Remember Me vs Witness Me
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| Title: | Remember Me vs Witness Me |
| Creator: | daxxjaxx/Andrew |
| Date(s): | November 13, 2016 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | Mad Max: Fury Road |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Remember Me vs Witness Me |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Remember Me vs Witness Me is a piece Mad Max: Fury Road meta by daxxjaxx/Andrew. Posted to his Tumblr in 2016, he uses two of the movie's messages, the War Boys' "Witness me" and The Vuvalini's motion of remembrance to explore identity and history.
Selections
Memory is a theme that is especially present in Fury Road, and yet it’s the aspect of the film’s thematic gamut that I see least discussed. Mad Max as a whole takes place in a sort of limbic time warp. How long ago were these disasters? The oil shortages, the flying nukes, the water wars? Fury Road might take place two decades or two centuries after this cataclysm. Even people who grew to adulthood in the old world, like Max and the Vuvalini are implied to, have foggy, off-kilter memories of those times (”Everyone had a show…”), that seem more like secondhand myths than actual recollection. The old world has passed into legend and superstition even to those who lived in it. The remnants and parphenalia of the pre-apocalypse and their use in the post- is a major cornerstone of Mad Max’s aesthetic, and even in this, there is a clear thematic distinction between how these trappings manifest between groups. The Buzzards, for instance, seemingly lacking even the demented ingenuity of Immortan Joe’s rev-heads, merely scavenge the past, cannibalizing it into a shape that is feral, ungainly, and myopic.http://daxxglax.tumblr.com/post/153113923808/remember-mevs-witness-me
So back to Furiosa, who herself has gone on a journey from being trapped in the depths of the War Boy culture to reconnecting with her past and, like Max, relearning how to connect with people, to move beyond the instincts of survival. In the moment of her confrontation with Joe astride his Gigahorse (incidentally the first, last, and only time in the entire film that Joe comes truly face-to-face with either of our protagonists), Furiosa sums up her entire journey, not just in the film, but over the course of her entire life, in those two words, before literally, figuratively, and gruesomely ripping the mask off the false god and spelling an end to his horrific ideology. From this perspective, “Remember me” is a powerful statement, the mantra of the society that Furiosa, the Vuvalini, and the no-longer-Wives will build, where people are more than their “usefulness”; where the past has lessons to teach, not just trappings of power to grant; where those you’ve lost do not become spectres, but immortalized in memory.http://daxxglax.tumblr.com/post/153113923808/remember-mevs-witness-me