I told my friend Ashley, a college student who works at the Round House Cafe, that I was going to see “Mad Max: Road To Fury” Friday night at a theater in Bennington, Vt., Maria was out with some friends. Ashley was surprised that I was going to see it, she said she didn’t care for those kinds of movies much herself.

I understand that. I told her I didn’t go to those kinds of movies much myself, but that was the reason I wanted to go. I said the first death in my mind is when people close themselves off to new experience and stick only with what is familiar. The second death – the body – is just a technicality. I hate nostalgia for that reason, it is a trap and delusion for me. I never hear anyone say the new  days are better than the old, yet for me, they are.

I like “Mad Max,” a lot, I am new to this series, the movie was gorgeous, deafening, relentless and yet still managed to stay focused on human beings. There is all too much relevance in the movie – drought, warring and hostile civilizations, the oppression of women, greedy and mindless leaders, climate change. Women are not in the background of this movie, they are the heroes and the stars, they even overwhelm Max for most of the film.

Things that just a few years ago seemed in the realm of sci-fi and imagination, are now in the news every day. Our planet is falling apart while our politicians dissemble and cower. The movie is a set piece really, with a very straight and coherent story line. The Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron)  helps five beautiful young “breeders” escape their imprisonment and is pursued by the evil Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and an army of men driving Rube Goldberg junkyard contraptions with engines. Along the way, she and the tortured and imprisoned Max  (Tom Hardy) link up to fight the bad guys.

This is not a movie with chase scenes, it is a chase movie.

The battle begins quickly and runs pretty much straight across various deserts for two hours. There are not a lot of twists and turns, the narrative is the new kind of cinematic violence that seems to have overwhelmed Hollywood but which has become a serious and entertaining genre. I will say that the movie ends on a high note, the good guys do right by them and by us, but the horrific side effects of war are not edited out, as they often are in these movies, but graphically revealed.

Furiosa has a prosthetic arm and when she loses it in the battle, she fights with her stump, something you don’t often see in a big bang-em-up movie. Wounds bleed, people struggle and die. There is a powerful sense of morality in the film, an exploration of the awful things people do to one another in our world. Furiosa and Max are a powerful team, they turn on the evil empire and wreak havoc together, but they are not lovers, this is not a fairy tale.

It is sometimes thrilling, sometimes overpowering. It is always wonderfully filmed.

I thought the movie was beautiful, and I recommend it. I’m increasingly drawn to this drama, which surprises me. I also never want to lock myseif into the idea of culture so narrowly that I shut out change. This kind of movie is real and now an important part of the culture. I know to know about it and experience it. And I’m glad I did, I liked it.

The rest of the weekend was spent closer to the world I worked in for so long, I am eagerly awaiting a new biography, “Man In Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker.” Mitchell was a hero of mine, an inspiration.  He was the most wonderful and prolific writer. I wanted to be him for much of my life. He was perhaps the country’s greatest literary journalist, his profiles and essays redefined what a profile was, and broadened the idea of who was worthy of one. Although he bristled at the patronizing nature of the term, he was often praised for writing about the “little people,” from the mysterious homeless intellectual Joe Gould to McSorley’s Bar in the East Village to life in the Fulton Fish Market, Mitchell excited me as much or more than any journalist I had ever read.

I always wanted to work in the old New Yorker, no other publication in American history that I know of treated writers better or more respectfully. I almost made it, an editor there invited me to submit some ideas for essays when I was working in Philadelphia, but she left the magazine to move out of the country and no one else there would ever write me back. That’s how life is, I think, crisis and mystery, twists and turns. I feel sometimes that I am the cards on a blackjack table, I never know who is going to pull me from the deck, or leave me there.

But the weekend was interesting to me, and exciting, going from Mad Max to Joseph Mitchell. The two ends of popular culture, both comfortably within my life span. I could never have imagined a “Mad Max” movie more than a generation ago, when I started writing.  I hope and pray I never close the doors in mind to new things, never say this is something I will never do or consider doing. I don’t want to be a slave to change, but I never want to close the window on change either, I am not ready to die yet, not in the mind, not in the body.

Popular culture is my real news, the mirror of life in my world. What is sweeter than sitting in a movie theater by myself, eating some buttered popcorn (small, these days) and watching one of the greatest car chases ever filmed. And then, hours later, sitting in bed in the dark with my Iphone 6 Plus, reading a profile of a bartender by Joseph Mitchell. Life is good, life is rich.