Ode to a Honda Accord

 Tomorrow, I'm going to be purchasing a new car and leaving behind my old one. It's time to make the change, and I'm excited not only to have a hybrid car with much better fuel efficiency (especially as someone who primarily drives in the city) but also to have many of the modern amenities that cars have had for the last decade plus, like a back-up camera, and the ability to connect my phone to play music or podcasts over the car's speakers.

But there's a feeling of nostalgia and even grief in getting rid of my old car.

That car is a 2003 Honda Accord. When my family purchased it, my sister had recently gone off to college, and given how well we liked her then-new Civic (which we had taken on a road trip to LA for her to go off to college), my mother decided to replace her old '91 Mercury Sable station wagon (the slightly fancier version of the Ford Taurus ones anyone who grew up in the '90s would be familiar with) with the Accord. There was an expectation, though: I'm two years younger than my sister, and so my own college journey was coming up, and so I think the plan was always for me to take the car when I needed it.

I wound up going to school in New York, so it wouldn't be until 2008, when I moved to Los Angeles, that I actually took the car, driving it across country with my best friend.

We got the car in the fall of 2002, so it's nearly 22 years old. It still runs, though it has accumulated a lot of problems over the years that have seemed more trouble than they were worth to fix. For example, the "moon roof," a window in the roof that could be opened with the press of a button, stopped working probably over a decade ago, and there's a gasket around it that's partially popped out that I couldn't even get fixed at a Honda dealership because they apparently don't make that part anymore. The sole remaining key is its "valet key" because the actual metal key part of the primary keys snapped out of their plastic shells, making the "key" really more of a remote fob.

It's really an odd thing: the car is somewhat fancier for its era than the one I'm getting. It has a leather interior (a dubiously wise option for a sunny, warm city) and what was then a very fancy six-CD changer. Funnily enough, it was made in what I like to refer to an "interregnum" between the time of cassette decks and the time of built-in auxiliary ports. My dad tried to instal an Aux input but it would just drain the battery. If you're too young to remember, you used to be able to buy a fake audio cassette that had a wire coming out of it, which you could plug into a portable CD player or an iPod. With only a CD player, I don't really have an option to listen to anything from an external source.

Living in LA has not been kind to the superficial structure of the car. Especially after living in an apartment where one of the three of us has to park on the street at any given time, and where I find myself usually drawing the short straw, it has meant countless dings and scratches as people bump into the car. In 2014 I also got into a 5-car accident (not my fault - it was stop-and-go traffic and both the person behind me and the person in the next lane over were rushing to fill the gap behind me, speeding up to do so while I was coming to a stop because, you know, traffic, and the rear-most car slammed into the car behind me, which then slammed into me, pushing me into the car in front of me - and so on until 5 or maybe even 6 cars were affected. It was some real insanity). Also, a year or two ago when we got a hurricane in Los Angeles, I had parked beneath a tree that I had parked underneath many times, but which this time deposited a bunch of strange goo (I assume some kind of sap) that then hardened when the sun came out and peeled up a bunch of patches of paint.

The air conditioning has broken three times, and I have had it repaired twice, but this most recent time felt like a sign it was time to get a new car.

But I really feel a need to pay my respects. I have something of an animist view of things - it's hard for me not to anthropomorphize objects and ascribe feelings to them. This car is like an old reliable friend - even if it struggles, it always gets me where I need to go (except the time that the gear-shifter broke the exact same time my catalytic converter was stolen - on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, no less!) And we've been through a lot - as I said before, the summer after I graduated from college, my best friend and I drove out to Los Angeles, and it was probably the most fun I've had on a road trip (no offense to my family - two years later I drove with my sister in her Civic when she moved to New York, but there was a folding bike poking into the back of the passenger seat the whole way, so it had its downsides.)

And I'm not here to advertise for a giant corporation, but man were early-2000s Hondas good. My sister's Civic, my Accord, and my Dad's 2005 Accord all lasted the better part of two decades. And my car still runs! But it's getting to that point where it feels more cost-effective (and frankly, just preferable for comfort reasons) to get a new car.

I think the emotional attachment to the car is also because it was my mother's. As I've written about on this blog, my mom died in 2017 after a year-and-a-half-long battle with a rare cancer. Very nearly seven years on, I still grapple with the grief. I suppose that you never really get used to the idea. And it's this odd thing where it's not like she died when I was very young - I was 31 - but nevertheless I had this expectation that I would have her around for a lot longer.

The car has been mine a lot longer than it was ever hers. But she'd drive me to high school in it. It's the car that I took my driver's license exam in. I guess it's just another reminder that the world she inhabited is one that is continuing to slip into the past, one that will be looked back on through the haze of memory and then, later, second-hand stories. It's hard for me to imagine my mother joining all the relatives I never got to meet, like my namesake great grandfather Daniel Ring, who died not long before I was born. The world is going to look a little different - I'm going to be driving around in a Toyota Corolla Hybrid, not my old blue Honda Accord.

And yes, it's ultimately just a machine. A piece of equipment to help me get around in our modern world.

I'm not a guy who typically refers to his car by a name. But I'm also a fantasy writer, so I like naming things. Long ago, in part thanks to its blue color (and one of the minor tragedies here is that Toyota basically only sells greyscale cars now, so my new one will be silver,) I decided to call it River.

So, so long, River. You've been a really good car.

Furiosa

 So, I think I need to give George Miller credit once again. What seems like a bad idea - a spin-off prequel to a legacy sequel - wound up being a genuinely good and entertaining movie.

When I first saw the teaser trailers for Fury Road back in 2015 (or possibly even late 2014) I didn't understand why one of my friends was so hyped about it. I hadn't seen any of the Mad Max movies (the at-that-point last of them, Beyond Thunderdome, came out a year before I was born, and thus thirty years before Fury Road) and so it felt like just another example of Hollywood digging up some property that would appeal to Gen Xers feeling nostalgic (notably two of the trailers before Furiosa was for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Twisters, which feel very much like  "these don't need to happen" kind of movies).

But, Fury Road was amazing, and got better with a rewatch.

Ever since the Star Wars prequels, I've been very skeptical of the idea of prequels. And inherently, there are going to be some aspects of the format that send up warning lights.

But I think Furiosa avoids many of the pitfalls - it doesn't concern itself with explaining every little detail about Fury Road. Immortan Joe is already a wasteland warlord with an army of zealous War Boys who are willing to destroy themselves to prove worthy of him, and while he and his allied kingdom of the Bullet Farm and Gastown are central to the plot, the winking nods are minimal, and new characters are introduced that fit pretty seamlessly into the implied backstory for Furiosa from the original movie.

Anya-Taylor Joy, admittedly, has to do a tough job, which is to bring something new to the character while also creating a believable continuity with Charlize Theron's portrayal. I think she does fine, if not mind-blowing work here. Furiosa is tough as nails from the start, and I think I might need to digest the movie a bit more to really map out her character arc.

While these movies are full of violence and heroes who sometimes do pretty ruthless things, the ongoing theme seems to be the need to make a place for compassion. Furiosa finds someone even when she is swept into Immortan Joe's forces who shows her some kindness and respect, and while his lack of presence in Fury Road gives a pretty strong hint that he won't make it to the end of the movie, Praetorian Jack (played by Tom Burke) helps her to create a place of selflessness and compassion that will ultimately lead her to the liberation of the women in Fury Road. Somewhere, somehow, you need to find a person to trust, and to be vulnerable with. The relationship is not explicitly romantic, but there's definitely love.

The show-stealing performance, though, belongs to Chris Hemsworth, playing the movie's headlining wasteland warlord, Dementus. Hemsworth gets to be Australian for once, and plays a monster of the wastes who dabbles in religious iconography (he's first introduced wearing a robe made out of a parachute that makes him look like Jesus) but is ultimately also kind of an ill-adapted leader for these times. When he hears of the Citadel (from a Warboy with a bolt in his skull who thinks that he's died gone to Valhalla,) his on-a-whim attempt to conquer it by force is such an unmitigated disaster that it's no surprise he won't be a problem still by the time of Fury Road.

To borrow D&D terms, while Immortan Joe is lawful evil, building an empire that does, you know, function and work, just in a horrible, oppressive way, Dementus is chaotic evil, ill-suited to forethought and the ramifications of his actions. He's unpredictable - he manages to succeed in infiltrating Gastown by having his men just kill his own allies - but in the long term, his choices leave him with problems he doesn't know how to solve.

Still, what's interesting about Dementus is that, unlike Immortan Joe - whom one sort of gets the impression was always bad - we get some indication that Dementus might not have been such a monster before his family was killed. We don't know how it happened, but he mentions having had children, and keeps one of their toys, a little teddy-bear, on him at all times.

And thus, his relationship with Furiosa is twisted - while she has never forgotten her own mother, even after she is taken by Dementus and her mother killed - he seems to retain this weird paternal affection for her, engaging in some kind of emotional transference. Ultimately, this gives him the desire to instill his worldview in Furiosa, to abandon all hope and embrace the brutality and cruelty of the wastes. He wants to see that validated by giving it to her.

What I find very heartening is that Furiosa as a movie is structurally very different from Fury Road. It would have been easy to simply give her some other feature-length action sequence, but this movie takes more time to sit in the quiet times, and to see her grow from a child into the Imperator that she in in Fury Road. By giving her a quest for vengeance against Dementus, there's a compelling, ongoing plot that makes the movie feel substantial without making it feel like her arc is fully complete (and thus making room for the other movie).

I don't know if this movie gets quite as many points for innovation - there are definitely some awesome, jaw-dropper moments of action, but perhaps not as many as in Fury Road. But I think if we're giving Fury Road an A, this is getting an A- or a B+ at the worst.

Finally Saw The Road Warrior

 With plans to go see Furiosa a week from now for my birthday, I figured I'd go back and watch one of the original movies, and among them, chose to see the one that is generally considered the best. I've "seen" the original Mad Max, though this was on mute in a bar while socializing, so it doesn't really count. The Road Warrior was reputed to be where the series really developed its post-apocalyptic setting and aesthetic, and that certainly seems to be on display.

I know this movie is beloved by many, but I came away from the experience thinking quite resolutely that Fury Road is the better film. With the glut of legacy sequels coming out of Hollywood these days, Fury Road was a rare case where the artistic intent and integrity was fully maintained (it didn't hurt that it had the same director, but we've seen cases of brilliant filmmakers returning to their popular franchises and not really sticking the landing, such as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull).

I think a few things benefit Fury Road (a movie that, shockingly to my millennial mind, is already nearly a decade old) such as improvements on special effects, a seemingly larger budget, and a George Miller who I think has continued evolving as a person.

It's hard not to notice that Lord Humungus, and particularly his primary war dog Wez are kind of gross homophobic caricatures. The movie has a very 1982 attitude toward homosexuals, which boils down to "violent thrill-killers and perverts." In the early part of the movie, Wez travels everywhere with what is plainly his lover, a man with long blonde hair, and when this lover is killed as Wez ducks the Feral Child's razor-sharp metal boomerang (the movie is very Australian) it hits this (as far as I know) unnamed man, filling an already psychotically violent character with a particular rage. There's a lot of BDSM imagery with Humungus' gang, and, well... the movie was not exactly ahead of its time on these issues.

The plot is simple, which clearly serves this franchise well. Max encounters a man with an ultralight helicopter and, as tends to happen in the wastes, gets into a violent confrontation that the "Gyro Captain" (that's gyro like gyroscope, not the delicious Greek pita sandwich) in which the Captain offers to take Max to a settlement where a group of people have been able to refine gasoline. They travel there and discover that a gang of raiders (the Humungus) have been attacking the place, trying to steal its resources. Max witnesses some of the residents trying to flee, only to be caught by the raiders and subjected to rape and murder. Max attempts to take a survivor back to the settlement in the hopes of earning some fuel for his troubles, but the man dies, and so instead he has to prove himself by helping to fight off another raid.

The leader of the settlement, Pappagallo, has been planning an evacuation, where they're going to go north to a place that is supposedly less violent and dangerous. To get his car back with some fuel, Max offers to bring back a truck that he had found on the road, giving us one of the big car-chase setpieces as he brings it back to the settlement. With his car returned, despite making a connection with these people, he decides to head off on his own - only for Wez to catch up with him and wreck his car (the fact that both here and in Fury Road we see Max's V8 Interceptor destroyed really reinforces the hazy approach to continuity). While Max escapes getting killed, his dog doesn't, and it's the Gyro Captain who rescues him and takes him back to the settlement.

And that brings us to the climactic set piece - Max drives the truck with the fuel (supposedly) while the other residents escape riding in the opposite direction. There's a giant fight on the highway in which characters who we like even if we don't have names for them get killed, but ultimately it all ends when Lord Humungus drives straight into the truck while Wez is on its hood, smashing both remaining headliner villains to smithereens.

Again, we can see how Immortan Joe of Fury Road feels like an evolution of Lord Humungus. The latter wears a steel hockey mask at all times, but is otherwise clad in skimpy fetish gear. But we see a shot of the back of his head, where his hair seems to have fallen out and he's got weird, pulsing veins. We never see his face, but what little hair is left is stringy. He also has a vague German accent, and notably pulls a german pistol with a scope from a box that has an S.S. skull symbol in it, suggesting that perhaps he's got some connection to Naziism, or at least likes the aesthetics. But the way he hides his face (and we never see it) suggests perhaps some freaking deformity. It's never 100% confirmed that nuclear war has happened - in fact, it almost seems as if the "wasteland" where the story takes place is not necessarily how the rest of the world looks (though given that the epilogue tells of how the residents of the settlement become the first of the Great Northern Tribe, one has to imagine there's pretty broad societal collapse).

As with Fury Road, Max's experience amounts to essentially a couple of really tough days in a life full of tough days, and while the supporting characters go on to evidently live in peace and start to rebuild society, they don't see Max again.

Given how uniquely non-stop Fury Road is, it was a little surprising to me how little of the movie was car chases - which is not to say that it doesn't have its fair share. In fact, there are some big aesthetic parallels - both Fury Road and Road Warrior largely involve fighting atop a giant truck being swarmed by an army of evil raiders.

I do think that an interesting contrast between the two movies is that Immortan Joe feels like he commands significantly more power. He's a member of a triad of local warlords, and probably the most powerful of the three, with a fortified settlement of his own. Lord Humungus has a big gang, but it's not clear if the gang really has a permanent home at all, and instead seem to be just parked near the refinery for most of the movie.

I don't think this is a flaw - the stakes are still high even if the whole thing is just on a smaller scale. But I do think that while this movie takes things much farther into the post-apocalyptic world (the original movie arguably not being post-apocalyptic at all, and just scuzzy and crime-ridden the same way that The Warriors portrays 1970s New York) by the time we get to Fury Road it feels like the old world has been so completely swept away that something else is emerging to take its place.

Max's lesson in this movie, if he can be said to have one, is learning to accept help and partnership - exactly the thing whose breakdown has allowed this anarchic wasteland to exist. That Pappagallo and his people are even attempting to rebuild something resembling a society tells us they're the good guys, while Lord Humungus seems in it for the short-term gain of raiding the place and taking what they've produced.

I haven't seen Beyond Thunderdome, but skipping ahead to Fury Road, it feels like we're now looking at the next steps: Immortan Joe has, in a way, rebuilt society, but he's carrying over the worst aspects of the civilization that came before - exploitation, demagoguery, and patriarchy. We can hope, perhaps, that at the end of that movie, Furiosa will arise as a just ruler who will actually work to cultivate and uplift the people who depend on her. I don't think we get as much of an epilogue in Fury Road, but my general sense is that, for all their desolation and violence, these movies are ultimately optimistic, showing humanity climbing their way back from the abyss. It's just that not everyone is going to make it, and Max's tragedy is that he can't really walk into that better world to come.