Sunday Blog #7: Furiosa, Trying season 4, Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal
‘It’s a blessing to have someone to be kind to.’
Prior to Furiosa, I’d seen two Mad Max movies. The original from 1979 starring Mel Gibson, which I have no memory of, and the big-budget reboot Fury Road from nearly ten years ago. I’ve stored a few images from the latter: the battle guitarist, a skeletal Nicholas Hoult shouting ‘WHAT A LOVELY DAY’, and the gang of sex slaves led by Charlize Theron’s Furiosa (assisted by the titular Max, played by Tom Hardy). The 2015 film accelerated through bright, sandy, and Daliesque visuals that demanded the biggest screen possible.
Director George Miller resumes that arresting, over-the-top action style for his new spinoff prequel starring Anya Taylor-Joy, in what’s probably her biggest and most explosive leading role to date. She suits the sooty, hardened heroine spectacularly well. But almost equal praise must go to Alyla Browne as the younger Furiosa, who’s snatched from her green, more feminine homeland and plunged into the desolate, dystopian Outback of Australia. The vast, weird, and culty triad of The Citadel, Bullet Farm and Gastown trade among each other, with the anti-messianic Dementus (a well-bearded Chris Hemsworth) causing hedonistic chaos on a motorcycle chariot.
There’s plenty to enjoy here. Miller’s detailed world-building drives you into the anger of tyres and engines, offering a tribal steampunk aesthetic with a lot of lore behind it (inspired by the global oil crisis hitting 70s Melbourne). Miller savours these vivid constructions in the first act – unusually lengthy, but I was happy about that. Often filmmakers love to get the first act out the way, yet Miller relishes Furiosa’s origins and he takes longer than predicted to introduce Taylor-Joy.
Such immersive effort races through the veins of the action. It’s like people have had to be hurt to make these scenes possible, tangible. Scepticism around action films is unsurprising because most directors don’t know how to make good ones, so we have to wade through the chaff inevitable in franchise filmmaking. But Miller clearly wants to make his own version of art, his tools being trucks and shotguns and dynamite.
However, my praise for the film falls down when discussing the script – penned by Miller and co-writer Nick Lathouris. You have the sense throughout that there’s no fixed structure, despite the strange chapter headings that include ‘The Pole of Inaccessibility’ and ‘Beyond Vengeance’. It’s only later when Miller and Lathouris seem to decide on a revenge plot, which thankfully pays off, but a few threads are snipped without satisfaction. The introductory ambition for Furiosa to find her homeland is abandoned. Her enlistment as a wife to Citadel warlord Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) isn’t followed up that well. And the romance subplot, though briefly enticing, feels shoehorned in as a break from the action. This is a movie you watch for choreography and cinematography, but not for narrative depth.
Pulling to milder temperatures in present-day north London, Andy Wolton’s endearing sitcom Trying returned this week with two opening episodes. Despite entering its fourth season, it’s one of the most underrated shows of its kind – I can only put that down to its being on AppleTV+. The streaming platform has some of the best and most original programming, but there’s just too much competition from Netflix (269 million subscribers), Prime Video (205 million), and Disney+ (153 million). Even at 50 million subscribers, Apple are losing against Paramount+ (71 million), Max (76 million) and even – weirdly – YouTube Premium (100 million). But that’s still no reason to ignore Apple’s potential, which will only grow over the years with Trying being one of its best assets.
Despite a general pessimism that thrusts me into an indifferent universe, day after day, both the world and I need shows like this. Shows that unveil the best of humanity or, at the very least, the warmer sides of a doomed species. The series started with Camden couple Nikki (Esther Smith) and Jason (Rafe Spall) plunging into the difficult, judgemental world of adoption. And now, after a six-year time jump, they’re in the thick of parenthood with two adopted children. But the psychology of that process still permeates family members – especially the forthright eldest daughter Princess (Scarlett Rayner), who finds out the name of her birth mother and engages in a Facebook search.
Although Trying straddles light and dark, it’s not as grievous as After Life (Netflix) or as bleak as Six Feet Under (Sky/NOW). This season opens on a funeral, yet there is joy as much as sadness: the familial love cuddling against the innate misery of life. Jim Broadbent has a wonderful cameo in the second episode, as an elderly widower who’s told his upcoming date has recently died – making Esther reflect on her relationship’s recent lack of excitement outside the house. Like a kick to the heart, the widower says:
It’s a blessing to have someone to be kind to.
Maybe that’s the crux of my love for the series: it’s kind, gentle and caring – attributes the world really needs.
What the world doesn’t need is Ashley Madison, nor the three-part Netflix series that digests the company’s rise and fall and continuance. For those who don’t know: Ashley Madison is a dating site specifically aimed at adulterous people, looking for matches to cheat with. The company started in 2002 – prior to dating apps becoming the modern norm – and faced an intense data breach in 2015, during which millions of members were hacked and exposed online. It’s hard to know what’s worse: creating a website that facilitates cheating or choosing to ruin lives with a mass leak. Though I believe the users of Ashley Madison deserve bad things, digital privacy is essential. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear just doesn’t process in a well-computerised modern world.
In Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal, the filmmakers interview those affected by the hack – including a cheated wife whose husband killed himself after his name came up. But regardless of the tragic consequences, I can’t summon much sympathy for the exposed. Cheating not only affects the scum that grow in dispiriting populations on the site (still rising at 70 million users), but also the partners who endure the betrayal. I don’t think all cheaters are awful people, yet to go so far as to waste potential therapy money on Ashley Madison is morally suspect.
I chose to watch Sex, Lies & Scandal because, since releasing on 15 May, it’s risen in the Netflix charts – sitting at No. 3 between Bridgerton and Baby Reindeer, with over 24 million hours viewed. I understand why people have flocked to it: the theme is juicy. So many partners biting their nails over whether their spouse or soulmate is playing away. I hope that watching the documentary will inspire the betrayed to poke further and/or make the adulterer (most likely a man) sweat.
But I cannot comprehend why anyone who isn’t a completionist, like me, would want to finish this series. It’s a contradictory mixture of boring and infuriating, exacerbated by superfluous reconstructions that cater for sociopathic attention spans. Even worse: the filmmakers prioritise the cheaters and the Ashley Madison staff. Is it because most of the betrayed don’t want to re-expose their private lives to Netflix audiences? One of the few examples is a Texan family vlogger whose husband cheated and lied, only for her to take him back. I haven’t timed it, but he seems to be given a lot more screentime – weeping on a nice sofa as he recounts the awful things he did. Awh, bless.
But these frustrating southern Christians are hardly the worst in this. At the top of a pedestal of shit stand the employees of Ashley Madison, who are loving the attention. None of them have moral reservations; in fact, they justify themselves by claiming they help marriages rather than break them. They wield greedy grins, as if saying, ‘yeah, it’s not conventional, but we made so much so it’s fine’. All they care about is the money, not the lives they’ve ruined or what dark, unexplored corner of human weakness they can exploit for profit. They’re among the worst dregs of modern capitalism.
What’s remarkable is that Sex, Lies & Scandal tries to take a neutral approach and, in doing so, balances the empathy in evil’s favour. It attempts to manipulate you into caring about these terrible people, as well as the tedious nuances of the hack that nearly brought them down. And at times, the series appears to conflate cheating with polyamory and ethical non-monogamy as if they’re one and the same. But they’re not for the crucial difference of trust and consent. Cheating discards consent and mutilates trust. As well as following a philosophy of ‘Monogamy is Monotony’, Ashley Madison also tagline themselves with ‘Life is Short. Have an affair.’ Yeah, Ok, life is short, so why not collapse as many lives as possible with our burden of mortality?
I’ve known victims of adultery and they turn into wrecks, scarred by the human urge to love and place faith in other people. But no, let’s not focus on them – let’s chat with the philandering dad and the laughing millionaire. That’ll make the world a better place…
TRAILER PARK
Fantasmus, Max (no UK release date announced)
Am I OK?, dir. Stephanie Allynne and Tig Notaro
Presumed Innocent, AppleTV+
Longlegs, dir. Oz Perkins
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, dir. Tim Burton
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, dir. Mark Molloy