"Madame Web" and our new bullshit translator (OBSESSED #15)
In the era of movies made by committee, the people need a hero. Her name? Dakota Johnson.
There’s a moment in Madame Web that pretty aptly encapsulates the movie’s goofy surrealism and soullessness. We’re in — where else? — New York City, at a shipping warehouse, where there’s just been a terrible accident. Lots of people are hurt. If only there were a hero…
Dakota Johnson, who we’re supposed to believe is a paramedic from Queens, gives chest compressions to a man on the pavement. Adam Scott, who’s also supposed to be a paramedic from Queens but looks and sounds like Adam Scott, helps wheel a man on a stretcher past Dakota.
“He’s got a herniated tummy, two bruises, a ruptured foot…,” Adam rattles off. (I didn’t write down any of the medical words.)
Dakota has a vision. A premonition. Something shifts in her. Then, suddenly, déjà vu. Adam’s wheeling the stretcher in front of her again, calling out the same ailments from before. Only this time, Dakota senses something she didn’t before...
“Hey,” Dakota says cooly. “Check his abdomen.”
Adam presses down on the man’s abdomen.
“Andddd… internal injuries,” Adam says, with the same cadence he’d use to announce he found another fortune cookie at the bottom of the bag. “Nice, Cassie!”
Madame Web is a quiet, strange kind of awful. It’s not bad in a loud way, like The Room, or Troll 2, or my personal favorite, The Wicker Man. It doesn’t take massive swings that fail to pay off so spectacularly that the whole thing feels like a big, stupid comedy. Madame Web isn’t that kind of movie, because those kinds of movies are made with heart. For Madame Web, it’s the one time saying something feels “like it was written by a computer” feels bone-deep accurate, because Madame Web was … kinda made by a computer? (To me, like a group of birds is a “flock,” a group of studio execs is a “computer.”)
Now, a teeny tiny disclaimer: I have only seen the first hour of this film (lol)1. But ask yourself: has any of this struck you as uninformed? No, it has not, bitch! In that lone, dark hour, I saw plenty. I saw Sydney Sweeney emerge in a giant strawberry blonde wig and Barb’s “Stranger Things” glasses. I saw a woman at Emma Roberts’ baby shower say, with no trace of irony, “Next game! Let’s kick off the Guess The Name of Mary’s Baby. I’ll guess … Sam?” And then a bunch of women just … guessed wrong names?2 I saw Dakota Johnson begin to realize the full extent of her powers: seeing roughly seven seconds into the future. I saw an $80 million movie anchored by the no-holds-barred story engine of a woman who can see seven seconds into the future.
From Peter Debruge in Variety: Her powers prove pretty boring once the pattern establishes itself. The premonitions are freaky, like “Final Destination” flashes, but Cassie’s “let’s try that again” do-overs render each situation less interesting.
Unlike Room and others of its ilk, Madame Web is not a movie destined for watch parties and midnight theater showings. It’s too boring for that. Instead, Madame Web will go down in history as a surreal relic of our current moviemaking era, in which studio executives, blinded by all the new ways to predict consumer behavior, are solely fixated on making movies that command as wide and profitable an appeal as possible. And that ethos is bound to yield some bizarre, bloated movies guaranteed to collapse in on themselves, like Madame Web, or The Emoji Movie, or Hanes Her Way: The Panty Movie, which may not exist yet, but we’ll see if that’s true in five years.
To watch Madame Web is to engage in schadenfreude, because you can’t help but guffaw at how epically these dumbass studio executives beefed the assignment. And honestly? Seeing how little studio executives think of their audiences? Cathartic and refreshing to have it all out in the open. “Holy shit — this is what studios think we want! Thank you for saying the quiet part out loud!”
(The quiet part: “We don’t respect you.”)
Despite all of this, it’s worth seeing Madame Web to watch Dakota Johnson, the most disaffected person on the planet, lead a Marvel movie. Dakota is the daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, making her a nepo baby of the tallest order. She carries with her an air of nonchalant entitlement, but not in a bad way! It’s more like she’s just landed on Earth after being raised on the ethereal, dreamlike planet of the Super Rich, and frankly found the whole thing ridiculous.
From Alex Abad-Santos in Vox: Johnson’s unrelenting dryness is her hallmark, like when she famously claimed to love limes. “I love them so much. They’re great, and I love them so much, and I like to present them like this in my house,” she said, pointing to a pyramid of limes during her house tour with Architectural Digest. There was an uncanniness to her delivery; something was endearingly off. Later, on The Tonight Show, she revealed that she was actually allergic to limes, and they were planted by a set designer. “It was hard to just ignore them, so I just lied,” she said, of the citric flourish. Later, she doubled down, saying “I don’t really care about limes.”
With her at the helm, Madame Web starts to feel like a metacommentary on the clichés that make Marvel movies a genre of their own. All the signature moves in a typical Marvel flick (or, at least the ones I saw during my hour of viewing) land on a bored, disaffected proxy in Dakota.
“Guess he didn’t die after all,” she says breezily, after opening her window to save a bird that flew into it a few seconds earlier. She delivers the line like a consummate professional — one who’s gonna do the best by the material their given, but won’t wear themselves out putting lipstick on a turd. And in a movie trying to disguise itself as bigger and better than the sum of its parts, Dakota feels like a sage translator, coolly telling audiences, “Yeah, I think this is bullshit, too.”
To close, here are three lines of dialogue from Madame Web that I wrote down:
“Hey, Scrooge. I hate to break it to you, but you can’t change anything.” -Dakota Johnson, stressing about her visions, to her TV playing Scrooge.
“She’s trying to keep me from working, but I’m not gonna let her do that. Not when I’m this close.” -Dakota Johnson’s mother, a spider scientist, scouting for spiders in the Peruvian rainforest while eight months pregnant.
“Hope the spiders were worth it.” -Dakota Johnson, to a photo of her now-dead mother.
Here’s what happened: I’d just seen a 4 o’clock show (Rima Parikh’s excellent one-person show, “Death Threat: A Cancer Story”), eaten nearby, and had a couple hours to kill before a 9:30 p.m. show at the same theater (Chandler Dean’s excellent monthly-ish show, Abolish Everything). There was a movie theater nearby, but no movies ended before 10 p.m. A question materialized: might there be a film worth watching for an hour, on the big screen, that I wouldn’t struggle to peel myself away from when it came time to leave? A story I may never know the ending to? A story that didn’t matter? You know the rest.
Literally. One woman says, “... Steve?” and a grinning Emma Roberts shakes her head. Another says, “Richard, Jr.?” and Emma, again, shakes her head. What the hell is this game?
“Roughly seven seconds into the future”😂😂😂😂🙌🙌🙌🙌
Yes! The computer generated a long-ass Pepsi commercial as a juxtaposition to Fansville.