Like the summer of 2003, this year’s blockbuster movies ask their protagonists and audiences if they have free will, or if events are predestined to happen.
Reading Jonathan Nicastro’s thoughts on Across the Spider Verse, I was reminded of 20 years ago, when two other summer blockbuster sequels tackled the question of predestination and asked their heroes and audiences, “do we control our fates, or is every event that happens to us part of an inescapable destiny?”
It’s easy to see why Hollywood screenwriters keep choosing to explore this question, often pitting a free-will protagonist against a fatalist predestination-minded antagonist. Most, but not all of us, prefer to believe that we make our own choices, and that our actions have consequences; different actions have different consequences, giving us a limited but real ability to at least influence, if not completely control, future events.
This sort of conflict gives the antagonist a very clear motivation — “this is the prophecy, this is the way things are meant to be,” etc. — and the protagonist a very clear reason to resist.
And as I noted back in 2003, the free-will vs. predetermination philosophical debate in the summer blockbusters echoed the then-very-active War on Terror. Al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden had argued that because his plot to crash planes into the Twin Towers wasn’t expected to bring the towers crashing to the ground, the towers’ collapse was evidence that Allah was on his side. OBL contended that Allah approved of the 9/11 attacks, that it was his will, and thus it was unavoidable and inevitable. In this vision, all of us are merely actors, reading from a script that is already written, and our fates are predetermined by our creator. Thus, anything we do was already meant to happen, and even an act as abominable as the 9/11 attacks could be justified as the will of the divine.
(Mild spoilers for Across the Spider-Verse ahead.)
What makes the Spider-Verse argument a little more intriguing is that one of the key antagonists, Miguel O’Hara, is arguing something that objectively is true, that death is inevitable, and not every death can be prevented. O’Hara isn’t rooting for people to die, nor does he take any pleasure in it, but he insists that certain people’s deaths are “canon events” — an awfully self-aware meta-commentary — and are meant to happen; interrupting or preventing those deaths eventually leads to an apocalyptic outcome that destroys everyone and everything.
And if you step back, almost every major superhero’s story begins with some sort of terrible tragedy. Superman’s home planet of Krypton is destroyed, young Bruce Wayne witnesses his parents’ murder, and promising scientist Bruce Banner becomes a hostage to his rage after the gamma ray accident. It would be easy to conclude that most heroes’ desire to save other people stems from their determination to prevent others from experiencing their grief and loss. Can Peter Parker become a responsible hero if he doesn’t blame himself for not stopping the death of Uncle Ben?
(It appears that D.C.’s big summer blockbuster, The Flash, will explore a similar question of grief, guilt, and destiny, as the trailers suggest the Flash travels back in time and prevents his mother’s murder, but inadvertently sets in motion dire consequences for the entire world.)
Our hardships, setbacks, tragedies and loss are part of what make us who we are. And yet, many of us would still give up just about anything to have averted those outcomes. Perhaps that’s what makes the choices of these protagonists so relatable and understandable, no matter how many times the wise mentor characters warn them about the dangers of meddling with past events or trying to rewrite history. How many of us would accept a risk of a disastrous outcome if it could bring back a loved one who passed far too soon?
But if Miguel O’Hara is right, that certain people need to die before their time in order to have beneficial effects on the people around them, then our hero Miles Morales needs to fail — and while Sony’s animated Spider-Man movies are inventive and unpredictable, it’s very hard to envision the title character failing in something as high-stakes as preventing his father’s death. People go to the movies to watch their favorite heroes triumph against all odds, not acquiesce to the inevitability of some tragedies.
So it is likely that Spider-Man will find some way to have his cake and eat it too — a recurring gag in the movie — and save both the individual and the whole world before the credits run. It will be a little bit of a cop-out, as real-world heroes like police, firefighters, EMS, and others can’t always save everyone, and a big part of their jobs is coping with the knowledge that is impossible to save every citizen who stumbles into a life-threatening situation. Then again, the movie The Amazing Spider-Man 2 explored that and most audiences didn’t like the downbeat ending.