Okay there’s more tho, that first gif, she’s looking over at the Vuvalini, they’re standing there watching their conversation and can you, CAN YOU, imagine how the conversation with these people she JUST got reacquainted with goes down maybe like:
Hey, so it’s been super long since I’ve met you but can you spare a bike for my bro here? Well we can haul the misplaced vuvalini on a trailer. He might… come with us? He did good, he’s good in a fight, he’s reliable.
#head in hands
Ugh. She talked to the Vuvalini and whatever she said had them agree to give him a bike. In this Wasteland? That’s so huge.
AND THE VUVALINI ARE RIGHT THERE WATCHING THE CONVERSATION.
So much awkward.
This scene slays me so incredibly hard. There’s something so formal and polite about the wording of her invitation to him that’s been absent from the dialogue thus far. As though they were living in a different time and she’s inviting him to a BBQ with her mates, and she doesn’t want him to feel like he’ll be crashing it. When actually HERE LET ME GIVE YOU SOMETHING TOTALLY VALUABLE THAT OTHER PEOPLE WOULD KILL FOR LIKE IT’S NOTHING.
*dies*
IT’S NOT EVEN HER THING TO GIVE. She had to ASK for it, and it’s clearly a big deal because
1) Miller would not have put the Vuvalini in that scene
Fully loaded. You’re more than welcome to come with us.
Okay I have writing promises to keep but I need to scream about this for JUST ONE MOMENT. (okay no first tho, ‘you’re more than welcome’ oh god what Furiosa what, what’s coming out of your mouth, do you realize Furiosa has like 100 lines in this movie, she uses short sentences, she doesn’t waste words. what is she. what is falling out of her mouth.)
And this bike tho.
Check out his bike.
Look at all the fabric on it. That’s not fabric scavenged from War Boys. That’s Vuvalini fabric. All except his new neck scarf, which the costuming behind the scenes notes indicate is a status symbol among War Boys. And he doesn’t appear to have it the night before despite the chillyness.
It’s the same fabric. Did she seriously just promote him secretly? Like, oh hey, here’s this scarf, you’ll probably find it useful. (oh hey, here’s this medal of honor, I think you can make use of the pin. oh hey, here’s this cop car, you should drive it. Oh hey wear this doctor’s lab coat… YOU JUST DON’T DO THAT.) Just imagine Max going back to the Citadel and the War Boys automatically calling him Imperator and his deeply deeply confused face.
But back to the bikes, even more, compare:
Nux and Capable in the back, then a trailer, then two bikes, another half-full trailer with a vuvalini riding it, then a bunched up group in front:
Now Max is the lead bike, Furiosa’s bike doesn’t have any gear on it.
For the most part there’s maybe half the amount of stuff on their bikes as that which’ve been crammed onto Max’s. Even taking into account the the amount that’s been crammed onto the trailers, you have to admit that Max’s bike is more than just “fully loaded”, if we assume a fully-loaded bike is the average bike you see here.
Now I just want you to imagine Max’s awkward face as the Vuvalini all try to press things into his hands and giving him head daps and Furiosa not even looking because she tried yesterday, dammit, and he already told her no and she’s busy checking things over kthxbye.
*puts on feminist media critique hat*:
I'm glad that there was no kiss or forced romance between Furiosa and Max.
*puts on filthy shipping hat*:
I want them to touch each other's scars with trembling fingers, run reverential hands over the other's body, and fuck tenderly underneath cyan post apocalyptic stars as they reach tentatively into one another's souls in the hope, the faintest thread of hope, that they might find redemption there.
“Charlize is a real warrior,” director George Miller declares. “She was
the one who said, ‘I’m going to shave my head’ and she took on the
10-pound (4.5-kilogram) mechanical arm for the whole shoot and rolled
around in the dust in fight scenes so it all felt real. I remember
driving back to base camp one night as the sun was going down and I was
in the back of the War Rig watching her drive and thinking, ‘If there
was an apocalypse, I’d be glad she’s here!’”
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.
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.
