Into the Spider-Verse

I finally watched Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse for the first time last night, cementing my place as the last person on earth in my age bracket to see it. In many pleasant respects, 2018 feels far away now and I had a hard time believing it had been released that long ago but there the date was, nestled right above the 97% Rotten Tomatoes score. I spent some time afterwards reflecting on the movie and the 4 years it took for many thousands of people to create it, plus the 5 years of recommendations and dude-how-have-you-not-seen-its that poked up through the surface of my post-Spiderman serenity like a rice paddy. The movie is a stunning achievement in every possible way, and one of the rare entertainment moments whose creation you cannot quickly explain.

It also tied nicely into something I’ve been chewing on all week as I’ve started reading The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (many thanks to my lifelong homies Sean and Katie for mailing me a copy of it). Mainly, that creativity is a fluid and infinitely unfolding force that we each participate in both through existing and through choice. Let’s say that 5,000 people worked on this movie, and each of them on average had poured 10,000 hours into their craft (that’s very likely on the low side for some of them) just to be picked to work on this. That’s 50,000,000 hours collectively of preparation for something they likely never knew they’d be a part of.

To put that into a strange perspective, the earth is 24,901.461-ish miles around at the equator and walking at 3mph for 24 hours a day you’d complete a lap of it in a little over 345 days (I think. I hope that math is even remotely right). That means this group spent enough time preparing to be a part of this project to walk around the earth 6,024 times. Which felt like a meaningful statistic to me while I was considering the impact that something like this project has. Millions of people all over the globe have left the theater or closing credits on their TV or phone stunned after seeing this thing, and I would venture to guess they also left shifted in some way in terms of their awareness of what it’s possible to make. Many modern films, minus the complex context of the tools used to make them, would melt the brains of someone who discovered them in an archeological dig or exploratory inland quest in much the same way that the pyramids in various places around the globe have for many, many generations. And “how did they do that?” is perhaps the most compelling gong bonk possible for pulling each of us deeper into our own relationship with our creativity and context. Which left me both humbled and grateful as I was falling asleep last night that so many people gave so much of themselves to make something like this.

I think we inherently know, but often don’t want to admit, that art isn’t really about us so much as it’s about bringing something else into existence. It’d be understandable for a radio set in the 60’s or 70’s to start to think over a period of a few years that it’s the Beatles, but the fact remains that it’s channeling in something else from a fundamentally different place. And while I don’t know if a different group of 5,000 people could have made the same film (my guess is no), I do feel strongly that the Oscars back in 2018 should have been held in a football stadium so that everyone involved in this project could have gone onstage. Because it’s easy to look up the directors online and begin to believe that the point of your life is to be one of them holding up a statue and thanking a faceless mass of people behind the scenes for everything they did, but the truth of it is that the only real arrival available to any of us is making an agreement to join the ongoing and seemingly infinite crowd of everyone giving their lives to their own creative and often unrecognized (at scale) acts. Which might mean that the fundamental irony of the modern age is our inability to decide whether we’re meant to be in front of the camera or behind it, and if that’s the case then the only way out seems to be to give up trying to decide. The great drama we’re enabled to feel is swirling around our decisions and seasons lifts in the face of deep gratitude for the projects and people we’ve been given the chance to spend time with, and I think that if there is a point to anything we do while we’re alive it has to be much closer to that. An active participation in the places and relationships in which we find ourselves, and the ongoing admission that much of what other people might find interesting about us is coming from somewhere else.