missmuggle: “WE ARE NOT THINGS” My piece for furyroadfanzine…
Friday, August 26th, 2016“WE ARE NOT THINGS”
My piece for furyroadfanzine and the no text one, BECAUSE I SPENT A LOT OF TIME DRAWING ALL OF THEM
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“WE ARE NOT THINGS”
My piece for furyroadfanzine and the no text one, BECAUSE I SPENT A LOT OF TIME DRAWING ALL OF THEM
Reposted from http://ift.tt/2bSV6As.
“
Miller’s purpose was to tell an honest story, and he let nothing else get in the way of that. Not even the male gaze.
I’m just going to drop this quote from him in, because it relates to the same thing, “it couldn’t be a man taking five wives from another man. That’s an entirely different story.”
There’s words and there’s action; Miller may not label himself a feminist, may not have set out to make a feminist movie, but he put his ideas and dreams and heart and soul into this impossible movie. And that heart and soul says he respects women deeply; he respects them enough to understand that a man taking wives away makes it a different story. The movie is so consistently insistently precise that even if he says he didn’t mean to, I can see it.
If someone says they respect me as a person but cannot stop staring at my ass, I can see it. Does it matter if they “deliberately” look at my ass?
Actions matter.
”
– bonehandledknife, from Filmmaking Intent v. Film Theory
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Favorite world-building elements: Limited exposition
When introducing another one of my favorite movies, Kevin Smith said:
It doesn’t give a shit whether you know what’s going on or not. It dumps you right into the middle of an existing universe that things have happened in before, and the movie accepts the fact that hey, our audience might be bright enough to catch up.
That’s what Fury Road does.
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Favorite world-building elements: Realistic depiction of trauma
One of the things that makes Fury Road so immersive is the way it presents the result of violence. Unlike movies in which characters shrug off what in the real world would be horrific injuries*, the inhabitants of the Wasteland experience the full effect of the bad things that happen to them.
Some examples:
George Miller financed the original Mad Max with his earnings as an ER doctor, and made the movie in part to explore the effects of trauma on people who encounter lots of it. Although he hasn’t worked as a physician in many years, his experience clearly still informs his approach to storytelling, and adds greatly to the believability of Fury Road.
*No disrespect to Holy Grail. That shit’s hilarious.
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I saw Fury Road again today. This was in a better theater in 3D; I figured I should give that a try even though I’m a curmudgeon who usually avoids it.
It was so worth it. :-)
Besides the visuals, I was able to hear things I hadn’t heard the first two times. Like this: After the lancer on the war rig’s fuel pod chromes himself and shouts “witness me!” before leaping onto the Buzzards vehicle, you hear a chorus of war boys shouting “witness!” in response to his sacrifice. But there’s also one shout of “mediocre!”
Which was hilarious, but so perfect. Because in the hyper-masculine war boy culture, there’s always going to be That One Guy.
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The Vuvalini | A Working Library:
There’s been some discussion of whether or not Fury Road is a feminist film, whether its unabashed celebration of violence and death preclude that label, or whether its admittedly extreme presentation of misogyny and literal smash-the-patriarchy plot device make it too facile to perform feminism. I’ll confess I’m not moved by either argument: feminism, like any political viewpoint, can be just as capably communicated via hyperbole as more subtle forms. And while feminism and non-violence have a long history, feminism is hardly a subset of pacifism—one does not need to be a pacifist in order to be a feminist. Not to mention that any work of art sufficiently good enough to warrant criticism is likely to be complicated enough that a straight up declaration of “yes, this is feminist” or “no, it isn’t” won’t be trivial.
The more interesting question is not whether or not the film is feminist but whether it furthers feminism: whether, via plot or character or camera it furthers the ideas of feminism.
To that I answer a resounding yes.
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