On the left here is my boyfriend Tommy. After gushing about this movie for a solid hour, I really got him excited to see it so we pulled a triple feature at the theatre today and saw Mad Max: Fury Road before we left. Even though I told him about all the amazing aspects of this movie, I think the selling point for him was the character Nux, featured on the right,played by Nicholas Hoult.
In the film, Nux is one of the very fascinating soldier type War Boys. These characters are interesting because even though they are warlords, their biggest killer seems to be a form of Leukemia. Whether it’s due to inbreeding or their less than steller conditions, these boys are called “Half-Lifes” because they aren’t expected to live very long. Nearly all of them have tumors protruding from their necks, and more than half of them (like Nux) require constant blood transfusions (supplied in this case by our very own Mad Max himself.)
Even though the bald heads are not a product of chemo, and symbolize something entirely different, the imagery is there, and these boys spend the movie trying to die in battle with glory instead of wasting away with a disease.
When Nux fails to find acceptance among his brothers and with his father/god, he turns instead to himself. Throughout the film we see Nux’s evolution from a cog in a machine to an individual human being with purpose and importance. His true goal in life is to be useful and needed, a goal that many of us can understand, especially those of us that are suffering from illnesses or disabilities. I know that there are countless posts about Furiosa on this front, but I found that for Tommy specifically Nux was a character he needed to see.
Some of you may already know this but, about a month ago Tommy was diagnosed with stage 2 testicular cancer. Although he is well on his road to recovery, he has struggled with his masculinity, his pride, and most of all his purpose. I can tell that he feels like the world doesn’t need him sometimes, and being sick often makes you feel like a burden to those around you. Although this is not true in the slightest, it is very hard to convince him otherwise. However, tonight I watched as his eyes lit up at the sight of a very sick character making a very big difference, and being a total fucking bad ass while doing it. Please go see this movie, it is so important.
There is just something special about this movie that I can’t quite explain. It’s a beautiful film, but that beauty doesn’t mask the horrific aspects of it. At first it seems like any other action movie, but then it transforms into something deeper, which is the part I can’t explain. Amidst all of the explosions and carnage, there was something beautiful, and that’s why I love this film.
I had a really interesting discussion with justinoaksford earlier today regarding narrative messages and creative intent – and while I usually keep this blog to art stuff, I think we both had enough aha moments that some of it might be worth sharing. Bear with me, as I’m sure most of this will be painfully obvious to anyone who is a writer, even if it felt revelatory to me at the time :B
This conversation came up, of course, because of the incredible and much-discussed feminist storytelling in Mad Max: Fury Road. There are about 8 million articles on that already which are all fantastic, so I won’t go into that specifically. What had piqued Justin’s and my interest was the question of how and why. Movies and stories like Fury Road are super powerful and can be a real force for good in the world. As people who are in the film/games biz, who want to tell stories ourselves, we want to know how to make things like that!
There are people out there with the opinion that entertainment is just entertainment, and social agendas should be left out – it’d be too preachy, it’d constrain something that’s supposed to be fun and escapist. There’s a grain of truth in this, in the sense that if a specific lesson is shoehorned into a story, instead of being an organic part of it, that lesson will feel, well… like a lesson. It’ll be obvious, pasted-on, and can detract from the fun of being entertained. However, that initial assumption – that social justice has no place in entertainment – also assumes that entertainmentwithouta “social agenda” has no kind of impact on the people consuming it. I would confidently say that media affects people very deeply, regardless of whether or not the creator had any kind of agenda or intention, and regardless of whether or not the person consuming the media realizes it. In fact, it’s when the messages come in a super entertaining form that our barriers are lowest, and we accept as emotional truth some pretty deep, unconscious lessons about ourselves, others, and how the world works – at least according to that story.
Which brings me back around to Fury Road. It’s unquestionably full of the fieriest kind of social justice around, wrecking the patriarchy like nobody’s business, giving us amazing examples of men and women hurt by it and trying reclaim themselves from it. It’s been analyzed almost to death already, and it’s hard to imagine that a message so resonant could be in any way accidental. But George Miller himself has said that there wasn’t a feminist agenda in the beginning:
The meaningful nature of the story grew really organically out of a scenario involving these wives escaping. And I think the entire reason it became the furious beautiful feminist thing it became, instead of sliding into a cheap “Max helps a bunch of sexy women” story (as it easily might have in the hands of a lazier creator), is because Miller cared about those characters as people. The exact manifesto in the movie – “WE ARE NOT THINGS” – is why his story doesn’t cheapen or fall flat, and why it resonated and provided so much meaning. He didn’t set out to tell a feminist story, but he had empathy for literally everyone he put on screen, and clearly did his best to imagine and construct how they would feel and respond to a situation like the one in Fury Road. And as he picked his way forward through the decade of development this went through, he cared enough to research, and to get experts like Eve Ensler to add their experience and knowledge. And none of this was to paste anything on, to preach, or to shoehorn anything in – it was to make sure the story and the characters that drove it were simply better, truer, more interesting, more entertaining.
Basically, it’s good writing.
Meaningful stories that deconstruct our world are things that happen naturally when, as a writer/storyteller, you care about your characters as real people affected by the world they live in. And when your characters act like humans, not things, you can achieve films like Fury Road, where the excellence of the fire tornadoes and Doof Warrior-backed car melees is enhanced a hundredfold by the fact that you, as an audience member, care about everyone on screen.
So this:
And this:
…are not in any way opposed, but are facets of a cohesive whole that would be way less excellent for the loss of either.
This isn’t to say that having a conscious point to your stories should be in any way avoided. Rather, there’s a lot to be said for discovering the meaning and power in a story – by writing with empathy and honesty within a story or world that you as a creator feel kid-at-Christmas gleefully excited about, and staying open to expanding into the territory your characters lead you to when you let them.
More often than not I suspect that effort and openness will lead to other Fury Roads.
Now I really want to know what the rest of the tags said…
Heh. It was something like:
# but that if her feelings were unchanged # one word from her would silence him forever # and then SHE said her feelings… # yes? what did she say? # *looks pointedly at his empty glass* # barkeep! another round! quickly if you please! # aah # that hits the spot. # go on, then. what of the lady’s feelings? # her feelings? oh yes. her feelings were… # WHAT? TELL US MAN! # quite… the… OPPOSITE! # HUZZAH!
