I Want To Go Back To Living In Madame's Web

This is my first post and I can’t commit to writing this consistently. Also, this will be a very raw space and won’t necessarily be the most polished writing. I will now move on to what you came for — my musings on nude photoshoots and Madame Web.

Terms like “cult classic” and “camp” gets thrown around a little bit too much. As a very astute Pitchfork review of Rebecca Black’s horrible album put it, camp as an aesthetic — or guiding artistic ethos — can be an easy way out for lackluster work. Sam Levinson, for instance, overtly tried to simulate a cult classic with his 2018 film Assassination Nation (I recommend Zoe Dubno’s skewering of that Sundance Catnip for Los Angeles Review of Books). You can’t force the magic of a theatre packed with gay dudes howling and cheering and applauding for all the wrong reasons. And when you try to, everyone can tell and the gay dudes — who Samantha Sontag Jones famously foretold as the prophets of pop culture — will hate you for it.

That’s why, as cheesy as it may sound, watching a deranged flop like Madame Web felt like taking MDMA at a crowded warehouse party that somehow has been gifted by the presence of LMFAO performing alongside David Guetta. I was put on this planet to use my AMC A-List membership to support a box office failure featuring an Avengers-esque assembly of nepo actresses —Zosia Mamet, Dakota Johnson, and Emma Roberts — navigating the choppy IP waters that is a movie that’s in association with Marvel, and yet, not really a Marvel movie. Like most things in this tortured life, Madame Web is a film about a series of DocuSigns gone awry. Johnson, seemingly, thought she was joining a real MCU film that would catapult into her the lucrative world of infinite merchandising and sequels but instead gracelessly landed into the Sony slush pile of content. Although the film sets itself up as the first of a Sapphic Spider franchise, it’s clear that none of that will ever happen and we won’t get to see Sydney Sweeney and two other actresses work alongside Madame Web to stop crime (?) or venture to the jungles of Peru to discover the origins of their superpowers (?) and eventually, meet Peter Parker (?).

Showgirls may be a tempting comparison — nonsensical melodrama, lesbian overtones, and queer chosen family vibes. But for all its faults, Showgirls actually has great dance sequences, costumes, lighting, and cinematography. Madame Web is much more similar to The Room; it’s the type of misguided disaster that one can imagine a film school professor showing students to teach them how to pay attention to an amalgamation of little things — plot, dialogue, pacing, ADR — which go into making a watchable movie. I haven’t been to film school so I have no idea if that’s how that works. I imagine that they probably show Citizen Kane instead of Sex and the City 2. But maybe that should change one day.

A common refrain that I see developing in criticism circles is dismissing something trite and cliche-riddled with “ChatGPT might as well have made it!” To me, the memorable disasters don’t fall into this camp because they are jarringly imperfect. AI has invaded my daily life — Google Docs, gmail, autocorrect — and from what I sense, these annoying bots aren’t trying to render my pitches or drafts into Madame Web dadaism. Rather, AI is striving for anestheticized flawlessness. Back in 2017, when The Disaster Artist, a film adaptation of the making of The Room came out, Richard Brody, my favorite comrade in contrarianism, notoriously argued that The Room was a “better movie” than Franco’s highly ironic film. I wholeheartedly agree and not just because I relish in being annoying. I was present for the first few midnight screenings of the film at Sunset 5 and I can remember it ever so clearly— throwing plastic spoons at the screen, sneaking in red wine in Arrowhead water bottles, and screaming out lines that I had memorized from YouTube compilations. Years later, I really can’t recall watching The Disaster Artist at all.

On Valentine’s Day, I got an Instagram notification that a nude photoshoot I did back in November with my partner had been posted as part of a carousel of lovers. I originally did the shoot on a whim: my partner was invited to strip to his birthday suit, and I accompanied him to the Culver City studio for a moral support and after I danced with him for a bit to hype him up, the photographer’s assistant invited me to also strip in my birthday suit and join him. The whole experience took 30 minutes and earned me $200. I don’t necessarily think of myself as a model. As I’ve explored in my Vogue essay about go-go dancing, sex positivity is still something relatively new for me. But I actually didn’t overthink signing that waiver and doing something a little risqué. I am not a professional model; I don’t spend hours and hours at the gym striving for Kouros perfection. And the vibe of the photoshoot was inviting in that way — come as you are.

Spoiler Alert: I have been feeling a tad jaded by the act of writing. I’ve been striving for a level of success that is statistically difficult and after years of publishing and working on my own fiction, I, like many people, feel the magic slip away. I started sharing my writing publicly through a Tumblr performance art project that now lives on as merchandise that a hundred or so people in Los Angeles, New York City, Australia, Canada, and England have purchased. I want to tap into what made me happy. I want to get back to self-expression that doesn’t feel so high stakes. I want to go back to Madame’s Web, laughing and rejoicing in the flaws; celebrating with people who get it.

And so, here is my newsletter. I will be writing about why I’m sex neutral. I’ll be writing about frozen yogurt and expensive cupcakes and why Earthbar is better than Erewhon. I’ll be writing about reuniting with my brother to record a podcast about Jennifer Lopez’s beautiful disasterpiece This Is Me…Now. It will be free because democracy dies in darkness and I really think that my bicoastal musings can save this country. Just kidding. Or not?