You Mean the World to Me

[Spoilers ahead for The Last of Us, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and The Flash]

In 2004’s Spider-Man 2, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) gives up being Spider-Man. It’s too hard to have a life of his own, and while he has a “great responsibility” due to his superpowers, if he didn’t have them anymore, he’d be grateful because it would mean he could be with Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) and live a normal life. But when he visits with his Aunt May (Rosemary Harris), she tells him that heroism asks for something more:

Peter comes to realize that part of his “great responsibility” means sacrifice, and that he has to sacrifice the safety and security of an ordinary life to protect others. Even the film’s conclusion, where he and Mary Jane get together, is tinged with sadness as their reunion is short-lived with sirens calling Spider-Man to action, and Mary Jane looking out the window, contemplating her own sacrifice as she’s fallen for a man whose life will constantly be in jeopardy.

I mention all this because Spider-Man 2 largely sets the superhero template of what’s demanded of these characters: sacrifice. There is no easy heroism, but we’re lulled into its safety with non-existent stakes. These characters can’t really die, so when they “risk” their lives, it’s more the thought that counts. In the story, the character believes he or she is going to die, and that’s good enough because they’re willing to give their life to save the world.

Where stories get more interesting isn’t if the hero has to give up his or her life; where they get interesting is if they’re willing to give up their love. Even Spider-Man 2 acknowledges the uneasy truce Peter and Mary Jane strike in letting him continue as Spider-Man. What’s fascinating is seeing newer stories try to confront the concept of sacrificing love if it meant saving the world.

In 2023, we’ve seen some major stories toy around with the concept of what love means, and how it ties into notions of heroism. At the start of the year, we saw The Last of Us, which reached the same conclusion as its source material: Joel (Pedro Pascal) would lie to Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and let the world continue on as a zombie-ravaged wasteland if it meant keeping her alive. The noble, “heroic” sacrifice would be to let the doctors kill Ellie (which, it should be noted, is what Ellie would have wanted so that she felt her sacrifice could mean something) in hopes of finding a cure to the zombie plague, but Joel couldn’t face losing his surrogate daughter, especially when he had lost his biological daughter twenty years earlier. It’s a conclusion that’s complex, fraught, and most importantly, honest to the characters and their world.

A couple weeks ago, we saw a similar story in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. In the film, hero Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is told by fellow Spider-Man Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac) that Spider-People need to have important deaths in their stories, and that one is coming for Miles with the death of his father Jefferson (Brian Tyree Henry). The consequence of refusing this outcome, Miguel says, is that the world will start collapsing. Everyone and everything needs to be in its proper place or else the world dies. Miles refuses to believe this, and goes off to save his father. While it’s not as dark a choice as Joel’s (and The Last of Us is a billion times darker than something like Across the Spider-Verse; we also don’t know how Miles’ story will resolve itself since the concluding chapter, Beyond the Spider-Verse, doesn’t come out until 2024, but I’d be shocked if it ever got a fraction as dark as The Last of Us), it still rings true that Miles wouldn’t let his father die simply because it may end the world. He’d make the choice (save his father) and figure out how to save the world after.

Which brings us to The Flash. In The Flash, Barry Allen (Ezra Miller), goes to an alternate universe where his mother wasn’t murdered and his father wasn’t falsely convicted of that murder.1 The complication is that there’s already a Barry Allen in this universe, and then the film becomes a buddy comedy where Barry needs to get back to his own universe and has to recruit Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) before needing to recruit Supergirl (Sasha Calle) to stop General Zod (Michael Shannon) from destroying the Earth, which would, again, kill Barry’s mom.2

The resolution for Barry’s arc in this movie is that he can’t change fate. After using a belabored analogy involving spaghetti, the film asserts that there are fixed events that cannot be undone. Barry eventually learns that to undo the damage he’s done (a moment that involves all multiverses colliding and CGI’d actors doing cameos whether those actors are still alive or not), he has to let his mom die. The whole fabric of space and time rests of letting Momma Allen get murdered in her own home.

I cringe at this conclusion for several reasons. For starters, it simply doesn’t feel like Barry’s Mom gets to be a real person in this scenario. She’s an object with no definition beyond “mother who loved her son,” and while that left Barry traumatized, the film never pauses to consider what that trauma means beyond feeling like he can’t save his dad. These are an interesting starting place for a character, but they seem detached from Barry’s goofball personality. The film wants to assert that scars make us who we are, but never really pays that off for Barry other than the alternate Barry being cavalier with his superpowers.

But the larger problem is the need to assert the status quo in such a clumsy, hamfisted way. It is “Better Things Aren’t Possible: The Movie.” That can make for a fine tragedy, but as a heroic outcome, the sacrifice doesn’t mean much more than Barry should accept his fate. That’s not inherently a bad story, but the it plays cynically in The Flash. It’s a movie meant to literally change the DC universe (altering the past) so that future movies aren’t tied to flops like Justice League. However, for the title character, he has to accept his circumstances…except not really because Barry’s Dad is miraculously cleared of all charges when Bruce Wayne’s super video technology can now show Poppa Allen’s face on the store security. So it’s sacrifice, but not really because Barry still got one of the things he wanted.

The Flash may be the newest of these three stories to arrive in 2023, but it also now feels like a relic that doesn’t want to engage with what it means to take control of your own story. There’s a punishing, “It must always be thus,” at the center of its narrative, and because the film’s storytelling is so slipshod to begin with, it never reckons or reconsiders what this underlying theme means other than some vague notion of sacrifice divorced from human emotion.

Do Joel and Miles make the “right” choice? That’s irrelevant.3 Those characters make the right choices for them, and we believe that choice because their stories have done the necessary legwork to make us believe the character’s decision. For those characters, their specific love matters more than the world at large. The Flash, by comparison, simply reasserts the status quo because it’s not about compelling characters but fan-service needs. It exists to solve franchise problems, reference other superhero things, and make you chuckle. And that’s fine for what it is, but I wouldn’t qualify any of those things as heroic.