What makes an interesting story?

What makes a story so good in your mind, heart, and soul that even after one viewing, listen, or read, your mind can’t help but wander back?

I decided to watch Spider- Man: Into the Spider-verse and I just can’t stop thinking about it. It feels like a living thing in my psyche, another small dragon hoarding mental bandwidth with some of my other treasured stories. There is a quality in it that speaks a level of truth that struggles to explain coherently. In fact, all my favorite stories do this.

Want my thoughts about Mother Nature and Humans? Twister

What it means to find yourself and others amid a world of violence and propaganda? Howl’s moving Castle

What is growing up? Spirited Away

Who is family and where does trauma fit in? Guardians of the Galaxy 2

What does it mean to step up to the plate or responsibility while being true to yourself and to who you love? Into the Spider-verse

In stories we find the pieces of ourselves that are hard to lay out in words. Sometimes the words are sharp and shred the throat. Others it’s because the voice is too weak to speak a loud truth, or… because it is easier to find comradery when people can answer one of the above questions with the same story as you. The finer details may be abstracted from one another, but the deeper feeling is the same. We are mirrored in one another.

When I watch Into the Spider-verse I first see the dedication to the craft, an animated movie so full of life that it feels more real than the hyper real CGI Lion King. Each room, each city-scape, alley, and neighborhood street feel’s alive. This is all to put Miles into a world he cares about, and only seems to heighten the realness of his problems. That he struggles with his identity, and what it means to fill a promise so massive and overpowering it is suffocating.

I may not be a superhero, but I know the feeling of being in over my head. Of feeling like I don’t have all of the tools when I need them. Of feeling alone in my own suffering. When I see Miles, it makes me feel less alone in that weight.

When I think about how frustrating my situation is, I remember how he always got back up, and not just in the stubborn “I don’t know when to stay down way,” but by finding strength in trying it one more time, but a little different this time around. And while I may have moments of self-doubt, of feeling like the world is too much, and that I can never stand again… Miles got up. I can too.

That’s just one of the many things about this movie that stares me through the looking glass of my eyes, into my soul and says… “I see you.” In the world where spider-man saves the day, there is hope, not just at the individual level, but the societal. Everything may not be perfect now, but in this story of the real world, we’re nowhere near the credit’s scene. We just have to keep standing up. To keep facing the things, internal and external that threaten to pull us down.

And isn’t there something defiant about finding hope and meaning in the darkest of places?