resolved almost none of the larger narrative arcs that it set up.

At the end of this movie, Miles is still racing to save his dad and prove that he can carve his own path, he’s still captured by an evil doppelganger, he’s still separated from the rest of the spiders, he still hasn’t made it home to his parents, and he still hasn’t revealed his identity to them the way the movie has implied he will, or chosen with finality not to do it, or whatever the next movie decides. Miguel and his cool motorcycle-drivin’ partner Jess Drew are still after Miles, they haven’t been redeemed or defeated for good. Things are still rough between Peter B and Miles on account of the whole ‘keeping the truth from you and then betraying you for Miguel’ thing and he’s being an angsty dad about it. The Spot, who I haven’t mentioned because he’s not that important, basically a villain of the week, has proven that he is NOT a villain of the week, he’s still out there and dangerous, and thanks to him, one of the Spider people’s dimensions is actively dissolving.

And then there’s Gwen, who reaches the end of an arc by the movie’s conclusion, but is robbed of the chance to follow through by its premature ending. It’s like if the original movie ended right after Miles’s famous leap of faith and didn’t actually show him putting his character growth to the test and then finding a new status quo on the other side.

The only things that are actually resolved at the end of Across, beyond the level of individual scenes, are Hobie’s betrayal of Spider Society, which was awesome as hell, and Gwen’s relationship with her dad, which is fine, but expecting it to do the entire job of creating a satisfying ending to the movie is absurd. Yeah, Gwen does serve as a secondary protagonist in this movie, but that doesn’t change the fact that our primary protagonist’s story is still unresolved.And yeah, Gwen does get some resolution with her father, but her story with the Spider Society is still just as unfinished as Miles’s.

In other words, the ending is unsatisfying. But that’s not even the end of it! The need to end on a cliffhanger also messes with the story on a structural level. The last 20 minutes or so of this movie totally drag because they feel less like a resolution for the movie you just watched and more of a sneak preview of the next one. They introduce a bunch of new ideas and even some new characters, and it’s exciting and interesting and I can’t wait to see what they do with all that stuff in the next one, but the actual movie we just watched? You know, Across the Spiderverse? That movie ended a while ago, before all this new stuff came in, and it’s impossible to shake the feeling that the movie is trying to end and failing for a good 15% of its runtime.

So yeah, on a nuts and bolts storytelling level, I think this cliffhanger ending is definitely lacking. It was a hard truth to cope with, that the property I love so much had such a significant flaw, and it left me scrambling for how to make this video at all…At least, until I started to look past the cliffhanger at the actual meat and potatoes of the movie, and began to realize how little that cliffhanger debacle actually matters.

After all, structure is really just about finding the best method of presenting a story’s heart.

And the heart of this movie is just as incredible as the last one.

title card: ACROSS THE IDENTITY-VERSE

Metaphors are based because they allow stories to be about more than what they literally depict. Into the Spiderverse is a movie about being a spider person, but thanks to the power of interpretation, there’s a million different ways that “being a spider person” can be extrapolated into something more relevant to actual everyday life. That is, of course, assuming that you are not an actual spider person. I don’t know you. I did a lot of interpreting in my original video, but I definitely didn’t cover every possible reading, and that’s fine! With a great movie like Spiderverse, each valid interpretation adds to and interacts with the next, like a big ecosystem of meaning. And one of those alternate meanings kept coming back to me while I was watching Across. Something that I mostly breezed past in the original video but that is definitely deeply present in the movie: the power of finding a community that shares your hidden identities. Now, the phrase “hidden identity” sounds really intense. And it can be! For example, I think the reading of Miles’s journey as a metaphor for discovering queerness as a teenager is one with a lot of credence. But it doesn’t have to only be the intensely important and meaningful stuff. It can be more universal than that. For example, sometimes it’s best not to bring up your political opinions around certain family members. That’s a hidden identity. There is a necessity to hide. When you’re the only one you know with a certain hidden identity, it’s really easy to feel lonely and confused. Sometimes hidden identities are things that you decide on for yourself, but even then it often doesn’t feel like it. A lot of aspects of your identity can feel more like the inevitable result of you being you, and less like anything you purposefully chose for yourself. So you end up like Miles, bitten by a spider by pure chance, realizing he’s Spider Man, and not knowing what the hell to do or feel. He wants to go to his parents, but, well…he’s not sure they’ll get it or even accept that part of him, (and that’s another place where I feel like the queer reading is particularly meaningful). “Dad, do you really hate Spider Man?” It isn’t until he meets Peter B, Gwen and the others that he finds someone he can actually talk to about his spider problems. Not only that, but these spider people have more experience with that hidden part of themselves than he does and can guide him through the growing pains. Something that’s true of the first movie but that I noticed a lot in the second is that…spider people don’t ever bother hiding their true identities from each other. Some characters just don’t seem to have designs that would account for taking off their masks, but even then, they share their names, and most of the others are totally comfortable with their masks off. Even Hobie, who makes a joke about not showing the audience his secret identity, takes off his mask without a second thought when it’s just other spiders around. I know that, in the logic of the story, it’s because they’re all from different dimensions, but there’s a lot of meaning in the fact that they don’t feel the need to hide from one another. When it’s just other spider people around, they can be their full, honest selves. The other spiders serve as mentors and role models, guiding Miles on his journey towards his authentic self and the moment that he embraces spiderman as a part of his identity. And once they’re all gone, just the thought that there are other people like him out there, all struggling with and enjoying that identity that they share, keeps him going. But, as we see at the beginning of Across the Spiderverse… he’s still growing, still figuring it out, but he misses them. He has feelings for Gwen, definitely, but he’s desperate to see any of them just to talk to someone else who gets it. So it’s a dream come true, when, right after clashing with the parents that just don’t understand, Gwen turns up. Someone else who feels the same pressure. Someone else who wears a mask to hide their identity from the people they love. Or at least, did. “Don’t tell them.” Her ability to see the world the way he does is beautifully represented by the visual metaphor of them sitting upside down together. It’s electric for Miles, he’s so damn happy just to see one of his friends. Which is why he’s so excited by the idea of a society of spider people and so hurt that Gwen won’t include him.

Then…he has a talk with his mother. And a combination of witnessing the way Gwen runs off and motherly intuition leads to her telling him exactly what he needs to hear. Play her words She does that difficult parenting thing and acknowledges that her son has grown, and then she lets him go free as long as he remembers the love and acceptance he’s felt while he was still under her wing. She wants him to be the one who decides where he belongs and where he’s going, no matter where he ends up. To grow and face the world, but not to lose himself in the process. “Just, don’t get lost.” This scene makes me want to go give my mother a hug, without fail. With his mom’s blessing, he follows Gwen and ends up among the community that she was (reluctantly) trying to exclude him from. How little he knows about interacting with this community is immediately evident, but when the chips are down, it turns out, he fits in great! Even when he unknowingly does something that is considered bad by the community, everyone actually present can recognize that he’s done something amazing. But then…he meets the leader of the community. Miguel O’Hara. The guy who everyone defers to because he’s been there the longest.
He very much shares that hidden identity, which is why, despite his hard ass, tough guy exterior, he empathizes with Miles’s situation. Tries to make him understand when he could have just tricked him instead. But he explains to Miles that there’s a way things are done around here. An order that Miles has tampered with. When it becomes clear that Miles has no interest in such strict societal rules, and isn’t just going to assume that Miguel is right because he’s the leader, Miguel tries to force him into line. All the while, shouting about how Miles doesn’t really belong, How he isn’t a …true member of the community. Now where have I heard that phrasing before…(reddit)

I think this is a movie about gatekeeping. I mean, just look at what they named the supernatural force that brings ruin to every spider dimension that doesn’t share key similarities with the others, that might not even actually exist, and that Miguel worships. They named it “the canon.” Oh no, don’t break the canon! Not the precious canon! You’ll ruin everything if you break the canon! Spiderverse has always been eager to take a very meta look at Spiderman as a cultural construct, but this feels like a very deliberate response to certain types of fan backlash. It frames Miguel as an old guard, hardcore fan, a grognard, a sweaty reddit moderator (except, y’know, sexy) who doesn’t take kindly to newcomers challenging what he’s known this whole time. To the point where he can’t see the beauty of people who weren’t quote unquote “supposed” to be Spider Man becoming Spider Man anyway. He tried to stray from the canon in the past and was hurt for it, so now, he views anything and everything that strays from it as certain doom. In other words, he thinks the reason that his Spider Man story didn’t work out is because ANY ALTERNATIVE INTERPRETATION is inherently a problem. But if you ask me…I think he’s wrong, both metaphorically and in the story. I don’t think the canon is real, or at the very least, I don’t think it works how he thinks it does. Pavitr’s universe is dissolving, but not because of the broken canon. It’s because of what the Spot did. But Miguel won’t even listen when Miles brings that up, nor when Gwen questions him later. He enforces his own views and makes no room for different perspectives. “This is the way it was for me, so this is the way it has to be for everybody else. Otherwise, you don’t count as one of us. You’re not a true…insert identity here.”

“You’re an anomaly, the original anomaly”

What’s also interesting about Miguel and the Spider Society is that part of how they define being Spider Man is experiencing certain familiar pains. That’s something you see all the time in gatekeeping, whether the thing being gatekept is a community, a fandom, or even just a status, like adulthood. “We had this terrible thing happen to us as a part of our hidden identities, and you just waltz in here without going through that and call yourself one of us?” But there’s a couple flaws with that mindset. First of all, the idea that everyone should go through the same pain that you did is a very boomer mindset. If newcomers to a community don’t face the same obstacles or pains that you did, that’s not a bad thing. That’s good. Sure they might not know the same things as you, but that means there’s less pain in the world. That’s the goal. Second of all…Pain can be a teacher. And sometimes, we humans can do this incredible thing where we take our pain and turn it into beauty. A charity for people who have gone through the same thing, a piece of art that really captures the experience of that pain, or even just the motivation to keep moving forward. But that does not make pain a necessity. We do not have to define ourselves by what we go through. That’s how you end up stuck, dragging your trauma forward with you. Instead, it’s usually better for us to define ourselves by what we choose to be. When Peter B says to Miles that “bad things are gonna happen,” he’s right. Being alive means bad stuff happens to you. But when he follows it up by saying “they make us who we are”? He’s dead wrong. “Pain doesn’t make people. Love makes people. The pain is inconsequential. It’s love that saves them.” “I want my little boy to remember he is loved” “Don’t get lost” “Everyone keeps telling me how my story is supposed to go. Nah. Imma do my own thing.”

Miles isn’t jaded like Miguel. He still has love and hope, still believes in a version of his story where the police captain doesn’t have to die. With the spark of individuality he learned to harness in the first movie and perfected with the help of an anti-authority legend, he rejects Miguel’s close minded idea of Spider Man and sets out to make his own path. Maybe what’s next is for him to show Miguel and the others that there is no set path. That a bit more variety in their community and its various identities isn’t threatening, but wonderful. And that newcomers who haven’t gone through the same pain as him being Spider Man doesn’t invalidate what he’s gone through.

But…this bitch ends on a cliffhanger! So if we want the full thematic statement… we kinda have to wait! I’m so torn. What do we do, here? How can I feel a sense of closure about this movie? How do I not end this essay on a cliffhanger? Let’s figure it out.

BEYOND THE ART-VERSE

Okay. I’ve done some thinking. Shocking, I know, that’s very unlike me. The long and short of it is this: When I first walked out of that theater, I was frustrated. But with every day that has passed since the first time I saw it, my appreciation for Across has skyrocketed, much higher than I ever thought it would have. And that, I think, is the ultimate lesson here. Satisfying storytelling and good entertainment is worth pursuing. It’s what pulls an audience in and makes a story sing even for people who don’t look very far beyond the surface. But I do think sometimes we can value that immediate interest and satisfaction, that monkey-brained release of dopamine, more than the deeper stuff, the stuff that will actually last in our memories. Ultimately, this cliffhanger thing is a problem that will mostly go away forever as soon as Beyond the Spiderverse comes out. And all of the stuff that sucks about splitting this Spiderverse sequel into two movies is just a consequence of something that every writer faces: the struggle to take their narrative and put it into a format. Chapters, episodes, movies, sequels, parts, volumes, even scenes, and if you wanna sound like you're in a writer's room for a second, story beats. something funny that’s 1 beat long happens They’re all ways to make for a better experience for the audience, which, to be clear, is an important part of what the art of storytelling is, but also something that can occasionally get in the way of greater artistic aims. It would be convenient if every narrative fit perfectly into a digestible format that has proven to work in the past, but it would also be profoundly limiting. Artistic expression is simply bigger than the sense of disappointment one might feel when asked to come back for a sequel.

So yeah, as long as writers are trying to create a grand story and not a grand amount of money, I think I’m okay with cliffhangers. We can definitely continue to have that complicated conversation about ways to do cliffhangers better and worse. But when it comes down to it…the number one takeaway I have from this whole experience is actually incredibly simple: I’m really excited for the next one!