Witness me!

He's just another warboy, another faceless warrior on the highway to hell, as crew of an elite war rig. Many of his brothers will be crushed and splintered by the velocity of their battles, some will get sucked up into the sky and spat out again. But this guy has his moment.

He's just another warboy in the story of Mad Max, riding the fury road eternal on the back of his rig, all shiny and chrome, until he gets speared in the fucking face, and goes down.

But then he gets up, and demands and takes the epic death he needs. He's not bleeding out like a wimp, he's taking the poor other mother fuckers to Valhalla with him. Witness him.

The film rises to it, the score soaring and the camera given this doomed boy the status of a titan, the heroic moment he craves above all else in his stunted life. He just needs to be seen and all his brothers see him.

There is a lot of weird philosophy in Immortan Joe's worldview, ideas that takes some severe brain bending to even comprehend, let alone justify. But this bit of it, the desire to be witnessed, to be seen, that feels more eternal than anything else in this white line nightmare.

We have been carving our names in stone since we first learned to write, and we can still see those names now. We can still witness them, and speak of people who are long dust, their presence on this earth still noted, after all this time

We all have our own ways of doing it. Some of us want to be seen in art, or in family, or in accomplishments. Some of us might be seen in their blog about any old bullshit. 

They don't need to be remembered by everybody - indeed, the amount of people you want to be seen by always has a limit, and everybody has a different level. Some just want to be seen by a few, some want to be seen by the whole world.

Some want to be invisible, and who can blame them?

So the Warboy is an absolute monster, a fascist cog in the machine of death and tyranny, but we all know how he feels in that last moment, even as his suicide bomb death is a rejection of all thing civilized. Don't think about it. Just look at him.