Watching a Film with Women without Losing My Manhood

Going to take a short break and write another post today. I just finished watching Madame Web. I'd like to talk about it.

Went into it with the attitude, "Well, let's see how bad it really is." Because I had every reason to expect it to be. The internet buzz was vicious, incendiary and unrelenting on this film: it was bad, bad, bad. Some of my sites that I subscribe to deconstructed this film and found it loathsome, irrational, you name it. I was told it was another Marvel misfire, that Dakota Johnson gave an "awkward performance," that it was a "2000s throwback" and a lot of other things that essentially had buried this film for me.

But... was coming off Death By Lightning, which I watched yesterday, and had no more gas to do anything else tonight. Blog post written, other content designed... feeling up for something and found nothing to watch. So, like I said, "Oh what the hell, let's see how bad it is. Bet I don't last ten minutes."

I have to start by saying that cultural commentary just now is on autopilot. People see a cape, a studio logo, a few stills... and the next thing you know they're creating a bunch of "stickers" with words on them, ready made to slap on the product sight unseen. I've been told that Dakota Johnson had an "odd, detached delivery." Nonsense. She spoke like Dakota Johnson. Now it's fine if you don't like her, I don't really care, but anything about the way she delivered lines is just made up. That "2000s vibe." I've seen all those 2000s superhero movies. This isn't like any of them. It's not X-men or Sam Raimi or Constantine, all of which I've seen this compared with. The atmosphere? It doesn't have an "atmosphere," unless for some reason "filmmaking" is now somehow not what it has always been. 

I've seen arguments that if a thing doesn't "fit" with everything else, then it must be a new "species" of film. Like films must have a genealogy, they can't be defined as a moving process of narrative, character discovery, exposition, introspection and resolution. No, films "gestate." They're not deliberately fashioned by hard working individuals who have a vision. They come out of the womb instantly and fully made, and if they don't fit preconceptions, then it's the film that's wrong. 

What a pile of steaming horseshit the critical part of this culture has become.

I'll go into why I think the internet dumping ground didn't like this film. There are some unfortunate special effects choices that happen in the first few minutes. It accepts an invented cultural structure that seems like it's going to strongly influence the plot of the film... except it doesn't, at any point, actually do so. The structure exists to give exposition. But if a person watched the beginning of the film, and did not go on watching... then they would almost certainly extrapolate the wrong expectation from the film's first ten minutes. I think this alone accounts for a least a third of those who "didn't like it." They never saw the film at all.

A shaky CGI spider, an unfamiliar mythos, and they assumed they knew the whole thing.

It takes too long to get started. Most superhero powers of this genre function like a vending machine. Punch button, get powers, kick ass. This doesn't do that. More than half-way through the picture, the character still cannot "just turn her powers on." I think that drove quite a lot of people absolutely fucking nuts. The character is confused; she acts confused; she has every reason to BE confused. Anyone in the same situation would be. And when you're confused, you speak in a "detached, stumbling, slightly fearful manner." This is where the detached shit comes from. All you have to do is ignore the plot and assume it's the actress, and there you are. How do you arrive at that conclusion? You watch the entire film skipping 10 seconds/30 seconds at a time and assume you know everything that's going on. You don't know, but you write and present a youtube video anyway.

This is also where you get the "2000s vibe" shit... because in the same way, Raimi's Peter Parker needed time to "figure it out." Rachel Weiss in Constantine needed time to "figure it out." Wolverine was struggling with "figuring it out." That's not a fucking "2000s vibe." That's how films have been made since Buster Keaton's The General. Characters get information, figure it out, and we figure it out with them. But the vending machine of DC/Marvel cut-scenes have ruined filmmaking and characterisation. That's NOT the fault of a film that decides to pursue it.

Now, let's get down to the so-called real problem of Madame Web. It's not about a man. I don't exactly know when or how it became acceptable or even reasonable to decide that a little better than half the population of the planet were defacto unworthy of respect or conceptual storytelling, but this is where we've gotten, isn't it? Yeah, I know, the fucking gamers give a shit. And the little incels do too, the poor belated pillow humpers that they are. But I am totally unclear on how the rest of us are expected to actually get on board this train. Some of us have women in our lives, whom we love a lot, whom we would happily sacrifice ourselves for should it come to that. Quite a lot of us, actually. And daughters and sisters and mothers... and so I'm not really clear on why I'm supposed to forget things like what it's like to have a daughter, or care about girls or women, or such like, because some diddly-fuck with an internet channel screams about how "boys don't get attention any more." I'm getting pretty tired of that long-playing record (reference from another time, ignore it), and the time it's being given by the not-even-remotely-mainstream television media (also a relic of some 30 years ago). I'm just as happy to sit and watch a movie about a woman character figuring things out as a man character. If others aren't, well... I'm just very glad to say I don't have any males in my life like that. Not a one. I told the last to take a hike coincidentally 30 years ago, because I was tired of carrying him.

Sorry.  I feel somewhat incendiary about this, because I was very much misled by what I heard online, and since everything I heard online was bad, I'm not very keen with that community just now. And though I am 61, I'm fundamentally Bohemian, fundamentally a misanthrope of my own variety, and fundamentally not especially respectful of prudishness. So, when angry, I swear a lot.

Madame Web commits the SIN of having most of its lines spoken by four humans of the female gender. There are two supporting actors in the film that are male, and one villain that is male. The actor playing the villain is Tarim Rahim. He tends to play parts where he has a quiet intensity, an authority that radiates rather than bluster. Obsession, instinct, not high-testosterone coded. He's also pretty. Pretty doesn't sell well with the incels.

One of the supporting males, Mike Epps, gets about six lines and then... well, no spoilers. The other, Adam Scott, is well known for playing the basic sympathetic male he's playing in this film, notably in Severance. Thus — and this is stupidly important — this makes all the males in this woman's film all "pussy-boys." Un-Ak-ceptable!

The men don't drive the plot, the men don't achieve any important success, they don't contribute the hyper-key thing that the women critically need to succeed... they are the Captain Dunsel of film characters and that just is not how films have to be made as per the internet. There are rules we're supposed to follow, dammit (fuck knows why) and this movie didn't even come close to following them.

As such, there's no possible way this could be a good film. It doesn't matter what the women do, or what they believe or what they figure out without needing a man to propel, protect or sacrifice himself for them... the sin of doing it all on their own absolutely violates the first principle of The Protect the Male's Significance code! (Don't blame me if it's the PMS code for short).

I am a man. And weirdly, watching women figure things out without help, and come together to care and protect each other, doesn't make me feel emasculated. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I think with the lump above my shoulders, and not about using my hands to protect the tinier lump below my hips.

Yeah, it's "tinier." It's not bigger than my fucking head, is it?

I'm not going to talk about the plot. I enjoyed the film. It takes its time, it provides rational reasons for action, there are no significant plotholes... I'd watch it again. No, it's not a "great" film. It's not The Graduate. But it is a good film. And if you're an adult, and you haven't tried it yet because you're worried about what's been written about it... and you don't need to have your plot injected at warp speed, I think you'll have a pleasant time with it.