Logan (2017 film) versus Mad Max: Fury Road (2015 film)

Intro:

Ok, here we go with a post that is for a just-out movie that I flipped over AND one that might drag some hits and readership in from google search hits (I know I've always said that I am just putting stuff up on this blog as a place to record it, to "jot it down and write it up" so I don't forget it ... but ... let's face it, we all like knowing somebody out there is reading our idea  ... even if they do scurry off after a few seconds of "this guy's a little touched"). I'll just say in advance, to any who are already used to some of the jargon, sorry if I over-explain it in places; some might be interested in reading who are not, and I think those of us who are forget how much of a "little black box" language can be and the days of frustratingly wondering what somebody meant by some term they kept using.

Aside: Case in point, I should explain "little black box," because I just googled to make sure that if anybody didn't know it, it was findable on the internet, and I got a lingerie site as the top hit ... I don't know if the term predates Michael Behe's book or if he coined it himself, but he uses it for Darwin's theory on the cell, which he calls "Darwin's little black box" because we couldn't see inside it at the time, and so Darwin said "listen once we can seen inside the cell, it will all be clear, you will see that I have been right all along," and he said this because it was nowhere near demonstrable that he was right at the time when we couldn't see inside the cell (I'm not arguing that he's been proven right now that we can; in fact, from what I understand from the guy I knew who was a bio major who was talking bout it one night, Behe's book argues that seeing inside the cell has decidedly not proven Darwin right), so the issue was opaque, and the place where the answers could be found was opaque, a little black box, but supposedly once we got inside, the answer would be clear as day ... as for my using it for language, once we "get" what a certain term means and how it is used, it seems completely natural to us, but before that, the uses are just confusing because the meaning is completely opaque to us, a little black box that, like Darwin's, once we get inside, all this mumbo jumbo this person is speaking will make sense (this is especially true when they are adaptable terms like "scape" that you can suffix onto lots of things).

OK, NOW FOR THE ATCUAL CONTENT ALREADY:
The current movie is, of course, Logan, and I am also exploring a comparison with a recent movie, Mad Max: Fury Road.

My baseline position is: I liked Logan a lot (three viewings so far as of last night, the last night it was in the one-screener in my small town, that may last me til DVD, but I also might have to go see it again in the second-run a half-hour west of here), and I found Mad Max: Fury Road to be pretty much useless. I wanted to get that out of the way just to have my cards on the table. There will be a fair bit of exposition of that below, but not necessarily in an orderly fashion because of what I will describe in a moment as my focused concern. But right off the bat and before I get to real content, just to address any charges against myself as contrarian, I will say this in my own defense: I went in wanting to like Fury Road. While Beyond Thunderdome was a bit over the top, I still love Road Warrior as a classic of the genre (and the original Mad Max too, although it is a bit of an adjustment for the current viewing mind, as it is a distinctly 1970s horror style, with all the screechy strings and all ... once, when I had to work with a friend and do a 5 min scene in a Shakespeare class in undergrad, I pieced together the whole Oberon and Puck subplot from Midsummer Night's Dream and thought about trying to do it in the style of Toe-cutter and Johnny, but I figured even fewer people would get that than would have gotten my first plan, which was in the style of Kramden and Norton of the Honeymooner's, which I gave up on when my friend just gave a blank stare to "you know, Jackie Gleason and Art Carney, the Honeymooners, bang zoom, to the moon Alice?" ... I felt very old, and I was only in my mid twenties ... actually my first plan was a scene from Taming of the Shrew with him as Petruchio and myself, with my long beard at the time, as Kate, but the starry-eyed prude of a prof [whom I have mentioned in other posts, especially the one on Tolkien versus Shakespeare] nixed that ... for as little as I think of WS on some fronts, he would would have loved that).
And I like Hardy as an actor (particularly in Inception, Warrior, and Dark Knight Rises). So... I went in wanting to like Fury Road, but it left me flat at best. AND I have given it more of a chance than just one viewing in the theater. I netflixed it and watched it again not long ago to give it a chance because one guy and his son and another friend's son were all excited about it

ANYWAY, My point in THIS post, however, is not necessarily to make convincing arguments for and against (although I obviously do hope that a reader will find any arguments I wind up making along the way convincing), but rather to explore whether or not I have the basis for a comparison that I tossed up on Facebook after the second watching of Logan: That I think [main thesis:] Logan does what Fury Road (as well as all the fanboy critics) wishes and thinks it did but it didn't.  Since the set ups (global/time setting, social structures present etc), of the two films are fairly different, I thought I should do a thought experiment of trying to justify comparing one against the other at all to be able to claim that I am not comparing apples to oranges.

This will naturally include some details from Logan that I like and and thought Fury Road failed on, , but it's not my primary focus (believe it or not, it honestly isn't, which you will find hard to believe by the end, or I should say that there IS a part of me that is, for its own sake, apart from my preoccupation of "I'm allowed to have not creamed my pants over Fury Road" (albeit alongside that preoccupation) interested in the question, for it's own sake, as I say, of "hmmmm, is that comparing apples to apples rather than apples to oranges, and what criteria would you use to determine if they are enough in the same genre of movie to justify comparing their performances? This is a most interesting question") . At the end, I'll close out with some of the stuff I loved in Logan.


Post-Apocalyptic versus Western 

So, Fury Road is usually classified as a post-apocalyptic film, and Logan is not. But, to me, that genre classification doesn't really count for too much because, for me, a post-apocalyptic film has to go somewhere in order for genre to be a relevant factor, and I don't think Fury Road does. A contrasting example would be Book of Eli's issue of "where do we go from here." In that film, the options are a local warlord type, Carnegie (Gary Oldman), misusing the power of religious language and ideas to motivate, on the one hand, and the Alcatraz plan of collecting the great works that bear witness to the history and trying to rebuild some kind of civilized culture, on the other hand ... and Eli is searching for some type of "where do we go from here" thing like that after the apocalypse ... Max in Fury Road, on the other hand, is eating lizards in the desert (I'd even be tempted say that that could be some sort of John the Baptist eating locust in the wilderness, except that the movie never goes anywhere paying off on anything like that). Or take another post-apocalypse, 12 Monkeys by Terry Gilliam (one of his only two really great films in my opinion, the two where he really hit his stride and nailed something well, the other being his film before it, Fisher King): the question after the apocalypse, and the reason for the whole time traveling experience, is how we get back to the surface.

Even take the apocalyptic lead-up and transfer in the original six-book Dune series (to speak of a more true apocalypse set in a desert world): After the death of Leto II, God-Emperor of Dune (who is the culmination of the Kwisatz Haderach experiment line by the Bene Geneserit), all the different elements like his fish-speaker female bodyguards and the others who fled out into the diaspora come back to the core after having coalesced and evolved into the ruthless "honored matres," and the big question is not just who will will be in control, honored matres or Bene Gesserit, but how it will happen and what model will get there now that the control of god-emperor is gone, and it is the evolutionary assimilate-and-adapt method of the Bene Gesserit that wins by assuming the honored mater strand into themselves in the person of  Murbella ... that is the answer to the "where do we go from here?" question that defines post apocalypse (and as regards the Dune diaspora and return plot, make no mistake, for the REAL concepts of apocalypse and post-apocalypse in the real history of the ideas, diaspora plays a great role ... it was the first diaspora, the Babylonian Exile in 587 BC/BCE, that began the earliest apocalyptic thinking, the apocalyptic stage of Judaism, the answer of "next world" to the question of "how do you reconcile the promises of God regarding the Tempe and the dynasty when this other country just blew both to hell?" the second diaspora after the even more definitive "blow it to hell and beyond" by the Romans in 70 AD/CE finished the job for good, that's why you have stuff like 1 Enoch being locked down into a more final canonical shape around 100 AD/CE... and interestingly, I think the name "kwisatz Haderach" in Dune is probably based somehow on the Kefitzat Haderach of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, and its direct descendant, Hasidic Judaism, in which it is the ability to travel from place to place at miraculous speeds and possibly bilocate, which is used in Chaim Potok's The Gift of Asher Lev, in the mysterious way in which Asher is visited by the Rebbe).

Fury Road simply does not seem to me like it pays off in the "where do we go from here" department. It can be implied by the fact that the person who won was the woman who was taking the girls away from big Joe and his male-heir-factory mentality that they're not going to have any of that any more, but it doesn't really give you any idea beyond that.

So, long and short, I don't think Fury Road pays off as a true post apocalypse. But I do think that it fits another genre that is definitely on the page with Logan.

Logan has been characterized by Jackman, when talking about concrete discussions with Mangold going into the making, as a western, and it is very open about this: Mangold was the one who decided on using Shane actually in the film (and I think it was well done ... the performance of the lines by the girl at the end was amazing). I think that, for all the hype as a post-apocalypse and drooling over the landscape, Fury Road has more of a western-genre set up, even to the extent that I would say that it is basically a western and nowhere near a real post-apocalyptic (people confuse theses kinds of things all the time, for instance: In addition to being more true post-apocalyptic, Dune was a true sci-fi, but what made it so was not techno-babble or off-world technology, not even the elements of folding space through spice prescience, but rather questions of realized genetic engineering and bio-medical ethical questions and prejudices concerning things like the Bene Tleilaxu axlotl tanks for growing gholas, and I swear I remember reading that in one of the later books of the original six-book series that they're pretty much modified living female bodies, even though the wiki on axlotl tanks has nothing on it ... and I actually think there may have been a hat-tip in Logan to that in Dune, if there is anything to my fuzzy memory about the human females as ghola-gestation ,when the nurse Gabriella describes the children being bred in the bellies of Mexican girls who were never seen or heard from again. I'm not sure how strong my evidence is on that, but it's a possibility, and a nice sci-fi hat tip if it is).

Anyway, my working thesis is that I am justified in making a comparison between the two films as westerns, and I am now going to examine the elements that I think they share in common along these lines as further justifying comparing them at all in the first place.


Specific Elements

So, the elements I see in common between the two films with a particular emphasis on how they fit the western genre. First, although this is more of a peripheral thing, there is simply the arid desert setting. Actually, for being in the "post apocalypse" genre, Fury Road is even closer to traditional westerns staging in this regard than Logan, since you have the battles in the passes and the equivalent of the "Indians" attacking from the high ground etc. Logan has its desert action drama characteristics too; they're just not as stereo-typically western. I'll just say, on this element, that I think the chase scenes in Logan were every bit as well done as they were in Fury Road in the aspects that really matter as far as the "will they get away?" and close scrapes (I liked the "don't get caught watching the paint dry" style whip it around the front of the train) ... what Logan didn't have, and what I will say Fury Road uses as a poor substitution (but one that everybody wets themselves over for some reason), is an overload of clever contraptions, which I think Fury Road, as I say, uses to distract from the fact that it's really not all that original in its chase choreography (if you want to see an example of a cleverly choreographed interesting chase scene, watch the "follow me Tonto" scene in Way of the Gun ... the "move ... moving" scene is pretty good too). In Fury Road you have the polecats and the guys who shoot hooks that drag into the back of the tanker and so many others you can't keep track of them (but the girls who have assumedly been kept in breeding most of their lives seem to know what they are and be able to rattle off the catalog so that excitable aficionados can wet themselves over the excitement immediately forthcoming) ... and that's really about it ... varied gimmicks in place of actual choreography.

I will also add this here, on the theme of the million and one contraptions on Fury Road ... why? I don't mean from the current viewing setting, in which the why is that it sells. I mean in the context of the story. Bullet Farm and Gas Town and Joe's water hoard all work together and out in the desert you have pretty much a handful of rat-people. All this spray painting the teeth with chrome and "witness me" ... witness you fight whom? All the people worth witnessing you fight are your allies.

But, really, the elements that define the western are more on the character and society levels. The society is the looseness of law and law-unto-themselves characteristics. This sort of crosses over with post-apocalyptic, in which the apocalypse event has collapsed the structures of law enforcement on all levels including the international. But you have it in all westerns in which it is necessary for a lone gunman or a small crew of gunmen to fight for justice and the protection of the vulnerable because law and order (whether sheriffs or marshalls) have little or no control of the situation (much different from the modern movie FBI/ATF/DEA/SWAT brigades around every corner). Joe's waterhole and Bullet Farm and Gas Town may be said to actually be the government of their time in Fury Road, but they're not exactly what you would call civilized government ... the main thing being the lack of any sort of concept of due process. Likewise, the scientist and the mercs in Logan are not controlled by any jurisdictional law-and-order entities and obey no concept of due process.

The main thing the two films share as westerns, though, is the conversion of the originally amoral character, although in Fury Road I think it is more an alleged conversion. It's not that I think Max was evil and he didn't turn to some evil ways in the end. He just didn't go much place else. He just kind of slips out the door at the end with this sort of over-used world-weary but somehow at peace or something half smile, like "I learned some things ... well, not really ... mainly I got my shit back ... but I did feel kind of guilty, so I helped, and that sort of counts as some conversion, right?" Beyond that, you mainly have him going "that's my car! That's my jacket!" for the first half of the film. I guess you could say he stuck it out through going finding the lost female tribe, but up til he has one of the dirt bikes, leaving really isn't an option ... Joe's people are going to find him and probably torture him before they kill him because he really can't get even far enough away to avoid notice while he is on foot. And even if he could avoid detection, he dies in the desert from exposure ... might as well stick it out with the girls. The turning around once he has a bike is really the first of any conversion that I see ... and I don't think it's really connected in the film. All the time when they could have been doing character, the film was busy overdosing on  pyrotechnics, and then this conversion sort of pops out of nowhere, and I think that the main reason that it "works" for so many is that it is what they expect. They're given the broad outlines and they fill in the color themselves, rather than the film actually filling it in, and they do it while calling the film great because they wanted to see it as great in the first place. I just don't see the big conversion.

Some will say that the kid, Nux, is the real conversion, but he starts on that mainly because, as he says, Joe already saw his bloodbag driving the rig so he'll be killed anyway. And then he has kind of the young love interest, and I'll be the first to say that we should not snub the deeper conversion embedded in romance as showing deeper conversion to be what actually make romance possible, but it's a very truncated version here, if at all (again, most of the time it could have used to develop is hogged up by pyrotechnics) ... and then the kid is dead. If you're going to do a sacrificial death, at least give the element enough build-up time so that the sacrifice actually means something, so that the audience has enough picture of character to feel what is being sacrificed in the fact that that character will no longer be able to go along certain development paths (again, the trick on which the film relies is getting the eager audience to fill in those lines themselves, rather than doing the work).

Logan has a lot more to him, and I don't mean just what is brought in from the previous films, and actually there is very little of that. Mostly there is this the "Westchester incident," which is really described only in Logan. And that is really a piece-it backwards thing anyway (they keep mentioning it and you keep going "what Westchester thing" and then you're given enough through seizure events and comments to have the basics: he had  a seizure there that killed mutants in the school and wounded many others). Even the guilt that drives him to care for Charles, the feeling that he owes him for saving him from a career as a cage fighter, while we know that story from other films, it is explained within this one when Charles is saying what a disappointment he is, described in such a way that we don't really need to have seen the other films to get the basic idea. But you have to read til further below to get the parts I think are the more to Logan. For her, my main contention is that the redemption of the amoral character is a clear trope of the western that is shared by the film and, therefore, a further justification for comparing them, but I will say for here that my would argue that Logan clearly does it better.

Then there are the people saved by the amoral character, which act of saving drives the conversion. A more traditional western with this would be the group of prostitutes in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, the ones offering the money for any who will avenge the girl who was cut up by the cowboy. In Fury Road it is the girls whom Joe has been using as a breeding farm, and in Logan it is the mutant kids. In both films, you have a place to which they try to escape (Fury Road is not a "take our town back" western until much later in the film). The films even share an older female character who initiates the escape before enlisting the help of the reluctant amoral character who is redeemed by the end: Gabriella the nurse in Logan and Furiosa in Fury Road.

So, all in all, I think I am justified in comparing Logan and Mad Max: Fury Road against each other (or with each other, if I liked both, etc, but the point being to say that they have likenesses that make examining them together and in comparison with each other over-all fruitful).


SIDE NOTE: Interesting tidbit though: I just checked to make sure that the name is Joe and see if I recognized the actor ... he was actually Toe-cutter in the original 1979 film, Mr "Johnny ... light me" when they burn Goose alive ... maybe he survived getting run over in the first film? More likely just an inter-movie allusion for the nerds like me.


Main project: The Scape

Having done all that up there, and before going on to things I really liked in Logan (and probably pitting off what I thought were less than stellar executions of the same kind of thing in Fury Road here and there along the way), I want to touch on the idea of "scapes" because I think it is a lot of the mechanics of Fury Road especially. "Scape" is a meme that gets a lot of mileage in contemporary literary studies. I would describe the idea by noting that the word presently comes from the fact that we have adapted the word "landscape" into other realms like "dreamscape" and "cityscape" (just saw a book in a toy store this morning that was something about cityscapes) and so the "land" idea of a "topography" goes with it. In a landscape, even the most limited in scope, you have raised up areas and even areas and depressed areas (or meaningful lack of them). There different areas with different qualities and movement between them is possible within the same landscape ... and most especially, from the artistic point of view, the eye always does move between them, and the artist usually wants it to do so in a particular way without letting the eye know that that is what it is doing. But the main thing is that there are defining elements in scapes and they can be done differently by different people: if tall buildings are part of a cityscape, Manhattan still has a very different cityscape from LA.

For instance, for me, a central thing in a cityscape really having substance is rivers and bridges. It's why, when I lived in Cleveland for a year, I had difficulty taking it seriously as a city (rather than just an urban area; I once put it that Cleveland was urban without ever reaching the level of urbane): no real river bridges. All the classic cities in Europe are built on rivers. The "first city" (NYC) and "second city" of the US have them heavily (I've ridden all 17 bridges on and off Manhattan Island, including the two bike/ped only,  plus the Pulaski between Queens and Brooklyn and the Marine Parkway [Flatbush Ave] from Brooklyn to Far Rockaway/Queens and the Verrazano from Brooklyn to Staten Island). Some people would say that Cleveland fits a cityscape because it has a few tall buildings ... I tend to disagree. My main point in all this verbiage, though, is the idea of different kinds of scapes and the possibility of defining them in different ways, by different elements (defining cityscape by tall buildings or rivers and bridges, and then the difference between the tall buildings view of LA vs NYC or the difference between the feel of London Bridge over the Thames and Brooklyn Bridge over the East River, and the difference between both and the series of bridges over the river in Chicago or the series of bridges up the much wider Allegheny in Pittsburgh).

Keeping with the city-scape idea and to give a little more idea of "scaping" before talking about it in these two films briefly, I just edited a book with an essay in it that drew on a work by French twentieth-century philosopher/literary theorists/social activist  Jacques Elul on cityscapes, in which work he talked about actually constructing cityscapes with what he called something like "not space," by which he meant in-between spaces, not officially in one "area" or another, such as a suburban area that can't be pinned down and is really sort of a no-man's-land between the center and the periphery. It's Paris, but you can't pin it down to any part in the center or in the suburbs, and it doesn't look entirely center of city or suburb in general; it has qualities of both.

Basically, you can discuss just about anything as a scape if you can demonstrate that it makes a sort of "topography" of sorts with different "areas" that have both marked differences and demonstrable interaction (even if the interaction is a distinct non-interaction that sticks out because both have interaction with a third party).

SO, for Fury Road, I want to talk about "landscape," "socio-scape," and "character-scape." My basic contention about Fury Road is that it has no real character-scape and masks that by a heavy use of landscape and socio-scape.

One of the things the film is noted for is it's impressive landscape, and I already discussed a lit bit of that above for the landscape quality in westerns ("Indian" attacks in the mountain passes in the desert kind of thing). I'll admit, there is texture to the scenery and the feel, and I am sure that there is a whole lot that is going on as far as technique in shooting that is contributing to that, and all of that has a value in its own right. But I don't think that it can replace more core elements.  A film is more than simply principle photography or landscape. It has a plot and, most importantly, it has characters and character developmen. I think that one of the main things Fury Road gets away with is substituting landscape for character-scape.

It's part of the western genre that it has limited engagement with a larger socio-scape. In Logan, there is none of the usual involvement with larger world affairs as there usually is in XMen/Marvel: no fighting in a series of wars for the US, no Professor X talking to a scared US president, no Cuban Missile Crisis, no Magneto dropping a whole stadium on the white house lawn, not even any big Japanese money and Yakuza. If I would say Logan has a social-scape, I would call it a "nomad-scape."Below I mention Gen 4:12 in passing, Cain sentenced to nomadic exile, and I think many would claim that this is what Max is, the wanderer, but I think really that Fury Road is less of a nomad thing and more of just a run-around-loony-scape and then a make-animal-noises-when-captured-scape. In reality, transiency always has some connections. Squatting on corporation deadland just south of a porous but heated border while doing pick up work (literally, picking up passengers on a moment's notice when texted by dispatch ... and figuratively as the broader description for having your own leased vehicle and hiring it and yourself out) north of the border is a lot more like actual nomadism.
For Fury Road, as I noted above, bullet farm and gas town and Joe's diner might be said to be the sort of government but without the due process. The more important thing for here, though, is that they seem to be this all-encompassing geopolitical landscape with its own mysterious social order, or socio-scape. But it's never anything that you really discover much about. I suppose that, if you read the comic books or graphic novels or whatever, you get some of it filled in, but I'm a believer in films being standalone narratives. It's one thing if, in reading the graphic novel, I get MORE out of the story, or maybe a slightly altered story in which the alterations are interesting, but if I have to read them to get anything, then it's the same as the whole thing of giving just broad outlines and the viewer having to fill in the colors for you but then you also get the fame of being so great with colors. For example, I got more out of reading Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy, and it wasn't not worth reading because I already knew who the mole was from watching the miniseries, BUT it also was not necessary to have read it in order to know what was going on in the miniseries.

If the details of the socio-scape didn't matter at all in Fury Road, that would be one thing. But they do matter, I think in part because that scape is what is claimed to fill in for actual character-scape. It definitely plays into what is supposed to be the driving motivational core. We really don't care about Max having to eat lizards; what we do care about is that he has this conversion in which he helps Furiosa and the girls because he sees how unjust this breeding system is with Joe's young "wives," and that draws the viewer into the questions. But the questions are so caricatured and weary-troped and basically just all over the place (who the fuck is the midget and where is he in the "sons" rank, who do the war boys do war with) that you have to fill in the colors yourself and all you really get in place of character development is the titillation of morbid curiosity: "oh my, he's full on breeding them as slave "wife" baby mamas" and "oh my, they're milking the chubby girls continuously right out in front of everyone and they carry mothers milk along with them ... kinky" and at most (although, if we're honest, this is the main idol/drug of choice for us all) "yes, well, I'm sophisticated because I don't get phased by all this stuff that makes other people blush."

It might not be so bad if we actually got some characterization, and Theron is probably the best out of the three, but I can sum them all up in a few lines:

Max: "My car!" "My jacket!" "Get this thing off my face!" "They're trying to kill me and you're not, so I'll go with you." "There's nothing in that direction, you might as well go back and try to take over the camp." "I'll just slip out the side door here and wait for the sequel."

Nux: "WOOOHOOOOO! I'm sickly but I'm hopped up!" "Oh shit! he saw my bloodbag driving the rig and I dropped the gun, so I can't go back there, better find some motivation to be in this camp; hey, she's hot and she's nice enough to talk to me; oh shit, well at least she sees me die like a hero."

Furiosa: "We're leaving!" "You double-crossing assholes!" "Hey, your a man, I'm going to shoot you and not bother asking questions later." "I rigged those switches myself so only I can start them." "HI !!! I USED TO BE FROM THIS TRIBE!!!!" "We could use your help but we won't stop you from going because you have genuinely helped us and we genuinely appreciate it and you've earned us giving you one of the bikes and some supplies so you have a chance of making it" (that's the part that I mentioned where you get more out of Furiosa than the others). "WOOHOOO! let's kick some ass! ... remember me motherfucker?!?!?!?!"

Oh yes, lest I forget ... the other thing that Fury Road has (and the all the fanboys really  wet themselves silly over) and that it tries to substitute for character-scape more than any other is what I call "psycho-scape." I don't mean a real psychological landscape. I have noted in conversations with friends before things like that on Charles Williams's War in Heaven is an easier read for many because it has a much more physical landscape, whereas his Descent Into Hell has a much more psychological landscape ... that isn't what I am talking about here. I'm talking about a topography of psychotic "people" being substituted for a topography of actual characters. You have big Joe with his young girls in chastity belts and his fat girls with their boobs hooked up for milking, and he has his little (bastard child? who knows? ) midget with the spy glass, you have Joe's muscle-troll son Rictus (with his desire to have a baby brother?), you have one of the other leaders with his big swollen feet, and then yet another blasting away with his machine guns from the car after he is blinded.

The "gore-scape" is also closely related to the whole weird face thing that everybody goes gaga for: Joe's facemask and all the ghoulish howling faces in all the fight scenes, the other leader I just mentioned with big swollen feet of one of the other leaders (sorry, Vladimir Harkonnen was a much better attempt at the nauseatingly obese and disgusting trope), that sort of thing.

SIDE NOTE: This might be the easiest place to mention one of the only places I though Fury Road had something interesting to say. It's a limited one, but still, best to say something nice if one can. The traveling guitar player was interesting. I mean, of course, as a male in the contemporary era, there is the "whoa ... that was wicked cool" factor, but I mean a little more than that. It's a good image of how we all carry around our own soundtrack with us because we are all always carrying around our own little screenplay narrative in our heads of what we are doing.


Two Final Things about Fury Road
(before positives of Logan)

So, I know I said this was mainly examining the basis for doing the comparison, and not even a full defense of Logan, let alone an attempt to fully shred Fury Road, but it's also, as is this blog for me, a catch-all place, a place where I collect the ideas so that I won't forget them, and there are two more thoughts that have come to me in my thoughts on critique of Fury Road after conversations on it, so this is as good a place as any to record them.

1. Classic form is not enough 
This may be rehash of my post on "chiastic bodies," but it never hurts to write things more times than once, if for no other reason than being able to go back and look at them side by side and say "well ... those two don't make sense together" so that you can further hash out what you're getting at (as one mentor used to say, "we write to think").

So, one of the people excited to defend Fury Road as the greatest thing since spice racks was going on about it being a hero's journey. I haven't studied Jung's hero journey thoroughly in it's contents, so I asked the kid what elements in Max were the hero journey and he said it was actually a mix of the three characters of Max, Furiosa, and the Nux, which all sounded like it got a bit wobbly to me, kind of like a legos projects that uses too may of the smallest kind, the single layer with only two nubs, but, as I say, hero journey never was a speciality of mine and I'm definitely not fresh on it now ... I know the shadow is involved and the shadow is a doppleganger/the unconscious/everbody-debates-what-it-is-in-comparison-to-Freud's-unconscious, but the details are a bit hazy (but that was one of those "bite your tongue" moments in the conversation: The kid had not mentioned Jung by name and then there was something else I said and I mentioned Jung's name in some context, and the kids says,"yeah, that's who it was, Jung, I wasn't sure if you would have heard of him" ... felt like saying "you go look up 'M. Phil.' and come back and tell me what it is, and then I'll show you the one I have with my name on it in an ancient texts field and THEN I'll tell you whether or not I've heard of Carl fucking Jung and you can tell me what you think of his analogy between dreaming on the individual level and mythology on the level of the world soul or why he might have named a major work Psychology and Alchemy" ... but I didn't ... I was nice ... I was a good boy).

But, in all seriousness and all cranky-pants aside, here is my real response to that claim. A classic structure like that alone is not enough; it has to be executed well, and that means in the context of good character development. I'll use an example from my own set of avid interests. John Granger has done a lot of work on ring compositions, and while he once credited me as breaking the ground on applying the general principle, chiasm, to Harry Potter, he is much more widely studied in ring composition than am I, and much more insightful ... much more. I am friend with him and respect his scholarship as well, well beyond my own (and he's also a much better human being than I will probably ever be). And  he is reading ring elements in Rowling/Galbraith's Cormoran Strike series. If he says its in there, I believe him without question. But it still doesn't change whether or not I give the book a good review or, after reading the first novel, Cuckoo's Calling, I have any inclination to read any further, which I don't ... I thought the characters and main content of action were abysmally trite at best, and in places painfully cliche ("that's not my leg, but it's helping ... " really? really??? My own personal theory is that this is the result of her buying the bullshit of certain pundits that she needs to impress them by writing "adult" works). Fury Road may or may not follow a hero journey pattern or adapt it in certain ways or whatever, but even if all that can be demonstrated, that alone does not make it great or even good ... such things can be done in very wooden, mechanistic, and cheap ways. At the end of the day, nothing in the characters or plot left me with any inclination to want to find out more about them. The question "I wonder if this character's arc is a hero journey" never arose for me because the thought was already there "whatever kind of structure this character arc is, it is a very thin version of that structure and, more importantly, boring as hell at best" (like I said, it "just breaks my damn heart" to say it because I went in wanting to like Hardy in this role because I like him in general and I like Road Warrior, but no luck).

2. Easter egg syndrome / Seriality

I have noted this before as what I find to be a weakness in the whole MCU project, a weakness that was avoided in Logan precisely by it being an endings film. But here is seems to me like what might be at least part of what is behind Fury Road failing (in my judgment). Max just kind of slips out the side door with, as I said, that worn out trope of the world-weary style but sort of "happy(?)" half-smile. Some of my discontent may be that, while some of us are cursed to be "wanderers and stumblers," to quote Gen 4:12, that worn trope tries to turn that into something quaint (it cheapens it ... and in Fury Road, part of the cheapening is that it is so caricatured from the beginning with the eating the lizard thing, for which my thought at the time was "oh goof grief, please tell me it's not that kind of movie where there are probably aficionado's in this theater right now creaming their jeans going "oh goody, we're going to get some grotesquery!" like the little beak guy watching Jabba's tail). BUT my discontent also does have a base in a feeling of built-in incompletion for the sake a sequel, the same seriality that I have said I think makes it difficult for Marvel's main franchises ever to produce really great films ... you're not as focused on the ending because you're already trying to figure out what's going to be in the easter egg and which other Marvel strand they might try to hook this one up with (I'll have some comments below on the fact that Logan is a trilogy ender and that there are callouts, I think, to the first trilogy).


Logan Positives (aside from not being Fury Road, said the myopic critic):

Character
Logan:
It's hard to touch on Logan's character. I mean, where do you start? What's revealed in fighting with Caliban; the scenes of numbness in toting around white-holes (the tuxedo-wearing young white male bigots shouting USA driving by border patrol happenings; the young rich white girls for whom a male driver is just a prop in their movie about how much raucous fun they have); the fighting with Charles; the not being really angry at the guys trying to strip the wheels on the limo at first (til they shoot him) but just kind of world weary; the halting admission that it's not necessarily that he doesn't care enough to drive her the rest of the way ... that might be the case, but he has to admit that the situation doesn't even make it to asking whether he is unwilling because, as much as he hates to admit it because of the hurt to his pride as a man, especially one who once had such vitality, he can't physically do it: "I am fucked up ... It's a two-day drive ... and I can't make it." And the redemption is great: the initial struggling with trying to frame things in such a way that it makes sense that the kids escape and that is a good thing that he contributed to but that he is not pushed like he needs to be pushed in the direction of trying to be part of a family; and then that final "so this is what it feels like" was amazing. The "there's water" scene was well done too (that's the thing with Fury Road: for all the interestingness of its "landscape," it didn't hang any of its character "developments" on any concrete hooks, on any physical details; it's just "escape" and "kill"; but for Logan and Charles, the water means something; it symobolizes something they wanted in getting beyond the past, in getting to where they could survive peacefully, but it also has a distinct feel and multiple distinct feels that make those ideas stick: the water of the open sea under a boat, the sunseeker; the calm of a lake overlooked by a cabin in deep forests).

Oh yes, can't forget, the attacking the pickup with the shovel was classic. It's probably a male thing, but I am sure I was not the only one in the theater thinking, "hit it again, that damn mirror is still hanging on."

Charles:
The crazy old guy mix with the guy who still knows some of what is going on and has realized some more important things in life, like the need for family ... it was just a lot better done than I went in expecting. I'm not one of the people who drools over Patrick Stewart. He definitely does the job in a lot of roles, but I've never been gaga over him; I've always been more "what's the role? is it decently written? does it work for the plot? Does the actor or actress do a sufficient job of it for those needs?  ... yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't really care how good or bad of a job you think they did in this or that other movie or how much of a fan or a hater you are ... what happened in this movie?" And as far as what happened in Logan, it's that the role and Patrick Stewart both really rocked. The sticking out the tongue in the back of the truck; the "this was the most perfect night I have had in a long time ... but I don't deserve it do I?"; the pain of recognition, the excitedness in first talking to Laura, the "pharmaceutically castrated" line. I went in expecting Jackman's performance as Logan to be good and Stewart's to be sufficient for the role. But when I saw it, I realized they really nailed something.

For some reason the one that sticks out in my head the most is after the hotel seizure as Logan wheels him through the casino lobby with everybody still trying to pick themselves up, Charles crying "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." Stewart and the director and Jackman (or whatever double was pushing the chair), in whatever weighted relationship was operating between them in doing that one, really nailed something about the regret of an older man being rushed survival-style through the carnage he inadvertently created while he was genuinely trying to do good, trying to utter what apologies he can to fleeting glimpses of victims still too muddled to have any idea what he is saying, a man a little further down the same path as Logan, frustrated in losing strength to control the collateral effects of powers that are great helps for good but potentially dangerous too if not wielded well, full of regrets for the places it went wrong.

Laura

In a FB comment to an acquaintance who said they were looking forward to seeing it when I posted that I liked it, I wrote that the one thing that might be unsettling (I mean, beyond the general amount of blood and swearing, if you're sensitive on that) is these violent actions being done by an 8 or 9 year old girl. But I also noted that it never goes to the level of bloodlust; it is rage, but it stays on the level of a feral rage that is in reaction to the oppression of the surroundings, as much defensive as offensive (I like the detail Charles throws in about the foot claw being defensive in lionesses). That rage scream she gives every time she attacks is the same yell she gives when she looks in the back of the pickup and realizes Charles is dead. The yelling when attacking is not bloodlust; it's pain.

On of my favorite scenes all three times I have seen it is has been right before that awesome Logan admission of not being physically capable of driving two days. It's when she first speaks, "de nada." And then it's a torrent of Spanish about getting to Eden, and when Logan pulls out the comic book and she thinks he is going to start talking about it positively and planning to go there her eyes light up and it is "si .. si ... si," and when it is obvious he is saying no, she sets her face and just starts repeating the names of her friends ... That is SUCH a stubborn little kid moment; very realistic and so endearing in the interplay between the little kid and the frustrated and tired adult.

And that performance of the Shane lines at the grave speaks for itself.


Other Element

Last Supper and Deposition/Pieta 

So, not every movie has to use religious tropes, and some have used them that should not have done. I'm bringing this up mainly as something that I think Logan did and that I like, but also something that I think Fury Road had some distinct potentials for and maybe made some brief allusion to but didn't, in the end, really use them, so it is sort of a point of comparison, even though, as I said, not every movie has to have them and so it's not generally something you can use in a comparative judgment between two films, but I do think it has some significance here. And part of what makes me say that is there were two things in Fury Road that distinctly gave me the "oh, wait, maybe" and then the "nah, guess not," and part of my dissatisfaction may be a feeling of that they were just throwing a bone to try to drag along certain types of viewers who like religious symbolism, but not really doing anything with it, more to the point not caring to do anything with it as long as it drags in whatever viewers it might, and if not, who cares? The two that stick in my mind are Joe saying not to be controlled by addiction to the water, which is a pretty hard thing to avoid because our bodies are made up of a majority of water, and then there is the potential for baptismal imagery, and I mean imagery with real substance connections, not just the same thing of outlines and do-it-yourself coloring, such as having them releasing the water gates at the end ... it spills all over the people but you have to be wanting to read baptism to get baptism; you have to distinctly eisogete it.The other is, if I remember rightly, some kind of tree out in the desert ... but that kind of goes nowhere unless you're determined on your own to use little details as an in to eisogete everything you can to show how great the movie is, basically because you wanted to believe that in the first place.

So, in Logan, it is a Last Supper scene and a Deposition (taking the body down from the Cross) and Pieta (Mary holding the broken body of Jesus). The Last Supper should be pretty obvious, the dinner that Logan, Charles, and Laura share with the family of three, and so what I really want to do is to clarify what of that I want to emphasize and what part of the Last Supper I think it connects with. For, it doesn't match and appeal to all aspects. There is no sacrificial victim in the meal itself. Yes, it is Charles's last meal before he dies, but he does not die as a sacrifice even in the way Logan does. What makes it a Last Supper is that the Last Supper is the institution of the Eucharist and the Eucharist is the eternal family meal ... it is a mystical participation in what will be really home in the next world, the ultimate family bonding in a meal (it's why the Eucharist is so central for Catholic and Eastern Orthodox). And that is what that meal at the farmhouse is for Charles especially, or at least he is the one who is cognizant of it as that and tries to call Logan's attention to it: this is what a home and a family is like, stop and feel it. And it is also a hope of finality ... the point of running and fighting is not, or at least should not be, for its own sake ... it's to be able to have the place called home in the end, the place portrayed so well in that meal int he farmhouse. And that meal has it's effect already on Laura. The meal is characterized by laughing and joking around: Charles being a teacher, Logan "getting kicked out several times," Charles joking that the words would stick in his throat to say that Logan was a model student. And the family is finding the humor in it and everybody is laughing in a healthy way ... and so is Laura. If you watch, she is doing the same hawklike watching she always does, but now she is mimicking because what she sees is something that feels good, that feels healthy. As with most kids, she probably doesn't get everything, but she can sense it is a healthy sharing humor, and she wants to participate. She can sense a warmth in it and is smiling too.

The second religious image is the Deposition from the Cross, the taking down of the body of Jesus. This also should be too obvious to miss, but sadly, sometimes people are too preoccupied, or too prejudiced against religious imagery, to see it. Logan's body is literally broken on a tree in giving himself to help the kids escape, and then Laura cuts him down from it by cutting the spike on which his doppleganger pinioned him. And the Pieta is daughter rather than mother, but it is a similar female holding of the slain male family, and closer familial than uncle-niece; its a parent-child relation, even if it is discovered only in the very moment that it is lost (which is kind of the point in a movie like Logan that has such a focus on transiency).

Call outs:

When I discuss call outs, I am not talking about things like the katana sword or other actual material objects that came in from previous movies but might not be noticed unless one is an aficionado looking for them. I think that is all fine and good, but what I am talking about is visual imagery such as scene textures or phrasings or positioning or such things being reminiscent of those same elements in key scenes or sections in other films. I say all that just because I am not sure what to call them such that there would be no confusion because a lot of people discuss those other objects in the same way I discuss this stuff (so I want to clear up the confusion first).

I'm aware that I am in a minority in liking XMen: Last Stand. I know that most aficionados find it to be wretched. I think it was well-done as an endings movie and had a good core issue: the person who is so powerful but so uncontrollable and the person who has to undo them does it for their own sake to put them out of their suffering ("them? I'm not doing it for them ... I'm doing it for you"), and that the person has to use continual radical healing power to even get close because of how badly the uncontrolled person is ripping them to shreds (I also thought the "right to turn it off" was a good core theme question too), and I thought the Phoenix visual was some of the downright most wicked to come out of Marvel studios, with the veins and the desiccation-like tightening of face skin and the eyes going black and the ominous smile.

Anyway, I am going to take the fact that that was the film from the original trilogy to which Logan found it easiest to make a visual call out a justification for claiming that it is actually a lot better than many Marvel "diehards" can admit. But, of course, I need to support that there actually is a visual image call out. Watch the scene in which Phoenix kills Charles in Last Stand and then  the seizure scene in the hotel in Logan. That's basically my argument: watch them and see how similar the telekenetic upheaval/stasis is (and also take into account that there are two such scenes in each movie).

I would also mention here sort of a further critique on the whole "easter egg" seriality thing. I think another connection between Last Stand and Logan, and particularly as distinct films within the seriality of the MCU, is that both close what have become distinct trilogies. Regardless of whether they had to reboot after Last Stand because it had gotten so bad, as many Marvel-heads claim, even if that is true, it is in addition to the fact that, even if it is NOT true, they had to reboot anyway because this was simply too definitive of an ending to a trilogy. I always think that multi-installment but distinctly set numbered projects (the Dark Knight Trilogy, 7-book Harry Potter, 5-movie Fantastic Beasts) are better than builtin unbounded seriality, so much better that it is a difference of kind and not of degree. I think it is why, even though other books included George Smiley, people gravitate toward speaking of the Smiley trilogy and why Terry Gilliam gravitates toward speaking of a couple different trilogies in his filmography. It hooks for us. Even though Origins and The Wolverine may not have been great, I think that being the ending of a trilogy in the first place strengthens the character of Logan, and that the same strengthened the character of Last Stand (even though XMen 1 and 2 were better than Origins and The Wolverine)

The other call out is to a film outside the Marvel Universe, and that I have already mentioned, The Book of Eli. In spite of what I have said about Logan and Fury Road being westerns, I have to say that the fact that a call out like this works latently supports a claim that Logan actually matches up better even for post-apocalyptic than Fury Road does, despite all the hype of FR as a post-apocalypse. The image of which I speak is the headphones received from a black guy, received by a Hispanic girl and carried with her in her travels. Laura didn't get them from her sacrificial savior Logan the way Solara did from Eli; call outs generally never do match up entirely because they're not meant to pin down material meaning; they're meant to bring in a flavor, and I think the headphones from a black guy does enough to bring in a little bit of flavor of Book of Eli's wasteland world with it's lawless "mastermind's" like Carnegie.

So there you have it, rambling though it be. My glowing praise of Logan and my fierce (haha) defense of my right to not like Fury Road no matter what the critics say :)