The highly anticipated Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse premiered in theaters earlier this month to the delight of web-slinging superhero fans everywhere.
While many may marvel at the film’s 2 hour-20 minute artistic and animated dazzle, it’s also worth considering what the film’s creators, including producers Phil Lord, Chris Miller and directors Kemp Powers, Joaquim Dos Santos, and Justin K. Thompson, communicate about 21st-century parenting and family life. Unfortunately, the film teaches some unhelpful lessons regarding honesty and respect.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse earned an impressive $120 million in domestic sales and the No. 1 spot at the box office during its opening weekend attesting to its wide appeal among American moviegoers. The film is a sequel to the 2018 film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. According to Rotten Tomatoes, the 2023 animated sequel scored a 96% with audiences as well as on the Tomatometer. The sequel’s stellar sales and reviews indicate strong audience engagement.
Miles Morales, Brooklyn’s friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, joins Spider-Woman Gwen Stacy and a multitude of new Spider-individuals in an odyssey across the Multi-Verse where they must confront a quasi-immortal and malevolently quirky supervillain.
For their part, families will confront a different adversary: unhelpful lessons for children and teens when it comes to telling the truth and honoring their parents.
Honesty
The film often sends confusing and potentially harmful messages about honesty and its role in the relationship between parents and teenagers. To be sure, fictional adult superheroes such as Superman and Wonder Woman must conceal their identities in valorous ways to protect loved ones from harm. But the creators of Across the Spider-Verse take the notion of deception too far for an immature teen superhero like Miles Morales. Notably, both Peter Parker, the original Spider-Man’s alter-ego, and Miles Morales, are or were originally mere 15-17 year-olds.
When Miles shows up embarrassingly late to an appointment with his guidance counselor and parents, he admits skipping class five times (a deception in itself). The counselor corrects him with a terse “actually six.” After Miles scurries out of the room and the conversation concludes, the counselor demonstrates her intuitive expertise with children and tells Miles’ parents in a matter-of-fact way, “He’s lying to you. And I think you know it.”
While Miles and Gwen, the teenage Spidey-people, do pursue the admirable end of serving some notion of the greater good, the deceptive means they must repeatedly employ to do so – lying to their parents, school officials, and members of their community – set a poor example for young viewers. Admittedly, Miles and Gwen choose to act dishonestly in pursuit of saving their parents, their world, and maybe even the Multi-Verse. But most of the kids sitting in theaters eating popcorn while viewing this film face more mundane dilemmas in their lives when it comes to deciding whether to tell the truth – perhaps related to a “C” on a report card for instance. It is safe to assume kids seeing this movie will be left with the damaging impression that lying to parents and authority figures is common, acceptable, and even cool.
Thankfully, both Miles and Gwen eventually reveal some truth to their parents about their identities, but at the cost of broken trust, eroded relationships, and tainted memories. Those consequences, if sufficiently highlighted and linked to the deception, could have served as a valuable moral lesson. But the characters leave many lies and deceptions unresolved and unforgiven such as those Miles tells his parents about his classes or his whereabouts during a party to honor his father.
The creators also suggest their approval of deception when they cloak it in humor. Peter Parker, as a father, encourages his toddler daughter to join him in keeping secrets from her mother, whispering the sneaky mantra that rarely pays “Don’t tell Mom.” Hollywood often intends to inspire a laugh as in this case - but unless it’s about a birthday gift, most mothers I know usually don’t appreciate what constitutes a family fraud.
For early American superheroes, telling the truth mattered. Consider Superman’s original motto: “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” He prided himself on never lying. Wonder Woman’s “truth lasso” served as a lie detector compelling those she restrained to tell the truth.
The directors of Spider-Man: Across the Spider Verse don’t appear to place the same premium on truth telling.
Instead, they make lying a norm in the Spider-Verse.
In an era when so many children spend hours each day immersed and unaccompanied in the virtual world and struggling to navigate its plethora of threats and harms, a film that (perhaps inadvertently) encourages kids to deceive their parents is the last thing families need.
The United States Surgeon General recently warned about social media in the lives of children and provided suggestions on how to prevent harm by engaging in “open family discussion” and “conversations with children about who they are connecting with, their privacy settings, their online experiences, and how they are spending their time online.” Kids who have seen this movie may be less inclined to have these necessary conversations with their parents.
Responsible filmmakers who have the best interests of kids in mind will infuse their creations with messages that encourage honesty and open lines of communication between parents and children. Across the Spider-Verse simply sends the wrong message for young viewers on this point and leaves them thinking it’s admirable to keep secrets from the people who love them most and know them best - their parents and guardians.
Respect
The movie also suggests it’s okay for children to disrespect their parents and other authority figures such as school officials.
The film’s trailer – that first impression of a film carefully curated to convince audiences to trek to theaters and open their wallets – begins with Miles answering his mother’s question about his whereabouts with an irreverent “Whatever.”
The creators deliberately chose to use a scene of teenage sass and back-talk to a mother as a way to draw moviegoers and peddle their film with affirmation of being unacceptably rude.
In addition, Captain Stacy, the father of the troubled Gwen (Spider-Woman), allows his daughter to treat him more like a friend than a parent. In numerous interactions, Gwen treats her father with a complete lack of respect. In addition, after meeting Miles’ parents, Gwen leaves abruptly without a courteous goodbye.
The fictional parents, in this film, do not receive (or demand) the baseline respect they deserve from their teens. It takes a mature and aware young person (or deliberate post-movie damage control from parents) not to internalize some of the corrosive attitudes exemplified by these lead characters. The filmmakers have created models many young viewers will either consciously or subconsciously admire and mimic.
This story about growing up and letting go could have taken an entirely different direction. Growing up and letting go – even for fictional superheroes - does not need to involve dishonesty and disrespect.
Today’s parents could certainly use some support from Hollywood.
Despite the film’s technical extravaganza of spectacular animation and visuals, the film teaches the wrong lessons when it comes to modeling how kids and teens should relate to their parents.
“With great power comes great responsibility” says Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben. He’s right. Unfortunately, the makers of this movie ignored that admonition.
Until the next post,
Antonette