S. Scott Whitaker's Blog, page 14

Eric Grienke. Occupy Poetry

OCCUPY POETRY

For decades poet, small press innovator, and critic Eric Grienke has been working in poetry and with poetry, that is to say writing, publishing it, and probably most importantly, questioning the aesthetics that makes up the craft of verse, free or no.   Poetry is everywhere. It happens. The internet has given the micro presses the ability to challenge the traditional university publishing house stranglehold on words. Art is thriving in the world, and very little of it resembles what the industry deems is quality poetry. Before his essays, I had not read Grienke before, which is part of problem Grienke discusses in the essays The Potential of Poetry. Part of modern poetry's problem is distribution and publication. If you are a self published poet the industry (the university system) assumes you are a hack, and if one doesn't write the cookie cutter creative writing workshop poem...then well, sorry Charlie, you're out of luck, you don't win our annual press  open competition.  Poets exist in small galaxies of small town academia, writing groups, coffee house gangs, and yes, universities.  To score a national book contract and/or a reading tour is equivalent to joining the industry, which for better or for worse, is the face of quality, or what passes for quality in poetry. Grienke argues that the very nature of these houses and institutions narrow the scope of poetry . It all grows in on itself, and like a rat king, its hard for one beast to escape the knots of the others.  And the internet has exploded the self publishing and micro specialty publishers, where Grienke argues, is probably where the next visionary will come from; a loner working with words, words, words. You see, Grienke champions the poetic challenge, defying critics who look for “accessibility” in poetry, willing and wanting to play with language. The potential is there.

For Grienke, poetry is spiritual, and he aptly describes what happens with good poetry “a poem doesn't happen on a page. The reader is the poet” and based on the consciousness of the audience the poem happens.

Grienke's been around for a while, knocking back poetry and promoting the self published anti-establishmentnt poetry movement (many of the essays share an anti-McPoem snarl, and a stick-it to the English teachers of academia rhetoric) and he's seen it all, and the essays here serve to open Grienke's life long dialogue with poetry to his audience.

Grienke's politics are on display in his newest volume of poetry, Traveling Music, which is aptly named, for the poetry Grienke's writes is like a well worn country blues record; quiet natural moments, and lightning snarls of foot stomping passion. Grienke balances his voice between working class and old man mystic, perhaps evoked by the nature he captures, or the haiku inspired poems “Lunar Fog,” “Japanese Bones,” and “Deep Moorings,” among others.

Grienke's knowledge of quiet natural scenes is honed, such as in “Shadows” where  “Blueberries/Grow in cedar swamps/Favored by the bears.” The poet is at home in nature, and in the prose poem “Kayak Lessons” passes down lessons of living with the natural world, how to live, and of course how to paddle a kayak. “Direction,/ concentration, perception. You become the paddle...”

His voice is comfortable with many tropes, not just natural ones. The section “Mild Violence” uses the metaphors of movie house monsters to address the monsters of our modern day. Media junkies become the snatched bodies of alien pods, and the bride of Frankenstein is a spoiled bridezilla princess, the Vampires are all the crooked and corrupt that run the world's machinations.

The final section, Persona, is elegiac and sparse, a world of roadkill,  “ancient/pockmocked battlefield” and “Galaxies/Hearts of light/Years away.” Grienke's world is imprinted with a touch of surrealism; a bit of absurdity poking out like a clown's nose at stark reality.

In his essay “The Potential of Poetry” Grienke lays out ten concepts he sees more potential for in our collective poetic future, which include, but are not limited to, the use of multiple personae, real time reportage, and non-linear sequencing, areas Grienke explores, practicing what he preaches.

And that's the real message Grienke brings to his work. Live your art. Exercise it. Go outside and play.

Eric Greinke's For the Living Dead a visceral and rich anthology of the poet's work.

Eric Greinke’s For the Living Dead: New and Selected gathers Greinke’s breath from 1969 through 2012, and shows the breadth of Grienke’s work. The poems are tough, tight, simple and beautiful.  For the Living Dead opens with “Fur Found Rhythm” a bluesy cut, and like a saxophone player, or a samurai, sets the tone for the collection, “a sweetsour burden/& cry/...Married./Found./Lost.”   The improvisational feel of the lines, and the short sentences punch sounds like a jazz sideman on Saturday night. Greinke’s work is visceral, soulful, sometimes simple, but never simplistic. The lyrics in the collection are balanced with narrative, and Greinke's collection offers up a full plate for fans and new readers alike; the volume illustrates Greinke’s contribution to American verse.
The early poems reflect a rich tonal palette, while later poems are stripped to the songbones, and with both Greinke's voice soars. His syllables click and collide as birds in “The Way Heat Pours Out,” “Perching on glazed branches,/Singing unheard songs./Redwing blackbirds, purple finches & exotic/Chinese canaries/Haunt me now that the ice storms of January/have made the air too cold for flight.” Fast forward to 1986’s “After the Ice Storm” where the breath is arranged to bring forth the hard syllables of winter when, “We walked among the pines in back,/Accompanied by the clack & click of branches/...So now we wait protected and safe/until another bough may break.” Greinke’s ear remains sharp through the years, matching sounds to content, a seasoned master.
Greinke’s collection has lighter moments. Fine nature slices, as well as poems that pair humor and sex. He takes a hands on approach to spirituality, and composes in a myriad of modes:  “Tonight” from 1973, is gorgeous eight line sounding of beach and sleep. “Black Milk”, also from 1973, is surreal danger lurking in hard conso-syllabics: “Diamonds gleam from a president’s mouth...a flag courts a fire engine...If a man drinks a milk that is black/He will turn into a stringless kite.”
I like it when a motif is happened upon by the poet, and rain and a wonderful warm wetness hangs about Greinke's work, particularly from the seventies, but not just rain, but also body fluid, and dampness, wet earth, and the poet is at home in the earth and the coming and going of death.
Newer poems reach backward into memory and the poet speaker retells escapades from the late 1960s and recalls early sexual desire disguised as hero-playing, and all through the lines the warmth of Greinke’s voice is present, aware of memory’s trappings and high bright windows. Perhaps this is most evident in “My Father’s Job”, from 2012, where the speaker recalls watching his father enter the automobile factory, and glimpsing the grey uniformed men inside, mistook it for a prison. “My father went in through a small red door.../A quick glance revealed it as a prison.../We took him to that gray place every day.../Once he quit to play piano in a bar./ He was happy for a while, but/..my mother wanted more money so/He went back inside, this time for life.”
The collection ends with “Flood Tide,” a Prufrockian elegy for love where death proves to be the great isolator in a flood of sensory information. The speaker is wet, swimming in the endless ocean, swamping through tears in a flooded factory. The speaker laments all of the sensations, all of the water, all of the possibilities if you will. “There is no/ pail for love. Even though/we’ve wrapped ourselves within/each others arms, each/of us still drowns alone.” Like Prufrock who cannot bear the cost of women on the beach speaking to him, the speaker here cannot levy the cost of human contact to the spirit. It’s almost too much for one man,  “pages/drift in pools, like travelers...we wonder if/the ocean breeze will keep us on course/or blow us back into ourselves.” The human spirit and condition are Greinke’s subject, and in this well balanced collection offers up insight and music.

Walter Bargen is watching. Trouble Behind Glass Doors is masterful

Walter Bargen is watching. In the Missouri Poet Laureate's newest book Trouble Behind Glass Doors $13.95 University of Missouri-Kansas Press, Bargen crafts poems out of negative space, recording what is not happening as well as what is occurring in small towns and personal lives alike. Whether Bargen wears his laurel like a poet of a small town parade or the harbinger of the end of the world, Bargen’s work shapes a world where human interaction is held together by inaction and action, and it is the tension between the two that gives Trouble its emotional punch.
Trouble is a well oiled machine of language. It opens with three epigrams concerning hope, framing the theme for the three sections of Trouble. Paul, from Romans, gives us a message of patience and hope, Baudelaire warns that hope and desolation go hand in hand, and Kafka states that “hope is not for us.” And Trouble delivers as promised. It’s a work that grows darker by the poem, and one can feel the cold terminator of night marching across the wide open spaces of the Midwest.  
Section one finds the poet as an outsider/laborer; whether speaking as a working artist, or speaking for those who feel outside the norm, Bargen’s verse reminds that slow mundane work frees as well as fetters. Consider the opening poem “Dyslexic Forest” where the disinterested, and disenfranchised student “falls asleep in class,” but yet is aware of the mystic way his writer/neighbor “reads to the stones” and “calls to the clairvoyant moon.”  The student knows how the writer’s work is a noisy affair,  and class, he almost smirks, is a boring place, quiet and full of un-work, the un-imagination. What the boy does not say, but is shown in Bargen’s poetic narrative, is that work of the mind can be a magical experience for those uninitiated. The boy learns much from listening to the poet across the hollow, and not so much from school.  In “Forest” the writer is a lonely illumined soul, a common motif in literature from ancient Greek poetry to the prose of Stephen King; the very forest of words a writer tends must appear to be a vast wilderness to those who struggle with words and ideas. There is a connection though between the boy in the forest and the writer, albeit a tenuous one, just as there is connection between the poet and the small town in which he lives and serves as a parade marshall in “Poet as Grand Marshall of the Fall Parade.” The poet works through  anxiety over being lauded in the parade, but when the poet “passed out poems once the candy ran out” the gulf between the artist and people has never been wider. Candy is certainly better than poetry, and after all the poet is not a football player, nor a cheerleader, and the part of his body that he offers up to the fall parade is not as strong nor as lithe, but is as important even if it is unseen; his mind. The poet is fettered to his work as he is freed by it, and it is this tension that gives the first section power and punch. But the theme of writer/outsider is most crystallized in the haunting “Poet in Prison” where the speaker passes through the gates of the prison, section by section, on his way to a creative writing class for those inside. Nowhere else is the poet more aware of the differences between himself and the harsh world. America imprisons more citizens than any other nation in the world, and probably boasts more poets as well. The descension into the prison is as close as the modern poet will ever achieve to Orpheus descending into the underworld, and just as important. But Bargen doesn’t preach or pat himself on the back, he instead shows us the lonely, the unwanted as they are.
Loneliness and disconnection haunt the first section of the book, but age, dying, and finality haunt the second section of the book. It begins innocently enough in “The Whole Facts” as car parts lay strewn across a yard, but through the poet’s imagination they are transformed into body parts from a war. But for the speaker the experience is a reminder of life, of hope, despite the violence the imagination recalls.
The second section of Trouble finds death hanging about, an old friend calling who will soon die, an obese stroke victim, a poor deluded Don Quixote, almost bare of hope save for his chance to be “knighted and benighted each Friday midnight/at the Thirsty Turtle and Gladstone Bar & Grill.”  But it’s not just death, or the end of our greatness that Bargen explores. The promise of the end to intimacy and friendship, as well as the promise of death is evocatively explored in “Point of No Returns.”  Here the speaker presents us with a relationship with two people who are “propelled and repelled/by each other’s presence,” a relationship that has reached a point of no return,  “there was no point in us/ever knowing why we were not lovers/and will always be doubtful lovers.” Here the tension is as much about the promise of what is to come, as it is about the past, about what is about to happen and about may not happen.  Sensuality, and eroticism carried special weight when we speak of desire. It is no accident that the French call the orgams the little death, for desire burns out just like a life. That promise of finality all wrapped up with desire continues in “Blouse,” which could be a companion poem to Robert Pinsky’s “Shirt,” where Bargen’s music is as tight as that which is “stitching the chapters of a lonely woman together... Premonition of coming clawed critics./The fourteen to forty crowd who spills midriffs/And cinch bulging thighs with zippered denim...their dislike, disdain disturbingly/Uncivilized.” But the promise in “Blouse” isn’t as hopeful or mysterious as the promise of a sexual liaison in “Point,” it’s a slippery promise , one that proffers that a piece of clothing, or a kind word can transform us, pick us up out of the doldrums, and put us upright, make us feel young and desirable. Bargen shows it fails more often than not.
The dying and finality of section two hardens into death and cruelty by the third section where Bargen’s poems show us war, the end times, when neighbor turns upon neighbor.
It’s not often that murder is made poetic in American letters. It’s there to be sure, consider Larry Levis’ murderous thieves from Elegy, Carolyn Forche’s “The Colonel”, Frank Bidart’s psychopathic “Herbert White,” or Martin Espada’s cruel racists. Bargen’s disturbing “Neighbors” belongs right down in hell with them,  and finds the poet employing crisp lines and stanzas to mimic the blade crossing a throat, and the containment of the camps.  At one point the protagonist of the poem has been roused from his house by a ski-mask wearing neighbor turned enemy, who marshalled him into a internment camp to begin his new life. He witnesses the horror, and Bargen’s lines might as well be a rag wiping the blade. “They sleep standing shoulder to shoulder,/Through a crack in the shed wall he sees/Neighbors strip a neighbor with long hunting knives/Then cut off a pound of flesh...as he bleeds away, the body doused/with gasoline, this man’s life and his own are aflame.”
War, and foreign conflict are the subject of many of the poems in the final section, as well as a fervor for the apocalypse, but the themes are present in the poems that are not explicitly about war and cruelty.  In “Booneville Bridge Demolition” all of the small folk, lovers, children, and small town witnesses live and love and gather in the shadow of the demolition that is to come, and that ultimately waits for us all. Destroying a bridge could as easily be an act of war as it is about civil service in the name of public safety, or a metaphor for destroying those we love while we are in the throes of emotional turmoil. “It could easily be a holiday celebration...but for the ripping and tearing...so much giving way...after many years of holding up both sides..the unbridgeable..the aftermath of all their crossings uncrossed.” And this is how Bargen leaves us, bereft of structure to hold us together, bereft of decency, yet still hoping, spending all of our luck on what may or may not be there anymore.

Jehanne Dubrow’s The Arranged Marriage, from the University of New Mexico Press, expresses the violence of relationships

Jehanne Dubrow’s The Arranged Marriage, from the University of New Mexico Press, expresses the violence of relationships, and the emotional and physical toll that such violence creates. Front and center are poems expressing how men vie for control of their women, and how the simplest domestic chores reveal the chaos within a one-sided marriage, within a relationship, and within us.
The most striking poems in Marriage tell the story of how the poet’s mother was held hostage in a home invasion, and it is the diction of that encounter, of shock and violence, which permeates the entire volume. Whether Dubrow writes of a dog on the street or writes an ekphrasis response to a painting violence is inherent in the language. The consistency of her diction and her unified poetic vision elevate Marriage, and illustrate the violent tyranny of the patriarchy that for some women in the world is a very present danger.
An arranged marriage is a dated concept, and many of the men in Dubrow’s book are old school patriarchs, men who want their wives to cook for them and lay with them whenever their desires are pricked. These are men who smell of cigars and whiskey, and prefer women to express their freedom in the kitchen; remnants of an older, crueler world. But Dubrow’s book isn’t only a feminist political argument, it is a collection that aims to tell the story of her mother, and her mother’s sufferings, and of the women who suffer similar fates.  It doesn’t matter if Dubrow writes about a model of marriage that is out-dated in the West, the narratives within Marriage are important.
The collection opens with “The Handbag” where the poet’s mother checks the weight of her purse which she hopes she will not have to use as a defensive weapon. “What the man doesn’t know is that the bag is full of borrowed books rigid at their spines. The man with a knife.” Many of the poems, like “The Handbag,” speak in staccato rhythm, as if fear has broken down the language of the victim, in this case her mother. What’s terrifying and skillful at the same time is that the man, the invader, is all men. Marriage is as much of a portrait of men as as it is women.  Man, in Marriage, is father, husband, lover, antagonist, invader, robber, and rapist, and the roles blur into a figure of authority that looms large over the landscape of the poems. Dubrow isn’t man bashing here. These aren’t diatribes. These are poems that express the great woe of women who have had to endure suffering at the hands of men.
What makes Marriage all the more complicated is the way in which the women, her mother, and the other “characters” react to the men in their lives. The third poem in the collection, “Makeshift Bandage,” the woman in the poem, presumably during the break-in, has bit her attacker on the hand, and is now bandaging him “where she bit him.”  However “the towel won’t stay. She finds electric tape inside a kitchen drawer. The tearing sound it makes--nothing should tear the way the loop of tape uncircles from itself.”  Stockholm syndrome, sure. But more likely the garden variety kind of toxic co-dependence that both men and women find themselves stuck within. Here the sound of the tape is sticky and unnerving, it is the sound of torn flesh being mended, but it is the visual image of the circle that either character cannot escape that wields the power in “Bandage.”
It is that very circular nature that Dubrow plays with with regard to form. The collection is made up (almost) entirely of prose poems. They function like circles, or perhaps bruises, or scars. Fat blocks of black type that illustrate the starkness of many of the lives on display in Marriage.
In the end, Marriage is a book about identity. In “The Blue Dress” where the speaker is tired of playing dolls and dress-up, and discovers by accident old photographs, evidence of past lives, of secret histories unknown to her. In the context of the book, these discoveries aren’t revelatory, or joyful, they are like finding a corpse, “a body dragged from a lake.”
Dubrow’s poems about domestic life, childhood, and art, are not devoid of violence, in fact they reflect the pain expressed in the poems that are directly about the arranged marriage, and about the home invasion. However, there is hope.
In “Story” the mother is working for the government transcribing narratives. Dubrow is masterfully unclear about what kind of narratives she transcribes. The women could be discussing World War Two, they could be discussing Central America. The women could be from anywhere, which is Dubrow’s point.  Her mother translates another woman’s story, and in doing so relives her own, and also perhaps, puts the terrible event behind her. “The woman is telling a story--how many cigarette burns, that the camps were called HOUSES, the riverstone of her body. My mother asks, How many cigarette burns? and waits for the translation. This is the word for RIVER, this is the word for RAVISH.” Once again language is affected by the experienced violence, broken up in block prose poems. Later, in a moment of synthesis, her mother’s story becomes part of the woman’s story she is transcribing. “Twenty years ago, my mother was telling a story. She tries to hold the memory of that man, his knife, his hands, what he could have killed, each word a water glass, all of it water....” It is a moment that occurs in other poems in the volume, and one that occurs for the reader as well. This identification illustrates human nature at its most intimate, and most brave. When we try to understand another person in pain, how can we not be transformed by the experience?
Arranged Marriage is beam of light shining in dark rooms. A beam of light made up of dark words, dark stories, dark secrets. The exigency of this work is Dubrow’s mother’s story, but Marriage transcends the singular narrative and becomes something else entirely. It is as if the poet is acting as a healer, expressing what has long been in the dark and left to fester. And by the end, Marriage has cleaned up and cleaned out the old rooms, and “there are no surprises. Nothing is crouched and waiting with a knife.”

Whitaker, Chappelle to read poetry at Irish Eyes July 29

Whitaker, Chappelle to read poetry at Irish Eyes July 29

#PoetryReading at Irish Eyes, Milton, DE Wed July 29th-I'll be slicing lines & hosting the #OpenMic

EVENT: Poetry Reading.  Wed, July 29, 7:00-9:00 Broadkill Poets Scott Whitaker and Sherry Chappelle poetry reading followed by open mic.  Irish Eyes, 105 Union Street, Milton, DE 19968 

Drop on by and enjoy refreshments.

See you there.

#Sense8 Sci-Fi for your heart

The Wachowskis films are visual delights, often airy and delicious as pastries and coffee. Nothing too substantial once the body is done with the sugar, that's not a jab either; the Wachowskis make pop-corn munchers with flair.

Bound, their thriller debut, The Matrix, and Cloud Atlas are their strongest directorial work, some argue V, and many argue CA is a bit hokey at times because the actors donned prosthetics and wigs, and played multiple characters, often switching genders or ethnicity. I liked that about CA, a touch of old school Hollywood, but at places it felt forced and lacked grace. I digress, regardless of their work, at heart of the Wachowskis is the power of transformation.

Together with Babylon 5 creator and writer, J Michael Stracynski, the Wachowskis deliver unto Netflix Sense8, a sci-fi drama that focuses on the heart, the emotional center of its characters.

Sense8, their new Netflix show (Tom Tykwer's fingerprints are all over Sense8 ...the co-collaborator for CA, and the director of some great German thrillers...notably Run Lola Run) concerns eight individuals born on 8/8/88 who have the ability to share their consciousness with each other. Born in clusters, the individuals telepathic and empathetic powers manifest in their 28th year. Guided by Jonas (Lost's Naveen Andrews--suave and cool), a "terrorist" who has made visually contact with two members of the cluster, the individuals begin to learn that they can share, not only one's experiences and feelings, but skill-sets and abilities. This makes for great fun when the characters are on the run from government bad-guys led by Whispers (Think Agent Smith with a Euro-accent, who BTW is also a sense8--though from a different cluster). Jonas claims Whispers wants to lobotomize the sense8s and use them for zombie-like shells that Whispers can control telepathically. Whispers isn't a threat unless he makes visual contact, thus chase scenes. Because once visual contact is made the sense8 can share and visit with another sense8, accessing knowledge, feelings, and emotions.

The government conspiracy chase sequences are great fun, but that's not what the series focuses upon. The series instead is a long character study, a soap opera, about the eight individuals trying not to go crazy as their inner life and inner world become invaded by other people's inner worlds. Through this plot device the Wachowskis and Straczynski explore gender, sexual, political, and socio-ethno identity. Set in Iceland, London, Korea, Kenya, Germany, India, Mexico City, and the United States the characters become immersed in each other's lives. There's sex, child-birth, humor, and of course gunplay, car chases, and martial arts.

Sense8 is provocative, like all great sci-fi.  It's pretty, but the beauty is in our own diverse Earth not some far away galaxy.

It's not perfect. Sense8 could use some trimming.

It starts slow, but with so many "main" characters it must. Be patient and enjoy the scenery. It takes several episodes before the myth wheels start to chug.   It's foreshadowed in the credits, which are
an homage to Koyaanisqatsi, and Baraka, non-linear non-narrative films.

There's a enough action in the beginning to keep fans coming back, but the series focus is on people, world culture, and emotional intimacy.

The characters are great, and so are the performances, anchored by Brian Smith's Will Gorksi (the cop, the hero, the leader), Ami Ameen's Capheus (the good natured and buoyant bus driver), Miguel Silvestre's Lito (the closeted action movie star) Jamie Clayton's Nomi (the MTF transgender hacktivist), Tuppence Middleton's Riley (the damaged DJ), Bae Doona's Sun (the bad-ass emotionally neglected martial arts expert), Max Reimelt's Wolfgang (a safe cracking gangster with a heart of gold), and Tina Desai's Kala (the hesitant bride to be). However, the performances would be so much better the drama could have been trimmed, or at least toned down.  At times emotional scenes are drawn out like a big Hollywood action sequence. Examples:  Kala's on again/off again wedding grew tiresome. Nomi, who survived her controlling family, almost going to jail, and transitioning... cries a little too much for someone who should be more bad-ass confident. Lito's break-up episode with Hernando featured about ten minutes too much of emotional torture.  At times the audience is hammered with meaning and importance. Consider the birthing sequence. Riley is in Iceland watching her father perform with the symphony and re-experiences her birth. And of course, the sense8s all revisit their birth, and the birth leaves nothing to the imagination. Babies slipping out of vaginas, mothers crying, mothers dying, characters tearing up.  Brave, yes, especially for sci-fi, but too much--almost to the point of self-parody.

Half-way through the formula for the plot becomes evident: the writers must concoct a conflict that involves crazy driving, hacking, martial arts, gunplay, deception, music, and chemistry/medicine for all of the sense8s to participate.  Not that all of the sense8s have to participate in the action, but obviously how to get them all involved in the conflict can trump clearer, more direct storytelling. If Netflix green lights a second season, it will be very interesting to see how the myth evolves.

What Sense8 does right: gorgeous cinematography, bright colors, interesting LGBTQ characters, scene stealing anti-heroes, and a great sci-fi concept. Addiction, traditional faith based religion, the a fore-mentioned sexuality & gender identity, ethnocentric politics, poverty, and family are given equal staging in this provocative, science fiction soap opera.

Out this week: Thirty Days: Best of the 30/30 Project. Featuring my poem "Love in Reverse"

Marie Gauthier of Tupelo Press selected one of my poems, "Love in Reverse" for Thirty Days: The best of the 30/30 Project Year One.  It's one of a few anthologies to feature my work (cue haughty accent, spotlight, espresso, and French cigarettes).

Hopefully you'll be hearing more from me over the next few months as projects near completion. Thanks for the support.

The secret to #FuryRoad is good writing. Mad Max avoids pandering to the groundlings

Warning: Spoiler alert.

Fury Road is buzzing. Easily one of the best action films of the decade, or theaction film of the decade, critics have been ringing up its “live stunt” merits, its ingenious action sequences, and its feminist core. But what exactly makes Fury Road so effective? To put it simply, it’s the writing. Yes, film writing is only part of the success, you have to actual film what you write, right? And act it, and so forth... Fury Road is a successful Film (with a capital F) because the writers do not pander to the groundlings. George Miller, Brendan McCarthy (known for comics and TV work), and Nico Lathouris (an actor/ TV writer who had a bit part in the original Mad Max) craft a world without Basil Exposition. If you are prone to long bathroom breaks you just might miss an image crucial to the plot.
Is this a groundbreaking filmmaking technique, to let the pictures do the talking? Hardly. Just one rarely used in Hollywood. Hollywood likes to scaffold a big budget film so that everyone is on the same footing. The Avengers, Age of Ultron, which debuted the previous week, featured plenty of Basil Exposition for the uninitiated. For example, Tony Stark and Bruce Banner explain the nuances of artificial intelligence, dropping sci-fi gobbledygook jargon to boost the audience's appreciation of Ultron, and later the Vision. But scaffolding can obscure a film. Christopher Nolan’sInterstellar, which I had high hopes for, is a long slough of mansplaining, combined with story threads that lead nowhere (remember the robotic combines that re-direct themselves to McConaughey's front door?). One could argue that Interstellar’s problem was the editing, but let’s be real...it was the script, the didactic dialogue, and excessive plot points that beached that whale. And the Avengers? Well, it’s target audience is kids, and dads, and geeks. If you haven’t picked up a comic in a while, let me tell you….it’s full of Basil Exposition.
Miller created the diesel punk movement long before steampunk became a cultural phenomenon. The first three Mad Max films are full of steampunk staples, goggles, do-it-yourself armor, and inventive clothing reminiscent of an earlier time. Miller’s visual palette established a whole culture of dystopian and post apocalyptic entertainment for the next thirty years. And he didn’t scaffold the originals either. The first time I saw Mad Max I didn’t know when it took place because Miller never bothered to tell us. Miller left clues, let the costumes do the talking, let air into the dialogue, so to speak, and didn't look back.
Fury Road is the bareback knuckles of dystopian film. There isn't any pandering here. Mad Max gives us a voice over in the first three minutes, just enough for the uninitiated, but not enough to drag us down. Mad Max doesn’t tell us who the bad guys are, he doesn’t tell us where he is. He doesn’t offer a clue as to what is to come. That all becomes apparent as soon as the first chase begins.
And yes, Fury Road is simply an over the top gonzo chase movie. It’s an action film. So why all the fuss? But it is also a movie about the one percent controlling all of the resources (in this case, water, breast milk, and healthy women). It’s also a film about the rich vs the poor, and it is also a film about the search for physical perfection.
Fury Road is Charlize Theron's movie, Tom Hardy is a grunting, stoic action hero, but one who ultimately serves Theron. As Imperator Furiosa, Theron is damaged goods, either through birth defect or accident. Either is likely; Furiosa is outfitted with a cool prosthetic arm. How she came to have it is not important. She is not perfect enough to serve as a breeder for Immortan Joe’s patriarchy, but she is good enough to lead his troops.
What is important is that Furiosa is planning a daring escape, a coup of sorts against Immortan Joe, whose grotesque body is encased in a type of armor, and whose lungs are damaged enough to require a breathing apparatus creepier than that of Darth Vader or Bane (Miller handles micing Joe’s mask way better than Nolan handled micing Tom Hardy's Bane’s mask in his final Batman film.). Joe spouts Viking macho-isms to his War Boys and gear heads who worship the war machines that make up the fractured myth of their post apocalyptic world. None of it is explained. It just is. You watch, you learn.
Much has been written about the feminist agenda in Fury Road, and my buddy Nate of Alpine Strangers over at Nerdshed has chimed in already, and touches on the inherent “Hollywood feminism” of the film. And he’s got a point. Charlize Theron, sans arm, is still Charlize Theron, and easy on the eyes in her tight leather end-of-the-world pants. Still, she's not sexualized like the breeders, whom she smuggles to the Green Place, and is the exigency of her escape. The breeders, whose flowing gauzy strips of clothing sometimes evoke women of the Middle East, are the reason for the escape. They are pretty women, young, and undamaged, for the most part. They are alien and precious in the post apocalyptic world.
We are not talking political diatribe feminism. Obviously, we are discussing the bare bones right to have control of your own body, to have control over your own reproductive system, and to have control over your own sexual partner. Miller does not mansplain any of this, it is told visually. If you blink you will miss the shark teeth chastity belts worn by the breeders, a subversion of the vagina dentata by Joe in order to control "his girls.” If you blink you’ll miss the women’s secret world. The books, their graffiti. Joe keeps everything under lock and key. Women, breast milk (pumped from rubenesque women whose one job is to produce milk), vegetables, water, and blood bags (prisoners, who are genetically clean or healthy and kept alive for the singular purpose of blood transfusions) are all controlled by him and his fat cats of the post apocalyptic world. He allows his War Boys to consume some of his goods (breast milk is the energy drink of Fury Road) but tortures the lowly poor citadel dwellers with allowances.
Miller could have cast less beatific women as the wives, but since their beauty is symbolic, or metaphorical (and likely to please the target demographic) the feminism of Fury Road is arguably glossy, and “Hollywood.” But again, their beauty is a symbol of health. Furiosa steals them away, and Joe is hopping mad.
They are off to The Green Place, where we later find out is Furiosa’s home, and was the last known place in the wastes where people grew crops. It is there we find a more Democratic, all inclusive, band of feminist warriors. The women of the Green Place are tired, weathered, and as dangerous as the War Boys and outlaws lying outside of Joe’s citadel. When we meet them, they are ready to spring a trap upon the war rig, and probably kill everyone on board. These women are quick to act. They are also keepers of seed, and of knowledge of the old world. Together with Furiosa's party, they decide to cross the salts for new ground.

Fury Road would have been successful without Max. It’s written that way. Max is witness. Max is an observer. Heck, for the first act of the film Max is a blood bag strapped to a War Boy’s war rig, immobile, emasculated. Max doesn't really want to help the women, the ghost of his dead little girl certainly does, but he isn’t so sure. He’s mad with grief, and you get the feeling that Max would be as happy making his way alone in the world. Tom Hardy embodies the angry grief with charisma. He doesn’t speak much (Gibson was as stoic in the originals) and it isn’t until the second half that Max begins to pull his own weight w/r/t to Furiosa's “plan.” One of his best moments is when Hardy has a bit of competitive spitting with a War Boy trying to overtake Furiosa’s rig. The War Boy and Max are on their respective hoods spitting gasoline (that’s right) into the intake of their respective rigs so their vehicles can maintain top speed. In the film Max exists to be muscle, not to be a rescuer of women, but an ally. The women in Fury Road do all their own heavy lifting.

Cutting Firewood in the Cup featured on The Good Men Project

The fine staff of the Good Men Project selected one of my poems this month. You can read it here. I don’t know if I channel Thoreau or not, but I was certainly thinking of an adventure at Walden Pond in college. We’d hit Concord by train, a short ride from Boston. We hiked the rails back, and crossed over into the park and stayed the night. Hollering and looping like fools in the moon and brisk fall air. Ah, good times. This poem isn't about that. That's a different poem. This poem is about chores and finding some connection to earth. Working on the lyric. That's all. A song in minor key. Peace.