Imperator Furiosa

A place for all things Mad Max, especially meta discussions.

[zanmor]

What is your religion and do you or will you have a christmas/holiday tree displayed in your household?

whether or not you put the tree up or would display it yourself, what is your personal religion and is there a tree displayed in your shared living space?

Christianity and yes

Christianity and no

Islam and yes

Islam and no

Hinduism and yes

Hinduism and no

atheism and yes

atheism and no

other and yes

other and no

Voting ended onDec 15, 2025

[raptorific]

One of the things that always drives me insane is seeing people try to work out coherent chronology and continuity of the Mad Max series, and the thing that makes me crazier is when people push back on this by being like "it's a dumb movie about crazy driving and explosions! it doesn't NEED to make sense!" because in reality the lack of a defined chronology or continuity is a feature, not a bug, and the reason for it is not that the movies are too dumb to be held to that standard, it's that the movies are much smarter than anyone trying to Figure Them Out give them credit for

[raptorific]

The short version of my explanation is that, in the Mad Max series, "Max Rockatansky" does not exist any more than "Jack" is a single boy who slew a giant, jumped over a candlestick, and went up the hill with his sister Jill

The long version is that the Mad Max series is a narrative within a narrative, with the movies being legends and campfire stories, an oral tradition of the storytellers of the wasteland, all of whom are, to some degrees, unreliable narrators because they're telling stories of things that happened a long time ago from their point of view, if they happened at all. The events of the movies are likely either exaggerated or outright invented whole-cloth in the same way that the myths and legends of antiquity were. "Mad Max Fury Road" is the founding myth of the Citadel, and if the Citadel is Rome, then Furiosa is their Romulus.

At some point, someone founded Rome, and the character in that legend may have been based on a real man, but how that man aligns with the myth is almost immaterial. The myths and legends of antiquity, crucially, all took place in what the ancient world would consider "the ancient world," in a mysterious far-off time period when the gods still mingled with mortals. Whether Max or Furiosa or Immortan Joe or any of the characters we see in the movie "actually existed" within the movie's world is as irrelevant as whether The Real Herakles at the root of the legend was actually the son of Zeus. In the story, he is.

"Max" as a character exists on the screen because a lot of the real stories in that world involve mentally unstable loners with obvious PTSD showing up, helping people out of a situation, and then leaving without telling anybody anyone about himself, and the oral histories and myths reflect that. "Max Rockatansky" is a stock character whose general identity and loose backstory is retroactively ascribed to any characters in any legend who fit that basic description.

To try to figure out the chronology and continuity of the Mad Max movies or the associated protagonist is like trying to figure out how it's possible that The Big Bad Wolf is killed in both "The Three Little Pigs" and "Little Red Riding Hood," or determine in what order Prince Charming married so many different fairytale heroines or why he never mentioned any of his past wives.

And, for the record, just to be clear so it doesn't seem like I'm overthinking this-- this is shown explicitly in the narrative, the second movie uses The Campfire Stories as an unambiguous framing device. The filmmaker behind the series has outright stated this is an intentional choice he made. This isn't just me taking the car explosion movie too seriously, this is the explicit text of the series

[eggcup-deactivated20180129]

that thing about how removing the middle 2 panels of a cad comic makes it funnier is true 

[zonecassette]

holy shit

[severalowls]

I can’t even imagine what meaningless filler went into panels 2-3.

[newtypenea]

oh my god these are actually funny

[baishujinkou]

[moonkitty]

this is 100% true and once you remove the horrible filler bullshit its comedy gold

[oldtumblhurgoyf]

so here’s what this is doing that the originals don’t in one word:

CLOSURE

in McCloud’s Understanding Comics he defines it as the “phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole.” the most obvious closure is how we fill in the motion that connects these panels

but it applies to all stories told through comic (and I’d argue works in written word too, though in some different ways because the medium is different)

I think one huge flaw of CAD is that it holds your hand through the whole joke and either gives you too much not necessary for the joke to land or else just walks you through it so slowly that it’s telegraphed well in advance and thus isn’t as surprising

the closest one from above is clues

while not telegraphed, that middle panel just isn’t needed. it dilutes the final panel and that final panel has so much more than it needs to convey what’s going on that it dilutes the punchline on its own. the edit above tightens this in and gets rid of extra unnecessary bits so the joke lands harder and cleaner

bringing this back to closure, the above two-panels rely on the reader for a lot more. you’ve gotta do more work and you’re doing it all in the time it takes you to look at those two panels. they’re gonna land a little differently for everyone. especially when the juxtaposition between the two panels is greater, each person is going to have a wider array of possible reasons they’re connected. and this is also the instance where you’re more likely to get people who tune it out and call it boring nonsense. but that’s a risk of art that asks people to do more–some people will say nah, not going to

CAD doesn’t ask the reader to do much of anything to “enjoy” it and the result is bland and trite. the bits above reconstitute the parts into a better whole by omitting info and asking the audience to engage more. CAD’s main flaw is that it asks very little of its audience and honestly would prefer they didn’t look or think too hard

[brothertedd-deactivated20240822]

MAD MAX Fury Road

Petrick Animation

[zanmor]

Lost in the Stars: Book One in the Celestial Series [Charles, Sawyer, Moran, Will B] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Lo

Hey one of my best friends wrote a book!

You can order it at the link above in ebook, hardback, or paperback.

It's a fantasy/sci fi story in a modern setting that is fun in a dysfunctional sort of way. Here's the blurb from the back of the book:

A seemingly normal teenager discovers her extraordinary origins. Caught between two worlds with no real place to call home, Shiloh Frear must work to uncover the hidden truths of her reality. Can she rectify her choices and escape her prescribed fate, or will she remain a permanent fixture in a strange and uncertain world?

I also know that the second book for the series is already well under way.

Oh, and there's a cute lesbian romance. :)

Help out my friend and read a cool story doing it!

[zanmor]

Gun to your head you have to eat one of these American delicacies

which one do you eat?

rocky mountain oysters

scrapple

cannibal sandwich

koolickle

burgoo aka "roadkill" stew

deep-fried butter

pickled pig's feet

chitlins

turducken

jello salad

Voting ended onMar 1, 2023

The Europeans who made that poll have no idea how bad it can get.

[zanmor]

how many first cousins do you have?

0

1 to 4

5

6

7 to 9

10 to 14

14 to 20

21 or more

Voting ended onFeb 25, 2023

Weird bins, right? I have assumptions about how this breaks down and want to see how they stand up to some data.

After the poll closes I'll share my hypothesis with y'all.

[tumblhurgoyf]

fibonnaci sequence poll

0+1 votes

1+1 votes

1+2 votes

2+3 votes

3+5 votes

5+8 votes

8+13 votes

13+21 votes

Voting ended onJan 21, 2023

[tumblhurgoyf]

Pretty solid start lmao

[imp-furiosa]

so if you just got each poll option to match the values of the numbers it shows you'd get pretty close. Like the first option at 1% of the votes, second option with 2%, and so on. It doesn't work perfectly but is a decent approximation compared to how it's looking now.

I think everyone needs to stop voting for the first option glfor this to have any chance of success though.

[imp-furiosa]

I was thinking about the bit in breaking bad where saul wants walt to buy an arcade or whatever to launder his money and...

I realized that the show for a good chunk of it shows that despite what he wants, walt is no master criminal and that those around him are essentially as good at this stuff as him. like when it comes down to it skylar is a quick study on criminal activities. it ain’t that hard

but then also we get the mastermind walt who wins in the end and gets to be a hero of his own little twisted drama. I think it’s better if walt gets beaten. like you have to make some changes in season 4 (and basically an entirely different season 5), maybe earlier, for it to be cathartic, but let these other characters be as smart as him, honestly. it’s not the story that was told but the story that was told undermines a good chunk of who the characters are in order to make walt the black sheep winner of the tale

[imp-furiosa]

glass onion tidbit (spoilers)

before I do this, know that this is a down and dirty quick splash of an idea that’s been knocking around my head since watching it. particular wording I know needs work and if I were writing up a paper this would be much more thought out and particular words would be very considered. in short, there are a few phrases I use here which could be picked at to undermine the entire argument and that’s not the sort of feedback I want to engage with. consider the vibe rather than the exact phrasing

thesis: Blanc’s character can point out what’s wrong but will not take the necessary corrective actions. a perfect allegory of liberal American politics that just wants to be correct, not do the correct thing

antithesis: it wasn’t Blanc’s action to take. he’s not some sort of white savior. he helped create the situation by exposing the truth but then left the shot at justice in the hands of the one person who deserved it, Brand

synthesis: Netflix workshopped and focus grouped a fun film targeted at a specific audience one might describe as “woke maskers” -- no offense intended to fellow politically motivated mask wearers. the film works very hard to create a situation where you can feel good that the Mona Lisa gets destroyed while of course the Mona Lisa doesn’t get destroyed irl. one of the first things it does is make up a fantasy mouth spray so that you don’t have to hand wring about Blanc and the others not wearing masks during their Covid party. our antagonist/villain is a guy just as insufferable as everyone else you want to punch on the screen, with the exception that we’re given some good reasons you’d actually punch him, whereas the social norms (the status quo we wouldn’t dare disrupt) say we can’t do that to the others

it’s a film about feeling good when the stars align and some rich asshole gets justice but not actually rocking the boat enough to do it for real. it’s about ignoring systemic issues to focus instead on intensely personal ones. the system is unimpeachable. you can only lash out at individual actors within the system when they commit some personal crime. like the “disruptors” in the film, the work’s final act of disruption and the good feelings it brings the audience are ultimately the false catharsis of a bourgeois placebo intended to placate its target audience. you know you’re good because you consumed a good film. there’s no need to do more (and you’re good: good people wouldn’t burn the Mona Lisa)

[imp-furiosa]

If I were to venture a guess (and I’m about to), the attempts to standardize and catalogue Goncharov will kill it. Doing that begins to close it off. Trying to say this or that idea is accepted “canon” makes it feel less like a space you can play in and make stuff up. Maybe I’m wrong on that, but it certainly sours me on the thing to see people iterating the same ideas and not spinning so many new scenes and things that just obviously couldn’t all fit into a single film.

And like it may not die as a meme and the big stuff will still get out to a wider audience, but it’s less inviting for new people to come in because rather than just looking at a poster and thinking “what would I want to see in a 1970 gangster flick?” and making something up that fits that, there’s this feeling, this obligation, that you’ve gotta work with the “canon.”

So this is your call to buck the observation that we’ve collectively made a movie that reduced its homoeroticism to subtext. The meme’s like 5 days old. My favorite scene was the car sex scene that woulda fit in the Titanic except it’s Pacino and De Niro steaming up the windows and Scorsese shows Al jerking of Rob until he cums on their fancy suits.

[imp-furiosa]

Oh and I forgot to mention the second big issue with standardizing and cataloging it. The thing's a fever dream where you can't verify anything. Establishing a canon of largely accepted ideas defeats that. We need to deconstruct and destroy what we've already done and rebuild.

Keep it an unverifiable mess. Reboot.

[imp-furiosa]

how good are deep fakes? how hard are they to make? I feel like this is a pandora’s box sort of thing but... Goncharov deep fakes?

[imp-furiosa]

If I were to venture a guess (and I’m about to), the attempts to standardize and catalogue Goncharov will kill it. Doing that begins to close it off. Trying to say this or that idea is accepted “canon” makes it feel less like a space you can play in and make stuff up. Maybe I’m wrong on that, but it certainly sours me on the thing to see people iterating the same ideas and not spinning so many new scenes and things that just obviously couldn’t all fit into a single film.

And like it may not die as a meme and the big stuff will still get out to a wider audience, but it’s less inviting for new people to come in because rather than just looking at a poster and thinking “what would I want to see in a 1970 gangster flick?” and making something up that fits that, there’s this feeling, this obligation, that you’ve gotta work with the “canon.”

So this is your call to buck the observation that we’ve collectively made a movie that reduced its homoeroticism to subtext. The meme’s like 5 days old. My favorite scene was the car sex scene that woulda fit in the Titanic except it’s Pacino and De Niro steaming up the windows and Scorsese shows Al jerking of Rob until he cums on their fancy suits.

[imp-furiosa]

Moby Dick Chapter One

***Spoilers for an 1851 novel, be warned. (As in if Whale Weekly is your first experience with Moby Dick, even in my discussion of Chapter One there will be spoilers from later in the book.)***

Ishmael goes to the sea to die. It's his stand in for actual suicide. “This is my substitute for pistol and ball.” But more than that, he notes how this draw is universal in people. “Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.” These people are looking to the sea and more than that, want to get as close as they possibly can to the mass of timeless, bottomless, meaningless water that dwarfs their entire existence in every respect. And for them that's enough. Ishmael, however, cannot stop at the shore. He must meet death much closer.

Even when away from the immense ocean, Narcissus drowns himself in a small fountain: such is the pull of water. Ishmael seeks out the sea when living becomes too much. There's a tinge of consumerism in the problems he has with life. He specifically goes as a sailor so that he subverts the typical transactional exchange one would expect—that of a passenger. There's still a transaction as Ishmael gets paid for his work, but one gets the idea that he'd go and do it without pay all the same. What he gets from it is much deeper and more meaningful than pay. And it's absolutely impossible that a passenger could achieve the same.

Or perhaps!

This book is a post mortem for the Pequod and its crew. Ishmael has returned home from a harrowing journey. He is already changed forever and we don't even know it. As a modern audience we might diagnose him with survivor's guilt if we knew what unfolds in the tale. When we meet Ishmael he has already died. The man who cheerfully consigned himself to perdition boarded that ship years prior and the man we are to call Ishmael has since returned, trying to deal with his experience and make some sense of it.

His search for sense in the death and destruction ranges far and wide: from Greek tragedy to the Fates and a sort of predetermination, to a more broad and vaguely Christian sort of mysticism or at least acknowledgment that the sea has long been considered mystic and holy. The take away here is that none of it is satisfactory. Ultimately the thing comes down to Ishmael desiring the escape in his deepest being. The truth is in him and him alone, both as the sole survivor and as the man from the past who signed on to the journey under “the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.”

Whatever the broad cornucopia of possible beliefs and sense-making available in the world, Ishmael returns to an intensely individual and personal interpretation of it all. Even as we participate in the world, interact with it, and connect so deeply with others, we still ultimately live and die discretely. Any truth we can find is solipsistic despite a desire for something grander, something universal, and Ishmael doesn't refute this but instead lives in the contradiction of a desire... rather a compulsion that he can't quite fully embrace. Because at this point to embrace it is to accept a necessity or rightness in the callous destruction of a force of nature, as well as the suicidal bent of the man who brought them to face it.

[imp-furiosa]

Goncharov is a Bad Meme...

...because it’s a bad movie. I don’t begrudge anybody their cult movie favorites, but so few people have heard of Goncharov that there’s a joke going around that it doesn’t exist and people have made it up just to troll. Ironically the things that have won it acclaim as a cult success are the very things that doom it as a work. You need look little further than the box office reception for proof.

Check out the top grossing movies of 1973 and you’ll notice that Goncharov doesn’t make the list. The Exorcist tops things out with a gross of $193 million. The bottom spot goes to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid with $8 million. Goncharov on the other hand was a commercial failure at release, barely recouping its unnecessarily bloated budget. Not that the budget was big, it was really a shoestring, but a list of production issues and re-shoots ate more and more time and money just to get something out the door.

Now I’m not trying to argue that box office revenue is all that matters for a good movie. It doesn’t at all. But in the case of Goncharov, the box office flop is informed by the way the film was made and thus informs its unique problems.

You see, Goncharov was filmed on location in Naples in the early 1970s during one or perhaps two extended “vacations” for most of the cast in the film. Highly unusual. But that’s sort of how things work when Stefano Pessina of Walgreens Boots Alliance (then Petrone Group) has an urge to play in an American mobster movie. He footed the bill himself (or rather convinced his daddy to), and the mess they shot was largely derivative and not worth any notice.

Scorsese wasn’t even involved until De Niro and Keitel approached him for help. Doing what he could to piece together what he assessed as workable bones, Scorsese tied together formerly loose threads and themes (notably the clock motif wasn’t nearly as significant before he took to work on it). The biggest thing is that he insisted on re-shoots as possible, adding new scenes, cutting scenes entirely, and notably excising all but a cameo of former star Pessina--the man can’t act. But he was paying the bills and while he’d find himself lucky to break even on the venture, his checkbook did at least allow the thing to see the light of day. Saved as much as possible by Scorsese’s talented eye.

All that cut material was saved, possibly at Pessina’s insistence, and has found its way to the public in the half century since its debut. Which has resulted in a number of new cuts and editions. It’s a favorite for film students to practice editing because the copious extra scenes allow wildly varying stories to be told. Since most people aren’t even aware of the movie in the first place, those that see it happenstance may well have found an unofficial edition. This is why we see many wildly varying “canonical” scenes. They all exist, but very few of them actually showed up in Scorsese’s theatrical release back in ‘73.

This is also why it’s lauded on that famous poster with “Martin Scorsese presents.” Despite his extensive work directing re-shoots and new scenes, editing and producing, Scorsese saw it for the train wreck it was and chose to distance himself from the thing. Al Pacino once joked in a TV Guide interview that he wished he had been “able to distance my name from it in that manner. I think we all do.”

Look, who among us has watched Mean Streets or Serpico? Both of those are better works than Goncharov and came out that same year. For a modern audience they would have worked just as well for this joke. Except then instead of topping it off with the ultimate punchline of hunting down the thing and being disappointed you wasted two hours of your life, Mean Streets or Serpico would be enjoyable watches. So save yourself some disappoint and go watch one of those instead.

[imp-furiosa]

Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Click to read Whale Weekly, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of readers.

This is gonna be a Moby Dick blog for the next 2.5 years or so. Just read the first chapter and I get some thoughts. More to follow.

[sketchdeath]

was explaining to my mom on the phone the concept of a cosmic horror and she hit me with the one hit k.o. of "oh you mean like horton hears a who?"

[pensivetense]

[remus-sanders-is-the-bestest]

Explain???

[sketchdeath]

me: yeah so basically a cosmic horror is the fear of a godlike being or entity so much bigger than yourself and your perception of the universe that your brain cant possibly comprehend it, often leading to some sort of madness in the stories because of this "break" in your perception of reality because this entity is so incomprehensible to your limited worldview. the concept is credited to h.p. lovecraft because of stuff like cthulu but the guy was also a massive-

my mom, interjecting: ah, so like horton hears a who. i get it.

[almost-correct-quotes]

#wait so like#does the LEGO movie count#they manage to escape into the human world and it’s all hazy because they don’t understand#and the people were controlling them the whole time

SURE SURE THE LEGO MOVIE IS A COSMIC HORROR WHY NOT

[headspace-hotel]

The LEGO movie absolutely counts, and it's treated that way from the characters' points of view. Emmett describes The Man Upstairs as having "hands like giant pink sausages, like eagle talons mixed with squid" which sounds like a human trying to describe an eldritch horror.

Just think, everyone and everything in his world is made of Lego pieces. They are as fundamental as the subatomic particles that make up our world.

From the characters' perspective, the humans are gods that created these fundamental elements as drastically simplified playthings imitating their own world. Imagine finding out that the periodic table of elements was constructed by gods in order to build a simulation of something thousands of times more complex, and we are just simulations being puppeted by these gods for their amusement.

This also explains why objects like the Kragle and the Scepter of Q-Tip are considered "relics" with unnatural powers—they are discarded items from the higher, far more complex reality that follow the rules of THAT reality, not the characters' reality. That is why they can influence the character' world in ways not normally permitted by that reality.

This puts a whole new perspective on the scene where Lord Business uses the nail polish remover on Good Cop/Bad Cop to ERASE HIS FACE.

[zanmor]

there’s often another implied (sometimes explicit) level to cosmic horror and it’s the perfect understanding of it, rather than an inability to understand it

like a broken world view driving you mad is kind of like, yeah ok sure it could do that. that’s not limited to cosmic horror. the twist it often brings is this new understanding of the world and our place in it where it isn’t a broken perception, but a new twist on it, or maybe just an epiphany. like oh there are gods but they are inhuman and uncaring. we’re ants to them so I’m going to live like the ant I am--which is madness to somebody who hasn’t seen cthulhu or whatever, but it’s a different madness than the guy wimpering gibberish in a corner because his brain’s just broken now. it’s that character who the reader sees as nuts and extreme at first, until enough is shown and the world clicks in place and suddenly it’s clear as day why they’ve done what they’ve done, however horrifying or inhuman it might be

there’s a philip k dick story where aliens are trying to abduct some guy. this guy is a scientist working on atomics or something and basically he keeps seeing mirages of wealth and luxury, trying to lure him. he recognizes them for what they are and avoids even the most tempting and realistic ones, at first rationalizing it might be a foreign power trying to kidnap him to work in their own program. then he figures it’s actually aliens/extra-dimensional beings. from there he flatters himself that these incredibly advanced beings so desire his expertise, his mind, that they are going to lengths to abduct him. he imagines the sort of funding and technology such beings would afford his research. and with that thought he steps into the latest “trap” and allows himself to be captured...

...only to end up in the hands of an alien creature saying “that’s a big one! it’ll fry up real nice.” and he realizes he allowed himself to be captured by the equivalent of redneck alien fishermen and has perfect understanding of his errors and the fate that awaits him

I think the whole madness because you see something that’s incomprehensible to your view of the world is really difficult to separate from lovecraft’s racism--it’s the literal metaphor for it he used in just about everything he wrote. even where you manage to separate it from racism, it still basically does work of arguing that the status quo, the safety of the known, is what we need to protect or else we fall into ruin. that’s a chunk of the work the house in House of Leaves does (though I haven’t read it in years and can’t recall if it’s able to transcend that by the end). in short this conceit is inherently reactionary and authors should at least be aware of that if they’re going to try to utilize it

but the twist of understanding the horror you behold and acting accordingly is more in line with a post-nuclear world. a world where we know how precarious our position in the universe is and explicitly understand some means at our disposal by which we could end existence ourselves, let alone whatever the gods might have in store for us. finding meaning in the meaningless is its own sort of horror