During Victor Hugo’s funeral, most of the brothels in Paris closed down because all the prostitutes were in mourning for their best client #trufax
“No way that’s true,” I thought as I looked this up, thus starting the day by proving myself terribly wrong.
“A police source informed Edmond Goncourt that the brothels were shuttered and the city’s prostitutes had bedecked their crotches with black crepe in honor of the great man’s passing.” x
SPOILER ALERT. But let’s be honest–I wrote this for the geeks.
Update: Read the follow-up posts about Max and Furiosa.
Mad Max: Fury Road is the best action movie I’ve seen in years, and my favorite blockbuster in forever. It reminded me what it feels like to truly geek out about something, in the most delightful, over-the-top, childlike way. It’s not a stretch to say it reminded me what pop culture, and film in particular, is for: to produce intense, collective emotional experiences.
The movie is a perfect example of what action should be in so many ways. Its premise is as simple as an 8-bit video game: a bunch of people drive through the desert while various other people try to kill them. That exceedingly simple frame allows for a story that can unfold basically without dialogue, told through pure gonzo action, and in almost constant movement. From the moment the War Rig, the film’s hero vehicle, leaves the Citadel, everyone is riding or driving unless their vehicles are stuck or broken. It’s essentially a two-hour car chase of non-stop, increasingly bananas set pieces involving various combinations of wacked-out cars, fights and explosions, and it’s awesome.
In a genre where the visually unintelligible “chaos cinema” style has become ubiquitous, Fury Road stands out for its ability to maintain visual coherence at insane speeds. (The reliance on practical effects–all the vehicles, explosions and crashes were real and occurred in a real world with gravity, instead of a computer–certainly helped.) The film has 2,700 cuts, and yet we never lose the thread of the action–who is doing what to whom where. This has to do with both the cinematography (particularly the heavy use of center framing) and the editing, by George Miller’s wife Margaret Sixel, who had never cut an action movie before and thus didn’t cut it like everyone else. Sixel pared 480 hours of footage down into 120 minutes of unrelenting intensity. The film is able to make use of monumental wide shots and long, sweeping camera moves through dozens of vehicles where the camera skims along just feet from the ground, and yet the camerawork never feels distracting or like it’s being done for show.
If, like me, you have only a passing familiarity with the post-apocalyptic desert universe of Mad Max, you may spend about the first twenty minutes of the movie going, “What the shit is this crazy world?” That’s okay. The film will not attempt much more explanation than you get in Max’s opening voiceover. The elaborately-designed, exceedingly detailed world will sail right by you without trying to justify its existence, and by the time the action kicks into high gear you will just accept that this is a world where people build altars out of steering wheels and have names like The Splendid Angharad and go to war with a guy playing a guitar that shoots flames.
Fury Road is in a curious place in the franchise landscape. Although Tom Hardy has (handily) replaced Mel Gibson in the titular role, it’s not a complete reboot–more of a fourth installment with a 30 year gap, with the same director, George Miller, the same production designer and even the same stunt coordinator. But that we’re doing something new is made clear from the film’s opening moments, in which Max’s iconic Interceptor gets violently destroyed in short order. (The car’s body later returns, zombie-like, as part of a vehicle driven by Max’s enemies.)
If the original Mad Max movies were part of cementing the trope of the lone male action hero, Fury Road undermines it from its first moments. It’s common for action movies to open with a sequence unrelated to the main plot, but that demonstrates the hero’s particular badassery. But the opening of Fury Road demonstrates Max’s loneliness, vulnerability and brokenness. He’s been in the desert, alone, for who knows how long. He’s mute and basically feral–”a man reduced to a single instinct–survive,” as he describes himself. He reacts like an animal–see a threat and fight or run. He has audacious fighting and driving skills but not much of a plan, and certainly no expectations of help.
The limits of this strategy are demonstrated before the opening credits roll, as Max is run down, captured and enslaved by a bunch of War Boys, fighters in the service of warlord Immortan Joe. He then attempts a daring escape that totally fails, partially because he’s distracted by visions of his dead loved ones. Many movies would end the sequence with Max jumping onto the giant winch and sailing to freedom. In Fury Road, he swings right back into a tunnel full of War Boys and is dragged back to his fate as a human blood transfusion producer. This is your first clue that the movie is up to something interesting in the way it interacts with standard action tropes.
We’re conditioned to see Max as the protagonist of the movie, because we see him first and because the movie is called Mad Max. Yet for most of the first half hour, he’s literally dragged around on a leash through other people’s action, a steel muzzle over his face and an IV pumping his blood into someone else’s body.
The film’s other protagonist, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), has a much more traditional introduction. An elite driver in a world where driving is a religion, we meet her as she’s setting out on what seems to be a simple trading mission. We soon learn that her true mission is to liberate Joe’s five sex slave “wives,” whom she smuggles out of the city in her truck. Of course, Joe soon finds out too, starting the chase-battle that takes up the rest of the movie.
With her shaved head and axle-grease face paint, Furiosa is instantly iconic. She is stoic and silent in a way usually reserved for male heroes like Max, but not unfeeling. She has erased most outward signs of her femininity, but it’s undeniable that Joe’s treatment of women (and, perhaps, in some way that’s never exactly spelled out, her own complicity in it) is what motivates her actions. She’s not simply a woman playing a man’s part–her gender is part of her identity. Yet she’s never sexualized in the way of so many latex-clad hair-flipping action heroines. She is dirty, gritty, raw functional violence and power in a world defined by those qualities.
Furiosa is missing half her left arm, a fact that’s not once remarked upon within the script, but just accepted as the way she is. She has a prosthesis made of repurposed tools, but she’s not wearing it in the scene where she first meets Max. She fights him one-handed, holding him down with her arm stump at one point. He only wins the fight with help from a guy who was literally bred for war.
In the essential skills of this world–fighting and driving–Furiosa is just as competent as Max or more so. She drives a big rig through a monster sandstorm. She avoids tire-slashing devices and puts out an engine fire with sand while driving. She holds on to Max hanging upside down outside the rig with one hand while driving. She makes repairs hanging off the undercarriage of the speeding vehicle. She climbs on trucks after being stabbed in the side. She’s an ace with a sniper rifle. (More on that later.)
In a genre where power and agency is defined by your competence at violence, is showing a woman who’s just as good at fighting as all the men around her a feminist act? Yes. I’m gonna go with yes on that one.
But Furiosa is more than a good fighter. She’s grown up in a world where brute strength is not enough. Joe has legions of minions at his command; he can’t simply be overpowered in a fight. So she’s learned to plot and plan and think, to strategize, to be patient, to keep a cool head and have a good poker face. She’s also learned that alliances increase your chance of success.
Max enters her story not as a savior, but as an obstacle and an antagonist. He steals her truck and shoots at the people she’s trying to protect, because he can think only of his own survival. Her strategy is to get him on her side. While he’s waving a gun around and taking away all her weapons, her response is, “Want to get that thing off your face?” She understands his value as part of a team–but she’s still going to keep a knife in the gearshift lever, just in case.
In fact, this is how Furiosa treats everyone who enters the War Rig. She builds a team. Everyone participates in keeping the truck moving and the enemies at bay. This includes the Five Wives, who look like supermodels (some are) and are dressed in outfits impractical for fighting. But fight they do.
The Five Wives are young, thin, femmy, scantily clad, improbably well-groomed and mostly white, and when Max meets them they’re apparently in the middle of a wet t-shirt contest. Their adherence to traditional beauty standards has been highlighted as a reason the movie can’t possibly be feminist. Laurie Penny suggests an alternate reading that I find compelling–that their presence in a movie that also has 78-year-old biker chicks who do their own stunts is a deliberate challenge to our expectations.
The Wives may not be as strong or as skilled as Furiosa and Max, but they’re far from helpless or passive. The first image we see of any of them is of The Splendid Angharad, in her white tulle dress and pregnant, crawling from the tanker to the cab of the fast-moving rig.
Throughout the movie, the Wives serve as lookouts, learn to reload weapons, and help maintain the truck that keeps them all alive. They learn to compensate for their lack of physical strength by teaming up, as in this shot of Capable and The Dag cutting a cable that has harpooned the rig.
They even save lives–when Max almost falls off the rig during a fight, it’s Capable, Dag and Furiosa keeping him from getting smushed under the truck’s wheels together.
Sure, it takes two of them to do what Furiosa can do with one hand while driving. But Max would be dead without all of them.
In a moment that must certainly win Most Metal Thing You’ve Seen a Pregnant Woman Do on Screen, Angharad leans out of the cab and uses her fetus as a human shield to stop Furiosa from getting shot. She knows Joe only sees her as an object, but he values the potential heir she carries.
What’s so striking about these stills, which may be lost among the film’s relentless speed, is the looks on the Wives’ faces. They don’t look like scared victims or helpless objects. They look defiant, fierce, focused and alive.
The final member of the ensemble is Nux, a War Boy who starts out hunting the team in the War Rig and ends up fighting alongside them. Nux’s storyline is a perfect screenwriting example of a character who gets exactly what he wants, but not in the way that you expect it. Let’s just say that building a death cult can have unintended consequences.
Fury Road is a true two-hander. It’s not just Max’s movie, nor is it Furiosa’s story told through Max’s eyes. Furiosa’s actions are what set the main plot in motion far more than anything Max does. But Max has a journey to go on that is of value to the plot. For him, the story is about re-learning trust and solidarity in a world full of peril, and becoming able to take the risk of caring about someone again in a world full of violent death. It’s not only the case that he can’t survive alone–it’s that he starts to not want to.
(I think it’s worth asking why Max appears ready to leave the Citadel at the end of the film. Is he afraid that the bond between the two of them won’t last off the road? Scared he doesn’t know how to be a person in society anymore, a society Furiosa is now in charge of running? The film never tells us, but I think there are more interesting possibilities than the classic hero-riding-into-the-sunset idea.)
Other than yelling instructions at each other during battle, Max and Furiosa exchange hardly a word over the course of the movie. They don’t need to. The cautious, halting progress of their trust for each other is expressed entirely in functional plot points. After a meet-cute in which they try to kill each other, Furiosa showing Max the secret code to start her rig feels like a first kiss would in any other movie.
Then there’s this beautiful, wordless moment involving a sniper rifle that we know has a limited number of bullets. Max takes a shot and misses, pauses for a moment, then wordlessly hand the gun over to Furiosa crouching behind him. There is one bullet left and they both know she’s the better shot. She lines up the shot, using his shoulder to steady the weapon.
It’s interesting how many people, independent of each other, have identified this moment as romantic. And it is. It’s not a tension-free moment–there are no tension-free moments in this movie–but it’s quiet and extremely intimate. Of course in this world trust and respect would be symbolized by handing someone a loaded gun and letting them balance it next to your face.
This scene also encapsulates the theme of the film. The message of Fury Road is not that Furiosa could have necessarily done everything without Max or replaced him as the lone hero. She is as capable as anyone in this world, but she’s still outnumbered and outgunned. So is he. The only way to survive is to survive together.
Max and Furiosa never kiss or have sex, and it’s not clear whether they ever want to (although we may want them to). They hardly even touch each other outside of practical combat situations. Their relationship is completely revealed through action and it is incredibly compelling. When Max is desperately trying to save Furiosa’s life in the back of the cab at the end of the film, you can tell that he truly cares about her. If you never thought that stabbing someone to un-collapse their lung could be an expression of tenderness, you haven’t seen this film.
Max’s coming up with the plan that launches the third act must be viewed in the context of his evolving relationship with Furiosa and the rest of the team. On the surface, it’s a classic male-action-hero moment: dude rides up on a bike with a solution. But Max is not really much of a planner, is he? He wouldn’t think about whether they were making a wise decision, riding off into the salt flats, if he didn’t care about them. Not only has he adopted a more deliberate, Furiosa-like mode of thinking, but he arrives not commanding but asking for help–no, asking to help. Max can’t simply charge off and do the plan himself–he needs the skills of everyone he’s met in the movie so far, and he has to convince them. He could have easily left them at this point, but he doesn’t. He makes a choice to risk his life when he doesn’t have to, seemingly only for his own emotional salvation.
Furiosa starts the movie planning to take the Wives to the Green Place, a utopia she remembers from childhood. But this turns out to be a world in which there’s no magical escape hatch. There is no utopia to run away to–the only chance at survival is to fight for the one shitty world we have. In the end, what the characters need is not escape, but revolution, and they will achieve it together or not at all.
Mad Max: Fury Road has already inspired some of the most intense fandom I’ve seen, and been part of, in years. I think it’s partially due to the sheer intensity of the sensory and emotional experience the movie delivers. But let’s be honest. A lot of it is due to Furiosa.
The character has already inspired an outpouring of fan art and cosplay. Even among movie fans who aren’t part of those scenes, people who love her REALLY love her. (And I wholeheartedly include myself in this category.) I can’t remember the last time that multiple, grown-ass adults on my Facebook feed had profile pictures referencing a movie character. Several of them–men and women–have this one:
Why has Furiosa inspired so much passion? I think a lot of it has to do with the way she blows a giant flaming hole in the standard images for women in action films.
While recent years have given us some fantastic action heroines, they tend to be confined within a few set tropes, with remarkably little variation.
Of course, by far the most common trope for women in action is still to be the person being rescued–to be the prize the protagonist, usually a man, gets at the end of the journey. There are whole franchises built around this concept. I think we can all agree that’s boring and not worthy of a blog post.
But even among women characters who have agency in action movies–as protagonists or as villains–there are still some basic patterns that recur again and again. In particular, there are three basic templates that a large majority of female action characters fall into. The point is not that these tropes, in and of themselves, are wrong. It’s that they’re often all there is.
1. The Girl Hero
This is the default trope for YA. Katniss in The Hunger Games, Tris in Divergent…you’ve seen it many times.
Katniss Everdeen, The Hunger Games
The Girl Hero is virginal (often unusually non-sexual for a teenager). She’s usually small or skinny, sometimes for a logical reason (Katniss grew up starving), sometimes not so much. She seems like an underdog, but proves to be surprisingly good at violence and/or have some unique skill, and through her bravery and grit takes on foes much bigger than she is.
Tris, Divergent
It should be said that plenty of male YA characters share these characteristics–Harry Potter is also small and skinny, a novice in the world of magic, but unusually skilled at a few things. He doesn’t win his battles through physical strength, but through cleverness and bravery. And there’s an understandable appeal in having a scrawny underdog, of any gender, turn out to be a hero, especially in a book or movie geared toward young people. But with a few exceptions (see: Tamora Pierce) the Girl Hero with these qualities is THE template for young women in action/fantasy/sci-fi/speculative fiction.
2. The Sexpot
When the Girl Hero grows up, she can be properly objectified as a different trope, the Sexpot.
Lara Croft: poster girl for this trope
You’ve all seen this trope in the many, many superhero and comic book movies that are currently squirting out of the studio pipeline. She’s that one token woman on the team with four guys.
Yeah, that one.
The Sexpot gets to fight–and sometimes even gets artfully bloody and dirty–but she has to do it in a latex suit and while appearing cool and sleek and having a good hair day. (She has long hair, so she can flip it, and so we’re extra sure she’s a girl.) Her fight style is extra bendy and flippy and maybe when we break out the slow motion. She may use her sexiness as a weapon (a la Black Widow) or it may be just a bonus quality. She can be powerful, but only if we can look at her conventionally attractive body move around in tight clothing while it’s happening.
3. The Ice Queen
The Ice Queen is almost always the trope for female villains. She sits at the top of some kind of power structure–a state or a criminal enterprise–issuing commands to her minions but rarely doing the violence herself. She’s probably got a sharp suit or a uniform and a severe haircut.
Delacourt, the villain of Elysium.
She’s allowed to be older than 35.
President Coin, Mockingjay
The Ice Queen has institutional power but rarely fights; physicality is the low pursuit of men in her world. She may be smart, crafty and manipulative, but she will not punch you in the face. She’ll snap her fingers and get someone else to do it, although she may sit on the edge of her desk to watch.
Jeanine, the villain of Divergent
Maya, Zero Dark Thirty–an Ice Queen protagonist, sort of
The point here is not that there’s no variation on these themes. And there have been iconic female action characters who stood totally outside them before. Alien’s Ellen Ripley and Linda Hamilton as the original Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, doing pull-ups on her mental hospital bed frame, come to mind as the most obvious.
But it’s striking how often the women that do exist in the thriller, action, sci-fi and speculative fiction film universe fall into one of these three boxes. Which is why any character who doesn’t map onto one of these templates is so exciting.
Here’s Furiosa.
She fights a hell of a lot. She does not flip her hair.
She’s intensely physical, but you never get the sense that her fights are choreographed to perform her sexuality for you. They’re choreographed for her to fucking win.
When Max shows up, they have a knock-down, drag-out fight with each other. Max doesn’t pull any punches. Why? Because he makes no assumptions that she’d be less lethal to him than a man. They beat the shit out of each other in a big, messy, grunty, scrabbly fight.
For significant portions of the movie, Furiosa is driving a truck, which means Charlize Theron is essentially acting from the biceps up. You literally cannot look at her boobs. You have to look at her face.
She gets to be dirty. Really really dirty. This picture alone highlights how weird it is that all the other women above are so clean.
She gets to be ugly and make weird faces in the middle of fighting.
She gets to yell and be angry the way one might be in the middle of a nonstop road battle when you’re full of adrenaline because you’re fighting for your life.
In short, she gets to look like an actual person who is actually fighting, instead of a statue that can do a back walkover with the help of a wire rig.
So it’s hardly surprising that she’s racked up a lot of fans. She takes all the images of clean, pretty, carefully sexualized women we’re used to seeing, even in action, rips them to shreds, sets them on fire and then drives over them with an 18-wheeler.
This is all even more remarkable given that Furiosa is played by an actress who is very feminine-presenting in her everyday life. Charlize Theron is one of the very few actresses who’s been allowed to pick roles where she radically changes her gender presentation.
Here she is in Aeon Flux, playing about the most Sexpot-y character imaginable:
Here she is in Monster:
I think there are a lot more actresses out there who could take on these kinds of transformations, radically altering the way they look, move, and perform their gender, the way male stars do all the time. But the equivalent depth and diversity of roles for women just doesn’t exist in Hollywood right now.
Furiosa’s popularity shows how starved we are for images of women who are actually powerful and physical in the same ways that men get to be in blockbuster after blockbuster after blockbuster. It’s not that all the images of women in action have to look like this–it’s just that we hardly ever see a female fighter who looks this way. Furiosa reminds us that there is so much more out there than we’re getting in terms of what women can do and look like on screen.
Boys, protect girls. Call people out when they make offensive jokes. Stand up to those who treat girls like objects. Walk a girl home if she feels unsafe. Listen to them and be considerate of their feelings. Destroy that myth that women are inferior.
Girls, protect boys. Call people out when they make fun of a boy for showing emotion. Stand up to those who tell boys to ‘man up.’ Support boys who enjoy feminine things. Destroy the myth that men can’t be victims and that women can’t be predators.
Boys, protect boys. Protect your bros from violent relationships. Comfort your bros when they need somebody. Stand up for your bros who are ridiculed for not wanting/liking sex. Destroy the myth that two men can’t be close without it being “gay.”
Girls, protect girls. Defend sisters who enjoy having sex. Stand up to those who define sisters for what they wear. Don’t judge your sister’s worth from how many boyfriend’s she’s had. Destroy the myth that girls have to constantly compete with each other.
So a new blog has started called “Is There Rape In It”. Basically, it’s a blog dedicated to listing movies, TV shows, and videos game that have rape in them, so that victims and survivors can avoid triggers.
Since they have just started up, they don’t have full lists yet. So if you are aware of rape in any of those forms of media, please reblog their lists and let them know!
sometimes i end up quoting tumblr posts irl and they make my friends laugh and a part of me feels powerful but another part of me feels bad like no i’m a fraud
its “thighs rubbing together under ya sundress” season
Buy cute, cheap lace leggings. Cut them a little above your knee. Hem them or don’t, but then you can wear them under your sundresses and not worry about how you sit or if your thighs chafe, and if anyone sees them they look cute af so hell yes
Or a little deodorant between the thighs is magical
Also, LUSH sells this dust called Silky Underwear that makes your skin smooth so they don’t stick together or chafe.
I love that we’re all here for each other in this season of need
I recommend Silky Underwear from LUSH as well. Such a godsend. Also, if you’re in the UK, yoursclothing.co.uk does some pretty nice legging shorts to wear under dresses. I own a silky pair and they’re great.
A prince with a love of the sea undergoes a terrible shipwreck and wakes, briefly, while being rescued by a mermaid. Obsessed now, he requests the help of a land witch and gives up his “charm” - looks and speech - for a tail. Silent, disfigured, and lost beneath the waves, he discovers that though he can breathe, every breath he takes feels like fire in his chest. Still, he hopes to find the mermaid who saved him and someday earn her heart…
A young, beautiful wolf with a coat as red as blood is off to visit her grandmother - now living in another pack. She’s warned by her mother not to approach the path, for humans lurk there. However, the pup ignores her mother’s advice, lured away by a girl’s tempting treats, and later at dusk, when she finally arrives at grandmother’s, a whole group of hunters sets upon the pack…
A young man is selected to keep a fearful ‘beast’ company, living in a castle far out in the woods. Yet when he arrives, he finds not a beast, but the most gorgeous woman the land has ever seen… one who claims to be under a spell. She is not human and utterly despises this form, but the spell will not be broken until someone loves her for reasons beyond her appearance. This man, gentle and well-read, may one day look past her beauty and if he does, he may still love the ‘beast’ that then springs forth…
A princess is told by her father that she must marry and a ball is planned to find her a husband. Angry and panicking, she flees to the edge of her kingdom where she finds a young man, living with two brothers and an abusive stepfather. These fast friends hatch a scheme: the princess will take one of the man’s shoes, claim it belong to her one true love, and send her father on a fool’s errand to find the ‘prince’ to which it belongs. In return she will help the man escape his family, if he wishes, at least for one night - at the ball. But when they dance together, more than friendship might form…
the reason male comic book fans work themselves into a frenzied rage over “fake geek girls“ is because they think they can’t get a girlfriend because of their love for comic books (a.k.a nerdiness). if they accept that geek girls genuinely love comic books, then they’re left with the cold harsh reality that it’s not their nerdiness that makes them unattractive to women, but the fact that they are misogynistic condescending dickbags who need to be avoided AT ALL COSTS
That line from The Social Network? “You are going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.”
My last post, about Furiosa and how she’s different from so many women in action films, is kinda blowing up right now–which I think just proves my point about how hungry people are for a diversity of female characters.
But Mad Max: Fury Road is not just filled with awesome women. It treats its male characters in ways that I think can only be seen as deliberate attempts to undermine what we expect a male hero in an action movie to be and do.
Talking about tropes is a little different when you’re talking about the overrepresented group. The most basic trope for men in any genre of film is universality. Men–in the US, specifically white men–are the default protagonist. Men can be and do pretty much anything on film. Female characters, because there are fewer of them, are much more likely to be carrying the impossible weight of trying to represent everything about their gender, instead of just being characters with one of many possible stories.
Of course, within the action genre, there are certain expectations for the male hero. On the surface, Max seems to meet all of them. He’s buff and gruff–he barely says two words for the first thirty minutes or so of the movie. Physically, he’s the textbook picture of scruffy action masculinity.
I’ve got a cheekbone scrape to show I’ve been in a fight and also draw your attention to my eyes. Is it working?
But here’s where things get interesting. Because while Max may look like your typical action hero, most of what he does in the plot of the film is anything but.
The first sequence of an action movie is often a piece of action that may be only marginally related to the main plot, but shows the hero’s competence, skill and bravery, and primes the audience for the kind of action that’s going to come.
Think of the beginning of any James Bond movie ever. Or this:
Max definitely gets a propulsive action sequence at the beginning of Fury Road. But it’s the exact opposite of Indy sliding under the stone slab with a second left to grab his whip. Before the opening credits even roll, Max is chased down, crashes his car, is taken prisoner, tries to escape and fails.
Opening shot. I’m so alone.
The whole sequence that serves as Max’s character introduction is about how isolated, traumatized, vulnerable and trapped he is. He’s mute and feral, tormented by hallucinations of dead loved ones he couldn’t save, and outnumbered in the tunnels of the Citadel by manic War Boys. He immediately fails at the basic measures of competence in this world–escape from danger by fighting and driving–and is captured and enslaved.
He’s an animal in a cage, bound, muzzled, leashed and hung upside down (Max spends some key moments upside down in this movie) to be slowly exsanguinated. It’s the most un-heroic character introduction you can imagine taking place in this world.
Okay, this is definitely worse than being alone.
In the early parts of the movie, George Miller makes sure that some of the iconic symbols of Max’s power and identity from earlier films get taken away or fail him. His Interceptor winds up in the War Boys’ chop shop in the first ten minutes. When Max happens across a sawed-off shotgun very much like the one you might remember from earlier installments of the franchise…
…it doesn’t work. Max is even stripped of his signature leather jacket, although he eventually gets it back.
Worst day ever.
Furiosa gets a much more classical hero’s introduction. In a fantastically economical sequence, the film introduces her–mysterious but clearly respected and powerful, first fully seen behind the wheel–along with her antagonist Immortan Joe, and the War Rig itself, the truck that functions as both a character and a key location in the movie. We also learn important information about the ideology and physical layout of the Citadel; this is basically all the time the movie spends on exposition.
Structurally, Furiosa’s actions do the lion’s share of the work of driving the plot forward. A screenplay is built around a character pursuing a goal despite obstacles. Furiosa’s goal is obvious–escape to the Green Place with the Five Wives. She is the reason we’re watching this moment as a movie, as opposed to all the other days when she went on normal, non-movie-worthy supply runs to Gas Town and back. On this day, she makes a choice that sets in motion the action of the film.
Max enters Furiosa’s story not as a savior, but as an antagonist. He’s an obstacle in her path, stealing her truck and shooting at the people she’s trying to protect, waving a gun around, reacting not out of confidence or power but because he is scared and hurt and desperate, capable of thinking only of his own survival.
Furiosa–who’s as smart and strategic as she is skilled and brave–realizes that she can turn Max into an ally if she calms him down and helps him, and that having him as a member of her team is more useful than simply waiting to shank him when his guard is down. She offers him concrete aid (a tool to remove the muzzle from his face) and a powerful measure of trust (the secret code to start the War Rig) when he’s done nothing to deserve it. It works, and she essentially wins him to her side through de-escalation. And so Max becomes not the initiator of the main action, but an antecedent to Furiosa’s plan, already in motion.
And it turns out that they fight incredibly well together, as we see during the Rock Riders’ attack. Max drives, but Furiosa knows to use the truck’s plow to put out an engine fire with sand. Max reloads weapons for her and hands them up while she picks off attackers through the retractable roof of the truck. At one moment, he fires a pistol between her legs as she’s balanced on the seat and the dashboard, and neither one of them misses a beat. It’s Max’s first action sequence that feels classically heroic, and if we’re still unsure, the soaring music cue tells us so. We finally see Max’s full fighting potential–not as a lone warrior, but as part of a team.
Throughout most of the rest of the movie, Max and Furiosa share the main action beats equally. They’re pursued by three warlords: the Bullet Farmer, the People Eater, and Immortan Joe. They take down the Bullet Farmer together. Furiosa blinds him with an expert long shot steadied on Max’s shoulder, and Max skulks off into the darkness to blow up his car, in what would presumably be a major action sequence in most movies but doesn’t even merit screen time in Fury Road.
In the final, monster chase-battle that takes up most of the third act, Max goes after a secondary henchman, the People Eater, while Furiosa–gravely wounded at this point–attacks and kills Joe. We know this is the only way it can happen if she is to have a satisfying character arc, defending her team of warriors and getting the revenge she has wanted since childhood. Meanwhile Nux, who’s grown up wanting nothing more than martyrdom in battle, gets exactly that, but for the cause of revolution instead of tyranny. For his self-sacrifice he earns the privilege of driving the War Rig, the film’s hero vehicle, into a kamikaze crash that will ensure the safe passage of the rest of the team.
If the action is being driven by Furiosa’s choices, it’s worth asking why Max is there at all. And here is where Fury Road does us one better than just replacing a lone male hero with a lone female one.
Fury Road is a dual protagonist narrative. Max isn’t there just as a supporting character. But because Furiosa’s storyline does so much of the heavy lifting in terms of moving the plot along, Max is freed up to have a story that’s mostly about his feelings.
Of course, he does plenty of fighting–everyone fights in this world. But the main change his character undergoes from the beginning of the movie to the end is emotional. For Max, the movie is about re-learning trust and solidarity and the value of human connection, even if all those things carry the risk of grief.
In a world full of violent death, Max has shut himself off from caring about anyone and anything but his own survival, because that seems less painful. But it’s not. He’s plagued by trauma and guilt, which manifests itself in hallucinations of people he’s seen die. In the first act of the movie, these visions are a constant presence. They impede his progress at critical moments, punishing him for past failures he can’t undo.
Over the course of the second act, when Max is around people he learns he can trust, his flashbacks mostly disappear. He still has nightmares–this isn’t trauma that’s going to be healed overnight. But he has someone to tell him it’s okay when he jolts awake, someone we know is just as capable of protecting him as he is of protecting anyone. For the first time in a long time, he’s not alone, and that starts to matter to him.
As soon as Max separates from Furiosa and the other women, the visions reappear. But this time, they urge him forward, back into an alliance with Furiosa. They even save his life in battle. They serve a different purpose when he has something worth staying alive for.
In this context, Max riding up with a plan to capture the Citadel feels much less like a stereotypical action-hero-to-the-rescue moment, and much more like someone who’s realized they’d rather die fighting alongside people they care about than survive alone. He’s not doing it out of a chivalrous, self-sacrificing desire to help them. He’s doing it to heal himself.
This is also why the scenes of Max trying to save Furiosa’s life at the end of the film are so powerful. Healing and caretaking are often the provenance of women in the action realm, where taking care of wounds is a substitute for, or a prelude to, other forms of intimacy.
Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese, The Terminator
Matt Murdock and Claire Temple, Marvel’s Daredevil
The scenes of Max taking care of Furiosa are not just impactful because they’re a reversal of this trope. They are the culmination of Max’s entire journey over the course of the film. He cares enough not just to pump his own blood into Furiosa’s body, but to invest new levels of trust into their relationship (finally telling her his name) even thought he knows she might die. He’s decided the connection is worth the risk.
It’s not totally clear where Max is headed as we fade out on the movie’s final scene. But the last time we see him, he’s not alone.
finally telling anyonehis name since the first move.
But yes, this meta is awesome. I have no regrets about long posts, can you tell?
No one could even argue that she was a threat. A teenage black girl a child in her swim suit unarmed and no feasible way to hide any weapon on her got fucking slammed into the ground and was treated like a rag doll by an officer who is probably 3 times her age and weight. How can you really justify that? Then pull out your gun when people try to defend her! He came out there with sole intent to hurt those black kids
And when people say that “She should’ve kept quiet!” Don’t y’all remember the VERY FIRST FREAKING AMENDMENT that y’all just absolutely rave about when you wanna say something racist? Respectability politics is dead, and you can’t arrest a child for talking. Attitude problems are for her parents to deal with, not for the police. His feelings were hurt cuz a little girl had the nerve to stand up to his B.S. That arrest was illegal, because she did NOT commit a crime.
clingy and annoying doesn’t bother me when it’s from the right person
yes yes 100 times yes I literally do not give a fuck if my boyfriend sends me a picture of a car he likes at 3am even if I don’t like fucking cars his first thought was I know I'ma send that to my fucking girlfriend like yes fucking yes I love that shit
YES THIS.
But also. For those of us who sometimes desperately need space. It is not that we don’t love you. Just that we need to not be around anyone, that we would not be around OURSELVES if that were possible. We will be back and then we’ll probably be just as clingy.
That is why the older generation is trying to suppress your vote. They know that you can change the world they destroyed.
The first step we should take is getting Bernie Sanders elected President of the United States. We should show the world that we refuse to stand aside while an older and smaller generation insists on the destruction of our Democracy.
This is just the beginning, This is the first year we have as the largest voting generation in US History.
Let’s make the most of it.
Those of us almost-old folks who are NOT fucking assholes and who are getting fucked by the system are relying on you to fix what we could not because we were too few.
And we believe in you completely because you already show every sign of being extraordinary.
Also, please do not forget to vote in Congressional races - we cannot let them control both houses any longer. We need a progressive intelligent President AND a Senate AND House of Representatives so they can work together. Also, your next President will likely be appointing Supreme Court Justices - we want good appointments to go through! If we lose the Presidency and Congress, it will be lights out.
GUYS I WAS SINGING IN THE SHOWER AND I THOUGHT I WAS ALONE IN THE BATHROOM ‘CAUSE IT’S A COMMUNAL BATHROOM AND WHEN I FINISHED AND SHUT OFF THE SHOWER PEOPLE FREAKING APPLAUDED
I DON’T THINK YOU UNDERSTAND I NEARLY HAD A HEART ATTACK
GUYS
I’m laughing more than I should…..
GUYS THIS WASN’T SUPPOSED TO GET ANY NOTES WHAT ARE YOU DOING
GUYS
are you kidding this is hilarious
SO A LOT OF PEOPLE HAVE BEEN ASKING WHAT I WAS SINGING
AND I WAS SINGING ON MY OWN
BECAUSE I THOUGHT I WAS
ON MY OWN
GUYS
To be honest I think your url makes this all the more funny.
So there’s a girl I went to high school with who has one arm. And she never talked about it and usually tried to hide it and just generally seemed kind of embarrassed about it.
And the other day she posted a status on Facebook about how excited she was that she will get to have the BEST Furiosa costume this Halloween, because of a feature she used to dislike about herself.
And if u don’t think that’s the tightest shit ever which proves why representation for physical disabilities matters, then get out.
Ok so we know that some wizards marry Muggles, which means that at
some point in the relationship there has to be a conversation that goes,
“Honey, I’m a witch. Stop laughing. This is my wand, I send letter by
owls, and can travel in your fireplace.” And for some people, once their
partner gets out their wand and does a spell, they believe it and
adjust. But there has to be some Muggles that NOPED right out of there.
So
like is there a Department of Breakups inside the Obliviation office
for when things go wrong? Do you have to send a sad little owl to the
Ministry to have your ex’s memories erased after the relationship ends?
Bringing a whole new meaning to Muggle Liaison Office.
My best friend trusts me so much she gave me her phone and had me sext a guy on her behalf while she’s driving. This is the realest relationship I’ve ever had
No offense but I don’t like……….care about the military
“no offense but i dont like………..care about people who sacrifice for the well being of the country”
i really hate the number of notes on this
the American military is sensationalized, overfunded and frequently used to commit acts of brutality on foreign countries and launch violent invasions on civilians
I care about soldiers, sure, but you could not pay me give a single fuck about the military as a construct
the number of notes on this post is 110% founded and your commentary is unnecessary
First of all my mom just celebrated her 49th birthday. We went to San Andreas to enjoy some solid B-movie destruction and laugh at the science.
Second of all (as I have previously mentioned) my mom is bisexual as frick. Like. A perfect Kinsey three who raised me on a steady diet of Lucy Lawless and Lucy Liu as a motherfreaking badasses, among other gorgeous ladies.
Third of all my mom thinks that the fandom’s executive decision that Steve Rogers is also bisexual as frick is the best thing ever.
Fourth of all (and this is the real point here) my mom ships Steve/Peggy and Steve/Bucky with equal verve and as hardcore as anyone I’ve ever met.
vikings made their woman handle the finances because they thought math is witchcraft
During a military campaign, Vlad the Impaler, the basis for Dracula, once pulled his troops out of a major engagement in a valley at dusk so that the sun was in their enemies’ eyes. Once they were over the hill, they set loose a bunch of rabid bats who flew away from the sun (towards the enemy) and attacked them, leading to significant infection in their ranks, and Vlad’s eventual victory. Because of how the bats appeared from where Vlad’s soldiers appeared to be at dusk, myth stated that the soldiers turned into bats at night, which is where the “Dracula can change into a bat” thing came from.
The pet bird that you have overlooking your balcony shit talks me whenever I go out on my own balcony.
Please do something about your cat it keeps breaking into my apartment via the windows and I don’t know how. Plus it knows how to open fridges.
Look I know that life is difficult and we all have ways to cope but do you really have to do so with loud Dupstep music at 3 in the morning? (Bonus points if the dubstep listener is the cute/tiny one)
Every time you cook you set off the smoke alarm so you know what I’m just going to teach you how to cook.
I found you passed out in front of my door so I just dragged you into my home and put you on the couch please don’t scream.
I don’t know if you know this but I can hear you singing anime theme songs in the shower every morning and I like almost all the shows you watch.
Wow my pet snake looks so cute this morning and I’d be even happier if I actually had a pet snake.
My apartment key apparently also works on your apartment door? (Also I accidentally let your cat out.)
We both have 3DSs’s and Street pass each other every day and have conversation using the personal message feature (and sometimes we play games together)
You sleepwalk a lot and sometimes you knock on my door so I have to lead you back to your apartment.
You took the last of my favorite snack from the vending machine next to our apartment. Battle me in Pokemon for it?
Someone keeps printing out cute cat pictures/messages on my wireless printer and I’m determined to find out whom.
I don’t know how many of you guys know about it but this new movie, “Mad Max” just came out and has already reached critical acclaim. I haven’t seen it , but it’s supposed to be this groundbreaking masterpiece and a huge step for feminism. Which is all good and dandy In theory. But on tumblr there’s been a lot of criticism because the ALL white cast (with the minor exception of Zoe Kravitz). One of the most frustrating things about these types of movies and conversations is that there’s ALWAYS these white feminists that want to tell POC that we have to overlook lack of diversity and basically “take one for the team” (the team being feminism/woman). No. I’m not going to do it. It is fucking disrespectful and borderline racist for you, a white person, to tell minority women that we have to ignore not being represented. Since turning 18 and starting to really think about racism and the media, it is especially uncomfortable for me to watch movies and tv shows with NO people of color. This world is mostly non white and it simply doesn’t make sense for our media to not represent it. And as for feminism, this is not the first time this has happened. When Girls came out, minority women were expected to ignore the show having an all white cast because it was written and directed by Lena Dunham. And anyone who dared to not ignore this issue was considered “non progressive”. This is why I don’t identity as feminist. Because this is unacceptable. It’s unacceptable for these huge steps for feminism to not include people of color. And if you’re white and telling people to get over it, you’re a part of the fucking problem.
Okay, I don’t want to take away from some really great points you’re making about how white feminism often downplay or outright dismiss the representation of women of colour, especially in discussions of mainstream media WOC are often silenced or ignored.
However, I need to point a few errors that are a common form of microaggression that I see pop up all the time in intersectional discussions of representation, specifically in regard to the recognition of indigenous women of colour.
There are THREE women of colour in Mad Max Fury Road. Zoe Kravitz (which you already listed), but also Courtney Eaton and Megan Gale. Eaton and Gale are biracial Maori women. The presence of Polynesian women in this film and a fictional future are incredibly important on multiple levels.
The Mad Max films are set in a post-apocalyptic Australia. In fact, the franchise began as Australian films, George Miller the writer/director/creator of this world is Australian. This is not merely a geographic location, but an important cultural context for the films.
What’s important about the location and the presence of Polyneisan women within this future world is how their very roles reflect the history of colonialism in the Pacific region. Polynesian people were forced to relocate, our cultures and even identities erased. Many of us are biracial and our own ethic identity are often erased due to a form of cultural genocide that was not unlike what was done to Indigenous people of the Americas.
Polynesian women have long been viewed as tokens of exotic beauty. Taken as trophies, and forced in to sex work. Not unlike Fragile. Some, like The Valkyrie who actively fought against colonial oppressors. While Zoe/Toast is biracial black and Ashkenzai jew, she too represents an aspect of WOC’s journey through white supremacy and colonialism which was the driving force behind the trans-atlantic slave trade.
Polynesians often are erased, or mistakenly seen as white passing often because White Western culture only teaches how to see black or white, ignoring or wholesale erasing all the many colours in between. One of the really ugly truths behind why so many indigenous people are “white passing” is because of the long legacy of us being raped by white oppressors. Many of us only being valued as “pretty” sexual objects for the enjoyment and consumption of white men.
There is a BIG difference between being white passing and having your ethnicity erase from mainstream awareness. People, even POC, default code Polynesian women as white because they only SEE the parts of our features that are stereotypically viewed to be “white.”
I immediately recognizing Fragile and The Valkyrie as women of colour, and was deeply moved about how their presence and individual roles in this film reflects the struggles of many indigenous women throughout history and to see them empowered and fighting back against their oppressors made my heart soar.
Also there ARE other people of colour in the film, though by virtue of the dominate culture in the film being literally white male supremacy, the only men of colour we see are in the lowest cast of society. Not uncommon in colonialism either, given how white men see MOC as a threat to their power and masculinity.
My only real complaint about race in this film is the lack of Indigenous Australians in leading roles. There are a few of them crowd shots of the Citadel’s lower class, and at the end of the film we see a disabled Indigenous Australian man become the focus of a full two second shot, acting as the face of the oppressed class as he is quite literally is lifted up to salvation by women of colour.
There are powerful visual moments in this film, that tell not just a story of punching down the patriarchy, but of the dismantling of colonial oppression where indigenous women play key roles in the fight and future of the world.
So please don’t steal this context from the these women. It is very important to many women of colour.
