Mad Max: Fury Road as worship of classical physics

Still from Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).

Mad Max: Fury Road is thematically rich. There's bodily autonomy (I count at least three different invocations of the motif); femininity and choice; culture and identity. But as a newcomer to the franchise, I was most struck by how raw physicality plays into it all.

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Earlier this year, Venkatesh Rao (riffing on Penrose) described a trichotomy of ways reality and fiction give us affective experiences: physical, social and mathematical. Think Matthew Reilly vs. the Brontës vs. Agatha Christie; Angry Birds vs. The Sims vs. Tetris. (As with most systems of classification, it falls apart quickly when interpreted as a sharp-edged "either-or", but it does provide a useful framework to begin from.)

Action movies, as you'd expect, deliver most of their gratification through the physical. But it's not just these. Interstellar, for example, achieves a great deal of its emotional highs through moments of pure physics -- conservation of momentum, torque, thrust. It's an ode to the raw mechanics of piloting a spaceship (much as The Hunt for Red October is an ode to submarine piloting).

Similarly, Mad Max: Fury Road is a panegyric to the automobile, but its homage to physicality extends beyond that.

War culture. Ibid.

Conservation of energy

In a world without electricity, energy isn't abstracted away behind light switches. Giant pulleys are moved by human pedalling, cars are pushed out of mud with sheer grit, waterways open at the pull of a gargantuan lever. Every reaction is directly caused by an equally visceral action. This is a world without power steering.

The war drums (and war guitar, of course) embody this -- camera shots lingering on the drummers as their entire bodies swing into beat after beat, so entwined their riggings that they seem to be an extension of their war machines.

Indeed, even social power in this world is only ever a single level of remove from physical power. The characters with high standing -- Immortan Joe, Furiosa, and so on -- are characterised by martial prowess and brute strength.

This all certainly borrows heavily from the pre-feudal warlord culture the film riffs upon, but it's tangibly a part of the film's direction, not some contingent bit of stylistic afterthought. Energy and physical motion is currency.

Scarcity

And if physical motion is currency in Fury Road, then engine fuel is its most fungible manifestation. Fuel is the resource that raiding parties are sent out to hunt for; fuel is the bartering chip that gets the War Rig into the canyon. Unlike paper currency, its value is intrinsic -- characters count the fuel they have left, the number of days' mileage they can make on it. Even in a dystopian wasteland it can meaningfully be hoarded and stolen. And, of course, it can be destroyed.

Fury Road both depicts and embodies the worship of scarce resources. Fuel, water, bullets: everything is in short supply. Every shot fired, every extra gallon of gas, counts.

This attitude pervades the entire culture -- even the most cloistered of the escapees know like second nature how to count bullets and match them to their firearms. Water is coveted and fought for; its long-forgotten cousin, "green", spoken of with religious devotion. Human bodies are treated as scarcely more than sources of scarce commodities -- milk, blood, physical labour.

Ibid.

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Physicality embeds itself within the film in plenty more ways: the fetishistic cultural artefacts of the different factions; the motif of Furiosa's arm as both source of strength and mask; literal masks and exoskeletons and cyborg symbolism; telescopes and rifle scopes as an extension of the body. It's pervasive. The physical is everywhere. That's what makes Fury Road so effective as an action movie -- everything about it is written in the same dynamic language of force and momentum that underlies the genre.

Thoughts on Jupiter Ascending

A friend and I were excited to see Jupiter Ascending after hearing The Daily Dot describe it as “the precise gender-flipped equivalent of all those movies where some weak-chinned rando turns out to be the Chosen One, defeats a supervillain despite having no real personality or skills, and gets rewarded with a kiss from Megan Fox”.

Channing Tatum and Mila Kunis almost succeeding at sexual tension in Jupiter Ascending (2015).

The description was pretty much on point. To borrow David Prokopetz’s turn of phrase, “it’s not meant to be a Chosen Hero story; it’s meant to be a Secret Princess story”. The following notes are influenced by that interpretation.

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The film is tightly constructed, with the sort of economy of dialogue which suggests the screenplay went through dozens of revisions before it ever saw pen and paper. (My closest frame of reference is Nolan’s Inception, which I heard was a pet project which took a decade or so realise. I have no idea whether this is the case for Jupiter Ascending and would rather not look it up and spoil the mystery for myself.)

The autobiographical opening minutes meld sharp writing and cinematography to intimately contextualise of protagonist Jupiter’s relationship to her mother. The following scene, the first and only one to show all three Abrasax siblings together, exemplifies show-don’t-tell, hinting at the complicated relationships between the siblings while establishing the “delicate polity” style of the film’s plot, and doing so entirely by implication. By the time we’re introduced to present-day Jupiter we’re barely eight minutes into the film and neither the pacing nor the narrative deftness drop from thereon out.

A friend of mine later remarked to me that “nary a wasted scene” is a little too strong a description. The bees, for example, constitute a Chekov’s gun that’s fired into somebody’s foot a couple of scenes after its introduction, thrown in mostly for trailer-bait CGI spectacle (there are plenty of other ways to establish “you’re a wizard, Jupiter”). On the whole, though, I remain impressed by the film’s ability to keep moving forward with every shot.

The Abrasax siblings, ibid. Eddie Redmayne’s performance as the anemic, serpentine Balem Abrasax (leftmost) removes what little chance I had left of taking The Theory of Everything seriously.

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The political stage is proven strictly more important than action hero physics, contra many thrillers which mix both elements. Deutoragonist Caine (Tatum) spends the entire movie out of his element, a creature of war clearly ill-at-ease in the bureaucratic and political minefields he escorts Jupiter (Kunis) through.

Notably, even though Caine wins his fair share of battles through martial prowess, he never wins Jupiter’s for her. To be sure, his role is more than mere “dumb muscle” — he functions as messenger, as critical distraction, as leverage and as table-turner. But never does he “finish off” a primary antagonist. His direct influence is limited to the ancillary mooks surrounding the villains and the scenery he explodes his way through. Jupiter Ascending is explicitly constructed around the notion that the pen — in the form of contracts, inheritances, alliances, deceptions — is mightier, that war and physical violence are a mere complement to words, not an alternative.

Division [review]

Lee S. Hawke’s short story anthology Division is subtitled “a collection of science fiction fairytales”, and I’ll admit I wonder about that. To me, fairy tales epitomise oral storytelling tradition, trading in archetypical characters and grand, good versus evil dramas. This is not so much a failing as a characteristic of the medium: simple, powerful imagery is memorable, and thus it is this that survives generations of retelling. Division, on the other hand, exemplifies written word storytelling. Its characters are deep and recognisably human, its thematic explorations nuanced enough to defy Aesopian one-liners. As Hawke puts it, it’s “not Cinderella in Space”, it’s fiction which only resembles fairy tales insofar as it compels the reader to experience childlike wonder, insofar as the themes are timeless, which could be said of many a great work of fiction. It’s firmly a creature of its own medium, and it’s all the better for it.

The Soldier sets the tone for the the anthology, grim but hopeful, speculative in its setting but timeless in its themes. The enemies of this way are pestilence, disease; the eponymous soldiers, people blessed with supercharged immune systems that might hold the key to developing cures. Hawke takes this clinical presence and grounds it in the personal, the protagonist's torture as his body is razed as a battlefield bringing home the direness of this war far better than any bombastic, globe-spanning treatment of the same could.

Cover art, Division, Lee S. Hawke (2015). Blind Mirror Publishing.

Please Connect asks us what first love means, absent the social narratives that colour our perceptions of what romance and attraction “are” or “should be”. The protagonist, conditioned by a society that has obsoleted face-to-face interaction, sees even his sanitised courtship with an anthropological eye that Hawke impossibly transmutes into a warmer parlance. There is a raw eroticism in the language here, drawn from where it has always lain: in the quickening of a pulse, in the wetness of a breath.

Dissimilation and The Grey Wall both hark upon the themes of unreality and altered perception (the former with its Inception-like layerings of non-worlds; the latter with an expressly unreliable narrator whose doublethink allows Hawke a novel angle on magical realism). Both these stories ask something about when and how it is better to live within fantasy than reality, the question left deliberately ambiguous despite the characters’ own certainty. Meanwhile, Lemuria is set in the midst of an apocalyptic alien invasion where anyone who sees the monsters, dies, an incursion into psychological horror that is overshadowed by a late-game twist which all too briefly asks us what rated we would rather endure than death.

Beauty is perhaps the most explicitly political of the lot, a disillusioned neo-“plastic surgeon” ruminating on the homogeneity of his work:

He’d been a young girl then, and he still remembered the first advertisements. Transcend age. Transcend race. Transcend gender. But since he’d stepped out of medical school, all he’d ever done was fulfil the same three basic templates, again and again and again. The possibility of infinite variation had led only to convergence.

It’s a powerful meditation on the moral dangers of fashions, and on the beauty of the different and of individual expression.

The final story, Division, is about two women's grief following the death of their daughter. It's told through the eyes of one mother, Diyani, a passionate mechanic whose affinity is for her work, not people. Her heartbreak is raw on the page, her anger twisting her away from the world and, especially, her partner, the physical space of their shared bed reifying the deterioration of their relationship.

When the healing finally begins, it's faltering and unsure, the stuff of human beings, not fairy tales. Yet it feels like a burden being lifted, all the same. There Division closes, metaphor, story, and anthology: peering into what it is that makes us human, and in spite (because?) of all our faults, still finding magic.

(Disclaimer: this review was written based on a review copy provided by the author.)

Ten books I remember

Credit: paulbailey / flickr

List 10 books that have stayed with [you] in some way, without thinking too hard about it. They don't have to be the 'right' books or great works of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way.

...goes a meme that’s been doing the rounds on Facebook lately.

I wrote down the first ten I could think of. Then I shuffled them randomly so that I didn’t feel like I was playing favourites. These are those books.

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The Last Samurai, Helen De Witt

On the surface, De Witt’s 2000 novel is a coming-of-age story; a precocious young boy, raised by his equally gifted and eccentric mother, who finds a kind of independence as he seeks out his biological father. But The Last Samurai is so much more than that: it is about cross-generational bonds formed by intellectual kinship; autodidacts swimming in ponds far too small; it is about adventurers and explorers finding new roots in unknown lands; cinematic craft (the mother, Sibylla, raising the boy, Ludo, on Kurosawa’s 1954 Seven Samurai), and the art of storytelling; the loneliness of genius; the disjointed pace of parenthood (fragmented sentences and avant-garde paragraph breaks littering Sibylla’s narrative and suggesting an all-encompassing harried-mindedness); the semiotics of music; the ways in which even the very young look out for their elders.

I have read The Last Samurai only once. I intend to read it many times more. The prose is strange but mesmerising, and the themes speak to me on so many different levels that I get shivers just seeing the book lying patiently on my bedside table.

Still from Seven Samurai (七人の侍), 1954.

[Review] Offspring Fling OST

Title screen, Offspring Fling, Kyle Pulver, 2012.

The thing that elevates Offspring Fling in my opinion from “cute” to “beautiful” is the soundtrack by Alec Holowka. (My knowledge of the indie games music scene is shamefully lacking, but this is the same composer who did the soundtrack for Aquaria, including its joyful and exploratory first level theme, “The Traveller”.)

To provide some context: Offspring Fling is a game in which one plays as a forest creature rescuing her eponymous offspring from monsters and other woodland hazards. The mechanics are puzzle platformer-ish, though achieving full completion requires pixel-perfect timing and starts to veer towards the “masocore” subgenre of platformer.

The art assets are all low-res small-colour-palette sprites which achieve a homely, pastel crayon look which I believe is technically known as “a less shitty Kirby’s Dreamland 3”. The protagonist herself is round and lemon-furred, with tiny stumps of limbs that belie her strength and a positively saccharine smile that never disappears from her face. Never. Well, except for the “rare” occasion where one of the cubs gets eaten — then we see her face turn to a “goodness, gracious!” look of shock for the half second before the game resets itself to the start of the level. But for the most part: unending saccharine smile.

Gameplay screenshot. Ibid.

Oh, and the main game mechanic involves picking up cubs and tossing (“flinging”) them horizontally at high speeds. This is not a game that takes itself very seriously.

Thoughts on "Maleficent"

Still frame from Maleficent.

(Spoilers for Maleficent follow.)

(Also seriously, when I say thoughts, I mean disjointed sentence fragments.)

[Review] The Steep Approach to Garbadale, by Iain Banks

(I'll come clean: this is my first time reading Iain Banks. I haven't read the Culture series, nor The Wasp Factory, nor the rest of his oeuvre. Anybody who wishes to register a complaint should line up behind the You've never read Terry Pratchett!? folks.)

The Steep Approach to Garbadale follows Alban Wopuld, returning to the family fold after many years of self-imposed exile. The family business — a board games empire bigger than Parker Brothers — has been offered a buyout by its American partners, and as the rest of the Wopuld clan descends upon their eponymous ancestral estate for an Extraordinary General Meeting, Alban finds himself revisiting childhood flames and uncovering long-hidden family secrets.

Family is constantly at war with itself in Banks's twenty-first novel, most notably with the sharp family upheaval that follows Alban's teenage love affair with his cousin Sophie: a passion which sees the youths excoriated and separated by the family's stern matriarch, Win. More than a decade on, Alban still grapples ineffectually with the aftermath, and the question of closure weighs heavily over his mind. Years earlier, Alban's mother, Irene, took her own life, in what initially is cast as post-natal depression but which, as the novel progresses, reveals itself to be something more sinister.

Banks makes no secret of the link between water and death here: departed mother Irene in her hunting coat descending into the waters of Garbadale (the water chilling her utterly, sucking the warmth from her body), the adrenaline-seeking mathematician Verushka's traumatic brush with the tsunami of '04 (the thunder of its falling on the exposed reefs and sand, the splintering, crashing sound of it smashing trees), the lakeside fishing expedition beset by hounding rain as the tale approaches its climax. Water here stands for the elements, nature writ large: the characters may choose to weather it, fight it, or embrace it with open arms, but they cannot overcome it.

It is nature, however, which Alban retreats to — the book opens with his cousin Fielding tracking him down in a remote town nestled in forests and farmland — and in The Steep Approach we see the relative wilderness posed in stark contrast to the order and genteelness of the Wopuld clan. Even in his younger years Alban prefers to get his hands dirty, tending to the garden in the family estate at Lydcombe. We are shown a character far more at ease in nature's way than in the prim trappings of the family business.

Richmond was a strange, crowded, busy place after Lydcombe. The house was only a little smaller, apparently, but much more vertical and far more ordered; fewer eccentric corridors, half-landings, erratic staircases and oddly shaped rooms. It felt tight and constrained after Lydcombe, as though the building was forever standing at attention, incapable of relaxing.

The Steep Approach to Garbadale, by Iain Banks (2007)

Banks's prose is that of an seasoned author: precise yet illustrative, personal yet with a mordant edge of remove. Different voices enter and depart the narrative effortlessly, from Fielding, a libertine hiding beneath a businesslike veneer, to Alban's late mother and the all-too-accurately sketched depressive haze she departed the world in... and of course, too, Alban, who we see progress from the naivety of youth to his present-day weariness, his past at once both behind him and suffusing his every idle thought.

[Review] Welcome to Your New Life, by Anna Goldsworthy

I recently read Anna Goldsworthy's Welcome to Your New Life, a memoir addressed from mother to firstborn child, detailing their story, from conception to first birthday.

In many ways the book is an honest, unabashed look into Goldsworthy's mind, an unerringly human account of how her heart and mind open and mould themselves around the entrance of her (spoiler:) son into her life. Her account of the pregnancy, for instance, lingers around a theme of anxiety — of all the little ways things could go wrong. In one particularly poignant passage she expresses the full extent of this fear:

It is a clear winter morning when we drive to the clinic, and on the radio a Finnish violinist plays a glistening Vivaldi. For the first time, I allow myself to admit the scale of my ambition. To have a good pregnancy and a safe delivery. For you to be a healthy child. For you to have a happy and successful and long life. For there to be no apocalypse in your lifetime, or in the lifetime of your children, or grandchildren. Is there no end to my greed?

Welcome to Your New Life, by Anna Goldsworthy (2013)

Parenthood comes with its own foreign set of concerns and neuroses. In one memorable chapter Goldsworthy recounts a trip that she, her partner and their child take to a farmhouse near the coast. A weekend that begins with them settling into an idyllic farmhouse for the night takes a dark turn when Goldsworthy discovers that the house's toilet is an outhouse. Her mind instantly turns to fears for her baby's mortality.

I have seen how you would fall, she writes. That moment in which clumsiness ticks over into disaster.

As the night continues, Goldsworthy recounts how she is kept awake by constant fears of all the possible permutations of misfortune that might lead to tragedy.

You are incapable of locomotion... The only people of capable of taking you into the composting toilet are me and Nicholas... I repeat these statements in my head as though counting sheep. You are incapable of locomotion... The only people of capable of taking you into the composting toilet are me and Nicholas... I will not take you into the composting toilet... Therefore, the person who will take you into the composting toilet is Nicholas.

It is in this way that Goldsworthy maps out the changes in her mind like an expert cartographer. The everyday becomes sinister; the mundane becomes deadly; every word spoken near her becomes an implicit judgement on her worth as a parent and her son's worth as a human being.

And yet amidst all the worry, there are moments of unqualified joy:

Every day you acquire more purchase over the world, so that there are places now where I can meet you in wonder. At night in your nursery, I switch on the magic lantern and track the blurry lamb’s passage across the ceiling, absorbing the great weight of your silence in my lap. When you wake in the morning, we count the animals in your farmyard book, your miniature forefinger in my hand like a pencil, guiding me, teaching me how to look.

Ibid.

It's in moments like these that Goldsworthy's earnestness shines brightest. Newborns, as she puts it, are transient, and amidst all the tumult and trouble she describes her new world as, she certainly doesn't hide her joy in watching that world go by.

Thoughts on "Monsters University"

I didn't see Monsters University while it was in the cinemas, making it the second Pixar movie in a row that I've missed (after last year's Brave). But I finally got around to it on a plane trip a few days ago (ermahgerd i was on a plane), and was suitably impressed.

Of course, I have a soft spot for Pixar movies, but no wonder — their script writing has been solid for as long as I can remember... and of course, their visuals have always been artful as well as cutting-edge. (Maybe Cars 2 was crap? I've never seen it; I think it was a direct-to-DVD release.)

Still frame from Monsters University.

In any case, the movie was a lot of fun. Here are a few things I was thinking immediately after seeing it.

[Review] The House of Silk, by Anthony Horowitz

It was almost dark and with the coming of the night the sense of ease that I had felt had quite dissipated, and the city had once again turned cold and hostile. The shoppers and the entertainers had all gone home and their places had been taken by a different species altogether, shabby men and gaudy women who needed shadows in which to conduct their business and whose business, in truth, carried shadows of its own.

The House of Silk, by Anthony Horowitz (2011)

Cover: Orion, 2012 edition

Anthony Horowitz's The House of Silk is a contemporary addition to Sherlock Holmes canon that is in every way in the spirit of Arthur Conan Doyle's original stories, which, despite having had a strong influence on English-language crime fiction, have a distinctive style of their own which doesn't quite fit in the same mold as most mystery tales. It's not a six-character locked door whodunnit in the vein of Christie or Sayers, nor does it have the bombastic cartoonishness of the Robert Downey Jr. movies; instead, The House of Silk is a thing of its own: a crime adventure filled with twists, intrigue and a level of scandal that would titillate any Victorian reader (not that that'd be much of a feat).

Bad Piggies vs. Gourmet Race

TL;DR: video-game-music-induced feels.

I stumbled across this beautiful ohrwurm the other day:

(Context: I've never played the game, though I've watched people play it.)

Listen to that. Just sit back and listen to that majestic thing for a few minutes.

The light-hearted meandering across the piano. The upbeat mood in a minor mode. The bouncing tuba, supported on the offbeats. (Bouncing 4-beat tuba is instant shorthand for adorably unsubtle. It's the sort of musical trope you'd use to depict a litter of baby hippos trying to bake a cake, filling the room with billowing clouds of flour.)

This music makes me so inexplicably happy. :D

A few thoughts on "The Internship"

The Internship, starring blah blah blah and produced by blah blah blah look it's a two hour Google PR piece okay.

My company paid for the entire office to go see The Internship. We took up three cinemas at Event Cinemas on George Street. We ate terrible food and laughed at all the serious bits and cringed at all the jokes. After all was said and done, this is what was on my mind:

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The movie is absolutely a sugar-coated PR coup for Google. Despite all the major inaccuracies that portray company life and culture as far, far worse than it is.

I mean, sure, if any work environment was difficult to honestly insult, it would make sense for it to be a multiple-time best place to work. But man it's a little embarrassing seeing how shiny and wonderful a workplace they made Google seem.

(The having a beer with your boss line makes a little more sense now that I've seen it than how the trailer implied. One less thing to complain about.)

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There was a wonderful (if obligatory) sports scene in which the main cast played an exceptionally rough, entertaining match of unnamed-game-with-Quaffles-Bludgers-Snitches-and-broomsticks... which, yes, is an obvious Twilight reference that they clearly avoiding directly naming for trademark reasons — fuck draconian enforcement of trademarks, incidentally; broomstick-sport is an utterly harmless non-brand-damaging example of fan culture at its finest.

[Poetry review] "I don't mean to oogle"

I recently received the following cold-call message on LinkedIn:

Roses are red, and violets are blue
I don't mean to oogle
at your experience from [company]^*.

I know this may be a reach
but let me be brief
My proposal to you is unique
for your experience as a code loving geek