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Friday, May 29, 2015
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
Mad Max: Fury Road and the MTV Aesthetic
It’s summer and blockbuster season is upon us, so I decided to christen the season with Mad Max: Fury Road.
Let me set the scene for you: it’s a sweltering day, one of the hottest of the summer so far. I trek to the theater alone for a 1 PM showing of Mad Max in IMAX 3-D. So I’m sweating before the movie’s even started. I forgot to mention it’s a Tuesday. I know Tuesday afternoon isn’t prime movie watching time but there’s a discount on Tuesday which brought the ticket price down from an ungodly $19 to just an unreasonable $13. I could have seen the movie in just plain old boring 3-D but I thought this is a big movie so I might as well go for the biggest screen. IMAX it is.
I knew little to nothing about this movie going in, save for the amazing trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEJnMQG9ev8). All I wanted was a cool blockbuster.
When you hear the word blockbuster, you immediately think of explosions. And believe me Mad Max had explosions. It would even be fair to say Mad Max had more explosions than your average explosion-centric film. But more important than explosions, Mad Max had style.
I want to talk about the visual style of Mad Max, specifically in the context of what scholars would call MTV aesthetics.
MTV made its debut on American screens in 1981, the same year as Road Warrior (the second Mad Max film) came out. Coincidence? Probably. But there was a style developing, a certain sensibility in the air that would shape the media of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. After the advent of the blockbuster with Jaws in 1975, we saw the editing style and pace of films quicken. This is in direct relation to the rising popularity of MTV who marketed their programming toward young adults who liked fast cars and rock music.
When I watched Fury Road I couldn’t help but see the influence of all the various subcultures represented by MTV, or at the least MTV when it was still Music Television. I have no idea what the fuck they are now (see: Teen Mom, Teen Mom 2 etc.). Before I get into the mise-en-scene, I want to talk about the breakneck pace of the film. I know that crazy driving is a big part of the Mad Max films, but in Fury Road director George Miller really applies that idea to the editing style. In addition to lightning fast cutting, Miller actually under-cranks many of the sequences to give them a frantic sped up quality. Miller speeds up the shots of the antagonist Immortan Joe to give him a menacing god-like presence. Speed is an essential element of the MTV aesthetic and youth culture in general.
A lot of imagery in Fury Road bears similarity to extreme sports. Events like the X-Games are linked to MTV’s culture of speed. One of the bands of mercenaries that Max and Furiosa (Mmm Charlize Theron) run into rides motorcycles that look suspiciously like BMX bikes. They even go off conveniently placed jumps and do backflips on said bikes. Immortan Joe’s gang of baddies also has huge vehicles that look and function a lot like monster trucks. Another element is the "chrome" that the members of the citadel spray on their faces like war paint. For some reason this was reminiscent of chrome rims and bling, very important to hip-hop culture as well as the MTV show Pimp My Ride. See how this is all coming together?
There’s more. Maybe the most important legacy of MTV is the music, specifically rock music. This relates to perhaps the most memorable visual creation that George Miller graced us with on Fury Road. One of Joe’s caravan is a enormous truck with men pounding drums on the back and some dude shredding the most ridiculous guitar that spews flames, chained to a wall of amps. Now if that isn’t pure rock and roll I don’t know what is. The guitar guy even looks like insane drummer Brian Chippendale from noise rock band Lightning Bolt (see for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NZGbD236fw). Another connection to rock music was at the beginning when Immortan Joe stood in front of his worshippers who begged for water. In retrospect, it felt like a concert with fans worshipping some rock idol. In these ways, Miller updates tribal customs with modern MTV aesthetics.
It’s really interesting that this post-apocalyptic world George Miller created has so many connections to MTV imagery. Is Miller saying that MTV is going to bring about the apocalypse or that MTV will be the only thing to survive the apocalypse? Both propositions are equally terrifying.
Recommendations: If you liked Mad Max, you’d probably like some of George Miller’s other masterpieces like Happy Feet or Babe: Pig in the City.
Have a nice week!
Let me set the scene for you: it’s a sweltering day, one of the hottest of the summer so far. I trek to the theater alone for a 1 PM showing of Mad Max in IMAX 3-D. So I’m sweating before the movie’s even started. I forgot to mention it’s a Tuesday. I know Tuesday afternoon isn’t prime movie watching time but there’s a discount on Tuesday which brought the ticket price down from an ungodly $19 to just an unreasonable $13. I could have seen the movie in just plain old boring 3-D but I thought this is a big movie so I might as well go for the biggest screen. IMAX it is.
I knew little to nothing about this movie going in, save for the amazing trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEJnMQG9ev8). All I wanted was a cool blockbuster.
When you hear the word blockbuster, you immediately think of explosions. And believe me Mad Max had explosions. It would even be fair to say Mad Max had more explosions than your average explosion-centric film. But more important than explosions, Mad Max had style.
I want to talk about the visual style of Mad Max, specifically in the context of what scholars would call MTV aesthetics.
MTV made its debut on American screens in 1981, the same year as Road Warrior (the second Mad Max film) came out. Coincidence? Probably. But there was a style developing, a certain sensibility in the air that would shape the media of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. After the advent of the blockbuster with Jaws in 1975, we saw the editing style and pace of films quicken. This is in direct relation to the rising popularity of MTV who marketed their programming toward young adults who liked fast cars and rock music.
When I watched Fury Road I couldn’t help but see the influence of all the various subcultures represented by MTV, or at the least MTV when it was still Music Television. I have no idea what the fuck they are now (see: Teen Mom, Teen Mom 2 etc.). Before I get into the mise-en-scene, I want to talk about the breakneck pace of the film. I know that crazy driving is a big part of the Mad Max films, but in Fury Road director George Miller really applies that idea to the editing style. In addition to lightning fast cutting, Miller actually under-cranks many of the sequences to give them a frantic sped up quality. Miller speeds up the shots of the antagonist Immortan Joe to give him a menacing god-like presence. Speed is an essential element of the MTV aesthetic and youth culture in general.
A lot of imagery in Fury Road bears similarity to extreme sports. Events like the X-Games are linked to MTV’s culture of speed. One of the bands of mercenaries that Max and Furiosa (Mmm Charlize Theron) run into rides motorcycles that look suspiciously like BMX bikes. They even go off conveniently placed jumps and do backflips on said bikes. Immortan Joe’s gang of baddies also has huge vehicles that look and function a lot like monster trucks. Another element is the "chrome" that the members of the citadel spray on their faces like war paint. For some reason this was reminiscent of chrome rims and bling, very important to hip-hop culture as well as the MTV show Pimp My Ride. See how this is all coming together?
There’s more. Maybe the most important legacy of MTV is the music, specifically rock music. This relates to perhaps the most memorable visual creation that George Miller graced us with on Fury Road. One of Joe’s caravan is a enormous truck with men pounding drums on the back and some dude shredding the most ridiculous guitar that spews flames, chained to a wall of amps. Now if that isn’t pure rock and roll I don’t know what is. The guitar guy even looks like insane drummer Brian Chippendale from noise rock band Lightning Bolt (see for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NZGbD236fw). Another connection to rock music was at the beginning when Immortan Joe stood in front of his worshippers who begged for water. In retrospect, it felt like a concert with fans worshipping some rock idol. In these ways, Miller updates tribal customs with modern MTV aesthetics.
It’s really interesting that this post-apocalyptic world George Miller created has so many connections to MTV imagery. Is Miller saying that MTV is going to bring about the apocalypse or that MTV will be the only thing to survive the apocalypse? Both propositions are equally terrifying.
Recommendations: If you liked Mad Max, you’d probably like some of George Miller’s other masterpieces like Happy Feet or Babe: Pig in the City.
Have a nice week!
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