My top 10 disconnected observations about Mad Max: Fury Road

First, some news: my review of the relatively new Arnold Schwarzenegger zombie movie Maggie is up at Monstrum Athanaeum, and you can expect to see some more of my writing there in the near future.

Unrelatedly, I finally watched Mad Max: Fury Road last night, but since no one is paying for my opinion of that movie, prepare for my thoughts in their unsifted form:

1. It was a late night showing, and the projectionist put on Entourage by mistake. It took us a surprisingly long time to be sure we were watching the wrong movie, because Entourage begins with some sort of yacht party and jet skis, and water everywhere and no land in sight. But knowing that Mad Max is about a parched dystopia, I guess we all thought this might be a flashback of some sort... that the party might be interrupted by a nuclear flash. Even knowing now what we were watching, I think that would have been an improvement.

2. The actual opening of Fury Road is quite effective at breaking Max down. They use a trick I feel like I've seen work elsewhere as well: physically scarring the hero as a consequence of their loss (and not in a badass way, like the fashionable cheek or over-the-eye scar). We, the audience, know that the hero can get out of any jam they get into in Act 1 of their own movie. We also know, at least subconsciously, that no matter how dejected the hero gets it is likely to be turned around by the end of the movie; no matter how bloodied up he gets we know he can heal up and clean up in time for the final battle. But mutilations, burns, scars, and tattoos stay with the character no matter how sloppy or glib the writing gets--they have to matter. And because a hero's good looks are sacred in a franchise, this tactic rarely gets used. Max's involuntary tattoo is especially painful because the mark is a matter of identity and identification, and in particular because...

3. So often apocalypse fiction is, weirdly, a fantasy of self-expression. Stripped of our monoculture and commoditized comforts, everything we carry with us or surround ourselves with becomes an expression of character. One thing Fury Road does well is this characterization-through-objects. You see it in other apocalypses: consider your favorite survivors' choices of clothing, weapons of choice, equipment, and accoutrements. But I wonder what it says about us that we have this recurring collective daydream, that if civilization collapsed, and day-to-day survival was a struggle, we would just have so much more time for self-expression, you know?

4. A few absurdities aside, I've realized that Fury Road is the best--if nothing else, the most successfully audacious--piece of movie world-building that I've seen since the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

5. Relatedly, the thing that might have surprised me the most in Fury Road's scorched-earth world is the underlying sense that humanity is starting to crawl out from the wreckage of the apocalypse. My knowledge of the Mad Max mythos is spotty, but this possibility of rejuvenation seems like a new thing. But the people of the Citadel have dug a well deep enough to bring water to the surface. They've established hydroponics and even open-air gardens. Functioning trade networks are starting to emerge (the Citadel peacefully receives goods from Gas Town and the Bullet Farm, both separate settlements apparently devoted to producing and exporting a single commodity). By setting himself as a despotic god-king, Immortan Joe is misusing these things, but they are all markers of progress.

6. At the intersection of politics, economics, self-expression and world-building, one thing someone should write a paper on is the way characters in the Mad Max universe (one of intense scarcity) project power through conspicuous consumption. For instance, the Bullet Farmer flaunts his abundance of ammunition by wearing bullets as clothes and shooting profligately into the distance. Immortan Joe showers his supplicants with water in a naked display of power. The War Boys shoot gouts of flame from the sides of their vehicles, presumably burning precious gasoline in the process.

7. You can't talk about Fury Road without commenting on the names. For some reason in a universe where characters answer to things like Corpus Colossus, Rictus Erectus, Toast the Knowing, and The Doof Warrior, the name I have the hardest time swallowing is Max Rockatansky.

8. Nor can you talk about Fury Road without mentioning the feminist subtext. I think turning the movie into an outright allegory for women's empowerment would be a mistake, for all the reasons that Tolkien disliked allegory: namely that it reduces a rich story to a set of talking points. But short of that, I applaud what the movie did in terms of portraying well-defined and often powerful woman characters. All the more because the movie never turns to the audience and says, "I hope we're all learning something from this." It's possible that George Miller didn't create Imperator Furiosa for Culture Points. Maybe he created her because he thought the character made perfect sense in the world he had created.

9. And the people who actively object to it need to get over themselves.

10. Speaking of George Miller, some folks are surprised that this is the same director who made Babe in 1995. But go back and watch the first scene of Babe and tell me there's no trace of horrific dystopia in that movie.

I know something you don't know

If you're like me (and you are) you've had this experience: you find out about something, and then you see it everywhere. This is basically how I ended up learning a lot about web writing this week. I kind of oscillate between thinking of it as having learned something about the craft of web writing, and having learned something about why the internet is awful.

There's a certain style of headline writing that's been taking over the internet. I won't hesitate to compare it to a virus or a fungal blight, because even if the underlying idea is solid, the majority of the execution is terrible. You probably already know what I'm talking about: a hyperbolic, emotion-based claim that doesn't so much indicate an article's content as dare you to prove the headline writer a liar by reading the article in it's entirety. "You Won't Believe..." "Inconceivably Awesome..." "...Will Blow Your Mind." If the internet were truly as rich with such content we would all be quivering husks by now, our every assumption about the world shattered and our relentlessly blown minds a thin paste around the interior edges of our skulls.

Someone has taken it on themselves to make a browser plugin, Downworthy (warning: some language in the link), that changes these stock hyperboles into something more believable. "Literally" thus becomes "Figuratively" and "Will Blow Your Mind" becomes "Might Perhaps Mildly Entertain You For a Moment." I don't think I want to install it myself, because if anyone starts writing headlines like that in earnest I want to give them credit, and not mistake them for the work of my cynical plugin. Besides, Downworthy would only externalize what I already do in my head as I read these things. The point is that stumbling on this plugin was among my first steps down the rabbit hole.

Soon after this (or before, I don't remember--reality is confusing) I found the same style lampooned again, on Cracked.com, of all places. The irony here is that for years I had been thinking of this as "Cracked style," and if they didn't pioneer it they were the first place I saw it. Not to be too judgmental--I could forgive this sort of thing from a humor site. It was only when it caught on elsewhere that it actually became objectionable.

The last piece of the puzzle--I didn't think of it as a puzzle until I saw this--fell into place shortly after I found, through wandering internet happenstance, the following tweet:

Dear CNN https://t.co/B0edardjf3 The curiosity gap is not for every news story. Especially about murder.
— Adam Mordecai (@advodude) January 23, 2014

In reference to this tweet:

14-year-old girl stabbed her little sister 40 times, police say. The reason why will shock you. http://t.co/5ZFqHFrviw
— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) January 23, 2014

I took a moment to be suitable appalled about it all. But to the point of this post, I hadn't realized we (and by "we" I mean you, CNN) had sunk so low. And more to the point, I had finally given a name to my pain, and it is "curiosity gap."

A name enabled research. Whose bright idea was this? Well, I'm not being scientific about this, but some Googling indicates that the concept originated in behavioral economics courtesy of George Loewenstein in the mid 90s, and entered the marketing vocabulary (which is to say, metastasized) around 2006. The concept itself is innocent enough: people are curious about what you are going to say when you tell them you know something they don't know, and which they thought was unlikely.

Of course the difference between "informing" and "lying" rests mainly on externalities, what's good for telling the truth is good for lying, too. Conversely, the technique isn't evil in and of itself. Manipulative? Maybe, but not necessarily--surprising information exists. Tired, though? Hells yes. At least the way they're driving it right now.

I do believe that knowing the name of something is a sort of power. Now I (and you, too) can recognize this thing. I can conceptualize it. With the proper precautions I may even summon it someday and make it do my bidding. For good, of course.