PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological* "It's like, a woman's natural instinct is to protect, to give-- and it's like [Cassandra's] instincts to do both mix with her powers"-- actress Isabelle Merced's take on her movie MADAME WEB. This is a really weird one. It's not weird in a psycho-obsession way, for it's too middle-of-the-road in its appeal to represent anything truly personal. And yet it's not oddball in terms of any artificial intellectual obsessions, like a lot of the MCU movies. It's a movie selling itself as a superhero movie, which goes out its way to elide a major source of the genre's appeal, and it's also a "girlboss" film in which the main heroine isn't really an aggressive know-it-all, as is the case in so many other girlboss movies. The above comment from one of WEB's actresses is the closest thing to a "theme statement" I could find in the dvd's extras, and even director/co-writer S.J. Clarkson didn't really say anything in her few comments beyond platitudes about feminine representation. Most of all, WEB is a puzzle because it was based on a minor side-character within the corpus of Marvel's SPIDER-MAN comic-book stories-- hardly the sort of property most major film-studios would attempt to monetize, even given the fact that Sony couldn't work with anything except the corpus of SPIDER-MAN stories. (I mean, if Sony could do Madame Web, surely they could have adapted the earlier character of Spider-Man's premiere female foe, The Black Cat, who would have been much more marketable IMO.) 
So, here's the origin of Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson). She's just a gleam in the womb of her mother Constance when Constance goes exploring in Peru's Amazon forest, seeking a rare spider whose venom may stave off her unborn child's genetic illness (though the audience doesn't find out the motivations until later on). Constance finds the rare spider, but her guide Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim) kills her to steal the spider, which he believes will make him into a super-spider-man. A legendary tribe of spider-like natives come across Constance, who was also bitten by the spider before Ezekiel took it. The natives can't save Constance, they save the infant Cassandra. Somehow Baby Cass is transported to America, where she's entered into a fosterage program, though the viewers never know anything about what happens to the young Cassie in that system, any more than they-- or Cassie-- ever knows who her father may have been. Though the character doesn't make explicit comments about having lacked a mother, the film's diegesis makes clear that such is THE defining issue in Cassandra's life.
Since Cassandra can't change the past events that deprived her of a mother, the script's solution is that the protagonist should become a mother-- albeit only in a figurative sense, to avoid getting boy-cooties, I guess. She works as a New York paramedic and has no love-life and may never have had one. But a near-death incident causes the awakening of precognitive talents resulting from her mother being bitten by the super-spider. Cassandra (by now, the use of the Classical prophetess' name should be evident) has visions of a man she's never seen-- the twenty-years-older Ezekiel-- being attacked and killed by three costumed spider-women (all based upon characters from Marvel, of course).
To race past a lot of boring exposition, it turns out that the future spider-women are just teenagers in present-time, and since Ezekiel has also gained vision-powers from the spider-venom, he decides he's going to use his vast wealth to track down the teens and kill them before they kill him. (How did Ezekiel get rich with his powers of prophecy and Spider-Man-like abilities? Who knows?) Cassandra manages to find the girls and shepherd them away from Ezekiel, who assumes an all-black latex outfit as he crawls from wall to wall on his hit-mission. For the rest of the movie, Cassandra runs from pillar to post with her young charges, just barely managing to out-predict Ezekiel. I'm not sure why Ezekiel, who's been using his powers longer, can't use his powers to outguess the heroine. Possibly it's because it's only important that Cassandra should be able to realize her ability to change the future, since this is the essence of her feminine ability to protect and to give. Eventually, Cassandra's defensive strategies bear fruit, so that Ezekiel's superior male might succumbs to Cassandra's feminine ability to think outside the box. The film ends with the assumption that Cassandra will also play a big role in guiding her three figurative daughters to their destinies as full-fledged superheroines-- though we never know what factors are going to make them become heroes. (Maybe none of the girls want to become costumed crusaders-- and if not, isn't that a future that they can change if they please? That possibility is never suggested.)
Clarkson's peculiar approach only makes sense to me in terms of Hollywood's attempt to seek equity for the female of the species. Since big, expensive action-thrillers generate a lot of money and fame for successful raconteurs, advocates of social justice reasoned that the action-genre would become more equitable if more action-movies starred actresses. The problem with this logic is that the audience that was theoretically going to support all of these female-led films, comprised of American Liberated Women, did not significantly support such films, regardless of the films' good or bad qualities. Women viewers simply did not turn out for big expensive action-thrillers as often as male viewers did, because in general women don't like such thrillers the way male viewers do. So I theorize that Clarkson and her collaborators tried to rewrite the social justice narrative to make it work for women's dominant tastes. If women don't support action-thrillers in which all-female groups like the Birds of Prey and the Marvels get into fights with lots of flashy powers-- maybe that same audience will buy a female-led superhero flick that's structured like a super-expensive Lifetime movie. I'll conclude by stating that although the script for WEB is clunky and undercharacterized, I do not, unlike the podcaster The Critical Drinker, explain this by a snide reference to WEB being Clarkson's first theatrical feature. The woman had been working professionally as a television director for roughly twenty years before this film. She may well be a mediocre director, even in her TV works-- but the failings of WEB can't possibly stem from lack of experience.
So, here's the origin of Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson). She's just a gleam in the womb of her mother Constance when Constance goes exploring in Peru's Amazon forest, seeking a rare spider whose venom may stave off her unborn child's genetic illness (though the audience doesn't find out the motivations until later on). Constance finds the rare spider, but her guide Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim) kills her to steal the spider, which he believes will make him into a super-spider-man. A legendary tribe of spider-like natives come across Constance, who was also bitten by the spider before Ezekiel took it. The natives can't save Constance, they save the infant Cassandra. Somehow Baby Cass is transported to America, where she's entered into a fosterage program, though the viewers never know anything about what happens to the young Cassie in that system, any more than they-- or Cassie-- ever knows who her father may have been. Though the character doesn't make explicit comments about having lacked a mother, the film's diegesis makes clear that such is THE defining issue in Cassandra's life.
Since Cassandra can't change the past events that deprived her of a mother, the script's solution is that the protagonist should become a mother-- albeit only in a figurative sense, to avoid getting boy-cooties, I guess. She works as a New York paramedic and has no love-life and may never have had one. But a near-death incident causes the awakening of precognitive talents resulting from her mother being bitten by the super-spider. Cassandra (by now, the use of the Classical prophetess' name should be evident) has visions of a man she's never seen-- the twenty-years-older Ezekiel-- being attacked and killed by three costumed spider-women (all based upon characters from Marvel, of course).
To race past a lot of boring exposition, it turns out that the future spider-women are just teenagers in present-time, and since Ezekiel has also gained vision-powers from the spider-venom, he decides he's going to use his vast wealth to track down the teens and kill them before they kill him. (How did Ezekiel get rich with his powers of prophecy and Spider-Man-like abilities? Who knows?) Cassandra manages to find the girls and shepherd them away from Ezekiel, who assumes an all-black latex outfit as he crawls from wall to wall on his hit-mission. For the rest of the movie, Cassandra runs from pillar to post with her young charges, just barely managing to out-predict Ezekiel. I'm not sure why Ezekiel, who's been using his powers longer, can't use his powers to outguess the heroine. Possibly it's because it's only important that Cassandra should be able to realize her ability to change the future, since this is the essence of her feminine ability to protect and to give. Eventually, Cassandra's defensive strategies bear fruit, so that Ezekiel's superior male might succumbs to Cassandra's feminine ability to think outside the box. The film ends with the assumption that Cassandra will also play a big role in guiding her three figurative daughters to their destinies as full-fledged superheroines-- though we never know what factors are going to make them become heroes. (Maybe none of the girls want to become costumed crusaders-- and if not, isn't that a future that they can change if they please? That possibility is never suggested.)
Clarkson's peculiar approach only makes sense to me in terms of Hollywood's attempt to seek equity for the female of the species. Since big, expensive action-thrillers generate a lot of money and fame for successful raconteurs, advocates of social justice reasoned that the action-genre would become more equitable if more action-movies starred actresses. The problem with this logic is that the audience that was theoretically going to support all of these female-led films, comprised of American Liberated Women, did not significantly support such films, regardless of the films' good or bad qualities. Women viewers simply did not turn out for big expensive action-thrillers as often as male viewers did, because in general women don't like such thrillers the way male viewers do. So I theorize that Clarkson and her collaborators tried to rewrite the social justice narrative to make it work for women's dominant tastes. If women don't support action-thrillers in which all-female groups like the Birds of Prey and the Marvels get into fights with lots of flashy powers-- maybe that same audience will buy a female-led superhero flick that's structured like a super-expensive Lifetime movie. I'll conclude by stating that although the script for WEB is clunky and undercharacterized, I do not, unlike the podcaster The Critical Drinker, explain this by a snide reference to WEB being Clarkson's first theatrical feature. The woman had been working professionally as a television director for roughly twenty years before this film. She may well be a mediocre director, even in her TV works-- but the failings of WEB can't possibly stem from lack of experience.
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