Nostalgia Is Killing the Multiverse

Looking at the pleasures of "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse" and pitfalls of "The Flash" to explore the multiverse narrative's relationship to nostalgia.

There is no time in my past I yearn to return to. Not my childhood marked by my father’s abuse toward my mother and her emotional distance. Not my teenage years marked by mental hospital stays, surgery, and a disjointed sense of self. Not my twenties that were laced with mental instability so severe it culminated in staying far too long in a toxic relationship and a mental hospital stay I didn’t consent to. This isn’t to say the entirety of my past is defined by melancholy but I am my best self at 34. I am confident, sweeter, and have refined my creative talents in ways that have cultivated a life I am sincerely proud of. Perhaps, this is one reason why I have always been wary toward nostalgia and the cultural desire to heed its siren call. Even though I understand the impulse. 

My boyfriend has a theory that in the 1990s and early aughts, before September 11th plunged this country deeper into a morass of dangerous conservatism, that pop culture was actually curious and hopeful about the future. Music videos were rendered in chrome and vinyl excess like Busta Rhymes featuring Janet Jackson “What’s It Gonna Be?!”, Aaliyah “Try Again”, Janet Jackson and Michael Jackson “Scream”. Films like Johnny Mnemonic and The Matrix may have been dystopian to a degree but they still had hope for the possibilities and nature of humanity, rendering its future with great technological advancement and cool aesthetics. Dystopian fiction has existed for almost as long as human beings have been imagining what the future might hold. But now the future art imagines is only a wasteland. (Even a franchise as complex yet hopeful as Star Trek began to dip into darker, more violent territory in this manner.) It’s a wasteland in which the worst aspects of human nature have won, rendering our species peripatetic and scattershot, resources scarce, and society in never ending free fall. Maybe that’s one reason why the limited series Station Eleven — that actually imagines a healthy way forward post-collapse due to a deadly virus in which art not only survives but is rendered as crucial — didn’t become a mammoth hit the way the manipulatively cruel world of Last of Us became? Why can’t pop culture imagine futures for humanity undergirded by hope, possibility, communal care against the grave forces of climate change and capitalism? Why can’t we imagine a better future for each other? Has capitalism limited our imagination and our freedom to the point that the future has dimmed significantly? 

When your present is grueling and savage in its absurdities, when the future is darkened, of course people turn to the past. But, the nature of nostalgia in the American imagination has become a barrier for progress. Yes, there’s of course a powerful contingent in this country defined by their toxic cruelty toward the marginalized that seek to return to a vision of 1950s Americana that never even truly existed. Watch the midcentury works of melodrama artisan Douglas Sirk with films like Written on the Wind and There’s Always Tomorrow and it becomes quickly apparent that even then people were casting doubt on the sanctity of the nuclear family and middle class white American values. But there’s a deeper pull to nostalgia that bristles throughout American culture. People are desperate to return to a past where they felt safer, where possibilities felt endless. This is why grown ass adults treat pop culture with the childish desire of wish fulfillment. Adults now interact with film and television in the manner of children. Film seems hopelessly beholden to the worst, erroneous vision of the 1980s, 1990s and aughts by constantly prolonging the life of IP that no longer has anything to offer us. The pop culture of my youth can never die when a buck can be made. 

Watching Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and The Flash within a few days of each other brought to the fore concerns that have been on my mind for a minute. Is the way nostalgia is relied upon in American culture a danger for hope and community action? Is it undermining the imagination that should fuel the art we consume? There have been a multitude of multiverse filmic works over the last few years. The labored Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which I reviewed for Vulture at the time of its release. The pointedly manipulative bore Spider-Man: No Way Home; which cemented for me how utterly milquetoast Tom Holland is as a “star”. And of course, the Oscar behemoth Everything Everywhere All At Once. A film I found kind-hearted at first but quickly soured into a mawkish, overly simplistic vision of the multiverse for me. The multiverse as currently imagined in American cinema is more intrigued by what was than what can be. These works make trauma neat and easily understood by isolated incidents. Everything can be quickly explained by a genesis event. Those halcyon days are perfect to the point of becoming a lie. But that doesn’t mean we should count out the narrative device of the multiverse entirely.

 Across the Spider-Verse is ecstatic in how it utilizes the multiverse. The color palette is bombastic and richly rendered. The human body is elastic in wondrous ways. I can understand the complaints about its abrupt ending, that it’s overcrowded with Easter eggs and nods to fans. But it is primarily rooted in the emotional lives of its characters. The Easter eggs are in service of an emotional story and aesthetic prowess that resonates. And by questioning the nature of fate as well as critiquing its own fans’ adherence to canon it has an edge to it, so it never devolves into a rote or saccharine affair. If Across the Spider-Verse offers an imaginative way forward for the superhero epic that isn’t so bound to nostalgia or the canon, The Flash demonstrates what happens when a multiverse tale is more concerned with brand management than storytelling. It is too indebted to the recent past of the DC Cinematic Universe — as in Zack Snyder’s grim affairs of Man of Steel and Justice League — to feel fresh or exciting. Looking at these two very different films limns the potentialities and pitfalls of nostalgia as a motivating cinematic force. Hope requires a belief in the future. But if films of this ilk point to anything it’s that our culture is choosing the false comfort of a past that has never existed instead of the complicated but more fruitful disposition of looking toward the future. We must never cocoon ourselves in the fleeting pleasure of drowning in our own idealized pasts. 

Going forward this essay will dip into discussing the entirety of these films. So if you haven’t seen them and don’t want certain narrative turns spoiled for you, come back to this essay later. I will say for those on the fence, definitely see Across the Spider-Verse in theaters while you can. It makes such wonderful use of animation as a medium and the vital space cinema has to offer. The Flash should only be witnessed if you’re masochistic enough to be curious. And it should only be half-watched while you’re cleaning your apartment or getting work done. It is a waste of your full attention. I am also not going to get bogged down in plot synopsis. Y’all have seen the trailers and have a general idea of what these films are about so I’m doing away with that critical prerequisite.

The opportunity the multiverse provides artists is the ability to let their imaginations grow wild. Anything that can happen takes root. Invention is necessary. Spider-Verse takes advantage of the space and curiosity such a narrative device engenders. Yes, the film is resplendent with cameos and nods to Spider-Man’s long, complex history. But that’s not what I honed in on. I’ve never been fully invested in the mythos of Spider-Man so Easter eggs aren’t going to be a primary delight for me. What I gravitated toward in the film is its aesthetic prowess. Each of the worlds Spider-Verse delves into has its own assured, dramatically unique style. The water color softness and beauty of Gwen Stacy’s world being amongst the most striking. But there’s also a Lego world and a dimension rendered in traditional mid-century comic book style. The costuming — which I’ve been following comic artist Kristafer Anka share details of building this aspect of Spider-Verse on Instagram — takes the iconic nature of the Spider-Man figure and expands it in bold directions. Sonically it has a delightful touch. But Spider-Verse is most aesthetically potent through its use of color and form. There’s an elasticity to the film — in how it renders the body, in how it suggests the flexibility to these comic book archetypes. It has been my firm belief that superheroes are at their best operating as outsized archetypes that push the boundaries of the human body and our very universe to their wondrous limits. These works delight us by making the impossible seem not only possible but authentic. 

The reason Spider-Verse hits like a gut punch is because its visual ingenuity is in service to its stellar, careful characterization. I felt deeply for not only Miles and Gwen but the entirety of this colorful cast of characters. (Shoutout to its anti-fascist, cool-as fuck, black-as-hell MVP Spider-Punk voiced by Daniel Kaluuya.) Across the Spider-Verse is also bolstered by cultural specificity. Miles’s Spanglish and the black/brown cultural nature of Brooklyn. The baby powder endorsement joke. (In a way, the film argues that Miles Morales as a young Afro-Latino doesn’t need the approval of the diehard fans who refuse to acknowledge anyone besides Peter Parker or the industry defined by whiteness that seeks to invalidate his place as Spider-Man.) But in The Flash nostalgia hobbles its opportunities for invention and deep feeling. The characters have no interiority. They primarily register, thanks to the acting and the slapdash writing, as gratingly obnoxious (in terms of the multiple versions of Barry) or checked out (Michael Shannon does not want to be here.) They are entirely beholden to the grinding machinations of execs who look to these worlds not for experimentation or artistic play but solely for profit and brand extension. As I argue in my New York Magazine review, “The latest DC movie is the cinematic equivalent of a snake eating its own tail. This isn’t a film so much as brand management in flailing motion.”

Deep into Spider-Verse, Miguel O’Hara (voiced with extravagant brooding by Oscar Isaac) known as Spider-Man 2099 tells Miles, “You have to respect the canon”. Miguel, in many ways, becomes the films most crucial antagonist even as he believes he’s a force for good amongst the plentiful versions of Spider-Man working to save the multiverse. The Flash does something similar in which the shadowy speedster who punches Barry out of the multiverse, after he changes the past and heads back to the present, is revealed in the final act to be another alternative version of Barry corrupted and disfigured by his time trying erroneously to fix what has been broken. His hope to fix the multiverse by undoing his pivotal tragedy of losing his mother to a murder his father was incorrectly convicted for has curdled into something dangerous. Spider-Verse questions the canon; The Flash is undone by its loyalty to the canon it imagines as being important. Miles acts as an argument against what Miguel believes. Why does he need to experience the loss of a parent — the film nods to his father becoming police captain only to be fated to die — to be a true hero, for the multiverse to be safe? We shouldn’t need to hew toward the same beats. One critique, I wish the film would challenge the canon in terms of how superhero narratives are deeply wedded to the police and believe in the police force’s importance. It teases this a bit but we’ll see how the narrative wraps up in the final film of the franchise in this regard. Here’s what I’ve learned as a fan of superhero comics for over twenty years: the canon is what you make of it. I believe in fans cultivating their own personal canon rather than parsing through what these companies deem as canon. The canon is always shifting. This ground isn’t stable. But the way Spider-Verse and The Flash imagine the comics canon they’re playing with is defined by the way these stories relate to the idea of fate. 

Spider-Verse — through the turns in Miles’s story ending with him facing an alternative self from the dimension the spider who bit him came from — asks its audience to question their ideas about fate. It punctures the belief that fate is unmoving. I’m not one that believes in fate, that there are certain dynamics in my past and future that cannot be avoided or denied. The Flash believes fate is immutable. Barry must suffer, the past can’t be changed for the better. The way The Flash concerns itself with fate makes Barry become passive to its machinations. The pleasure of Flashpoint — the 2011 DC Comics ground shaking crossover event that the film takes cues from — was in its willingness to play with our expectations for these characters and the world they inhabit. In the Flashpoint comic, it’s Bruce Wayne who dies in that fateful alley. His father becomes Batman whilst his mother loses her mind becoming the Joker. Aquaman is a tyrant seeking to bring the surface world to its knees, while Wonder Woman and her Amazons are dramatically violent figures seeking to oppose his might. Superman doesn’t exist within this world. Instead, Kal-El/Clark crashed as a baby on Earth to be found by government forces that kept him imprisoned. I have my issues with Flashpoint but where was such imagination in The Flash? In Flashpoint, changes are made and even when Barry thinks he’s set things right by the end he discovers the world has been irrevocably changed. (This ushered in the New52, the reboot of DC Comics that I still revile for what it did to the female characters like Wonder Woman becoming violent, her Amazons rapists, and Barbara Gordon regressing to Batgirl instead of remaining in her more intriguing incarnation as Oracle.) 

The Flash meanwhile is a dead end. While there are some brief cameos they mostly amount to bored nods to a very limited view of DC’s history. Damningly, my theater erupted with the most joy when Christopher Reeve is brought back from the dead to “play” Superman. It’s rather telling that nothing from the bulk of the film really resonated with audiences such as this beyond Michael Keaton’s Batman. He becomes the gravitational force of the film more than its titular lead. The Flash and his mythos may not be as enmeshed in our culture but he’s a fun, zippy, weird figure who can easily be built upon with the right filmmakers. The Flash betrays DC’s lack of faith and interest in its own characters. The film concerns a Superman villain in the form of Michael Shannon’s Zod. It is obsessed with Batman deeming him the Justice League’s tactician and leader. (Anyone interested in these characters and their history know that’s bullshit.) It hobbles its ability to show alternate versions of characters by deeming the universe Barry finds himself stuck in free of metahumans or any working superheroes. With the space such a story provides, wouldn't you be daring with the aesthetics and characterization instead of relying upon the clear mistakes of this franchise’s past? Wouldn’t you explore the various corners of your universe instead of rendering it as if the only characters that matter are Batman and Superman? Look at how they do Kara aka Supergirl (Sasha Calle) so dirty. Her ass is “destined” to be killed by Zod as she doesn’t have as grand of capabilities as her famous cousin. She’s merely cannon fodder, not a character the filmmakers were interested in building upon or exploring. 

To make matters worse, The Flash is an exceedingly ugly film. The VFX are slapdash and uncanny to the point that no one in the audience can deny how overworked VFX artists are to get this shit done in time. But what points to its bankruptcy of imagination is evident in how it treats the visual world of this universe Barry is navigating. The crucial battles are defined by their gray as gruel aesthetics indebted to Snyder’s world building when he was involved at DC. But what struck me was that despite utilizing Michael Keaton as an older Bruce Wayne, the production design of his world trades the bombastic gothic excess that Tim Burton crafted for a sterile, banal vision of Gotham. The film trots out Danny Elfman’s score inelegantly but forgets where the pleasure ultimately lies in the Burton films it is trading on for nostalgia purposes. That The Flash ends with a cheeky cameo of George Clooney as Bruce Wayne demonstrates how pointless its story truly is. The film itself is a joke Hollywood is playing on its audience, expecting that we’ll eat up anything they offer up no matter how toxic or bland. I honestly walked out of The Flash baffled. I was parsing through questions afterwards rather than being enmeshed in the awe that a good film should provide. Why didn’t the film give a shit about The Flash’s own mythos and villains instead of swaggerjacking Superman and Batman? Why make the film hinge upon the murder of Barry’s mother if it would never solve that mystery? We never learn who killed his mother or why despite it being the driving force of the plot. Why hire Michael Keaton if you’re not going to envelope us in the grand, aesthetic wonder that character once traipsed through? Why cut the Batgirl film for tax purposes but remain loyal to The Flash and its legally problematic star, Ezra Miller, when the film itself has no future and does nothing to establish hope in its audience that Warner Bros. has learned a damn thing? 

I worry even with the exuberant experimentation and heartfelt characterization of Spider-Verse that execs and artists may take the wrong lessons from the film. Spider-Verse isn’t artistically successful primarily because it's full of loving nods to fans about the character's history. It is a strong work of art that cares about the interior lives of those that inhabit its worlds and builds an aesthetic terrain that is indebted to the comics but not only defined by their aesthetic grammar. It says, fuck the canon. It asks us to question are adherence to the roads untraveled, the possibilities of what could be and face what is. The Flash represents the dead end that multiverse stories have become in the American imagination. If we culturally divest ourselves from hope and imagining a better future, then what the fuck is the point of living? As it stands, Hollywood isn’t learning from the past, it’s entombing audiences and American culture in nostalgia.