flamethrowing-hurdy-gurdy:
Max: You done this before?
Furiosa: Many times. Now that I drive a War Rig, this is the best shot I’ll ever have.
Max: And them?
Furiosa: They’re looking for hope.
Max: What about you?
Furiosa: Redemption.Er pardon my butting in and also deletion of the convo because long but also because almost none of the above was my stance on this scene in the movie, because of the essential factor that neither of them are nice people and are both positioned as anti-heroes in the narrative/themes and also that despite their working together there’s still elements of trust missing (that I think people forget because of fanon), but also things they can’t flat out say, being the people they are.
I feel like their conversation really goes, taking in all the context, their tones, their face, and their body language:
Max: Can I trust you to get to this place?
Furiosa: Yes, even though I haven’t succeeded before.
Max: Why did you bring them along even though they’ve probably brought the war parties down on your head? Thought you wanted the ‘best shot’.
Furiosa: because they asked, and I couldn’t refuse them with the way they asked. They still believe in hope.
Max: Do you still believe in it?
Furiosa: I don’t think I can. I’ve seen/committed too many terrible things and I want it to stop weighing on me.
And what’s key here is that Furiosa spends all of this conversation with a thousand yard stare. She’s throwing off ptsd like paint fumes, her mouth is held in that way reminds me of the way people hold it when they don’t want it to shake visibly shake.
Watch/Listen to the delivery of Max’s lines. “How do you even know this place even exists” is delivered with actual doubt, ”Then why’d you leave?” with confusion, and everything else is like… gentle, after she says “stolen, as a child.”
Compare his delivery of “How do you even know this place exists?” with “You done this before?”
And then how he keeps on looking at her until she says Redemption and then how he looks away.
This to me was a great scene of talking around things, there are things that Furiosa would never say to Max like the line, “I used to be a wife.” But she says it here in a way that had Max changing his tone with her instantly.
The information in this scene was almost completely stripped from the dialogue itself, like much of the movie, it’s all visual and tone and context, and I can’t watch it some days because I can’t watch the trauma on her face and on how she holds her mouth like people hold it in that careful way when they are in public and can’t cry.
This is really enlightening. Thank you! I mean, I got kind of the gist of all that, but not parsed out so clearly.
Being who I am though, I still can’t figure out where/how the ‘many times’ fit(s) in. In the conversation you present, is it essentially the part that says ‘I can get us there/you can trust me to get us there’? Is she essentially posturing then? Because she really hasn’t been there in a long time, so it can’t mean ‘i’ve been there many times already’
Sorry I’m so damn pedantic; I just get really stumped. It takes the movie from being this perfect masterpiece where everything fits into place and has meaning, to this one piece of the puzzle not fitting. I am wholly willing to believe that it’s some lack in my understanding that makes the piece not fit. In fact, I can’t help but think it really does! And that drives me crazy, because I hate being clueless bout something I feel I should ‘get’
I think she might have tried? I honestly don’t get too hung up on it; she says it lightly in a way that I honestly wouldn’t be surprised was posturing, at least to a degree because it clearly hadn’t worked before.
I put it in the same category as the milking mothers, logistically it doesn’t make the greatest of sense but it works as a theme and we might get more details in future movies.
This is a better analysis of this scene than what I had going on tbh, because it gets to the heart of what the scene is about, rather than what the characters are saying.
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