Issue #330: Culture Can't Reward the Great
Here are all the movies I watched over the past week:
The Fall Guy (2024)
Haikyu!! The Dumpster Battle (2024)
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)
Charulata (1964)
Godzilla (1954)
Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987)
To Catch a Thief (1955)
Evil Does Not Exist (2023)
The Reckless One (1967)
They were mostly great, except for The Fall Guy, which was atrocious. I had seen Godzilla and To Catch a Thief before, To Catch a Thief quite recently, but the rest were new to me. I want to talk quickly about The Reckless One, something I watched last night.
This movie is awesome. I watched it with no subtitles because no English translation exists as of yet. It was uploaded on May 16th of this year. Prior to that, I don’t think there was any available digital file.
The movie stars the absolutely iconic Akira Kobayashi, best known for his role as Akira Takeda in the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series but best known to me for his role in Toshio Masuda’s Rusty Knife (1958). The director of The Reckless One, Akinori Matsuo, is a yakuza and samurai movie workhorse, but this is the first film of his that I’ve seen as director. He worked as the assistant on I Am Waiting (1957), though, another phenomenal film.
I’m going to be working my way through some of Matsuo’s other movies, but apparently The Reckless One is the third installment in a series. I need to know the movies that came before it, but that information is hard to come by online. If you have any tips, let me know.
“You must be that other thing”: Negativity in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
One of my favorite quotations in the history of literature comes from Middlemarch (1871):
‘He has got no good red blood in his body,’ said Sir James. ‘No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses,’ said Mrs Cadwallader.
In this quotation, James Chettam and Elinor Cadwallader are mocking Edward Casaubon. Casaubon has scholarly aspirations, working to write Key to All Mythologies, but he is hardly the ideal picture of intellectual acuity and accomplishment. Still, the idea of blood that is “all semicolons and parentheses” has great Lacanian resonances. It illustrates, through graphic metaphor, the necessity of discourse for the purposes of creating the social — castrated, in the Lacanian sense — subject. As Lee Edelman writes in Bad Education (2023):
Lacan … note[s] that when the “specular I turns into the social I” and the mirror stage comes to an end, leaving in its wake a Symbolic subject mediated by “the other’s desire,” the very “I” itself becomes “an apparatus to which every instinctual pressure constitutes a danger”: the danger of the subject’s reduction to an object governed by the drive. (25)
Discourse, semicolons and parenthesis, are part of what sustains the subject’s cohesion. The recognition of the “I” in the course of the mirror stage that Edelman recounts happens in a web of discourse, where the infant comes to understand themselves as an entity in the same way as other subjects. “You,” “I,” and the proper name are all significatory stand-ins for the subject. The vicissitudes of discourse are what manufacture the social “I,” the human subject as others come to understand it. One can only be understood through their utterances, their signifiers, “mediated by ‘the other’s desire,’” to the extent that one’s intention may be bungled or misconstrued as it is transformed to signifier and expressed to an other.
All of this is to say is that George Miller, in Furiosa (2024), made a movie where I can’t say “it’s all about the problem of the signifier.” It is, in fact, not only about that. Miller achieves this through juxtaposing several different kinds of subjects.
The History Man (George Shevtsov), a figure who has much in common with Casaubon, is juxtaposed with (young) Furiosa (Alyla Browne) herself as two figures with vastly different relations to the signifier.


The History Man is a recurring role multiple people occupy in the Mad Max series. The historical archive is written on their clothing and tattooed on their bodies. Discourse is written over the History Man, making obvious the state of the subject in relation to the signifier. It is the signifier that always comes out “on top,” domineering desire and depriving the subject of jouissance; but also protecting the subject’s cohesion from jouissance. By contrast, Furiosa’s mouth is bound by a restraint mask so she cannot bite — or speak. She has little interest in speaking anyway, however, as a counterweight to the History Man’s verbosity. Like Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), a film known for its sparse dialogue, Miller seeks to subvert the over-reliance on speech for both the characters and the medium he works within.
Speech is not the only kind of signifier, of course, though it is specifically discourse that dominates the subject and that Furiosa seems to reject through her silence. This form of discourse that is suppressed through the muzzle marks Furiosa in a way similarly to one of her cinematic antecedents, Hannibal Lecter.
Edelman, this time in No Future (2004), makes an analogy between Lecter’s muzzle and Andrew Beckett’s (Tom Hanks) oxygen mask in Philadelphia (1993). To the extent that Lecter is a queer figure, ignoring the question of whether or not The Silence of the Lambs (1991) is “homophobic,” Edelman argues that the treatment of queerness in The Silence of the Lambs might be preferable to that of Philadelphia. In Edelman’s view, the final sequence of Philadelphia inspires “indignation directed not only against the intolerant world that sought to crush the honorable man this boy would later become, but also against the homosexual world in which boys like this eventually grow up to have crushes on other men” (19).
Lecter, and Furiosa, then, are cut from the same cloth, and muzzled too, for their embodiment of a different form of queerness than “homosexuality,” a queerness that:
oppose[s] itself to the structural determinants of politics as such … This paradoxical formulation suggests a refusal—the appropriately perverse refusal that characterizes queer theory—of every substantialization of identity, which is always oppositionally defined, and, by extension, of history as a linear narrative (the poor man’s teleology) in which meaning succeeds in revealing itself—as itself—through time. (No Future 4)
Though Furiosa eventually asserts a name and title, “Imperator Furiosa,” and thus abdicates her queered position, relenting to the demands of discourse to identify oneself, Miller’s positioning of her is always elusive.
If Furiosa is ultimately meant to figure “the negativity opposed to every form of social viability” (No Future 9), Miller insists on that form of negativity being antithetical to discourse in every possible way. Furiosa refuses to speak, but she also cannot be spoken of. Her history is rewritten, her gender is obscured, her function as an organic machine in the hierarchy of the Citadel subverted. It is impossible to put a name to what she is, even as she adopts a proper name and title to cover over her impossibility. It is only in her final encounter with Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) where this is absolutely clear. Dementus says to her:
You are a freak. You could have necked me in the night, but you didn’t. You must be that other thing. Are you? That thing?
That other thing that Dementus can’t name is the queer negativity Furiosa embodies.
Even as Miller assents to some of the more milquetoast liberal pop cultural inversions, (take, for instance, Dementus mistaking Mary Jabassa [Charlee Fraser] for Furiosa’s father) Furiosa is yet another text that refuses comfortable, coherent representational logic. Instead, it substitutes affirmations for subversions with figures and ideas at the film’s core that are antagonistic, self-contradictory, and complex. The cleverness of Furiosa is that Miller works both at the level of narrative and form to subvert expectations, but these subversions are similar to the ones he has embraced for his entire career. Nonetheless, despite his frequent usage, they remain novel. And they make for great films.
Weekly Reading List
https://mangadex.org/title/e5357466-c8a2-4259-9b02-2580185bd2bb/billy-bat — I am a huge Naoki Urasawa fan. That should be pretty obvious, I think, after spending eight weeks writing about Pluto (2023), at least one writing about 20th Century Boys (1999), and I’m sure I must have mentioned Master Keaton (1988) here and there. I had never read, Billy Bat (2008) until recently, though. I’m only a few chapters in, but it strikes me as the most audacious of manga from an author who tends toward the audacious. It involves a comic written by the protagonist, Kevin Yamagata, but liberally includes segments from the comic Yamagata writes. Thus, the story unfolds in parallel, parts of the Billy Bat diegetic comic being written and rewritten as Billy Bat by Urasawa follows Yamagata’s strange descent into a mystery about the origin of his character.
So far, so good.
https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/the-boston-celtics-and-what-greatness-looks-like — The New Yorker wrote about the Celtics championship run. Banner 18 imminent.
As usual, Žižek’s framing for his essay about the recognition of Palestine as a state is intentionally provocative. Some of his provocations in this piece are less useful, and more objectionable (to me), than others. But I think it would be hard to deny that his framing of the issue of ICC warrants and state recognition is outside the scope of the more common praise or critique for these turns of events. He even finds an opportunity to make a reference to a film:
Most of us know well the culminating moment of A Few Good Men (Rob Reiner, 1992) when Tom Cruise addresses Jack Nicholson with “I want the truth!”, and Nicholson shouts back: “You can’t handle the truth!” This reply is more ambiguous than it may appear: it should not be taken as simply claiming that most of us are too weak to handle the brutal reality of things. If someone were to ask a witness about the truth of the holocaust, and the witness were to reply “You can’t handle the truth!”, this should not be understood as a simple claim that most of us are not able the process the horror of holocaust. At a deeper level, those who were not able to handle the truth were the Nazi perpetrators themselves: they were not able to accept the fact that their society is traversed by an all-encompassing antagonism, and to avoid this insight they engaged in the murdering spray that targeted the Jews, as if killing the Jews would re-establish a harmonious social body.
The most I think we can ask of Žižek’s substack is to occasionally resemble his best work. And this essay bears a resemblance.
Until next time.