The Best Movies of 2023: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse‘s Superheroic Parenting

Stage magicians have abracadabra; dads have “don’t tell Mom.” The former gets you a rabbit from a hat, a cheap bouquet from a tailcoat’s sleeve, the ace of hearts you picked from a deck of cards. The latter gets you anything: a brownie (or two) before dinner, an extra episode (or three) of Bluey, or permission to help hold the drill while installing new bookshelves on the living room wall. Don’t tell Mom: We’re watching The General for the first time. Don’t tell Mom: We’re making bubble bombs with vinegar and baking soda. Don’t tell Mom: We’re dimension-hopping to Earth-42 to save a fellow Spider-Man from certain doom. Peter B. Parker drops the last of these in the final moments of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson’s sequel to the groundbreaking Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
Having spent almost all of his scenes in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse with his toddler daughter Mayday strapped to his chest (excepting the moments where she’s slinging her very own webs), Peter is tired. Spiderhood confers all sorts of nifty powers upon those bitten – super strength, speed, agility, and durability, and spider-sense, a dual-purpose gift for crimefighters and parents alike – but fatherhood confers the greatest power of all: an uncanny knack for falling asleep at any time while doing anything.
Wrapped in a pink bathrobe, with his trusty paperback copy of How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk propped up on his chest, Peter snoozes. By contrast, Mayday, like all one-year-olds, will wake up unpredictably from deep slumber with even the slightest stimulus. Peter rouses from sleep to Mayday hanging upside-down from the ceiling by a web, pointing at the quantum physics event occurring outside her bedroom window; he plucks the tyke from her thread, looks outside, and sees Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), determined and desperate, staring back at him. They exchange no words, because none are needed: Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is in trouble, and needs their help. So Peter answers the hero’s call the only way he can as a Spider-Dad-Man: “Don’t tell Mom.”
It’s a moment so brief as to appear a cutesy throwaway. He whispers the line to Mayday, who looks up at him with stunned childish awe; Dad isn’t just inviting her to get in good, wholesome trouble with him, and she knows it. He’s inviting her to answer the same call Gwen wordlessly makes to him from the Parker family’s roof deck. This isn’t workaday paternal cheekiness. This is serious. So Mayday takes it seriously: She pulls her knitted Spider-beanie over her smiling face, her version of suiting up to save the day. Like dada, like daughter.
Your friendly neighborhood Department of Children and Families, not to mention fussy moralists and scolds in the audience, may take exception to a superhero participating in “bring your child to work day.” Crime never sleeps. Kiddos need to. Crime is typically dangerous, contextualized in the mores of the superhero comic book. Bringing a little kid to a supervillain throwdown seems like the definition of bad parenting. In fact, Mary Jane Parker (Melissa Sturm), Peter’s patient, understanding, no-nonsense main squeeze, brings up that very point herself, minutes before Gwen arrives. “Did you bring our baby to another fight?” she asks, voice pitched in a rhetorical key; she knows the answer, but she tosses the question out there anyway.