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Mad Max: Beyond Patriarchy — On Fury Road’s (2015) Visual Rhetoric and Apocalyptic Social Rebirth

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If you haven’t seen Mad Max: Fury Road (2015; dir. George Miller) yet, I highly recommend it.  Unexpectedly, it turned out to be a film I didn’t know I wanted.  There are a lot of things worth discussing here, but in particular, I want to explore two elements of the film that I think make it a significant work of cinema. Visual Rhetoric and Mad Max (in Brief) In my review of  The City of Lost Children (1995), I argued that Mad Max : Fury Road is primarily interested in storytelling as visual versus a story funneled to us through narrative proper.  The point I want to make about the visual qualities of Mad Max — an idea that also applies to The City of Lost Children, albeit mobilized for different purposes — is that there is so little in this film that is told to us as a narrative (i.e., in exposition, dialogue, or in literal narration) that it compels us to focus not on the narrative (the plot), but on the conveyance of meaning within its visual landscape, both in the straight symbolic sense and in the characters-doing-things sense.

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Book Review: Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge

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It is England during the reign of King George V. The Machine Age is at its peak, and human society is in flux, becoming increasingly urbanized, secular. The Great War has come to a close, but the traumatic devastation it has wrought echoes on in family’s lives. Nations struggle to recover and political/economic turmoil presages greater conflicts and changes to come. What the future holds is not only a concern for humanity, but also for The Besiders, a race that has lived alongside us in the margins, driven further into the isolated shadows as human civilization spreads. Eleven-year-old Triss Crescent awakens in a bed surrounded by her parents and a doctor, her memory fragmented and incomplete. She gradually recalls that the family is together on vacation, and that she has had an accident, coming close to drowning in the Grimmer, a local millpond. But she has difficulty remembering the details of how she fell in, or how she managed to get out. Triss’ younger sister Pen was there to witness the accident, but Pen sulks in the corner of the room, far from Triss, and won’t say more than angrily proclaim that Triss is lying, pretending; that Triss is not who she claims to be.

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Retro Nostalgia: The City of Lost Children (1995), Visual Rhetoric, and the Critic’s Confused Apparatus

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May 2015 marks the 20th anniversary of the premiere of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s The City of Lost Children (1995).  It is perhaps the most recognizable example of contemporary surrealist cinema, and it remains one of Caro and Jeunet’s most well-regarded works.*  The surrealist nature of the film is fairly evident from even a casual viewing, as it embodies just about every layer of the film’s plot, characters, visuals, and underlying “myths.”  It’s chaotic, moody, and, at times, bewildering.  The City of Lost Children‘s, in other words, is not simply a fantasy; rather, it is a fantasy which has been divulged of its realistic undercurrents.

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Book Review: The End of the Sentence by Maria Dahvana Headley and Kat Howard

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Malcolm Mays has been running from a tragic event in his past. His flight has taken him to the tiny community of Ione, Oregon. There, he has bought an old, abandoned house to make his own, sight unseen. Much to his surprise, the town knows all about the House, and its reputation casts a long shadow indeed. Worse, Malcolm is getting impossible letters from a prisoner, Dusha, in the Oregon state prison who should be long dead. A prisoner that tells Malcolm that the house will “welcome him” but that Malcolm must prepare for Dusha’s release from the prison at the end of the sentence. Impossible letters, a haunted house, dark secrets, the dread coming of Dusha, and Malcolm’s own tragic past come together in The End of the Sentence, a Subterranean Press novella, a collaboration between  Maria Dahvana Headley and Kat Howard.

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“Ten Post-Apocalyptic Novels Written by Women” by Nicolette Stewart

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There are 1000 ways to end the world, and fictional explorations of those possibilities have been popular (more so whenever disaster seems near at hand) for going on 200 years. But why do we love to watch the world burn?  Is it a desire to start over?  A catharsis for our fears about things out of our control? Or just a fun thought experiment in which we can examine the actions and reactions of humans put in the most extreme of situations?

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“Writing Toward Acceptance” by Sarah Remy

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Non-Binary Genders are gender identities that don’t fit within the accepted binary of male and female. People can feel they are both, neither, or some mixture thereof. It might be easier to view gender as a 1-dimensional spectrum with male on one end, female on the other, and androgyne in the middle, but the reality is that gender is more complex, and 3-dimensional models with axes for male, female, and how strongly you feel attached to that gender identity have been suggested. Recently I’ve begun a little experiment:  I’ve started asking various friends of various ages if they know what ‘non-binary’ means. Granted, I’m not kind enough to give them a hint with a qualifier:  do you know what non-binary means in regards to gender? Hints are not part of the experimental parameters. Hints might be cheating.

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