I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve watched Fury Road by now, but there’s always a few random things I notice or focus on more than the last time around. This time it was:
1. The way the exposed pipes on the front of the Gigahorse look like the tubing on Immortan Joe’s mask.
2. Slit saying “He was scanning the horizon” always always sounds like a Monty Python line to me. There’s just such a specificity to it that it makes me laugh every time.
3. The first glance between Furiosa and Max when he’s strapped to Nux’s car. Furiosa’s expression is not super easy to read here, but I think there’s a tiny flash of pity. Not like she’s about to help him–she’s got her own problems–but at least a genuine, “sucks to be you.”
4. The way the movie unites Max and Furiosa in action before they’ve ever interacted. They both almost get decapitated by the Buzzard buzzsaw and both have a moment when they breathe a sigh of relief, one right after the other, after it’s taken out of commission.
5. The transitions between diegetic and non-diegetic sound in this movie are siiiiick. The one I’m thinking of is the way the hollow bangs of Furiosa knocking sand off the Rig become part of the soundtrack as Max approaches the Rig.
6. When Max first rolls up to the Rig, Furiosa isn’t automatically hostile. Her first expression is wary and maybe a little curious? Even when he’s pointing the gun at her.
She only shifts into kill mode after he threatens Angharad with the gun.
7. Speaking of which…I can’t believe I never put this together before, but Max is basically using Angharad as a human shield when he’s drinking the water, making her stand between him and Furiosa with the gun pointed at her. Another instance of the taken by force/willingly given pattern.
8. “I saw it all. My own bloodbag, driving the Rig that killed her.” I find all the different interpretations of Angharad’s fall off the Rig fascinating. It’s such an important moment in the story, but there’s so much ambiguity in it. Of course Nux wouldn’t think to blame Joe for any of this, but he doesn’t even seem to particularly blame Max–he doesn’t show any hostility toward him at any point later. It’s more like he blames the machine, specifically, for failing her.
9. It’s impossible to pick a favorite action sequence in Fury Road but the nighttime stuff in the bog has a particular sense of terror to it. We know exactly how pissed Joe is now that Angharad’s baby is dead; the Bullet Farmer is coming for them and they keep. getting. stuck. It’s the most horror-like of all the sequences and it’s totally appropriate that it takes place at night.
It’s also the only time we see anyone firing any kind of rockets or mortars or really using any kind of long-range weapon (other than Furiosa’s sniper shots, which unsurprisingly also factor into this scene). Pretty much all the other weapons in the movie are things that you have to be close enough to your target to see them before you can fire. The mortar rounds are very effective as a scary escalation at a point when our protagonists already seem completely fucked.
10. Meeting the Vuvalini. The scream in the desert is the climax of the scene, but the thing that always gets me in the feels is moment after, “I can’t wait for them to see it.” “See what?” “Home.” There’s just this long beat of silence and you think oh no.
11. The tiny little crack in Max’s voice on “…you’ll go insane.” Just kill me now.
All of this very much (god, the crack in his voice just fucKING KILLS ME), but particularly the one about Nux’s perspective on Angharad’s death–that he almost seems to blame the War Rig rather than Max (who was driving) or even Furiosa (who’s really at the center of this whole thing). I’ve kind of abstractly toyed with the thought before that the War Boys seem to consider cars/vehicles a nigh-living force in their world, and I’ve had a lot of trouble putting it into words but I’m going to give it a shot.
In their world, the War Boys seem to view themselves as one half of Joe’s army: the half with thumbs, the half that drives. The other half, the sacred half, is the V8 engine, the car itself that they drive. Nux is VERY protective of his position as driver of his particular car, both because of the status it affords him (obviously) and maybe because he considers the car…almost an ally? A comrade in arms? It would make sense, given the society that Joe sets up. So maybe he does blame the War Rig. Maybe there’s a part of Nux–a part that he knows is objectively foolish because he’s a blackthumb, he knows that cars don’t have thoughts or wills of their own, but a part that persists nonetheless–that thinks quietly that Furiosa betrayed them all and somehow convinced the War Rig to side with her. The great and beautiful creation of Immortan Joe, THE War Rig, betraying him (and isn’t Furiosa a great and beautiful creation of Joe too, from that angle, all the parts ripped to pieces and put back together as something dangerous and unstoppable that he does not control nearly as much as he might have imagined?)
When I was a little kid, Disney’s Mulan was one of my very favorite movies (between that and my unwavering love for Robin Hood, a lot of my current personality traits should be easy to guess). And there were a lot of reasons, not least of which are:
a) the gorgeous animation (the avalanche, the smoke, the fire, it’s just so incredible);
b) the music (LET’S GET DOWN TO BUSINESS); and
c) Mulan, come on guys, it’s a girl who cheats her way into the army and becomes a hero even when no one–not even herself–believes in her, you had to know that was going to be my JAM.
But…like…it was also one of my favorite love stories (I also really love Beauty and the Beast, which will get its own rant someday), which I recently discovered is not a standard opinion. A lot of people spend a lot of time making smart remarks about Shang’s gay crisis. And…this might have just been me, but the change between Ping/Mulan never struck me as the pertinent part of the relationship. I figured that, yeah, Shang was 100% Here For That even though Ping was his subordinate and therefore off-limits. And then I figured that Shang was still 100% Here For That after watching Mulan dismantle a palace and light a warlord on fire, with the added bonus that she wasn’t his subordinate. So my assessment was that Shang was in love with the person, the earnest but slightly awkward person who almost flunked out of the army and specializes in haphazard plans based on blowing shit up and looks startled whenever people like them. And since he was in love with the person, his anger was because that person lied to him, not because that person had a different set of bits than he’d originally assumed, and his interest was in the person, not in their face or their clothes.
And that meant a lot to me as a kid for reasons that I wasn’t really sure how to articulate.
Here’s the thing. I am conventionally fairly attractive, through a combination of good genes and good fortune, and I recognize the inherent advantage that entails. I’m not a show-stopper or anything, but my features are symmetrical and my skin is usually clear and…well, to be honest, the triple-D cup size means that the rest of that stuff almost doesn’t matter. My shoulders are too broad to look like a pinup and I’m too short to look leggy and curvaceous and I’m too curvy to be ‘petite’, but I did okay on the physical end of the spectrum. I could probably understand if someone came up and asked to buy me a drink or something. I consistently cannot understand when someone shows interest, romantic or otherwise, in me once I’ve opened my mouth. You know the running joke of ‘well I’m not stopping traffic but at least I have a good personality’? Yeah, my assessment of myself is the exact opposite. None of my self-esteem issues related to the way I look, they’re all about the person who lives under my skin.
And Mulan is pretty, she’s lovely, no one questions that, she doesn’t ever seem to question that. But she always looks surprised when people like her, and she tries so hard to act the way people expect her to act, and she looks ready to take punishment for acting outside the expectations, even when she’s been killing armies and slaying warlords and saving emperors. I like to think she’s like me: she knows the skin is pretty, but she’s terrified that the person underneath isn’t lovable. And then she goes to the army and breaks laws and dishonors her family. And she makes friends who risk their lives for that person, and she gains respect for that person, and Shang falls in love with that person, and it’s all done on that person’s merits, whether you want to call that person Mulan or Ping or whatever, not on the merits of how pretty her face is or how busty she is or how elegant or well-mannered she can act.
And…that meant a lot to me as a scared, damaged kid. It means a lot to me, now, currently, in my differently scared, differently damaged almost-adult self. I probably haven’t made a lot of sense here, come to think of it. If you persevered all the way to the end, I tip my hat to you.
