Baroque isn’t the first word most folks would associate with Fury Road, but I’d argue this movie exemplifies the concept. I recall Guillermo Del Toro describing certain projects as baroque when they are detailed down to the most minute elements; his art style can be rather baroque. Whether you look closely or step back for a wider look at his films, you will see absurd levels of detail. Everything is considered.

George Miller’s style of filmmaking for Fury Road is similar, even if the aesthetic is post-apocalyptic.

An enormous ensemble is filled with distinct characters who have obvious lore associations that is mostly explained via aesthetics. Actor performances are outsized. You can be confident these characters are filled with character even if you haven’t seen the other movies, read the comic books, or seen interviews with the cast and crew sharing details. Just doing a few searches for Fury Road information brought up so much Mad Max lore that my head’s still spinning.

The editing is also baroque, packing so many quick shots into sequences that it feels like you’re somehow watching action occur from inside and outside vehicles simultaneously. A conscious focus on clarity of framing (trivia says they chose to center characters in the frame to make it easier to track) means you can absorb a lot of the exhilarating details without losing everything to the blur of violence.

And oh boy, the violence. These creative characters smashing around the movie are doing so with gleeful, drug-hazed brutality. The energy is usually frenetic. There are so many explosions and car flips. I’ve never seen another movie with stunts that feel as visceral as these ones. Though the special effects aren’t exactly hidden — often, the visuals look like a really cool art wall at a tattoo parlor rather than shooting for realism — a shocking amount of the movie was produced with practical effects, and you can feel it. Fury Road is a movie made out of exclamation marks with hardly a comma to breathe.

With this level of detail everywhere you look, it’s fitting that the actual plot of the movie is simple. Our Heroes try to get from point A to point B with minimal deaths, then are forced to turn around and return to point A. There isn’t much to follow if you don’t care to do so. The main character doesn’t talk very much.

If you do pay attention, you’ll note character development all over the place. Max goes from a feral blood bag to someone who goes to any end to save Furiosa’s life, the brides each find different routes to becoming fighters in charge of their own destinies, Nux turns his zealotry away from Immortan Joe–but while the presence of these arcs serve as a rugged scaffold to connect action scenes, Fury Road is still mostly about action scenes.

It’s fun to have such beautiful models centered in a fashion that seems typical for genre movies — presumably, under-dressed for our titillation as much as Immortan Joe’s — who each let slip quite a bit of character in their depictions and coexist in the movie alongside elderly and disabled women. They’re a great example of how Fury Road subverts the very tropes it benefits from. Despite the whole movie ostensibly being framed as another episode in Max’s life, this is one of the more radically feminist movies in the genre.

Behind-the-scenes trivia is worth reading for this one. The shoot it took to produce a ballet of exploding Burning Man cars was as harrowing as you’d think, and I can’t begin recapping all the trivia here. It starts with “Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy hated each other” and carries through “the oldest actress was 78 and did her own stunts” into “the nearly-naked girls nearly froze to death because the desert is flipping cold” and beyond. Hopefully everyone got over the difficult shoot well enough to feel proud of their contributions to one of cinema’s modern classics in retrospect.

My love for Fury Road isn’t anything new; it was one of the most popular movies of 2015. We knew Fury Road was a classic when it came out. For my money, it’s as good as Dredd 3D, the under-performing 2012 release that also featured an oppositional male/female pairing getting closer through killing people. The front half of the decade was so good for SF action movies!

(image credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)

A mellower, low-saturation story told in the “Repo! the Genetic Opera Universe” that isn’t about rich people, but about horny performance artists. Also, the pandemic here is novel organs rather than organ failure–but I think you get my drift.

I just watched Hellraiser yesterday and they have one basic similarity – in the commingling of pain and pleasure, losing the lines that distinguish them. It’s interesting how Hellraiser was so violent and desecrating, but Crimes of the Future felt sensual and rapturous.

Normally i do not watch, much less recommend, movies that not only make the death of a child central to the story, but starts off the movie showing the mother killing a child. (Not a spoiler, it’s literally the first five minutes.) But the emotional temperature is so turned down that it didn’t bother me.

Everyone is so mellow in this movie, mostly – well, it more seems like numb than mellow. Pleasure isn’t pleasure anymore. Surgery is sex. They only feel anything when they’re being gored. Léa Seydoux fellates Viggo Mortensen’s viscera and makes it feel like a normal moment of intimacy between a long-time couple.

I’m always more into horror aesthetic with dark themes rather than horror itself, strictly speaking, and that’s what that was. Delicious, weird, lovely, grimy, bleak, warm, loving. I want Viggo Mortensen’s wardrobe.

(Image credit: Vertigo Releasing. This review was originally posted on Letterboxd on Jan 25, 2023.)

This movie is pure vibe. I am *always* in the mood to play this movie and listen to it. The sound design, the soundtrack, the emotions I feel as everything plays out…it’s a nightmare on xanax where you’re too numb to feel how bad it is that these surreal things are happening.

I loved Donnie Darko as a kid. I was exactly the right age when it came out (thirteen and an edgelord). As an adult, I find myself thinking a lot more about how the movie feels irresponsible at its core, and maybe how that dangerous feeling is really the appeal of it. The titular character is a paranoid schizophrenic. The movie is essentially a paranoid episode if everything the voice in your head was telling you is true. And it glamorizes the tragedies that befall this sickly young man, bestowing him with attention and mystique and a degree of deranged coolness that resonates with damaged teenagers. “Your fantasies are true,” says the movie, “and you really do see the core of the way the universe works, and your untimely death fits into it aesthetically well.”

It would be easy for someone struggling with unreality to take Donnie Darko as a positive example. So it’s dangerous–evocative of sadness without being sad–and that sort of ferality is a lot of what makes it feel darkly delicious. Maybe that’s just me, as a frequent mental health patient.

It’s definitely a lot more relatable from a Millennial teen’s pov, but now as someone who has grown into something that vaguely resembles adulthood, I mostly enjoy it for the vibes. Donnie Darko makes emotional sense. Any rational analysis of the plot (and time travel/milieu) is going to fail to support the best qualities of the product, which is entirely vibes, the incredible cast (Maggie Gyllenhaal!!! my wife!!!!), and the sound design.

(This review was originally posted on Letterboxd on Feb 18 2023. Image credit Newmarket Films.)

The romance between Neo and Trinity makes the most sense to me if you don’t think of them as individuals. The two of them are sort of aspects of the same person.

Neo is the trans egg yet to crack. Trinity is his motivation to leave the Matrix, the love of his life, his soulmate, the reflection of his innermost truth: Trinity is the woman Neo must become.

Ask you local trans friend about aesthetic crushes. That’s where you think you’re in love with someone, but then you realize you just wish you looked exactly like them. You can spend a long time thinking you’re actually in love with a representation of your gender. It’s a heady, passionate affair, since there isn’t a real person on the other side, but the mental ideal of your authentic self.

She was almost The One. You could think of The One as being the whole self, the full identity encompassing Neo/Trinity/the transition/their real form. She was almost The One. Trinity really thought this was going to turn out for her, that she would get this authentic life where she starts out complete. The One wasn’t born into Trinity; The One was born into Neo. By following Trinity – the feminine ideal of Neo’s perfect aesthetic – down the rabbit hole, out of society, into a messier and more true place, Neo finally unites with The One. He is exactly who he is, and who he was always meant to be.

The Matrix isn’t just a trans narrative; it’s a story of true trans liberation inside self, regardless of what the system has done to you.

~

When I was a kid, mostly I just loved the action scenes.

You absolutely cannot beat the aesthetic of The Matrix. It landed solidly on my childhood when I’d already been frothing over Boomer Shooters for years. My siblings and I wanted trench coats, but I’m pretty sure we made do with those long cardigans popular in Y2K. We rehearsed the entire lobby gun sequence to the point we could reenact it without looking at the screen. My mom didn’t even let us have toy guns! We got scowled at for making gun shapes with our hands. We probably used books to shoot at each other or something.

Did you try to emulate Bullet Time too? The thing where the action slows and the camera swings around the actor? We did it by standing on one leg and hopping in a stupid little circle.

Morpheus and Neo’s training fight on the tatami was another favorite. As an extremely soft-bodied nerd whose mobility training was sitting in a computer chair, I still somehow taught myself to kick at sister head height. I don’t think I actually kicked my sister in the head. But I was ready for it.

They changed our goddamn lives, these action scenes. I had never seen anything so cool in my life.

~

I just can’t get over what an excellent metaphor red pill/blue pill is. I think about it all the time.

You are either complicit in the system and happy to live in its simulation of life, or you are on the other side of it and everything looks completely different.

When you blue pill, you choose to care about all the stuff inside the Matrix. Imagine living in the Matrix and you care about the presidential election. It doesn’t actually change anything fundamentally about the simulation, but it’s thorough enough that you can die without realizing that your actions changed nothing about the way the machines used you.

With the red pill, things like the USA president inside the Matrix don’t matter as much to you. You just want the machines to stop. Maybe you pity the people who have chosen to stay in the Matrix. Most of the people inside the Matrix don’t even know or care you exist. But you have a chance at something sloppy and real without any guarantees of safety and at least the machine isn’t eating you passively.

It’s hard to argue life is better outside the Matrix. It’s kinda not. But there’s plenty of people there, whether they wanted to be there or not, and you can’t really go back once you’ve gotten out. (Plus, once you care about the folks on the outside – actually care about them – you don’t want to leave them behind.)

It’s easy to imagine the Wachowski Sisters feeling themselves transitioning from blue to red pill; raised and regarded as white guys where that’s the hot demographic, only to start living as trans feminine – one of the most marginalized identities in America – would radically change everything about the world they knew. Everything about the lives they live must have changed transitioning that way.

I’m not trans. I can’t point to as obvious a moment where I started popping red pills. I’ve kinda microdosed my whole life, little by little, until a very blue (da ba dee) world has become very estrogen dominant. Uh, red. I said red. The two biggest turning points for me were the 2016 presidential election and the 2020 pandemic; only recently have I found myself incapable of squirming my way back into the simulation. So I think about red pills and blue pills a lot. There’s just whole swaths of humanity I don’t know how to interface with anymore.

But I remember being the other way, rather vividly. I even spent most of my adulthood there. I remember going to an anarchist meet-up and feeling like they were speaking a completely different language. They didn’t think any of the issues I cared about were issues. They were so polite to me, but seemed to feel bad for me, and didn’t trust me. I remember being *so confused*.

Now that I’m also starting to read machine code, it’s also easy to see why blue lumpen would be incredibly suspicious or dismissive of the rest. A lot of fringe stuff doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The blue/red pill metaphor has already been famously coopted by men’s rights. It’s hard to communicate a difference in philosophies that serve the system versus subvert it, particularly when you still believe the system well enough to stay in the blue. And as Cypher showed us, there are plenty of people who know what the machines are up to and totally fine with it, which further obfuscates any social proof element.

Whatever their strengths or flaws as filmmakers, The Wachowski Sisters truly caught something big in the net of their metaphor. The exact details of The Matrix, from its cyberpunk aesthetic to the awesome fight scenes, are extremely anachronistic, but the overarching story is a more timeless one about haves and have-nots, rulers and exploited, systematic versus disenfranchised. I wonder at other places in history where someone falling between castes might relate to Neo’s experience. Privilege lost in order to gain authenticity. Realizing how many lies you’ve believed in. I don’t think this is a modern experience, although the ubiquity of state control and media reach might make the transition more jarring than ever.

(image credit: Warner Bros.)