"I critique films that you love because I want to make my own."
Maggie Mae Fish is a youtube movie critic that does deep dive video essays.
Much like other critics on the vein of Lindsay Ellis, her videos are very deep dive and utilize the theory of theater and cinema, especially Close Reading
in order to analyze themes and techniques used in movies, as well as the people behind the work of media created.
One of her channel's subseries is Movies in Conversation, in which she picks two pieces of media and analyzes what they say together or how they contrast each other. Also, on Nebula, she has another subseries titeld Unrated, where she looks at the history of sex scenes in cinema.
Tropes in her Examinations
- Accidental Aesop: She argues that the play and, especially, the film adaptation of the play Cats are readable as a satire and ridicule of fascist ideas. Both take the fascist ideas that T S Elliot had himself and let bleed into his work - which includes the death cult elements of the story - and play it in such an odd way, to such a bizarre degree that one can come out of it thinking that Eliot's fascist ideas are, indeed, ridiculous.
- Achievements in Ignorance: In "CATS! And the Weird Mind of TS Eliot", she shares a personal story of getting an A in a modern dance class in college and how much it helped that she was the only student who didn't have any prior dance training and thus didn't have to train away as much the others.
- Dirty Cop: In "I'm in Love with a Church Girl - The Fyre Fest of Christian Films", Maggie argues the fact that the movie actually supports police corruption, as long as it benefits rich Christians. In the movie, a policeman that followed the criminal protagonist and is sure of his guilt stops following him and decides to give him a second chance after learning that the protagonist is now a church-going Christian. This is, ignoring the fact the cop already knows for a fact the man is guilty of multiple crimes and was going to arrest him up until he converted.
- Fan Dumb: In the prologue of her series about Zack Snyder, Maggie talks about the Snyder superfans that have become infamous on the internet for their worship of the man and his works. She recounts how she was the target of their ire earlier that year by tweeting about how there was Islamophobia in the opening scenes of Dawn of the Dead (2004), and points out that a lot of their arguments against it reflects fundamental misunderstandings about the film making process, like the fact that they tried to blame James Gunn, the movie's credited screenwriter, for that scene, even though he quit the project, and two other writers re-wrote the script before shootings. She also notes that they rarely properly attempted to address her criticisms.
- Freud Was Right: In "CATS! And the Weird Mind of T. S. Eliot", Maggie points out that among many of Eliot's weird ideas, is that only women should be penetrated. Not only sexually but in anything. She shows that a biography points out that he saw an uncomfortable eroticism in paintings of Saint Sebastian being impaled by arrows and saying that it should be a woman, not a man.
- It's Personal:
- "SAVING CHRISTMAS is about Money and Hams", about Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas, which tries to make Cameron's case that all the excess and commercialism is what Christmas is really about instead of being with family or goodwill to all mankind, ends with a personal note from Maggie about the recent death of her grandmother with whom she really enjoyed celebrating Christmas, making the crass message of the movie even worse for her.
- In her video about Motel Makeover, where a pair of entrepreneurs buy motels in small, tourism-driven towns and try to fix them up and run them, she says the show and its attitude towards such small towns reminds her of St. Joseph, the coastal Michigan in which she grew up, so it hits close to home for her.
- "SAVING CHRISTMAS is about Money and Hams
- Multi-Part Episode:
- She has a multi-part series of videos analyzing Zack Snyder's filmography, the themes and visuals they spouse, and what it says about his work.
- She has a three-part series analyzing three Christian films, Saving Christmas, Fireproof and I'm In Love With A Church Girl, mostly in how their messages are perverted by the materialistic message of Prosperity Gospel, that prioritizes money as a proof of love from God and from others.
- Out-of-Genre Experience: Change is a video essay not focused on any particular movie or in analyzing its technical merits, though it does reference the works of Jean-Luc Godard (specifically the Epic Tracking Shot of Weekend (1967)) and the TV show Hoarders. The video is much more personal and introspective, in which Maggie talks about her recent experience with grief after losing her grandmother and her dislike for things not changing.
- Poe's Law: Her video "Why Conservative 'Comedy' Fails: Rob Schneider vs Tim Heidecker" contrasts Tim Heidecker's standup special An Evening with Tim Heidecker, in which he plays an oblivious, entitled standup comedian making casually sexist jokes, to Rob Schneider's standups and his self-funded sitcom Real Rob, in which he makes many of the same kind of jokes completely unironically.
- Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense: In "The Dystopian Existential Nightmare of Motel Makeover",note she talks about the two hosts/subjects, April and Sarah, who are trying to run a business of buying motels, fixing them up and running them as a chain business, despite having no real experience in hospitality, construction or interior decoration, with predictable results. She uses this as an example of how detached the wealthy can be when it comes to knowing the personal and economic issues others have, illustrated by them not understanding how the COVID-19 pandemic will delay their construction project and them saying they are "losing money" when what's really happening is their income from the motels is just delayed and they won't go broke anytime soon.
- Romanticized Abuse: She points out how the movie Fireproof contains examples of spiritual and economic abuse being portrayed as romantic, especially the protagonist using money to purchase her love and treating their wedding as a transaction, not to mention that he is coded as being physically abusive to her as well. The movie also explicitly downplays the importance of feelings and communication in a relationship.
- Self-Made Man:
- In "Jaclyn Hill, Lipstick and Capitalism: A Love Story", she refutes the "rags to riches" kind of story by pointing out that it often hides the advantages one has when telling that story. She points out that while Jaclyn's story about being the daughter of farmers is technically true, she is skipping the fact that they're really big farmers, with 700 acres of property.
- In "Down the Off-Grid Rabbit Hole", she makes similar points against some "off-the-grid" personalities on YouTube who document their projects for going off the grid, moving to live in the wilderness and be self-reliant. She points out how some of those will gloss over the fact that they had huge head-starts, coming from wealthy backgrounds and having a lot of money to spend on their new homes and on hiring contractors to help build it.
- In "Jaclyn Hill, Lipstick and Capitalism: A Love Story
- Spiritual Successor: "American Desert: Breaking Bad & Punishment Park" is a video analyzing the similarities of both works, as she considers the former to be this trope for the latter. The analysis includes how they use water as a symbol, how both analyze an unfair power structure, police brutality, etc.
- Stealth Parody: The video "BEST Horror Movie Ever! — My Octopus Teacher, about a documentary journaling the filmmaker's year spent skin diving and an octopus he followed during this time, talks about it as if it's a terrifying horror movie about a self-centered man getting unhealthily obsessed with a wild octopus. However, the video is really a visceral critique of how the filmmaker, as well as other people making documentaries, tend to make the subject all about themselves rather than really try to do them justice.
- Take That!: She describes the villain of Cats, Macavity, as the Joe Biden of the Cats Universe.
- Unusual Euphemism: In her video "The Dystopian Existential Nightmare of Motel Makeover", she refers to the COVID-19 pandemic as "the lobster roll" in order to avoid getting the video demonetized.
