I Encounter No Dryad

This is a post from 2013; I'd intended to continue it at the time, but other things came up, and I forgot about it. I've been thinking about the topics lately, though, so here it is again, in slightly modified form, to be followed by its continuation shortly, unless something comes up and I wait another two years.

Masters of the interior life teach that it's inadvisable to dwell on one's own mystical experiences, and especially to speak about them with others. As John of the Cross has it: The Bride says in her heart, my secret for myself. Part of the danger is that we come to regard them as a species of personal property or, worse, as spiritual cosmetics; still more dangerous is the fact that true contact with the divine takes place, not on the plane of concept or feeling or experience, interior or exterior, but on the plane of relation. To speak of experience is to savor the peel and throw away the meat.

O secrecy without a secret! O accumulation of information!

So I will not attempt to quantify my own experiences (insofar as I've had any). But any writer's mystical and metaphysical outlook inevitably colors his writing; my own has been profoundly affected by I and Thou (1923), the slim but rich volume by the great Jewish religious philosopher Martin Buber.

Buber begins by asserting that man's twofold attitude toward the world accords with the two "primary words" that can be spoken by man.

     Primary words do not signify things, but they intimate relations.
     Primary words do not describe something that might exist independently of them, but being spoken they bring about existence.
     Primary words are spoken from the being.

The two words, he says, are compound words. Each involves the I; when I speak a primary word, I enter it and take my stand in it. Any use of the word I is really a use of one or another of these words.

     The one primary word is the combination I-Thou.
     The other primary word is the combination I-It; wherein, without a change in the primary word, one of the words He and She can replace It.

He goes on to say:

     The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being.
     The primary word I-It is never spoken with the whole being.

To speak I-Thou is to be in mutual relation. To speak I-It is to objectify. Think of talking to a person you love, of looking them in the eyes and addressing them as You, and how different this is from talking about someone not present as He or She. The thing is, you can use the word You and still mean It; there are people out there – narcissists and flatterers and manipulators, objectifiers and personifiers and conceptualizers – who are incapable of speaking in any other way. Such people never really live; the present is to them not the realm of eternal being, but the infinitesimal endpoint of the past.

The present is not fugitive and transient, but continually present and enduring. The object is not duration, but cessation, suspension, a breaking off and cutting clear and hardening, absence of relation and of present being.
     True beings are lived in the present, the life of objects is in the past.

Our relation with other men stands in the middle place. Below it is our relation with the world of nature; above it is our relation with the divine. Our address of I-Thou to (say) a tree may be somewhat mysterious, and take place on a dark, subliminal level, but it is real for all that. The I-It analyzes the tree according to utility, or form and color, or chemical composition, or what have you; the I-Thou sees it as it is in itself.

It can…also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness. […]
     The tree will have a consciousness then, similar to our own? Of that I have no experience. But do you wish, through seeming to succeed in it with yourself, once again to disintegrate that which cannot be disintegrated? I encounter no soul or dryad of the tree, but the tree itself.

When we speak Thou on any plane, says Buber, we address the eternal Thou. But there is an attempt to evade this dichotomy between the past and the present, It and Thou, object and subject, by appealing to a world of ideas, by raising up a conceptual structure and dwelling in it as a bulwark against the onset of nothingness.

But the mankind of mere It that is imagined, postulated, and propagated by such a man has nothing in common with a living mankind where Thou may truly be spoken. The noblest fiction is a fetish, the loftiest fictitious sentiment is depraved. Ideas are no more enthroned above our heads than resident in them; they wander amongst us and accost us. The man who leaves the primary word unspoken is to be pitied; but the man who addresses instead these ideas with an abstraction or a password, as if it were their name, is contemptible.

When we erect such a framework and dwell in it, we barricade ourselves from relation with nature, with man, with god. Yet how frequently do men try to scale the divine heights by such means! There will come a time – in the afterlife, if not sooner – when doctrines and confessional differences will fade in significance. For there are two fundamentally different ways of approaching the divine, and the dividing line cuts right across the world of ideas, confessional boundaries, and the human heart. It isn't the division between polytheism and monotheism, but between what I (for lack of better words and at the risk of being misunderstood) will label the pagan and the mystic. It is possible to be a pagan and yet believe in one god; it is possible to be a mystic and believe in many gods. Every person is at least part pagan. A pagan is someone who speaks only I-It. To him the gods are objects to be acted upon; to him a tree is nothing unless it be fictively personified, or conceptualized, or dissected and analyzed.

[W]ithout It man cannot live. But he who lives with It alone is not a man. 

Think of the old atheists' myth about the ebbing of belief. In the beginning, the legend goes, man believed that spirits inhabited trees and springs and other such things. As his familiarity with the world in which he found himself grew, he moved the divine agencies to the relatively inaccessible mountaintops. Further exploration forced him to relegate the gods to the distant heavens. And now, enlightened by precise astronomical observations, man has to locate god in the realm of abstraction.

Whatever the historical merits of this myth – asserted by some people with the ardent faith of the fundamentalist – I would counter it with a myth of my own construction. I would say that the peopling of hill and dale with rational spirits represents an attempt to deal with a fall. (Perhaps this is the source of the myth of the Fall, as hinted by Buber.) Man, alienated from the life of things, sought to regain his place by superimposing fictive animating agencies on the world of nature. No longer able to address the tree as Thou, at least on a subliminal level, he created the dryad. The impatient atheist is indeed fighting against one front when he denounces dryads and intelligent design. He is fighting paganism. But a pagan is really only a dishonest atheist; and there are atheists who, without realizing it, are mystics.

I've written a number of posts about how my perception of nature became warped when I was a teenager, due in part, perhaps, to my cognitive disability. At the time, I sought desperately to people my increasingly empty and meaningless world with minor gods. With all the data-acquisition-lust of my autistic mind, I pored over books about nature deities, demigods, elementals, fairies, and the like, collating and cataloging. I actually sought such beings in the woods and rivers.

Surely, I thought, the testimony of so many diverse cultures could not be without foundation. And perhaps it isn't! But I never found my fairies. Despairing, I sculpted goddesses from clay; I began the construction of a pagan shrine in the backyard, never to be completed. (My parents finished the garden after I went to college, but without the statue that was to have crowned it.) My point is that my alienation from the world of nature went hand in hand with my retreat into paganism.

When man fell, Our Father Who Art in Heaven became Jupiter; literally, the names mean much the same thing, but I speak in terms of connotations. Again, I'm not opposing monotheism to polytheism. Certainly the objectification of the divine lends itself to a multiplication of gods, which is always a movement of rationalization and conceptualization. But who could argue that the polytheist Socrates lived exclusively in the world of I-It?

I have some thoughts about how these two primary words, these two attitudes, play out in art, especially in the fantasy novel. Perhaps that would best be relegated to a second post. For the time being, you, my reader, who find yourself trapped in the world of objects, consider the following, as I have, and find hope and a path to life:

Believe in the simple magic of life, in service in the universe, and the meaning of that waiting, that alertness, that "craning of the neck" in creatures will dawn upon you. Every word would falsify; but look! round about you beings live their life, and to whatever point you turn you come upon being.

Seila in Pencil

Here's a pencil sketch of my Dragonfly character Seila, the lovely half-Druin odalisque of the Enochite underworld.

I'm working on a watercolor of the same size as my recent Zilla sketch, but my paintings don't always hold up to the promise of their conceptions, and I happen to like this little drawing considerably, so here it is for your viewing pleasure. Inspired by the Art Nouveau posters of Alphons Mucha.

History of the Conquest of America

Mural by Diego Rivera of life in Tenochtitlan, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City.

Summer is here, and our town library has kicked off its annual summer reading program for kids. Of course my kids always participate. They do pretty well in the raffle that follows, too.

Well, this year, there's a summer reading program for adults. Am I too proud to participate? No I'm not! Especially when the prizes comprise dinner for two at a local Mexican food restaurant, dinner for two at the country club, and a weekend getaway at a nearby river resort. The getaway and Mexican food sound pretty good; the country club dinner I think I'd scalp on e-Bay or something. At any rate, I've read less over the past few months than I like, so this is a much-needed spur.

So far I've read Prescott's History of the Conquest of Peru (1847) for about two and a half hours. (We keep a time log.) I read the same author's History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) several years ago in a mammoth Modern Library edition that contains both volumes. They're good old narrative histories after the manner of Gibbon, based for the most part on primary sources.

There are, I'm sure, more up-to-date histories out there, with glossy pages and color photographs, but I'll take Prescott over them any day. It's strange, but we no longer seem as able to produce the sweeping historical narratives that our forebears did, preferring the safety of narrow monographs and the like. My three favorite periods of history to read about are ancient Greece (for which I go to Herodotus, Thucydides, and J. B. Bury's A History of Greece), the later Roman Empire and Age of Migrations (for which I read Gibbon's Decline and Fall and Bury's Later Roman Empire), and the Spanish conquest of America. There's no better source for the last than Prescott.

Now, the author, William H. Prescott (1796 – 1859), an American historian who went blind after being struck in the eye with a crusty piece of bread during a food fight at Harvard College (!), is, unfortunately, rabidly anti-Catholic. What moved him to devote his energies to a culture for which he had so little sympathy I'll never know. Yes, the conquistadors were a damnable mixture of devotion, chivalry, rapacity, and cruelty, which is what makes them such interesting reading. And I'll even admit that perhaps their religion had more than a little to do with that. But it's tiresome to have Romish superstition and bigotry and credulity excoriated on every other page, and compared unfavorably with Anglo-Saxon virtues and the Protestant work-ethic.

One thing he likes to do is draw parallels between the human sacrifice practiced by the Aztec priests and the inquisitions of the Dominicans. Now, the enormities of the Spanish Inquisition are indefensible, but they were in quite a different category from Aztec piety, which (according to his sources) waged war for the sole purpose of securing sacrifices, and slaughtered tens of thousands of captives on an annual basis. I mean, it makes a difference, doesn't it, whether an execution is viewed (however wrongly) as a last resort but a necessary evil to preserve the social order, or as an act of supreme worship, an end in its own right commended by the gods? Plus, Protestant countries were not above the vilest cruelty in matters of religion or the mass delusion of witch-hunts, something Prescott conveniently forgets. I cast no aspersions, mind you; such was the tenor of the times.

But even this I'm willing to forgive, for they really are excellent histories, nitpicked but never to be superseded.

Mural by Diego Rivera of El Tajin, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City.

Why do I love reading about the Conquest? Partly I identify with it more than with the history of Anglo America. My father is Puerto Rican, that is, a mixture of Spanish, West African, and South American Indian. A good bit of that side of the family came from the Canary Islands, a stage in Columbus' explorations. In fact, my great grandmother's maiden name was Colon (Columbus), and family tradition holds that we're descendants of Columbus' younger brother, which would make me a great nephew of the explorer himself.

But beyond that, it's hard for me to think of a more picturesque period, combining familiar landscapes with fabulous civilizations and legendary heroic exploits. In 1541, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado y Luján marched across the Texas panhandle in search of the Cities of Gold. Think of that! Think of the clash of civilizations: of storm-tossed Spanish galleons landing on golden New World coasts; of armored caballeros hacking their way through steamy jungles and assaulting piled strongholds of ancient splendor; of floating garden-cities surrounded by snow-capped mountains, ruled by cannibal potentates of luxuriant cruelty; of stout Cortez who with eagle eyes stared at the Pacific, silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Well, no doubt I'll have more to say about the conquest of Mexico and Peru once I'm done. Or, more likely, you'll start seeing it pop up in my stories in various ways. I would love to write "sangre and sorcery" tales set during the time of the Conquest, but I fear that I'd have to visit the locales to do it justice. One day, perhaps I'll do just that.

The Iron Leaps

There is in the last second of time or hair’s breadth of space, before the iron leaps to the magnet, an abyss full of all the unfathomable forces of the universe. The space between doing and not doing such a thing is so tiny and so vast. [Chesterton]

My first real publishing credit is "Some Remarks on Autism and Catholicism," an essay that appeared in the Catholic literary quarterly Dappled Things in 2009. It's actually what led to my current fiction-writing endeavors, as the same issue contains this excellent advice on writing by Catholic sci-fi author John C. Wright, whose van Vogt sequel Null-A Continuum I reviewed here.

That essay is written under my real name; I'm kind of coming out of the closet here. I don't usually write about such matters on my blog, except as it affects my various crafts. What I mean is, I don't seek to persuade people to see things the way I do. Of course it's true that I'm just a scribbler, and have no reason to presume people would want to read my inane thoughts on religion. But then again, I do apparently presume that there's a big demand for my inane thoughts on fiction, art, logic, and chickens.

(Want to know something weird? I just finished watching Big Trouble in Little China, and the voice in my head as I reread this now sounds like Jack Burton's bad imitation of John Wayne. Here's the movie poster, just because.)

So I ask myself, what's the difference? Here's what I've come up with:

1. I've noticed that taking unpopular stances on controversial topics and stickin' it to 'em is a really awesome way to drive up your Internet readership and sell lots and lots of books. But somehow that isn't what I set out to do when I started writing.
2. I don't want to get stuck in a Catholic ghetto. Everyone wants to be the next Flannery O'Connor, but Flannery O'Connor was never the first Flannery O'Connor.
3. Some of my stories have gotten really negative reactions from Catholics. For instance, a science fiction story about nuns that I submitted to a Catholic literary contest last year garnered a "very bad visceral reaction" from a reader and "terrified" the editor. And most of my other stories involve sex and violence. So why bother?

But on the other hand, there's these recent Pew results about religion. I'm too lazy to look them up and link them, but it seems that American Catholicism is on the decline or something. It's got all the Catholic bloggers worked up. And really, it is getting harder and harder to be Catholic these days.

Elizabeth Scalia, a.k.a. The Anchoress, whose blog I've read since 2005, has called on Catholic writer-types to come out and say why they're not going to leave the faith. And, well, I'm not exactly a Catholic writer (though I'm Catholic and I write), but I feel like I ought to participate.

So, first little background, if you got bored and didn't finish my essay: After a youth of being taught by my elders to despise Catholicism, I was lured – lured, I tell you – into a fervid southern sect as a college freshman by a very pretty sophomore, who happens now to be my wife. Things went bad (and really, really weird), and I ended up a rather depressed and isolated atheist working on a doctorate in mathematics. And also married.

Some years later, in the midst of a prolonged bout of soul-searching, I went camping. This was 2005, shortly after the death of Pope John Paul II. It was Pentecost, though I didn't know it at the time. I had a long dream about the mass and the universal church and the election of Pope Benedict XVI. I won't go into the details, but it ended as I entered a confessional. That morning I knew I had to return.

Yes, I made a major decision that subsequently changed the course of my entire life as a result of a mystical dream.

However, the first thing I did was go to the university library to check out John Henry Newman's Development of Christian Doctrine. I read it in three days. Next I read the Apologia Pro Vita Sua of the same author. Then I knew that I really had to return, which I did that summer. My wife decided to convert as well, and was received into the Catholic Church at the following Easter vigil...

So, what was I trying to explain? Why I'm still Catholic? Well, it's my whole life. My whole life is the answer. Which isn't very satisfying, perhaps. So here's what I'll do. In the near future, I'll post a personal memoir about a crazy guitar duel with the Hare Krishnas of Mexico.

Zilla the Impaler

Here is a watercolor sketch of my recurrent character Zilla, one-time cupbearer of Vaustus the Enochite. It's 3.5" by 5" on Arches hot-pressed. I listened to a number of Clark Ashton Smith stories while drawing and painting it, including "Vulthoom," "The Weaver in the Vault," "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros," and "The Abominations of Yondo."

In other news, author Davide Mana of Karavansara fame has read and enjoyed Dragonfly. Read his review here. Rather than quoting from it, I think I'll just ask you to go read it yourself, because it's all very good. We obviously have very similar tastes in fantastic literature (he mentions Smith, Eddison, Hodgson, Peake, and Wolfe), so I take it as a great compliment that he enjoyed Dragonfly so much.

Incidentally, the one flaw he mentions is the lack of an e-book, a fault that has now been remedied. Go get it!

Dragonfly on Kindle

Being an incorrigible luddite, I've never owned or used an e-book reader of any variety. But I've read articles, you know? It's my understanding that, unlike print books, e-books don't "smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land." Also, people tell me that readers are terrible for pressing flowers and autumn leaves.

Nevertheless, it's come to my attention that some would appreciate the availability of Dragonfly as an e-book. And who am I to argue with potential patrons? Therefore, behold: Dragonfly is now available on Kindle. Price is $2.99, which is the lowest they'll let me charge. Get it here.

Incidentally, if you've already purchased the print edition from Amazon, you should be able to get the Kindle version for free through the MatchBook program.

On Whiteness

I'm currently working on an adventure story tentatively titled "Salt and Sorcery." I'm liking it very much, but the amount of liking I have for a particular story seems to have little to do with its publishability, so who knows if it will ever see the light of day. It's title is merely descriptive, because it's about (1) salt, and (2) sorcery, both interesting subjects in their own right.

Now, salt, as everyone knows, is white, so I here leave the reader with the tail-end of Melville's meditation on the terror of whiteness in Moby-Dick, Chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale," which inspires my story (and also my character Zilla, who comes into my writing from time to time):

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows – a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues – every stately or lovely emblazoning – the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge – pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

The Sea of Ice, Caspar David Friederich

Dragonfly Reviewed

Distracted as I've been this week by my own personal grading apocalypse (I'm a college professor), I've neglected to point readers to this Black Gate review of Dragonfly by Fletcher Vredenburgh of Swords & Sorcery fame.

Dragonfly is the first of a planned tetralogy. In this day of calculated, mass-marketed, trend-following books, here is a self-published adventure, practically handcrafted, with cover, map, and interior art all done by Ordoñez himself. It tells of a young prince let loose in a world of steam engines, complacent aristocrats, and tunnel-dwelling workers, and a social order on the verge of being overthrown. Ordoñez' style hearkens back to the likes of A. E. van Vogt and Jack Vance, as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs. Heck, as you can see from the cover, Dragonfly would look right at home on a shelf full of volumes from the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. [...]

Every chapter, nearly every page, is filled with such wondrous images. Ordoñez may mock himself by naming his publishing company Hythloday (talker of nonsense) House, but if nonsense, it's of a sort that will draw me back again and again. There's a degree of creativity and depth of thoughtfulness present here that is absent in most run-of-the-mill fantasy. 

If you have any taste for fantasy that doesn't simply mimic the fashions of the day you will find Dragonfly worth your attention. Fantasy gives the writer license to create things that do not just look like our world in fancy dress or with pointed ears. Ordoñez has embraced the opportunity to create a thrilling, mysterious adventure that stands out from the packs of grimdark books and Tolkien-clones. 

You should read it.

As an aside, let me say I'm glad someone got my little Hythloday joke. Raphael Hythloday is of course the narrator of More's Utopia, possibly named for the angel Raphael in the Book of Tobit, an interesting deuterocanonical text that inspires some of my demonology.

So, anyway, have you bought my book yet? If so, I thank you on behalf of my muse, and sincerely hope you enjoy it. If not, why not?

Mad Max: Fury Road

The light fades. The vision dims. All that remains are memories. I remember a time of chaos, ruined dreams, this wasted land. But most of all, I remember the road warrior, the man we called Max. 

– The Road Warrior

It seems so rare these days to see something truly new. Paradoxically, despite the fact that it resurrects an old franchise, that's exactly what we have in Mad Max: Fury Road. It brings back all I love about the first two installments, but with a strange and thought-provoking twist. It takes risks.

I've read not a single review, because I wanted my mind to be untainted by what people are saying. Some of the talk leading up to Fury Road makes it out to be a mindless action movie. Don't believe it. People say that about The Road Warrior, too. An action movie it may be, but mindless it's not. Yes, it's light on dialogue, but in movies it's possible, you know, to make actions speak. I'll try not to mention any spoilers in what follows, but I'm going to talk about various elements of the film, so you might want to go see it before reading, lest I taint your mind.

So, what's Fury Road all about, you ask? I'll tell you. It's about femininity. The whole thing, from beginning to end, is an exploration of what it means to be a woman, in all its biological messiness. I know, crazy, right? But there it is. Where The Road Warrior has a tanker full of sand (oops, spoiler alert), Fury Road has a tanker full of breast milk. Really. Max washes his bloody face in it. The pallid War Pups and War Boys slurp up bottles fresh from sedentary chattel slaves who, corpulent as prehistoric Venus figurines, sit in a row to be perpetually pumped like so many cows. (Late in the movie they play a singularly symbolic role.) This ownership of women is what drives the plot, for, whereas Beyond Thunderdome centers around a band of lost children, Fury Road follows the fortunes of a bevy of pregnant girls – cult leader Immortan Joe's Five Wives – escaping from slavery as breeders. Breast milk and water and blood – Max is branded as a universal donor – enter the plot again and again.

Themes of fertility aren't new to the series, of course. The Wasteland in which The Road Warrior takes place is freighted with its full mythological weight. But the concern there is more with male virility. Max enters the compound as a living source of potency, instantly drawing the inhabitants into his orbit and displacing Pappagallo (Daddy Rooster), who later in the film is injured close by the groin, reminiscent of the Fisher King. The other males in the compound are a gallery of failures – senile, crippled, conniving. The Warrior Woman and Big Rebecca have had to step up as fighters and leaders. On the other hand, the vermin besieging the compound correspond to a kind of male S&M nightmare (or fantasy, depending on your predilections), with Wez and his "armor bearer" the Golden Youth, the Lord Humungus (whose head looks like a giant pulsating testicle), Toady (who lives up to his name), and so forth. It also probes anxieties related to fatherhood. Max, whose infant son died in the first installment, is presented as a kind of "deadbeat dad" to the Feral Kid, underscored by the streak of white hair they share.

Fertility is the focus of Fury Road as well, but here the emphasis is more on bearing than begetting. We're presented with two extremes – a people in which women are treated as objects, and a people in which women are the only members. Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) leads the girls from the former to the latter, only to find it a poisonous mud flat. Her Green Place has become another wasteland, and the last remaining seeds are preserved like relics by the surviving women with nothing to make them grow.

Tom Hardy makes an excellent Max – sometimes I forgot I wasn't watching Mel – but Max isn't the main protagonist. He's a main protagonist. He shares the spotlight with Furiosa, and is often overshadowed by her. I'm not sure yet if this is altogether successful, because the viewer's interest ends up being divided. I'll have to watch it a few times to really be able to judge. It is a Mad Max movie, you know, and that means that Max has to have enough to do. A related sore point is the fact that Max's legendary black V8 Interceptor is shown in all its glory for only a brief while – it was cruel, terribly cruel, to have it play so small a role!

Anyway, I think this division of interest between two protagonists is intentional, an attempt to forge one character out of two. In The Road Warrior, an Australian bobtail, or "two-headed" skink, sits in the foreground at one point, and I've always taken this as a reference to the role of the tanker as a decoy. Well, Fury Road opens with an actual two-headed lizard, a visual reference, perhaps, to the two-headed character of Max and Imperator Furiosa. The title, too, might be seen as a marriage of Furiosa and the Road Warrior.

Throughout Fury Road it's the women who inspire the men to act. At the beginning, Max is presented as a scavenger, a survivor, a blood bag. Shockingly (to me at least, an old Mad Max fan), he's compared visually with Johnny the Boy at one point, with the Defiant and Broken Victims at another. The first time his actions go beyond self-interest, it's because he's doesn't want to see Furiosa's strength and devotion go to waste. And the War Boy Nux who goes along for the ride, unwillingly at first, grows into a man through the ministrations of one of the girls. That's not to say the women are accessories. They hold their own, and then some. But in survival situations it's usually men who bear the brunt of the fighting, by biological necessity. Here we see that their strength is nothing without their sexual complements.

Blah blah blah. Did I mention that Fury Road has awesome stunts? My God, it has awesome stunts. Filmed in front of a green screen it was not. Imagine the chase scene at the end of The Road Warrior on steroids, roaring through canyons, mudflats, dune fields, salt flats, and a titanic dust storm, and that's this movie in a nutshell. (Apart from all the fertility stuff.) It's raw, and grimy, and bloody. For the space of two hours, you inhabit it. The bad guys are more delightfully bizarre than ever before, but Immortan Joe (played by Hugh Keays-Byrne, a.k.a. Toecutter) takes the cake.

On top of all that, it's one of the most visually beautiful movies I've seen in a while. The desert is a kind of poetry in George Miller's hands. He's a painter working with a palette of red and brown and blue. I'm so glad we got the chance to see what he's really capable of here.

Cf. this post, which has links to various thoughts on the topic of Max and his relatives.

ADDENDUM: It occurs to me that the Mad Max series might be seen as chronicling the abdication of men and the assumption by women of their traditional roles. In the first installment we enter a world in which the ideal of masculine heroism is starting to ring hollow, the line between law enforcer and lawless nomad is becoming blurred, and women and children are left defenseless. In The Road Warrior, we see that these women and children have stepped up to compensate for their absent or ineffectual husband- and father-figures. Next, the founder and ruler of Bartertown in Beyond Thunderdome is a woman (Aunty Entity, played by Tina Turner), while the lost "feral children" have begun to form their own society.

Put in that context, Fury Road seems to rehash some of these themes while forming the next logical step in their development. The women rebel on their own account from their subjection but in the end the sexes are able to come to a mutual understanding on their new and more equal footing. Significantly, the next installment is to be titled Furiosa. Perhaps it will continue this arc.

Mad Max Returns

I am so pumped about the opening of Mad Max: Fury Road later this week. There, I just had to get that off my chest.

The first two installments – Mad Max and The Road Warrior – are a couple of my favorite movies; the latter I've seen so many times I have it memorized. (Not that that's difficult!) Beyond Thunderdome I pass over in icy silence.

What has me so pumped is that Fury Road is directed by George Miller, the auteur to whom we own the original trilogy. Tom Hardy plays Max Rockatansky, an amusing choice to me, as Christopher Nolan's take on Bane reminded me so much of The Lord Humungus. However, this enthusiastic post is prompted by my discovery that Fury Road also stars Hugh Keays-Byrne, the actor who played Toecutter in Mad Max. The trailers I've seen are starkly beautiful and recreate what I love about the visuals of The Road Warrior.

In the meantime, here's a few thoughts I've had on Mad Max in the past:

• Catharsis and the Post-Apocalyptic
• The Man With No Name
• The Dark Knight