There’s a very quick, subtle contrast in “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Throughout the film, we witness the brainwashed, blindly devoted War Boys hurl themselves at danger with the expectation of dying a warrior’s death. Just before their demise, they all call out to their comrades, “Witness me!” and then give themselves to Valhalla, as they believe. But just before protagonist Imperator Furiosa kills the megalomaniacal despot Immortan Joe, she locks eyes with him and growls not “witness me,” but “remember me.”
Each time I’ve seen the film, this line has stuck out to me — remember me. On the one hand it’s an unusual phrase to utter to someone who is seconds away from death and will thereafter remember nothing. But on the other, it’s a very poignant declaration of defiance, power and legacy. Something witnessed is fleeting, offering only a few moments of experience or emotion before vanishing. Something remembered carries weight; to be remembered is not to disappear.
Remembrance has been at the back of my mind, because at the end of this column I will, in all likelihood, never write about film again. It’s so strange to think that some 60-odd articles linked on a webpage will serve as the only markers of all of my effort, my time, my debates, my research, all of my studying devoted to the medium of film and all of its intricacies. Some of those articles I like a great deal; in others, I squirm at my obvious shortcomings as a writer and critic. But they are my legacy as a film critic. Even more, they are proof that I was a film critic.
At the end of this page, I can no longer call myself a film critic, or even a writer. And despite my frequent bouts with writer’s block as of late, I cannot help but be saddened by that realization, for I know there’s more that I can say:
I never got to tell you how “Lost in Translation” so masterfully captures emotion through a combination of image and soundtrack, how the guitar fuzz of My Bloody Valentine’s “Sometimes” mirrors the dreamy haze of a late-night drive through Tokyo. Nor was I able to write about Jeff Nichols’s incredible film “Take Shelter,” how it thoughtfully and beautifully meditates on mental illness, sacrifice and family while also serving as a modern parable of the middle class American family living in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008. I never got my geek on and went in-depth into my love of “Star Wars” and how I live by the words of Yoda: “Only what you take with you.”
I didn’t have time to find the release I’ve long sought by writing about my trips to the movie theater with my dad as he battled cancer in 2010. I couldn’t share how movies gave me heroes like Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford to look up to, and how I grew stronger through them and the spirit they embody on-screen.
Many of those articles are saved on my computer, critical skeletons dancing in the limbo of Microsoft Office. I never found the right words to complete those thoughts, and I probably never will. So I can only hope that my body of work was enough.
I like to think it was. I like to think that my readership included more than my parents, their Facebook friends, the Arts writers at The Michigan Daily and a couple crass, easily irritable Stone Temple Pilots fans. But in the end, writing was an activity for me and no one else. It was a process to sort out my thoughts, to challenge myself with new ways of thinking about film, creativity, interpretation and criticism itself. That it must end is, simply, bittersweet.
As a result, I’ve thought a lot about endings lately. How some films have the perfect endings — “The Usual Suspects,” “Field of Dreams,” “Apocalypse Now,” to name a few — and how others simply don’t know when to end. I think of the ending to “Lincoln,” which effectively strips the film of the subtlety imbued in its logical ending shot, a weary Lincoln leaving the White House to meet his wife at the Ford Theater, to give us a “proper” Hollywood biopic ending that martyrs the man. An ending like that isn’t actually an ending: it’s a gift-wrapped manufacture that tries to spell everything out for the audience.
In a way I understand it, this desire for a well-packaged, digestible ending for audience and director alike. It’s hard to limit oneself, to willingly deprive oneself of making that one final point, the one that can tie it all together and make it pretty. It’s hard to know that to add more risks detracting from the work as a whole. It’s hard to simply walk away.
But the proper ending can really be the difference between jumping out of your seat to beat the rush of exiting moviegoers and needing to wait for the lights to come back on because you’re just too moved to rise. It can be the difference between good and great — between witnessing and remembering.
Which is why I leave it here: no grand overarching statements, no sentimental declarations, just an ending. I simply hope someone found my words worthwhile. Witness me. Remember me. It’s up to you.