You Love to See It: Madeline's Madeline

For most of the runtime of Madeline’s Madeline, the titular character’s (Helena Howard) life is a shuttlecock swatted back and forth between her mother Regina (Miranda July) and the director of her experimental theater troupe, Evangeline (Molly Parker). The two maternal figures alternately berate and exploit the teenage Madeline, who suffers from an unspecified but volatile mental illness or illnesses. To her white mother she’s an unsolvable problem, a difficult child constantly doing the wrong thing and acting out in seemingly nonsensical ways. To her director she’s a vein of raw emotion to be mined, her personhood a distracting and inconvenient afterthought. When the two older women bond, their mistreatment of Madeline only intensifies.

At the film’s climax, though, it’s Madeline’s version of reality into which Evangeline and Regina are thrust. First, during a group acting exercise Madeline impersonates her mother with such perfect, acrid attention to detail that the woman flees in tears. Not long afterward Madeline and the troupe stage an abrasive, confrontational performance and force Evangeline to watch it, moving her unwillingly through the building in which they’ve arranged themselves while masked and vocalizing wildly, lights flashing, performers lunging at the director and thrusting themselves into her personal space. They make her security the object of their performance just as she made Madeline’s life a subject for study and improvisation, and for a moment it’s Madeline’s hectic, difficult experience of life that defines everyone else’s. 

While white society is happy to absorb black society’s art and culture, to write and perform about black pain, we have no willingness to exist within that pain, to go through it in order to find and uproot our own habitual objectification of black people. To make ourselves the object in the equation of art about blackness is unthinkable, but in Madeline’s Madeline a black and severely mentally ill perspective enfolds that dehumanizing, objectifying approach and, if only for a moment, forces the artists and caretakers who perpetuate it to run the gauntlet of their own violent lack of empathy. The film closes on the image of Madeline walking away on her own, hands raised, carrying the sometimes frightening and beleaguered dream of her reality with her.