This is a work with a dream-level artistic level, which not only breaks through the dimensional wall, but also rekindles the dream flame in our hearts that was once extinguished by the desolate winds and cold rains of secular life.
From "Miss Bird" to "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse", from the warm and sunny California capital to the high-rise New York City, no matter how the weather changes, we are always fascinated by the story of the teenager finding himself and realizing his ideals.
Miles was an ordinary teenager at a turning point in his life before being bitten by a magical spider. He not only has to face the heavy schoolwork every day, but also has to meet the expectations of the police father, and carefully hide his true hobbies.
The story begins with an argument between the two when his father sends Miles to a new high school. Miles said he would rather be an ordinary person in an ordinary school than study in this "too elite" study, which he felt out of place. Perhaps what he didn't say was that the school was "too white" and he couldn't find a sense of belonging.
Although there is no overt racial discrimination in the United States today, blacks and whites are still separated by mechanisms such as education, housing, and medical care. Restricted by their lower economic and social status, the white students in traditional elite colleges are still an absolute majority, and the schools also practice traditional Anglo-Saxon culture, such as reading the Bible, organizing rugby games, and paddling. Boating, etc. Even in plays and reading literature, the selected texts are mostly mainstream works in the traditional sense, and works from other cultures are rarely selected. Therefore, as a minority student, identity belonging and elite education cannot have both, and must choose one or the other.
In the first season of the popular American drama "This Is Us", Jack and Rebecca also had a disagreement over the education of their third son Randall. When the mother was so excited about her son's math talent and wanted to transfer him immediately, the father said, "Look at this school, it's better than the already 'white' school that Randall is attending now. 'White'."
Miles, who grew up in the African-American community, usually has his biggest hobby being graffiti, but he couldn't find any friends in the new school, and the only Asian roommate was just staring at the computer all day. Spider-Man is a pairing), no communication with him.
The turning point came when he and his uncle went to the secret base for graffiti, Miles was bitten by a magical radioactive spider, and when he went back to investigate, he met Spider-Man who was fighting the enemy. Perhaps it was fate. At the most perplexing moment, he met the hero in his mind. It's a pity that Spider-Man was killed by the bully Kingpin before he could say a few words to this junior.
After a brief moment of joy, the boy was lost again. He tried to become self-taught through hard work, but lacked the guidance of his predecessors and the approval of others, he was doomed to fail when he was young.
Fortunately, there is no way out, and the universe has sent him another Peter Park - but this Spider-Man is a little lost: middle-aged, fat, unshaven, frustrated in love, and can't feel the momentum of a superhero.
Here, the original Spider-Man (blond hair) represents everyone's ideal self, the hero we all dreamed of becoming when we were young. But the ideal is always too full, even if at a certain moment we have approached infinitely, it is still shattered in the end. After the ideal is gone, we are disappointed, we are sad, even angry and fearful, and we struggle to save it, as if a drowning person is trying to grab the last piece of driftwood. But in the end - if you're lucky enough - all you can get is a poor substitute, a greasy middle-aged Peter who may represent everyone's real-life self. However, people always have to recognize the reality before they can make progress, right? So this sloppy middle-aged man seems to be not bad. He sneaked Miles into the enemy base, taught Miles how to use spinning, and discovered his potential for electric shock and stealth for the first time. In fact, after the six people gathered, he was the one who defied all opinions and always believed that the little spider was capable of completing the task.
It is said that Spider-Man's uncle is a high-risk occupation, and this film is no exception. After Uncle Allen was shot by Kingpin, we finally have one of the ultimate themes of the Spider-Man franchise: loss and growth. In the original film of the 2002 version of "Spider-Man", Peter's uncle said the famous saying that has been passed down to this day: With great power comes great responsibility. In the film, the other members comfort Miles by saying that they too have lost their close relatives.
We can't help but wonder: Do you have to experience the loss of a loved one to become Spider-Man? Going a step further, do you have to lose your loved one to qualify as a superhero? Batman took a different path since witnessing the Joker kill his parents in an alley. Superman's adoptive parents died shortly after he graduated from high school, giving rise to the flying heroes in red capes that would later be seen in the metropolis.
Sadly, I think the answer is yes. For Miles, losing his uncle is not only the driving force of chivalry, but more importantly, it symbolizes the distance from childhood. From then on, the little spider no longer has a partner who can play with him and listen to him when he is sad. He needs to learn to solve all problems by himself and learn to become an "adult".
In primitive tribes, every boy and girl had to go through a ceremony before they reached adulthood. This special ceremony called rites of passage usually marked people's formal passage from one stage of life to another. They may need to hunt an adult lion alone, or survive three days in the wild without a food supply. In the process, some people will fail and die, and those who survive will return to the tribe and begin to assume the rights and obligations of adults, and no longer enjoy the care of their elders.
The old dies, the new grows; all things are replaced, and so on.
Thousands of years have passed, and human beings in a civilized society have long ceased to follow this cumbersome procedure, but it has always been imprinted in our cultural memory and reappears in a different form.
Peter chose to take his uncle's words to heart and struggled to lift the burden on the street; Miles figured everything out and jumped, and finally took the leap of faith. Instead, let's take a look at how the villain Kingpin copes with the loss of his family? After his wife and son had a car accident, he not only did not reflect on himself, but blamed everything on Spider-Man, and even opened the collider to destroy the world to save the phantom of his past life. The reason why bullies are bullies is not only that they have endured difficulties in life, but also that when faced with the same thing, they have made a choice that is diametrically opposite to that of a hero.
In addition to the main line of finding oneself and growing up, there is another branch line about the expectations of others and self-persistence.
Miles' father was also keen on street culture, but since he became a police officer, he parted ways with his former partner and embarked on a different routine. After starting a family and starting a business, he hoped that his son would become a dragon, and he sent his son to the elite school without saying anything, and also prohibited him from continuing to do graffiti. Miles' mother, who speaks a mixture of Spanish and English, presumably is Latino, and works in a hospital with a low-paying job such as a nurse. So this is a pair of minority parents who are both from the middle and lower classes, hoping that their children can be admitted to prestigious schools in the future and integrate into the mainstream group. Does the story sound familiar? Hahaha, it seems that no matter which minority they are, they have similar class anxiety.
This branch is also reinforced by recurring details in the scene.
The novel Miles was reading in literature class was Dickens' Great Expectations, and the close-up featured several times the name of the book and the book itself. Expectation in the title of the book means "(other people's) expectations, expectations". The protagonist of the book, Pip, was born in the lower class. One day, he was sponsored by an anonymous rich man to go to London to receive an education of "upper class".
Corresponding to this is the overpass connecting the campuses on both sides of the street that Miles passes by every day when he is in school. The word "Vision" engraved on the bridge is called "Vision" in Chinese, which is very expressive. The word comes from the Latin root "vis, vid", which means "to see", and is often used in sentences like "How do you envision yourself in five or ten years". Unlike Expectation, Vision is not about what other people think, it only points to your own heart. Where are your eyes looking? Where is your future heading? These are all questions that you need to answer through continuous exploration and honesty. In addition, if you want to complain silently, it is worthy of being an elite high school, and it actually has its own dedicated on-campus overpass. . . . . .
In retrospect, perhaps the story can be summed up briefly. A boy is at a loss at the threshold of adulthood, because Qi Yu suddenly has supernatural abilities. After several twists and turns, he has a fairly reliable teacher and a group of interesting partners. Although he experienced great loss and grief in the process, he also learned new abilities, he can face problems alone, and finally deal with the relationship with his family and find his future direction.
As the Old Testament Ecclesiastes says, there is nothing new under the sun. We always narrate the same story over and over again, wrapping it with different names, different faces, and different plots, and in this repeated narration and listening, we gain the courage and wisdom to face life.
What impressed me the most in the whole film was the few scenes where the little spider jumped at the top of the building after painting his battle uniform in black. The row upon row of skyscrapers in New York City were all turned into irrelevant backgrounds. In the sky at that moment, there was only him and his freedom.
May every young man roam freely in this cruel world one day.
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