I made these points in a reblog, but I want to re-state them in their own post, so that it shows up in the main tag.
Mad Max: Fury Road is a story about sexists, told by non-sexists.
I know it’s a bit confusing, because we’re so used to seeing stories about sexists told by sexists. We’re so used to sexism being portrayed by sexist male filmmakers for the sake of a sexist male audience, that we’ve been fooled into thinking this is the only way sexism even can be portrayed.
eabevella’s review of MMFR pointed out that the villains never call women “bitches,” nor are they shown overtly leering at the women in the film, and took this as evidence that the villains in the movie are not sexist. That they objectify women, but only in the way that they objectify everything, and their objectification is in fact quite egaitarian.
While the assessment that the villains are not shown leering or spitting gendered slurs is correct, I’m going to go ahead and say that the conclusion eabevella drew from this is wrong, wrong, so very wrong.
See, there’s a great lie we’ve been told – that in order for an audience to understand that a character is sexist, women must be humiliated on camera.
The truth is this:
When a male character calls a female character a bitch in a movie, that is not the filmmaker’s way of showing the audience the character is sexist; that is the filmmaker’s way of showing the audience that the character’s sexist point of view is worth hearing.
Read that paragraph over and over until it sinks in.
Mad Max: Fury Road makes it absolutely clear that the villains are sexist, and it does so without ever once implying that their sexist point of view is worth hearing. Instead, we learn that they are sexist second-hand, through context and world-building.
We see that the wives have been dressed in ridiculous, impractical gauze bikinis. We see that the wives are not only young and healthy, but also model-pretty. Through these subtle details, the narrative makes it clear that Immorten Joe, the villain, chose these women not just as useful stock, but as sexual objects in which he took sexual pleasure.
In contrast, when the movie introduces the audience to the wives, the movie makes sure to portray them in as humanized, and non-sexualized a manner as possible. Even when they are literally bathing together, we don’t see any water running down chests while the models arch their backs and run their fingers through their hair and sigh pleasurably. Instead we see a bunch of women perfunctorily rinsing off legs and feet, looking exhausted. When they see Max for the first time, they take on fearful, closed off expressions, and project fearful, closed off body language.
Compare this to, for example, Theon Greyjoy’s castration in HBO’s Game of Thrones. We know he was castrated, even though no one ever says the word “castration” and the camera never shows a penis being lopped off. The filmmakers manage to convey that the mutilation has taken place, but respect the character enough not to make a lurid scene out of it (and yet proceed to make lurid scenes out of every possible denigration and mutilation of every possible female character they can cram into their commercial free timeslot).
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As for Imperator Furiosa, it is hard for us, the audience, to not see Charlize Theron as a beautiful woman. But when we compare her appearance in the movie to that of the wives, it’s clear to see that Imperator Furiosa is, in fact, the opposite of what Immorten Joe and his war mongering culture view as desirable, beautiful, or womanly. They do not sexually objectify her because to them she is sexless.
If we ignore our own biased understanding of Furiosa – as a character that a beautiful actress is portraying – and instead immerse ourselves in the culture of the Miller’s world, it becomes obvious that Furiosa has taken great pains to make herself genderless under the villains’ gaze, and that her efforts have succeeded.
From Entertainment Weekly:
It was Theron herself who unlocked the image of the androgynous warrior—a woman who has escaped the fate of other women by erasing her gender.
“I just said, ‘I have to shave my head,’” Theron recalls. Furiosa is a war-rig operator living in a place where all other females have been enslaved as breeding and milking chattel. But Furiosa is barren and therefore of no value to the despot Immortan Joe and his soldiers. She is considered worthless. ”They almost forget she’s a woman, so there is no threat,” she says. “I understood a woman that’s been hiding in a world where she’s been discarded.” [x]
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The villains in the movie are absolutely misogynist. They are absolutely sexist. They do absolutely view beautiful women as sexual objects that exist purely for the male gaze.
But the movie is not about them.
The movie, instead, portrays sexist men as obstacles for the heroes of the movie to overcome.
Since I know there’s probably a fair amount of you out there who haven’t seen the first three Mad Max movies, I’m here to tell you a li’l secret about them:
All the people complaining about how Max “isn’t the main character” in Fury Road are big ol’ Fake Fanboys cause Max’s primary character trait in literally every movie is “I hate this, why is it happening, please leave me alone to brood in the desert in peace”.
He’s much more the central focus of the plot in the first movie but in Road Warrior and Thunder Dome he basically just gets kidnapped or beat up by wankers in weird bondage outfits and spends the rest of the movie trying to leave as soon as possible while other people are like “please solve our absurd post-apocalyptic problems”. There is not one single point where Max actively seeks out being a hero until it is forced upon him. He ACTIVELY TELLS PEOPLE WHO ASK HIM FOR HELP to take a hike.
Mad Max himself would like nothing better than to never, ever, ever be the main character.
He would also like for people to stop stealing his fucking car.
Nobody wants to escape his own movies more than Max Rockatansky.
He understands better than his own fanboys that his life sucks and you don’t want to be like him, to be Max is humiliating and painful. Every time he gets dragged into a conflict, he ends up worse than he started. Max seems to realize no good can come of this, and is weirdly genre-savvy because he’s always trying to make a getaway at the first signs of encroaching Plot. I find this darkly comical and endearing – at no point does he snap off witty quips and save the day and get the girl. Ever. He’s perpetually a weird desert loser with terrible luck. It’s great.
What makes Max a badass is the ability to survive to the end of any movie he’s unfortunate enough to find himself in.
I’m very glad that movies like Pacific Rim and Fury Road and The Force Awakens are as colorful as they are, because I am really, really tired of desaturated movies.
GOD ME TOO.
My buddy, my guy. Come close and listen to me.
You can have an apocalyptic, gritty, brutal movie with color. Really. You can. I promise.
I want to know how long it took Furiosa to figure out that her home was just on the other side of the mountains from the Citadel, less than twenty-four hours’ drive away. It seems clear in this scene that she’s bullshitting confidence a little. She doesn’t know precisely where it is–if she did, she’d recognize that the dead bog is exactly where the Green Place should be. But she knows which direction to drive, and that it’s not terribly far to go. And in fact she does lead them right to the place where her home used to be.
Imagine young Furiosa in the back of the slavers’ truck, unable to see where they’re going or just too scared and in shock to keep good track of time and direction, being driven for days and days and days around the mountains, or maybe on a circuitous route through different trading posts/raiding opportunities. She gets to the Citadel and assumes she must be thousands of kilometers from home; she was in that truck for so many days and nothing looks familiar here.
Maybe it clicks on a scouting run, that the mountains she can see are her mountains, the same ones that shelter the Green Place from the worst of the storms and give birth to the trickle of underground water that feeds their oasis. She’s never seen them from this side, but now that she really looks, she’s certain they are the same. Which means that home is right there, RIGHT FRIGGIN THERE, if only she can figure out how to get to the other side.
Now imagine Furiosa driving east through the night and into the next day, the Fool and the girls and the surprisingly useful War Boy sleeping through the midday heat, thinking it must be here, it must be. Maybe beyond the next dune, or the next…. Seeing the strange metal tower that her Mothers told her used to carry electricity and feeling a wave of relief, because she definitely knows that; she must have just confused the eastern border of their territory with the western one; it’s been a long time after all. The Green Place must be just beyond those dunes, just a little further away than she remembered, waiting for them…
Modern AU where Max finds himself making conversation and possibly flirting (is she flirting with him? He thinks she is…) with Furiosa the bus driver at a particularly long stop light.
I totally thought Furiosa was going to shoot Cheedo.
I did too, and I think it’s absolutely deliberate. We see Furiosa take aim in the shot above, and then we see this:
Furiosa’s crosshairs moving across Cheedo’s back. She moves over the women to aim at something beyond them - two war boys on a motorcycle. That’s the first time we see those two war boys, so in the image above, it absolutely look as if she’s aiming to shoot Cheedo in the back.
So why? For me, this goes back to something Charlize Theron said: that at the start of the film, Furiosa isn’t rescuing the wives, she’s stealing them. That if killing them would have hurt Joe more, she’d have done it. And that’s what this moment looks like: that she’d rather kill Cheedo than give her back.
It’s not what’s happening: I think Furiosa’s attitude has already changed, given her reaction to Angharad’s death. But I love that the film makes you wonder.
And I love this whole scene. Cheedo’s reaction is completely understandable: okay, Joe is horrible, but at least in captivity nobody was trying to blow her up every two minutes. It references the way abuse victims often return to their abusers, driven by fear and other complex motives. The timing within the film is brilliant. In her conversation with Capable and the Dag, it’s clear that Cheedo’s attempt to go back is a reaction to Angharad’s death, a mix of fear and grief. And of course it sets up the way Cheedo tricks Rictus.
Then there are the reactions of the onlookers. Furiosa’s response is ambiguous, taking action while not involving herself in the emotional fallout. And Max just… watches. He looks sympathetic, but he doesn’t comment or get involved, because it’s none of his business. This isn’t a movie that expects women to listen to the white dude’s opinions on their choices; Max is an action hero who knows how to stay in his lane.
If Trump becomes president I’m switching my major to music so when our country inevitably becomes a nuclear wasteland, I can be the guying playing the flamethrower guitar while the War Boys attack unsuspecting wanderers.
