Morning Cinema: Madame Ordinary
The receiving of a rejection letter comes with a return to normalcy. The dream is laid to rest and with it, the imagination of a future. But with the thrill of possibility gone, so comes back the blissfulness hidden behind it, one which initially resides in thoughts of nothing matters anymore and which continues towards a realization that besides the dream, like kept existing and will continue to forever exist in the present. Sometimes, nothing is felt.
In the nothingness of being, of work being a job and of appointments residing in the future, life opens up to being watched. Everything is exactly as it is, nothing more, nothing else. In this state, watching a film becomes watching a film, and while cinema certainly has the power to remove us from a lethargic state, it shouldn’t always have to. I am drawn back to the situationists, particularly Henri Lefebvre and his short engagement with the group, and how they would drift from screen to screen, constructing their own cinematic experiences. Or to Tom Gunning’s “The Cinema of Attraction” and its report on Ben Hur’s scheduled showings of only the most attraction-like scenes, offering the theater as a place that exists in the world, that is open not only as a place for cinema, but simply as a space that stands open to the public. It is in the midst of all these feelings, or rather the lack of them, that I found myself watching Madame Web (2024) on a Sunday morning—cinema sometimes requires a plan.
Madame Web is a morning film. Like the airplane film, the morning film exists (or is consumed) for a purpose. But while the purpose of the airplane film is to kill time with its magic—and here I am reminded again of Tom Gunning’s essay on cinema as “A Machine For Killing Time”—, the purpose of the morning film is more abstract. The morning film is an excuse to bike down the hill and eat breakfast while looking at a huge screen. I love airplane food.
Short and simple, Madame Web made me feel nothing. Watching Dennis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part 2 just the day before (in the afternoon) I was subjected to a whole lot of “feelings” that in the end just made me feel empty. Dune, was an empty movie disguised as a big budget “art film.” What made me enjoy Madame Web more, was that it was an empty film with no disguise. It stood as a vessel for me to enjoy a donut with coffee. Dune poses the question of why we are so obsessed with having cinema always be a catalyst for our feelings. There is this general belief that great cinema makes us feel something—Martin Scorsese speaks of this as an “impact” that makes us revisit a film years later. I can’t completely disagree with that statement, my favorite film is not Madame Web but Steven Spielberg’s E.T. (1982).
The Rotten Tomatoes critic consensus for Madame Web reads as “Madame Web's earnest approach to the title character's origin story has a certain appeal, but its predictable plot and uneven execution make for a forgettable superhero adventure.” While Madame Web is not good, it certainly isn’t horrible, its execution is objectively worse than Dune, for example, but they are equally as predictable and forgettable. The power of Dune, in comparison to Madame Web, lies in its suggestive Hans Zimmer soundtrack and “beautiful” cinematography. Its critic consensus describes it as “visually thrilling and narratively epic.” If a film can be considered a Sci-Fi masterpiece on terms as vague as a visual thrill, then the nothingness of Madame Web should receive equal praise.
The main difference between my experience in watching the two films was in their immersiveness. I thought nothing while watching Dune, while Madame Web made me both think about Dune and this whole essay. I watched Dune in one of Paris’ biggest theaters with part of a handrail covering the bottom of the screen, yet I felt completely drawn towards the film, ultimately leaving the screening room empty, not knowing what to say about the experience. Cinema is often hailed as an escape, and seemingly that is where the praise for Dune lies. But shouldn’t we be thankful that the movie theater can also offer itself as a space for reflection?
To mention Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1979) in the same critique of Madame Web is not something I ever expected to do, but thinking of great and recent cinematic experiences I cannot help but mention the feeling of being taken in and out of Tarkovsky’s film. Like the protagonist, going back and forth through memories and temporalities in my head, the past and the present of the film creating a temporal experience that is hard to achieve outside of cinema. Madame Web does the same through its odd discontinuities and awkward progression, feeling almost like a jerky rollercoaster that shifts between a smooth thrill and an awareness of the mechanic. In its awkwardness, it reminds me of Hong Sang-soo’s filmography, which through its zooms, movements and odd framings make us reflect on the watched film as it happens.
I enjoyed Madame Web for its lack of thrills, for allowing me to enjoy my donut and coffee and for the possibilities it gave me to think about cinema sitting right there in its mecca. It is time we understand that the power of cinema also resides in its ability to produce emptiness and nothingness, even if unintentionally. I, for one, will attempt to forever remember how the villain of the film died due to a product placement, more specifically the letter P of a Pepsi sign, placed on top of his chest. As a spider-person in the film oddly said “with great responsibility comes great power.”
“The destiny of nothingness and that of being are the same if one thinks nothingness properly.” — Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible