WEB
Web is the total thematic and intellectual dimension of a work: everything in it that carries, produces, questions or organizes meaning.
Without Web, a work has little intellectual stimulation to offer.
Web: 12 Angry Men
12 Angry Men is especially useful because so much else has been stripped away.
There is little spectacle and almost no worldbuilding to hide behind. What remains are characters, relationships, testimony, evidence, prejudice, doubt, persuasion, moral responsibility, competing interpretations and arguments.
The movie asks us to participate. We listen to claims, test them, revise our opinions, resist some arguments and accept others. Characters become meaningful through what they believe, what they reveal, what they fail to see and how their positions change under pressure.
It is therefore an unusually exposed example of Web. The intellectual and thematic dimension is not decoration around the movie. It is the movie. We are engaged because there is continually something to understand, question, compare, infer or reconsider.
Notes toward the chapter
Agents of contrast. Unfolding. Thematic puzzle.