Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE   **1/2

Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson

2023

IDEA:  Miles Morales faces a new threat to the Spider-Verse while continually struggling with the expectations of his parents and his growing love for Gwen Stacy.

BLURB:  Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is a dazzling feat of mainstream animation innovation and a cynical work of corporate brand extension. This is not so different from its predecessor, except this time the film is 140 minutes long (!) and merely the first part of a two-part story (!!) that abruptly ends in the middle of the action. Both factors give Across the Spider-Verse a flabby, disjointed shape, as its narrative and visual velocity propel us through a cavalcade of seeming-climaxes that never build to anything concrete. Even more than the already insular first film, this one assumes and largely depends for effect on the viewer’s brand loyalty, his intricate awareness and knowledge of not only other Marvel films featuring the web-slinger but the myriad franchise iterations of Spider-Man comics and cartoons. If this can be alienating to the casual or agnostic Marvel consumer, Across the Spider-Verse at least wows as a purely aesthetic and kinetic experience. Although it unavoidably lacks the novelty of the original, the film still bursts with eye-popping stylistic wizardry. Especially memorable are the Rothko-esque expressionist backdrops of Gwen Stacy’s world, the Leonardo-styled workbook pencil strokes that characterize the villainous Vulture, and the flickering magazine clippings of Spider-Punk. The animation also ably supports the themes, never more so than in the clever contrast between the Spot’s porous malleability and Miguel’s fanatical adherence to the rules of canon. Such a premium on artistry is a welcome sign of an attempt, at least, to transcend perfunctory fan service.

We're All Going to the World's Fair

WE'RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD'S FAIR   ***

Jane Schoenbrun

2021

IDEA:  A lonely, socially isolated teen girl named Casey becomes immersed in a horror-themed online role-playing game, blurring the line between reality and fiction.

BLURB:  The inclination to scorn the Internet for so many of our most harmful contemporary social ills is so strong, it can be jarring to see a piece of media express a discourse that’s anything less than purely dystopian. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is one of the most nuanced and ambivalent films in recent memory about digital technology and social media. Neither an alarmist, moralizing condemnation of online anomie nor a facile paean to Web 2.0 interconnectivity, the film regards the Internet as a catalyst and host for social activities and psychological effects that have a mix of implications. These implications are not high-handedly diagnosed, but suggested through Casey’s use of the Internet, which teeters between obsessive, reality-distorting absorption and the vulnerable self-exploration of a girl coming into early adulthood. Schoenbrun cannily plunges us into the digital rabbit hole with Casey by comprising a majority of the film out of Casey’s and others’ social media videos, which often appear in front of us, as they do on the Internet, divorced from linear time and space. We, and Casey, come to know no other reality than the online role-playing game she has immersed herself in, to apparently pathological ends. In the terror of losing oneself to this world - and to its various anonymous denizens, as personified by an enigmatic middle-aged man as alienated as Casey - Schoenbrun locates both a coming-of-age (and potentially trans) metaphor and a more specific kind of commentary about self-actualization in cultivated online communities. When the coda arrives, the horror of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair dissipates to reveal the longing our virtual spaces answer and frustrate in equal measure.

Demonlover

DEMONLOVER   **

Olivier Assayas

2002

IDEA:  A female lead executive at a software firm becomes embroiled in a corporate battle for control over an online pornography company.

BLURB:  As a representation of the perception-deforming effects of our hyper-mediated digital landscape, Demonlover is pretty compelling. Assayas, cinematographer Denis Lenoir, and editor Luc Barnier cogently embed these effects in the film’s form, from the rhyming of whooshing bokeh streetlights with closeups of flashing pixels and scrolling web pages to the elliptical cuts and ambiguous spatial relations that evoke the flattened temporality of the Internet. As the film grows increasingly fractured in its second half, the dissociation and derealization experienced by Connie Nielsen’s Diane unnervingly become our own. Demonlover is also successful, albeit in a totally didactic and mostly schematic way, in depicting the systematic exploitation – particularly the objectification of women – that fuels our global-capitalist image economy. Yet the film’s cynicism is trite and predetermined, inflected by a reactionary skein of technophobia and misogyny. The female characters in the film exist purely as manifestations of patriarchal fantasy, ruthlessly power-hungry corporate ice queens and evil lesbians who participate in their own oppression. Assayas wants to expose their dehumanization by the culture industry, but he ends up making them just further images to manipulate on a screen. Demonlover ends with a groaningly obvious “twist” of fate that could have arrived over an hour earlier with no ground lost, its grim irony as inevitable as the voracious march of capitalism.