Day: May 15, 2015

Two days before the release of Mad Max: Fury Road Rotten Tomatoes had it with a five star rating and NPR was toting it as a film worth seeing almost solely based on the work and character of Charlize Theron. I was sold. I adore Theron and, especially after Monster, would watch her eat a turkey sandwich in a dark alley just to see her on screen. So, I watched.

And waited to be impressed.

Then I started laughing, often uncontrollably. Mad Max #1 and the new addition seem to both reflect the core idea of the director. George Miller’s vision and cinematographic thrust are in full view, especially in scenes featuring the herky-jerky speed-up phenomenon often associated with Evil Dead movies and not seen since the first Mad Max.

Mad Max’s world seems carved out of Viking mythology with a dusting of the truly weird stuff they used to make the 2nd and 3rd Pitch Black films. This is largely hinted at throughout earlier films but here it is hooked on steroids and slammed in your face three dimensionally where possible. Cars are the religion here. When the ‘kamikaze’ fighters prepare to die they spray paint their teeth with silver to resemble the chromed out grills of prized automobiles from the dead world. However, the film isn’t about that. It is about redemption. On a more metaphorical note (and obvious one at that) it is about the relationship between what we prize, what we weaponize, and what we want to have sex with. In other words, it is a blatant reflection of the objectification of women (and other prized possessions) and the resulting perceptions of power that come from that.

This is not put forward in the subtle way we see in Ex Machina. In fact, in one scene there is a beautiful concubine wearing a white dress with her legs spread apart to create almost a basket effect. She’s counting bullets and dropping them one by one into her crotch-basket. The camera lingers there for some time. Later, an older de-sexified woman opens her purse and in it are all the seeds of creation. Literally. She talks about it.

I’m not sure I want to talk about it anymore. I’ll say this: The film is often jaw-droppingly beautiful. I said wow and that’s beautiful multiple times and if the set designer doesn’t walk away with an award then people need to be hit. Hard.

See the movie for the beauty, for the action, but not for the story. If you don’t take it terribly seriously you;ll have a good time and you’ll laugh.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. There are a series of books and book come TV shows that swirl around the idea of global extinction and cryogenic freezing. These stories tie into the idea of a controlled release of humanity back into a world that was originally destroyed by said humanity. I wonder if this is a niche market or becoming a growing trend in the speculative genre.
2. All apologies for not posting yesterday’s blog until this morning. I’d been away from the ‘net for a while–which is something I think we all ought to do from time to time–and blogged offline. Posted it before I started righting this one.
3. 1835 marked the beginning of the end of bloodletting as a thing. This happened 17 years after a group of authors supposedly held a contest to see who could right the best horror story. The authors included Lord Byron (who was in part responsible for Babbage’s Analytical Engine…), Mary and Percy Shelley, and Joh Polidori. That contest resulted in Frankenstein and the earliest vampire tales. It is strange to me how everything is even tangentially connected.

Ten minutes from now I’ll say, “and that’s all there is to say on the matter.” The matter in question is my understanding of intelligence and a revision, I think, of a longstanding belief that everyone is secretly smart.

You’re probably already saying, ‘no, dude, everyone is decidedly not secretly smart’. I used to disagree with good reason. We quantify and qualify genius through outdated testing and criteria. Genius doesn’t necessarily refer to one’s IQ. I feel like genius is a more situational terminology. For example, no one would ever accuse Iceberg Slim of being an MIT Scholar. He was, on the other hand, an extraordinary pimp much in the way that Mike Tyson was an exemplary boxer and boxing logician. While known for raw power, Tyson understood the nuance of intimidation, ring positioning, punch strategy, and so on. I am talking about scions of specific professions, but my belief was more basic than that. I felt like each of us had some area of expertise in our lives in which we were quite intelligent.

 

Now I feel like some people are straight dumb.

 

I’m not trying to be mean-spirited or condescending (though I’ve been recently reminded of my oft occasion to do the latter), I’m just at the point where I recognize the role that effort plays in intelligence. In other words, I realize the people and situational intelligence I credit has far more to do with effort and innovation than it does with actual intelligence. These people merely were not lazy. They decided that they cared so completely about one thing or another that it superseded their natural desire to lay sideways on the couch drooling to the staccato of the Itchy and Scratchy Show. I have recently discovered that this level of drive/effort is in of itself a rare thing, which gave me a new perspective on intelligence. Smart is something nearly anyone can achieve with a baseline intellect and a heck of a lot of hard work. Lazy smart requires a level of intellect that far exceeds average.

 

Lazy smart means that your raw intellect makes you capable of being very good at a very large number of things with little effort. This is particularly noticeable when seen in contrast with those who don’t have that raw intellect and put in the same amount of work as lazy smart people but with far worse results. Once I watched a student turn in a final paper she’d written in front of me only hours before it was due. I had the fortune of watching her friend do the same thing in the same room for the same teacher. One student walked out with a great paper and one was, well, crap. At first I dismissed this as one student having a better grasp of the basics of language and perhaps more extensive training prior to contact with me. Both of these things may still be true but what I read in those two papers can no longer be dismissed. One student exhibited a considerable depth of critical thinking and the other had all the depth of a rock skipping across water.

 

In the end it comes down to the ability to think critically. The depth of that capacity seems proportional to the depth of one’s intellect. If you can think enough to consider the important questions and think on the ramifications thereof, you have smarts (street or otherwise). If you can’t think of any questions, you’re just dumb. This semester I encountered some powerful thinkers and some people who were not so powerful. When asked, students tell me that they can’t be bothered with thinking critically about stuff they don’t care about or see the benefit of. I say to them: If you cannot reach the conclusion that coming up with important questions and finding the motivation to succeed in something where the immediate benefits cannot be seen, then I cannot ever call you smart.

And that’s all there is to say on the matter.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Caribe Devine is a local newscaster who, by name, could easily be mistaken for a stripper.
2. On a completely unrelated but far more meaningful note, Charles Babbage began work on his analytical engine back in 1834.