Your film theory stuff on Mad Max FR was awesome! You clearly like the film. I was wondering what you thought of it plot wise. Many of my friends say the film is boring and a waste of money as generally the main plot was basically them all going to find the ‘green place’ and then coming all the way back to the first place. I ofcourse didn’t find it boring but I dont know much about film to argue against them. How would you argue against that?
My first response is probably that they’re possibly people who prefer dialogue to convey exposition. For me, personally, it’s hard for me to get into dialogue-heavy shows like The Office or Gilmore Girls or Welcome to Night Vale because that’s just not how I perceive the world.
Movies/TV is an interesting art-form in that it has the potential to combine skills present in multiple already present art-forms, such as literature, dance, theater, painting/photography, music, radio, and so forth.
There’s however also a movement that asks, “But what makes movies unique of other arts?” What element of this form of visual media cannot be reproduced in other mediums?
The answer is the intersection of visuals and time.
No other medium can manipulate what you see and when you see it the same way that film can. The films that cleave to this concept completely is of a form called “pure cinema”, you’ll see Mad Max referred to in some reviews by this term, and that’s what they mean.
What is the plot of the first Avengers? Antagonist steals a thing and a team is brought together to fix the problem, but the team doesn’t want to be a team. The antagonist does things that brings the team together and then the antagonist is defeated with a heroic sacrifice.
What is the plot of Inception? We need to do this thing that involves going to a mysterious place (in this case a mind) that we’ve never been before, there is an this objective at that place but there are complications, and there is a valiant effort at the end that involves heroic sacrifice and an end that involves a heroic reward.
What is the plot of Fury Road? Anti-hero steals several things, who are not things, that involves going to a mysterious place they’ve never been before, they meet people who don’t want to be on their team but the antagonist makes them a team, and they try to reach their objective but there are complications. There are a valiant efforts at the end that involves heroic sacrifice, the antagonist is defeated, and there’s a heroic reward.
The difference between the three films is that the first two films explains it’s plot through dialogue, it builds it’s worlds and it’s complications through words. Mad Max Fury Road explains everything through visuals.
And people are either not paying enough attention to visuals or unable to read what’s going on, because visual language is still a language.
Specifically, too, Fury Road is speaking in the language of action genre, but via Baz Luhrmann.
It’s specifically… the easiest example that comes to mind is my Furiosa costuming post. I made that post initially because I was frustrated by all these posts asking about Furiosa’s backstory. Her backstory is right there. At least to me.
And I made this post as quick as I could get away with because I thought it’d be fairly obvious after I posted the visuals and made the comparison and that anything else would be beating a dead horse.
But the post only took off after this part was added, and I STILL see tags with people going “I don’t get it.”
So much of the communication in this movie is non-verbal that sometimes I still hesitate directly rec it to someone sometimes because some of those I talk to have autism or aspergers or is otherwise neuroatypical in a way that the movie would only frustrate them.
Because if you can’t ‘read’ what’s happening, then Max suddenly helping Furiosa doesn’t register as him gradually winding down from his decade long panic attack. Max and Nux working together with Furiosa and the wives would come out from nowhere. If you can’t visually read the movie, then you wouldn’t be able to see Max’s character arc, there’d be no reason for him to turn them back from the salt. Furiosa also become impenetrable, why is she doing this thing, why does she trust Max, why does she want to kill Joe when she was so highly ranked in his army?
There’s this entire sequence in the final chase that takes my breath away, when she brakes to save Max and there’s a moment when they look at each other, he swings an enemy over as a body shield but he falls off the rig and Furiosa catches him.
But she gets stabbed, and Keeper is dying, and Toast is captured, and Max is slipping from her grip, the engine is failing and the war parties are closing in and Slit is about to ram into Max.
And you see that moment when despair turns into anger, then engine clicks on, and the music revs up and she wrenches the wheel to crush Slit between two rigs because she might be bleeding out but fuck that.
And there’s no dialogue. No declaration. Nothing to take you by the hand and walk you through this sequence, no last call to Pepper Potts as a warhead is being taken through the wormhole, there’s no explaining that “you’re just a shade, just a shade of my real wife”. There is no explanation.
Granted the film isn’t as completely brutal to say, “keep up, or get crushed under the wheels”, that’s why you’ll get people who say, “I loved the movie but it has no plot.”
Too often audiences just don’t have the tools or the language to fully dig into what’s going on at a surface level, especially if the surface has enough to hang on to and still make sense.
That’s probably why on Rotten Tomatoes, film critics has a higher approval percent than regulars, and why Rotten Tomatoes rates Fury Road higher than Metacritic which is a more broad spectrum sampling of mainstream audiences who don’t care enough about movies to get a RT account.
You could still argue against your friends, but you should go into it knowing that it may be a loss. I will never be able to get into The Office or Gilmore Girls or any dialogue-heavy medium like Nightvale. A red-toned painting will be lost on someone who’s colorblind.
It’s not a value judgement on either the artwork itself or the audience; it’s just not the audience the piece was meant for.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1Gr0zok.
Tags: fury road, text post, visual storytelling.
