I am the one that runs from both the living and the dead. Hunted by scavengers, haunted by those I could not protect. So I exist in this wasteland, reduced to one instinct: survive.
endlessimpossibility: #oh man max looks totally lost#poor precious splendid
He really does, even more so a moment after this iirc!
If I may ramble for a moment (feel free to cut on reblogs, god!) – this is one of my fave FR blocking set-ups for disguised-character-development-as-misdirected-tension. Though the movie has shown that Max won’t use personal space violations as intimidation, it’s been pretty subtle so far. Kinda hard to make that obvious in a brawl (though the cues are there). So here is where the movie makes Max’s scrupulous boundary behavior (translation: his integrity) come home like a ton of bricks.
It’s a tight space. Max is still dangerously frightened and so clings to the idea of retaining some options by having a hostage. And so he wedges himself in there forcing Angharad to share a space that would be nauseatingly close with someone of unknown integrity and who has a gun. And yet… he’s leaving Angharad as much room as he can – look he’s backed off as far as he can be. There is never, even for a moment, a sense that Max will threaten her by invading her tiny remaining personal space, let alone do anything else. [as an aside, it would be absolutely par for the course for a man to just trample personal space here without even noticing it – just by unintentional shifting around. How many times have men blundered into your personal space bubble as if it didn’t exist, simply because they believe so completely in the presence of their own bubble? (no slight intended to the men who have awareness – you guys probably notice the same thing from these other guys!) Amazingly, Max doesn’t even do that despite the tight quarters]
But no – Max has already shown multiple times that while he’s maintaining his only-recently-regained personal space by any and all guns necessary, he also does everything he can not to crowd anyone else’s space as a means of intimidation. He backed off of Furiosa the moment he knew he had the upper hand. He blocked all of Nux’s enthused attempts to connect and ultimately put him on the dirt knocking the wind out of him without ever bulling into Nux’s space to establish dominance (for contrast, remember Slit trying to dominate Nux exactly this way). He doesn’t use the ability any guy with his strength and size could use, to crowd people as a means of intimidation. It’s totally and completely out of character for ‘scarily physical guy wins confrontation’ body language – and yet he doesn’t do it, not once.
And that same body language carries over here. I wasn’t sexual-cringe worried for a second when he forced Angharad to share such a limited niche with him – because everything he’d done up to that point showed he would not use invasion of space as a dominance maneuver. And amazingly, in this tiny constricted spot, he still manages to adhere to that body language. He’s not crowding her as a means of intimidation to keep her under control. He’s got the gun – he doesn’t need to exert one bit more force. And because he is not dominance seeking, he doesn’t.
As character development for Max as a trustworthy human, this is beautifully executed. And as character development for the movieitself as a movie that will refuse even momentary microaggressions (either to build tension or as icky humor), this is beautifully executed.
Fantastic.
That makes me think of one of my favourite shots from this film:
This is quite possibly one of the only shots in the film that is truly sexually charged. Our focus is on Angharad’s naked collarbone, her gorgeous hair and lips, the closeness of their bodies. The camera’s focus on her neck and mouth make the viewer almost feel the movement of her hair and her warm breath.
There’s just this moment of perfect stillness, offset by the tension in the Pass. As the rock walls grow close around the Rig, Max and Angharad’s bodies are pressed close together just inside the hold. At the risk of being too Freudian (though, let’s face it, it’s Miller and everything is Freudian), we are given the complimentary images of a gun barrel next to Angharad’s full lips and the long Rig penetrating the long, narrow archway of the Pass. The staging for this scene is uniquely sexual in a way that is quite different from anything else in the film.
And yet – Max is busy watching Furiosa’s movements and the cliffs beyond; he doesn’t really look at Angharad until she begins having her Braxton Hicks. As we see in the top gif, he looks past her to scan his surroundings; only when she cries out does he seem to remember that he’s sitting next to a pregnant girl and his eyes read: ‘oh, shit, now?’
As @redshoesnblueskies points out, this scene shows us a whole lot about Max, his integrity, and his respect for women. He’s oblivious. To him, she’s just another person that he happens to be crammed into a box with. And, oh fuck, she’s having contractions.
But that brings me back to the screencap I inserted here. The initial shot, focusing on Angharad, tells us more about what Angharad is thinking than what Max is thinking. Again, up until she cries out, he’s not thinking about her – he’s thinking about the Pass.
But Angharad? Angharad’s thinking about him.
This initial shot, we don’t see much of anything of Max but his shoulder, pushing in on Angharad’s space. And his gun, dangerously close to her face.
But we do see the tenseness in Angharad’s neck, the careful neutral expression on her face, even a glimpse of the downcast eyes. She doesn’t look him in the face, she just barely turns her face towards him, her movements subtle and stiff.
This moment is full of sexual tension. But it’s not Max feeling that tension – it’s Angharad.
And so here, within just a few shots, we are given a full demonstration of what male privilege looks like in day-to-day moments. Max is just having a normal (for him) day. Standoffs with hostile enemies, possible shootouts, the works. But in Angharad’s mind, she is framing the situation in terms not of possible gun violence, but possible sexual violence. Her body is pressed against another man’s, a gun to her face. She is tense, but also strangely collected. She has been in this situation before. Neutral expression and downcast eyes? That is the automatic-shutdown expression of a woman who has been abused before and who expects to be abused again.
For that one, tense moment, we’re not meant to see things out of Max’s perspective, we’re meant to see out of Angharad’s. And in her mind, she’s not thinking of what a good guy Max is for not abusing the situation. In her mind, she’s only expecting a groping hand – or worse. Not all men are rapists. Some are like Max. But that’s not the point of this shot: the point is that all women know what Angharad is expecting.
It’s only when the action starts up that we’e snapped back to Max’s perspective, once again worried about blazing machine guns and pregnant women.
And that, friends, is how you do visual storytelling.
– bai-xue
FUCKING BEAUTIFUL, YES.
and what does it say that, writing as a woman, that I just filed all of this under ‘assumed knowledge’ – because of course this is obvious to us [where ‘us’ equals the feminist readership I’m usually in discourse with] and needs no explaining…but it’s needful that we say it explicitly on occasion, because damn we all gloss over it as ‘assumed info’ way too often.
There’s somebody in the post apocalypse world that has space tech.
Listen. Furiosa and the wives and the Vuvalini see satellites. But satellites decay in space: their orbits decay, they run out of stabilizer fuel, their computers die, they lose communication. Many can be maintained from the ground through radio contact, but after fourty or fifty years of neglect, most will be space debris or wil have burned up in the atmosphere. Most satellites that can be seen unaided are in low earth or medium earth orbits. Those orbits are the most unsteady because there’s so much atmosphere.
There is someone maintaining the satellites.
(I was wondering about that too – the implications are astounding. Given Miller’s attention to detail, this could be foreshadowing for MM5…)
(Is my cyberpunk au gonna become canon
OOC: Space Tech, you say?
[I went on a rant at Kal so the relevant bits are transcripted below]
because there’s a lot of tech that goes into Doing Space
nevermind that we went to the fucking moon on what is basically three of today’s pocket calculators hooked together
There’s radio, there’s telemetry, there’s image processing, there’s image processing, there needs to be a reason to HAVE the satellites maintained in the first place
So, there’s a place that has the infrastructure (electricity, satellite dishes, computational support, networking, clocks/timing) to talk to the satellites but they also have either the necessity or the leisure to maintain the satellites
which, even if they’re not putting new ones in the sky, all the other resources they consume are expensive in a resource limited environment.
This means that there probably /wasn’t/ global nuclear war. The EMP & radiation would act like a solar flare and knock shit out of the sky
which is not to say that there wasn’t nuclear war. it just wasn’t global. Which makes sense, especially if Joe is poisoning the war boys, instead of it being a radiation problem. (Bartertown has radioactive water, though. but “clean” water is available, and max carried with him a Geiger counter. So, nuclear war happened, and so did fall out.)
[and then I derailed into talking about william gibson’s sprawl series]
I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS FROM DAY ONE PLEASE GIVE ME MORE MMFR SPACE HEADCANONS
Yeah, Okay! an earlier reblog of this post is going nuts, so this one of course is going to fall flat. BUT LISTEN
At the beginning of FR, Max is listening to a radio. A little handheld with a headset of some sort. It’s a gimmick to get the audience up to speed on the universe, but it’s also consistent with Max.
He’s crazy, but he’s not stupid. Everything he does has a reason. So, he’s listening to something real that isn’t his ghosts.
That means there’s someone broadcasting out there. Electricity. The luxury of maintaining a broadcast station.
And he specifically picked that radio and its headset up somewhere. It’s not the car radio. It’s not the police radio. Both of those are gone, because they’re useless to him. But he went out of his way at some point to pick up and maintain this little radio.
Who is he listening to?
I don’t know, but you know who doesn’t have radio capabilities? The Citadel.
The Citadel and the Bullet Farm, both run by military men who would know the benefits of radio communication to smooth operation. They have line of sight, which would make radio trivial. You could practically use a walkie talkie with that kind of line of sight. But no, they use morse code and a mirror.
But the Citadel has electricity. And it’s a safe bet that the Bullet Farm does too. Which would make them prime candidates for radio communication.
But they don’t. None of the vehicles that we see inside of have radios anymore. That tech is gone.
So. There’s someone out there with radio that Immortan Joe does not want the War Boys listening to. There is someone out there with a radio who is a threat to Immortan Joe.
With a policy of kill-all-trespassers and no radio communication whatsoever, the Immortan has incredibly information security: no outside information to pollute his custom brewed religion. There’s no way for War Boys to know that there’s anything else out there.
And hey, war boys aren’t stupid. Radios can be made out of a rock and a wire. Someone’s gonna figure it out.
And they get volunteered to the Bullet Farm mines or the Gas Town bloodsports. Half lives, you know?
Not to rain on the fun fic parade, but I think it’s possible that the one visible satellite (and the mention of others) is indeed only a legacy from the Before Time. Yes, many satellites will have suffered decayed orbits and re-entered. But there might be a few still visible. Mightn’t there?
Orbital mechanics experts: assemble. Important questions need to be answered. For science. And/or fic.
Because I saw @lurkinghistoric say they wanted raven!Max with a cowlick… and I wondered why I hadn’t actually drawn that before??? ASK AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE.
OH OH OH! This is adorable and irresistible. He is SO MUCH Max and SO MUCH a raven: the body language is wonderful. Thank you!
I understand everyone has different views on the matter, but sometimes it rubs me the wrong way when people act like it was so wrong for Furiosa to kill her crew. They obviously wouldn’t have helped her once they realized what her reason for going off course was. The women she was saving are more important than the men who worship the man who hurt them, as well as the man who forcibly took Furiosa from her home and murdered her mother. I don’t think there was any bond between them.
Whether it was ‘wrong’ for Furiosa to kill her crew or not, I do disagree about the bond between Furiosa and her crew. Everything in the body language and attitude of her crew spoke of familiarity and comfort. These War Boys – Ace especially – had done this countless times with Furiosa. We see it most strongly in the casual way Ace talks to Furiosa, the way they work together so fluidly when taking down Buzzards.
A natural bond emerges among soldiers when they do missions over and over again together.
It’s important to remember that one of Furiosa’s big motivations is redemption. She wants to get back to her roots, to strip away the Imperator she’s become and return to being the Vuvalini she once was. All this implies that, for a time, even if only out of a need to survive, Furiosa was a compliant part of Joe’s war machine, working among her fellow war boys and becoming a part of them. She was gone for 7,000 days at minimum – that’s 19 years. The idea that she could spend 20 years rising to the rank of Imperator, command an elite group of fighters on the War Rig, and still not bond at all with her crew is incredibly unlikely.
Ace doesn’t ask “Why won’t you stop” or “Why don’t you stop”, he asks Furiosa “Why can’t you stop”. To me, that says it all. He seems to have no reason not to trust her implicitly, and his disbelief and shock is painfully apparent. Being stabbed in the heart hurts more than being stabbed in the back.
I think there are a lot of textual clues–A LOT–that she had, at bare minimum, a level of professional trust and camaraderie with her crew, of the type you would expect in a military unit that has spent time training and fighting together. War bonds can be incredibly strong bonds–ask anyone who’s been in the military. It certainly took me multiple viewings to see some of these clues, but I think it’s undeniable that they’re there in the text. (Instead of listing every example I’ll just link here and here.)
But what I really want to say is about dramatic choices when you’re constructing a film story. In dramatic writing, you look for conflict. Films, in particular, are structured around high-stakes choices. You’re always looking for the impossible choice–the scenario that will force your character to choose between two unacceptable options.
Having Furiosa care about her crew, and then decide she has to kill them to achieve her mission, automatically creates a much richer dramatic environment. It complicates both the good guys and the bad guys. It complicates Furiosa, because it makes her not just a single-minded revenge machine, but a person who made real human connections in the place she was held prisoner–and then decides she has to betray those connections in pursuit of the goal that makes up the main plot of the film. It complicates the Citadel, because it turns the War Boys from one-dimensional cannon fodder into people who care for, and are cared about, by our protagonist. Even if they are also people who worship a rapist, slave-owning tyrant as their god.
What would they have done if they’d figured out her mission? We don’t actually know. It seems highly unlikely to me that all of them would have made the kind of ideological break needed to side with her, at the speed that would have been needed to not fuck up her plan. But that’s the most interesting option–if she knew that, and cared about them anyway. That’s maximum internal conflict right there, which is dramatic writing gold.
And I’d like to point out that all the stuff we’re talking about happens in her first few minutes of screen time. Lots of screenplays save the impossible choice for the third act. But the Buzzard chase is her character introduction! This is the beginning of the movie! And we’re already watching her make an impossible choice! That’s some next-level writing.
I have little to add to this excellent commentary except that I believe that John Iles who plays The Ace was formerly SAS military and also receives a credit as being a warfare and weapons advisor – so that’s perhaps an additional reason the War Rig v Buzzards sequence works so well.
Mad Max: Fury Road’s film editor, Margaret Sixel, is director George Miller’s wife. When she asked her husband why he thought she should do it as she had never edited an action film before, Miller replied, “Because if a guy did it, it would look like every other action movie” (x).
You know how you sometimes try to share something (a book, a movie, a song) you’re really, really into with someone else that you think will also be really, really into it and they…aren’t?
Like, they’re just sort of lukewarm on it at first and then they start straight up making fun of it? So it sort of sours you on this thing that you really, really fuckin’ liked?
Yeah. That’s where I am right now.
I’m sorry. It sucks.. It’s like “here, have a piece of my innermost soul” and then they laugh at it…
Hilariously (I guess?) the “thing” in question that I tried to share was Fury Road.
My folks kept saying, “Hey, Fury Road is up for all these awards. Is it really that good? Should we see it?” And I said, “I happen to have it on DVD and you happen to have a sizable television with a DVD player–let’s watch it sometime!”
So we did. And it didn’t work out as planned.
I had figured that, since they tend to like things like Star Wars, they would be able to deal with this, get into it, catch on to the nuances, understand some of the underlying ideas, and so on.
Instead, they kept walking in and out to get coffee or whatever, kept pausing it for one thing and another, didn’t laugh at the right parts, laughed at the wrong parts, nearly missed Doof Warrior’s flamethrowing guitar entrance, kept asking me who these people were or who those people were, didn’t think the storyline was “all that good,” didn’t pick up on the visual storytelling elements, actually talked over “Hope is a mistake” and then had to ask me what Max just said, thought the Vuvalini were “sort of unnecessary” and didn’t get why I like them so much, and (maybe worst of all) thought Furiosa’s anguished scream in the desert was “overly melodramatic.”
But, they said, we can see why it would be nominated for some technical stuff.
And I’m just like…are you actually being serious with me right now? I fucking love this movie. I don’t think you understand.
So I’m feeling a bit sour and salty right now.
I could totally see this happening. For me, it took some time to get into Fury Road. I mean, I _liked_ it fine when I first saw it (and my first viewing was in the theater, which I think was important), but I was mostly responding at first with: whoa! That was a fun ride! And it had some really cool elements that, the more I thought about them, seemed cooler and cooler.
And then because I’d seen it with my son but not with my wife, and she wanted to see it, too, I saw it in theaters a second time, and started to really fall in love with it, and then I fell down the rabbit hole with all my wonderful fellow obsessives, and we know where that ended up.
But it was a slow fuse at the beginning. I had a hard time really _seeing_ all the cool stuff because I wasn’t expecting it to be there. The movie’s almost deceptive in that way: it looks like a genre movie with stunts and explosions, and a lot of people (or at least people like me) have been conditioned to have low expectations of movies like that. And with the visual storytelling, you have to be paying attention to see it (or have obsessed online friends willing to point it out in loving detail).
In all honesty, too, especially at first when I wasn’t really processing all that was going on in terms of the deeper parts of the story, the scream in the desert kind of did seem overly melodramatic, and the Vuvalini did seem sort of underdeveloped. I don’t see them that way now, but I empathize with a first-time viewer who has that reaction.
Beginnings are delicate things. It can be hard when you love something and want to share it, just like it can be hard to be on the other side of that, when someone you care about who’s really excited to share something that you’re just not connecting with.
Maybe they’ll come around in time? But in the meantime, sorry you had to deal with that.
I know, right? I’m really regretting replying to that initial comment. I never should have given this person the idea that their views want airing in any way, and especially around where I am. Urgh.
(Anybody curious, please don’t go reply but let the idiot starve an attention death, like I should have done from the beginning)
“SHAPIRO: Can you give us an example of one of those scenes – how you kept the emotional content and the characters in there instead of just going for the big detonation?
SIXEL: You know, I’d often think, OK, I’m going to look at the film and only look at the Furiosa character.
SHAPIRO: This is Charlize Theron’s character.
SIXEL: Yeah – and see where she’s missing, where do I think she should be, what is she feeling at this particular point?
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “MAD MAX: FURY ROAD”)
CHARLIZE THERON: (As Imperator Furiosa) I’m going to need you to drive.
SIXEL: Because you know, when you got a whole lot of stunts, you can just get caught up in the action of that stunt and forget about where all your main characters are. So I would deliberately go through the film and try and keep them alive.
SHAPIRO: Alive, not meaning free from harm…
SIXEL: (Laughter) Yes.
SHAPIRO: …But alive meaning incorporated into the scene.
SIXEL: But you know, then I’d find a shot of the Vuvalini, who the older women – when one of the women died in the end chase, they would make this particular sign.
SHAPIRO: A hand gesture.
SIXEL: It was very beautiful, and in the midst of all the chaos, there was just this moment where they respected the dead Vuvalini. And it was those moments that actually brought you back to the human story. And we just paused the action there.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “MAD MAX: FURY ROAD”)
SIXEL: And we just let that moment hang there, which was kind of an unusual thing to do with a big action sequence. So all those moments added up and I think gave the film an extra quality.”
There’s a lot of things I love about this, but one of them is that this movie is OK with fudging stuff to get the desired result. It’s completely obvious in this gif (and now when you go back to watch the movie) that the War Rig lines up with a nice neat line of fine sand to create this practical effect on location. However, the result looks fantastic onscreen so I just don’t care. (I can’t even imagine how lame this would look if they’d tried to do this CGI.)
It’s totally obvious that the rock riders in that scene are going off huge motocross jumps too. But, who cares? It is a ridiculously OTT world, we established that back when… not sure when, but at the very latest when the Doof showed up. And it’s used as backdrop for the actually cool stuff – the characters and their conflict – rather than trying to use the stunts to make the movie cool.
There is something in here about how to do world building and suspension of disbelief, but I can’t quite put it together yet.
Right…I think we will forgive a lot when we’re emotionally engaged–we either won’t notice or we won’t care. That’s the #1 thing. If a movie loses your emotional engagement, the illusion starts falling apart very quickly.
Also, I think MMFR really excels at setting a tone in its opening scenes and just committing to it all the way through. People are doing all kinds of bonkers stunts that you probably wouldn’t survive in real life…but we also see that they can get hurt and killed and captured and vehicles can crash and get destroyed. The movie does a really, really good job of blending a sense of genuine danger into all this kamikrazy action…which helps with the emotional engagement once again, because you are actually afraid for the characters.
BTW, I’m still in awe that the sand was a practical effect. I thought it was digitally enhanced with a particle simulation at least.
Co-signing all of the above.
Also, I’m not sure there wasn’t CGI added to the sand effect. The flames are surely CGI, and I think in the later stages of the effect the sort of “misty” sand blowing off and around the hood has a CGI feel to it. Those aren’t things I noticed when viewing the effect in real-time, but staring at the gifs over and over I start to get that feeling.
None of which is meant as criticism, or as backing away from the caption I originally used, of this being one of my favorite practical effects. I just think it’s likely that they took a really wonderful practical effect and made it that much better with some judicious, restrained enhancements.
Which is just, hah! Restrained! As if anything in connection with this movie could be characterized as exhibiting restraint! Except it does. From Doof to the Rock Rider jumps to this sand plume to Max’s transfusion of Furiosa, the over-the-top elements are rigidly bound by a requirement that they maintain a degree of believability, that they not stretch the viewer’s credulity beyond a certain point. As someone who becomes That Guy when movies go beyond that point (which so many movies do), I appreciated that. It may be the thing I love most about it.
“For Fury Road’s fluid editing, Miller called upon his wife, Margaret Sixel, who had spent most of her career editing documentaries and had never cut an action movie before. ‘We’ve got teenage sons, but I’m the one who goes to the action movies with them!’ laughed Miller. ‘So when I asked her to do Mad Max, she said, ‘Well, why me?’ And I said, ‘Because then it’s not going to look like other action movies.“
And it doesn’t. Compare the smart, iterative set pieces of Fury Road to one of the incoherent car chases in Spectre, for example, and you’ll see that Sixel prizes a sense of spatial relationships that has become all too rare in action movies. ‘She’s a real stickler for that,’ said Miller. ‘And it takes a lot of effort! It’s not just lining up all the best shots and stringing them together, and she’s very aware of that. She’s also looking for a thematic connection from one shot to the next. If it regressed the characters and their relationships, she’d be against that. And she has a very low boredom threshold, so there’s no repetition.’
That Sixel was able to whittle 480 hours of footage down into a movie that sings still astounds Miller. ‘It’s like working in the head of a great composer,’ he said. ‘Movies like this one — in particular this one, because it’s almost a silent movie — are like visual music. In the same way that a composer has to have a strong casual relationship from one note to the next, paying attention tempo and melodic line and overall structure, it’s exactly the same process that a film editor must have.’ Sixel, surely, is one of the greats.”
so good on George Miller for giving credit to his wife and colleague. that said, FUCK YES women have ALWAYS edited for male directors without getting any recognition within the industry let alone any kind of mainstream acclaim. I mean, film editing isn’t really on the radar for most moviegoers/watchers so yeah, I don’t expect people to know this? But goddamn, even so many self-proclaimed film and cinema buffs fail to realize that so many of the “best” movies (mostly directed by men, natch) were edited by women. Does anyone remember that quote/anecdote about male directors discouraging their female film editors – or even actively sabotaging potential opportunities – because they didn’t want to lose the person who made sense of all their footage?
