When she is not talking about limes or getting a healthy amount of sleep, Dakota Johnson occasionally stars in movies. As such, she will appear this month in Madame Web, a superhero movie that is maybe related to Spider-Man but also maybe not. When the trailer for Madame Web arrived a few months ago, we did not get much clarity re: the plot, but we did find out that Johnson utters a truly jarring line at some point in the film: “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.”
Needless to say, this clunky string of words stopped the internet in its tracks. It is so unnecessarily long and so laden with conjunctions that it is hard to believe someone wrote it seriously. Dakota Johnson is also the perfect vehicle for this line, because she says everything as if she is learning about human language in real time. Delivered in the monotone Johnsonian daze that we all know and love, this line is a bold rejection of all common sense.
But Johnson? She sees absolutely nothing weird about “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.” In a recent interview promoting Madame Web, she struggled to grasp why anyone would think twice about hearing it in a movie trailer. “Why did that go viral?” she asked, in the wondrous tone of someone emerging from a coma. “Somebody brought this up and I have no idea what it’s about.”
When her interviewer attempted to explain that the sentence sounds absolutely insane, Johnson pointed out, “Isn’t any sentence out of context … out of context?” She repeated the line hesitantly, struggling to understand the problem, before concluding, “That seems like a basic story line to me.” How rude of us to think it was anything but.