[Reissue] Mad Max, Fury Road: Bear Witness, For Glory, For Feminism
This is a re-posting of and older essay I wrote about Mad Max: Fury Road back in 2015, with some additional writing and editing and notes from myself, now, in 2018. Enjoy!
I have not seen a Mad Max film in a very long time, and the fact that a “new one” was coming out, nearly 20 years after the last was strange. Here was not just a sequel, not precisely a reboot, but a matured addition of the franchise, like unearthing a vintage from the cellar that we had all forgotten was slowly languishing down there. The hype for this perplexing movie snuck up very quickly: one day it wasn’t here and then the next, I couldn’t escape from it. I wasn’t convinced immediately but as more and more of my friends started chattering about how excited they were to see it, I thought that it would be in my best interest to as well. What made me skeptical was that the word “feminism” was flying in the initial salvos of press. Could an action movie really be that? I felt hesitant, because as a feminist media critic, I am allergic to the idea that a piece of media can truly be part of some “feminist”/”not-feminist” binary.
However, before I could really ruminate on what the movie might possibly be doing, a larger cry went out: MRAs were up in arms about this shit. It’s like the entire nerd portion of the Internet got a fire under its ass and demanded that we go watch this movie. It was our duty to go see this film! Won’t it piss off those backwards misogynists who think this film is subversive “feminazi” propaganda! It will be the feminist film for the ages! Any and all other criticism of what this movie might be selling was instantly extinguished and it felt like a banner for Feminism being waved around.
I didn’t feel those sentiments exactly, as I penned that day of seeing Mad Max: Fury Road in theatres:
I find people (a lot of them ally men) becoming engrossed in punking more sexist/MRA men really gross. It turns away from wanting to elevate feminist discourse and turns it back around to power dynamics by two marginally different groups of men, separated by slight ideological gulfs. This division being made to the tune of millions of dollars that goes back into the pockets of mostly male movie execs and producers doesn’t liberate anyone, really: it doesn’t guarantee that movies will take more risks in the future, that more WoC actresses will be hired, more female directors will get their projects green-lit and backed. The way to progressive media is not that we have to “buy in” with our participation. It is a pretty performative and meaningless gesture.
In the last couple of months, I’ve really shied away from the kind of feminist act that is purely oppositional; I don’t do what I do as a critic or a woman because it will piss off men, I do what I do to speak and live my truth. It benefits no one but other men, in this instance, to fork over money so that some group I do not talk to will be angry in spirit. Men will always be angry. A movie does not change this, nor does it drive my politics.
I was also extremely wary about buying into the idea, as I stated before, that this was a noble, feminist act, and that this was a purely feminist film. While it might have some effect in Hollywood by showing that these kinds of films with the bare minimum of respect for women characters can be profitable, overall the world is as it is. My soul is restless at the idea that money can truly buy progressiveness.
(I found out that Eve Ensler consulted on the film as well, with regards to how women react in war-torn countries, for accuracy. Eve’s own politics veer very far from mine and I find her methods and treatment of many groups like trans women and women of color to be incredibly violating and distasteful.)
All that being said, I still did watch the film. It didn’t feel like I was breathing the entire time.
This is an incredibly well-made action movie and it puts many others to shame. We have been truly wandering in the desert up until this point — in terms of epic (actually epic, Odyssey-like) film-making and story, there’s very few others I’ve seen that attain that pure crystallization of vision. It is a tale of going there and back again, writ against the struggles of Max, along with the Wives, under Imperator Furiosa’s care, attempting to gain escape velocity behind the wheel of a war rig.
The cinematography was sweeping, allowing for moments of delicate close-up shots of Furiosa’s face, wide-angle desert landscapes and action that danced, clear and lucid on the screen. At no point was I confused about what was going on, and the use of movement in among all of the vehicles was spectacular. What the movie did the best was that excellent sense of vertical space; everything loomed large, whether unseen or all-too-close in the rear view. The stunt work and prop design also shone, from the very real flame-throwing guitar to the polecats that dipped in and out of frame.
The film does not burden you with much dialogue or exposition. Not knowing exactly how this world came to be made it easier to focus on what it was trying to say. Max is laboring under the sins of his past, and Furiosa is looking for redemption for herself as well as the young women she wanted to save. The women’s struggles to exist in a world where they are considered to be walking meatsacks felt familiar to me. Max and Nux are two men attempting to be their own true selves but unsure of what that means when their roles are so tightly defined, but in the end, are allowed to be heroic and compassionate. Their sacrifices and bodily nurturing flips much of the action hero archetype on its head, and allows the women space to enact violence and empathy on their own terms instead of being on the sidelines to Max’s pain. It’s a movie that wants you to be invested in journey of both the characters as well as the momentum of their voyage. It’s been a long time since a movie has taken hold of me so strongly that I find myself laughing aloud at points, clapping or hooting and hollering from the back rows.
But astonishment gave way to an itch in the back of my brain — this film would have been better if it wasn’t about Mad Max. Having his journey be central, rather than propping it up as a supporting lead felt like we got less risky, more salable option. I know it is a franchise that centers Max but it would have shown that this world’s women had much more interesting stories. This movie would have been better if told from Furiosa’s perspective, a heist movie of the highest order. The fact that it isn’t means I was curious about the gaps in her story; why is she not part of the thirsty people around the plateaus? How did the course of her life go? How did she become involved with the wives? (Ed. note: some of this is explained in a comic that was published later. It’s funny how these things go, whose stories get shunted to other media.) She’s certainly not “fit” to be a wife or a milk mother and yet all of the war boys seem to be men. (I could dig so hard into her presentation and her former tribe as saying a lot about how queer women are viewed in this society, but I digress.)
This is where I find the idea that this movie is flatly “feminist” to be a really erroneous take. Does it have merit from a feminist critical lens though? Absolutely. As a work, it grapples with a lot of things that I find both add and subtract from my enjoyment of it, as a feminist. This, like so many other things, is how I think we should approach works that the pop-crit sphere pushes as Capital-F Feminist: meritorious, open for discussion, focused with laser-like intensity but not a platonic ideal.
One of the first criticisms I heard was about how the film was well stocked with white people, despite this being post-societal collapse Australia. It is extremely routine to see fantasy and sci-fi movies neglect that the future will most assuredly contain people of color. While there were a few people of color in the supporting cast, the story is surrounding two or three white characters in a world that also feels similarly white. I think it’s incredibly lazy to constantly create futuristic sci-fi worlds, especially dystopias that reproduce the plights of underclasses and marginalized people (resource scarcity, slavery) and making them completely about white people.
As far as the way the Wives and Furiosa were portrayed, this felt the strongest, in terms of intentions with the writing. Each were given a least a touch of their own personality and way of dealing with things: confusion about the outside world, pleas for pacifism and compassion. The struggle among them over whether to give in and go back to Immortan felt too real in terms of what happens when trying to escape an abusive relationship, but the fact that they didn’t shit all over Cheedo for attempting to do so was a nice touch (That this is later mirrored in her part to help kill Immortan was especially poignant.) I also loved the inclusion of the Many Mothers clan, that while decimated, they were still glorious as well as key to the eventual survival of the entire group. The power of women’s relationships with each other was a rare treat given the preponderance of visual fiction that does so little with it at all.
What complicates seeing powerful women on the screen in this movie is their involvement with the aggression that the universe demands. Seeing Furiosa save the day time and time again by the skin of her teeth, shooting guns and stabbing fuckers in the face, all while driving the war rig was thrilling to me. However, women, particularly white women enacting violence is complicated. On the one hand, violence itself is not solely a masculine pursuit. There is absolutely fuck-tons of masculinized violence in this movie and we have to acknowledge the difference in looking at using violence as a survival mechanism (which is something Max, Furiosa and the Wives do, repeatedly) and violence as a subjugation tool. The War Boys are looking to destroy the uppity women attempting to leave, and grind them back into their place. Their motivation is fixated on conquest and retrieving Immortan’s property, the Wives. What all of the women in this movie are attempting to do is to not even just get revenge (though that factors in) but to get away with their lives and their bodily autonomy. My heart stirred when Immortan Joe’s body was ripped apart because that darkness has been in my body for most of my life. We have to allow women who have been victimized this truth and I find no better place for it in the fiction we create.
However, this is complicated by seeing people claiming that this violence is what made it flatly the most feminist film without looking into what the violence was doing in this movie. Violence from white women in TV and film has been used frequently in contemporary media as “girl power” that a singular female protagonist can aspire to after being seen as weak and feminine. It’s often the only way to create low-risk fiction that stars a woman. This delicateness as well as the ability to undermine it with violence is open to only white women. If Furiosa had been black or brown, the critical response to her triumph would have been very different. It would have not been hailed as the second coming of feminist films. Media criticism remains very white, untroubled and embarrassingly simple at times.
All that being said, there was still something potent in seeing this film, especially in a world that was set up to still continue the treating of women’s bodies as property, taken to a very scary conclusion. (Ed. note: It’s still like this in 2018, past self.) Dystopias and bleak futurescapes aren’t very fun as escapism, but it says so much about our present situation when we envision the future in this way. Art isn’t always here to ameliorate that anxiety, but rather to give us tools to cope with the narrative. The silver lining to the tension that we are heading towards the desolation presented in the film was admist the cruelty, there was still love and collective care among the characters. It gave me a small bit of hope that we can still achieve this as a society. Seeing Max give his blood to Furiosa so readily was the biggest symbol of this, a man putting aside his own needs to help and comfort the woman whose crusade drove the entire plot made me cry. It was well worth the price of admission.
Mad Max: Fury Road ultimately balances the grossness of women-as-livestock metaphor with the tenderness of the main players with each other, all with an incredibly vivid visual language and tight editing. It might not be a film we deserve, but definitely one we needed. Maybe one day we will see visions of the future where women are not crushed beneath the boot of Men, if not forgotten entirely from the world. Until then, this will do.
This piece was originally published on my blog, Apple Cider Mage.
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