Cahiers de Narratologie (Jun 2023)
« Into the Spider-Verse » : la méta-sérialité comme moteur narratif
Abstract
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman, 2018), a huge critical and box-office success, stands apart from other superhero movies by integrating the serial processes of repetition and variation at the heart of its diegesis: we witness how a film and a character, Miles Morales as the new Spider-Man, establish their originality by exhibiting their own serialization. The audacious meeting of multiple avatars of “Spider-people” around the young Miles through a dimensional portal is indeed an explicit thematization of the implications related to seriality, whose modes and effects this article aims to explore. The film constantly addresses its place within a phenomenally extensible “Marvel Universe” by employing both an aesthetic and a generic diversity in the service of a story centered on the theme of a dynamic transmission. Based on this case study, this paper aims to provide some insight on the narrative strategies at work in the major franchised universes. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse embodies the will to transmit to a younger generation of viewers the history of the character and of its mediums of expression, as well as that of the entire franchise, by integrating a stratified serial heritage in its storytelling, while faced however with the paradoxical constraints of the kind of “multiverse” screenplay it wishes to reinterpret.
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