“What you are experiencing is just a metaphor,” a nurse hovering above the camera says in the opening scene of Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline. This paves the way for the multi-layered forms of gaslighting to come, which only become clear much later in the film. The nurse continues: “The emotions you are having are not your own. They are someone else’s. You are not the cat.” The shot cuts to the eponymous film’s protagonist Madeline (Helena Howard) in her home, purring, arching her back against furniture, and coughing up a hair ball. She is, apparently, the one who needed to be told she is not the cat, although the delusion is a harmless and potentially playful one. Her mother, Regina (Miranda July), looks up from her desk where she’s filing an insurance claim and indulges her with a belly scratch. In the following scene we find Madeline with her experimental theatre troupe who are dancing in pig hats, before the frame dissolves into a brief, blurry sequence of shots in which Madeline approaches her mother from behind with a steaming iron in her hand (Is this fantasy? Flashback?). Next, we see a beach from the vantage of a sea turtle, and then Madeline on stage, lying on her belly, pretending to swim. “You were a sea turtle, and then you were a woman playing a sea turtle,” the troupe’s director, Evangeline (Molly Parker), remarks, instructing Madeline to look at her hands and remember her human body. This is the opposite of the nurse’s advice. Viewers, like Madeline, continue to receive confusing, conflicting messages from an array of adult women: mother, teacher, nurse.
Evangeline is a Type-A white woman who is performatively ‘woke’. Both her mean and supportive quips are offered to the troupe with the same faux calm, and she reminds me of a yoga teacher I once had who preached holistic healing but was clearly more interested in athleticism, and always failed to create a meditative atmosphere. Madeline’s Madeline critiques the innocuous yet often dangerous power that such well-meaning white women wield. The film is less about Madeline after all, and more about those who want to control her. We’re shown a few shots from Madeline’s vantage, but far more fascinated close-ups of her. A succession of older women all think they know her best.
“This is just a metaphor,” Madeline tells her mother, describing one of their fights that takes place in the film’s primary reality. This scene does not involve something fantastic like turning into an animal and is not shot with the blurry effect the camera typically uses to establish flashbacks and fantasies. Instead it takes place in the car, and speaks to the familiar struggle of trying to understand the world as a teenage girl. As if this wasn’t confusing enough, Madeline is mixed race but guided by adult women who are all white, which no doubt adds to the teenage experience of feeling misunderstood. Needless to say, these women also all have issues of their own. The car scene is one of the few early moments in which the audience, used to privileging Madeline and her point of view, likely begins feeling better equipped to negotiate conflicting realities than sixteen-year-old Madeline. As it’s clear the fight in the car is not, in fact, a metaphor at all, the psychiatric nurse’s advice for handling strong emotions does not apply here.
Madeline and her mother fight about typical things. When Regina catches Madeline watching porn in their basement with two boys from the neighbourhood she punishes her by watching it with them, something which is humiliating for everybody. Driven by a desire to protect her daughter, Regina undoubtedly does more harm than good when she calls Madeline a “slut”. It is Evangeline who first plants the idea that their relationship is not ‘normal’ in the mind of the viewer and – it’s implied – in Madeline’s mind too, when she asks her if she feels safe at home. Blurry scenes of aggression (Fantasies? Flashbacks? Metaphors? Or ‘reality’?) further hint at an unhealthy relationship, although it’s unclear who is the aggressor and if the aggression is ever actually physical. Soon after, Regina discovers that Madeline’s prescription ran out a week ago. She is neurodivergent, though her diagnosis is never revealed to us. But no one in this film is presented as completely ‘sane’. Why would Regina call her virgin daughter a ‘slut’? Why would Evangeline suggest that their relationship is violent if she isn’t planning on intervening? Neither seem to be thinking of her. Although the ambiguities surrounding the mother-daughter relationship are never resolved, Evangeline is revealed to be manipulating Madeline’s life for narrative gain, developing a play about ‘mental illness’ with Madeline as the protagonist. “Mental illness” is Evangeline’s term – we don’t know how Madeline herself identifies. The scenes set in rehearsal, it turns out, have not privileged Madeline simply because she is the film’s protagonist, but because Evangeline has set up the troupe to literally revolve around her, to prompt and indulge her delusions. Other members of the troupe begin to display their discomfort with Evangeline’s method, and she finally crosses the line when she encourages Madeline to improvise as a patient in a psychiatric ward. Madeline inverts the power dynamic by slyly tapping into pregnant Evangeline’s fears, performing as an expecting mother driven mad by the thought of giving birth.
Madeline’s Madeline tells the tale of a performatively-progressive white woman who mines the experiences of a neurodivergent biracial girl for her own gain. It should be pointed out that Evangeline’s husband is Black, too, as is the formerly-incarcerated man she brings in to speak about his experience to the troupe. Sitting in a circle with the performers, Evangeline treats the man both as a representative of all formerly-incarcerated people and a tragic exemplar of the failures of the ‘system’. The group is encouraged to see him as inspiration rather than as an individual, and Evangeline encourages them to ask him questions. Of course it isn’t problematic to marry a member of another race or seek out their stories, but set against Evangeline’s overt exploitation of Madeline, her behaviour forms an uncomfortable pattern. She more than flirts with fetishisation. Well-meaning white women can easily seem innocuous, even progressive, while at the same time abusing their own privilege. Watching the film, one wonders what Madeline’s delusions might be when compared to Evangeline’s.
Madeline’s Madeline suggests that Madeline’s neurodivergence involves being overly empathetic, an inability to differentiate her feelings from those of others. But Evangeline can’t discern what belongs to her either, something which is clear in her appropriation of Madeline’s feelings, experiences, and identity. In both cases – one considered a mental illness, the other an abuse of power – metaphors and realities are blurred. One thing is clear: Evangel(ine) sees herself as ‘evangel’ (gospel, savior) to Mad(eline’s) ‘mad’.
In making this critique of well-meaning white women, I do not attempt to exempt myself, and nor does director Josephine Decker. Madeline’s Madeline is a work of self-criticism – a warning, even. Upon discovering Howard at a teen performing arts festival, Decker invited her to participate in an experimental acting collective geared toward developing her next film. As the exercises came to increasingly revolve around Howard, the collective raised questions about the line between art and exploitation, resonating with contemporary debates about the appropriation inherent in telling a story that is not your own. The cost of Evangeline’s art is Madeline’s wellbeing and capacity for self-representation. As critic Caroline Siede puts it, “Evangeline is an introspective exploration of Decker’s worst impulses”. Madeline’s Madeline explores the boundaries between representation and exploitation, a must-see for all well-meaning white women.
Emily Watlington is a writer based in Berlin and Cambridge, Mass. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Mousse and Frieze.
Madeline’s Madeline is now available on MUBI and in select UK cinemas.
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