Max is Back

*The following review and analysis of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) contains spoilers for the entire film. It is also important to note that I have personally seen only one movie in the franchise prior to this one, The Road Warrior (1981). That being said, it is also worth noting that not seeing the previous films presents no barrier for entry here. Fury Road stands alone well as long as you are somewhat familiar with the basic premise of the series: “Mad Max” Rockatansky lost his family tragically—hence the “mad” in his nickname—and now he roams a violent post-apocalyptic wilderness where gas is precious. That is all, really.

"Mad Max: Fury Road Theatrical Release Poster." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 15 May 2015.

General Overview and Review (Spoiler Free)

            Describing director George Miller’s violence- and vehicle-focused pseudo-Western as one long car chase is an accurate way to sum up the basic plot action of the film. Charlize Theron’s Furiosa absconds with the five brides of a warlord of the wasteland who has also captured the eponymous Max (Tom Hardy) who later joins Furiosa in her mission to liberate the brides and find “the green place” where they may be able to live in peace. The bad guys are in hot pursuit throughout the movie’s two hour runtime, and there are precious few moments of quiet contemplation to be found here. The mayhem begins with Max’s abduction by “war boys” serving the warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and barely ever lets up. There is almost always something blowing up, shooting, or crashing into something else onscreen, and the soundtrack booms right along with the twisted metal and explosions.

I was struck by the frenetic first act of Fury Road, which later settles into a frantic but familiar chain reaction of carnage, and found myself associating the atmosphere of mania with that one scene in Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance when Nicholas Cage is on his bike, head ablaze, screaming and laughing like a lunatic. If you have seen even a single trailer for Fury Road you are probably familiar with the line shouted by the war boy Nux (Nicholas Hoult) who screams “What a lovely day!” as he barrels across the wasteland in pursuit of Furiosa, seeking a violent death that will propel him to Immortan Joe’s promised Valhalla with Max strapped to his front bumper acting as the weakened warrior’s “blood bag.” Suffice it to say that there is a lot of violence in Fury Road. The vehicles and villains bristle with grotesque protrusions and deformities both mechanical and biological, respectively.

The action unfolds across barren wastelands, but the sights and sounds of various desert landscapes are never boring. The roads are almost always teeming with interesting and twisted vehicles, some with long poles extending from them that the war boys of Immortan Joe use to vault themselves into combat. One particularly striking ride is a rock concert on wheels with no driver in evidence and a post-apocalyptic rocker on stage playing a bladed guitar that shoots fire. This is by far one of the more outlandish sights in the film, but the diegetic music of the guitar can be heard during key moments of the plot and blends dramatically and effectively with the score. The visuals, including the violence, are all distinctly Mad Max’s and, perhaps, Miller’s. The looks of the characters and vehicles alike are interesting and beautiful in their deformities. It is easy to see in Fury Road the elements that made the original trilogy so distinctive—the vehicles in particular finding echoes in later media such as the Twisted Metal series of video games, where the combatants trick out their rides with spikes and rocket launchers, and the movie Death Race in 2008, which was itself a remake of the 1975 film but sports a grittier aesthetic more in line with that of Mad Max.

Fury Road has met with critical acclaim since its release, and the praise is well-deserved. If you like action movies, this is one you cannot miss. If you do not like action movies but can still stomach the violence, which is prevalent but often neither as bloody or as much of a focus in the scenes where it occurs as you might expect, you should still see it. The characters often speak in ways that seem clipped but erudite, reminding me of the dialogue in a Cormac McCarthy novel. They often say very little given the emphasis on physicality and action, but what they do say often has the suggestion of profundity behind it.

Though the desert itself can be rather samey-looking, Miller still finds ways to infuse it with a certain dynamicism, often by filling a shot with a dizzying array of vehicles bristling with spines and spouting fire, but also through the occasional wide shot framing a single vehicle, often Furiosa’s tanker, plowing through the dust toward its far off destination. The blue-tinged nights and sepia-tinted days are striking in their starkness. One beautifully eerie shot of a swampland shows silhouetted creatures, presumably human, dressed in tatters, tredding the wasteland with stilts attached to their four limbs, moving slowly, almost animalistically, amongst dead trees and fluttering crows, one of the few other non-human creatures in the film.

My main gripe with Fury Road is that the Australian accents are sometimes hard to understand—a problem which is only exacerbated by the riotous soundtrack and explosive action. I was unable to hear one major character’s last words as a result.

The only other issue I took with Fury Road (minor spoiler here) is how the characters barrel ahead, propelled by the plot and the imminent threat of Immortan Joe and his army, only to turn around and backtrack during the third act. The plot and mythos of the world justify this decision, and it also makes thematic sense (more on that in the next section); however, I still felt a stab of disappointment at the prospect of just turning around after all that.

I will leave much of “all that” to your imagination.

Suffice it to say that Mad Max: Fury Road is an excellent film. Resurrecting old franchises for modern audiences is always a somewhat dicey business, especially when a new actor steps in to fill an old and familiar role. Inevitably, when I hear about this happening, I have to think, Really? Is this necessary? Perhaps “necessary” is too strong a word—Is any of this really necessary?—but the question of justifying the return of a series always arises. Fury Road runs that question down and flattens it under its tires. It barrels past fears of possible mediocrity and even samey-ness given how the post-apocalyptic thriller has developed over the past thirty years and how blockbusters have become progressively more bloated and filled out with millions of dollars in computer generated effects. Fury Road is a testament to the visceral power of practical effects and the pride that viewers can take in seeing them still being done and in being done so well, and, too, it is just downright entertaining the way that a big summer movie should be, without necessarily sacrificing thematic depth or a certain degree of social consciousness.

Female Fury: Fury Road, Feminism, and Empowering the Oppressed

            Mad Max: Fury Road is pro-woman—openly, unsubtly, and perhaps even problematically insofar as its depiction of women, violence, and institutionalized sexism are hyperbolic in the extreme, possibly verging, albeit unintentionally, upon caricature according to some. I will openly admit that I had some passing interest in Fury Road after seeing the first trailer, but I did not become adamant about seeing it until after the immensely positive response to it started to appear online, particularly on Twitter, where many of the women and men that I follow, almost all of them of a certain artistic, progressive, even sensitive stripe (again, I will admit to a preference), were gushing over Furiosa and talking with interest about the movie’s feminist themes. Since then, fan-created art of Furiosa continues to appear regularly. The movie still shows up in my feed as a few stragglers, myself included, catch the film and announce to the world that it is good. It is entertaining; it is also, apparently, feminist.

            The problem with the word “feminist” is the same one associated with terms like “postmodernism.” “Feminist” and “feminism” are multi-faceted concepts that carry a lot of denotative and connotative baggage. “Feminism,” after all, can be at once both a movement and a critical theory. It can be applied to subjects as diverse as pedagogy (in education) and literary criticism and cultural studies. It has associations both academic and secular—so to speak. When people talk about feminism on the internet—when they support it, rave about it, and even just type it: “feminism”—it is almost always a reductive usage simply because the word alone is inadequate to capture the many aspects tied up in the concept. Although we can further identify the brand or permutation of the concept we are trying for by using terms like “radical feminism” or “intersectional feminism,” we are still being largely ambiguous about what we actually mean. Certainly, there are popular definitions or understandings of the concept. Famous women self-identify as “not feminist” because feminists are pro-woman and hate men… At least, that is one example.

            I readily self-identify as a feminist, but if you were to ask me to quickly and concisely sum up what that means for you, I would probably need to sit down with a pen and paper (or computer) to parse my feelings.[1] Generally speaking, feminism is about femininity—often women but sometimes just the issues associated with them (or simply the feminine) and the ways that they (or it) interact(s) with society. Yes, more and more people are trotting out the word “patriarchy” these days. The idea that there is something wrong with the way that our society treats its women has become a point of discussion and much contention, particularly on the internet where it is very easy to express oneself openly and without a filter, often off-the-cuff, and perhaps under-educated on the subject at hand.

            As I discuss Fury Road and its treatment of women, I will do my best to elucidate what I mean when I say that it is a pro-woman film—possibly feminist by my particular reckoning but certainly pro-woman in almost any light.

            Before I talk about my own feminist reading of the movie, though, I must address another, as shortly after the film’s release and the aforementioned praising on the web, feminist and pop culture critic Anita Sarkeesian wrote a series of tweets describing her own feelings about the film and its depiction of both women and violence. To quote Sarkeesian:

 “I’m not one to shy away from expressing unpopular opinions. So here goes. I saw Fury Road. I get why people like it. But it isn’t feminist. On the surface, Mad Max is about resisting a cartoonish version of misogyny. But that resistance takes the form of more glorified violence. . . . Mad Max’s villains are caricatures of misogyny which makes overt misogynists angry but does not challenge more prevalent forms of sexism. Viewers get to feel good about hating cartoon misogyny without questioning themselves or examining how sexism actually works in our society.”[2]

Sarkeesian has more to say about violence in the movie as well, but I want to focus on the above comments here.[3] First, however, I want to establish a point that is implicitly understood in academic circles but is often not recognized in a more popular milieu like this one. Although I disagree somewhat strongly with Sarkeesian on the subject of Fury Road, I do not disagree with everything she has said or written, either on the subject of this particular movie or on broader issues of feminism, women, and popular culture. Some people sometimes mistake a measured, critical response to an argument for an attack on the person—and thus assume that the latter actually constitutes the former when they disagree with someone—but as I told a class of college sophomores not long ago, in the world of the academy “argument is conversation.” “Arguments,” with a central claim and supports, are meant to be responded to, and as long as you respond in an equally measured way, it is a conversation you are having. The idea might be problematic, but the person who expressed it is not the one being critiqued.

            Having issued that disclaimer, let us return to Sarkeesian’s comments on the movie. Obviously, given what I said before about the difficulty with feminism and defining its exact parameters, saying that Fury Road is not feminist requires some qualification, which Sarkeesian provides. One of the central issues with the movie that she discusses is that it is not feminist in any nuanced, cogent ways. The characters who are the abusers and who see women as objects are all physically deformed and ugly. They are so overtly sexist and recognizably “evil” that they can be read as caricatures or cartoons of real world misogynists. If only real world misogyny and sexism were that easy to identify. As Sarkeesian notes, though, apart from people who are openly and conspicuously hateful toward women, the real Immortan Joes—the equivalent real world figures, which may be more system than man—are much harder to recognize because they do not wear respirators that give them a permanently evil, yellow-toothed grin. Instead, they exist well within the boundaries of what we consider “normal,” both physically and ideologically. They may be men, but they are also values or concepts: again, the ideas that we often accept without a thought.

Mad Max: Fury Road confronts a big cartoonish misogynist who keeps his “brides” behind an enormous vault door head-on, but by locating the source of society’s sexist attitudes in a man (or a couple of men) who are so noticeably deformed and evil, it takes the easy road out by allowing viewers, as Sarkeesian suggests, “to feel good” about hating those characters and to think, There is the patriarchy everyone has been going on about. It was not that hard to find after all. It is not us; it is the ugly guy with the gross children.

Obviously much of this is in the subtext of the film, influences us on a subconscious level, and is largely a matter of interpretation. Sarkeesian’s argument (and I do think it is a valid one) is that Fury Road makes the solution to women’s problems in society too easy to write off. That is to say that it sends the message that somewhere out there is an ugly man who hates women and that if we can kill him, the problems with our society will be solved. Such a rendering of sexism (and its solution) does not engage with the truth of the matter: that sexism lives not in a villainous entity we can kill but in, say, our complacency with sexist ideas. When someone tells a misogynistic joke at a party and no one says anything—by extension, when we continue to condone media treatments of misogyny as humorous—that is the real evil: that we are silent and allow these things to exist and happen.

I have two responses to Sarkeesian’s argument about Fury Road specifically, however.

First, one has to acknowledge the limits of the medium within which Fury Road is working. After hearing the first big round of praise for the movie and its treatment of women, I posted to Facebook about it, admitting my surprise at hearing the positive way that this film, which, with its heavy emphasis on fast cars, rough-looking men, a bad-ass male lead, and violence, could easily have been just “a masculinist wet dream.” Fury Road could easily have been nothing more than a male power fantasy, but it is not. It could easily have only victimized women, but it does not.[4] To say that George Miller did not owe anyone the film that Fury Road is might be a bit much, but the fact that it is what it is has been a pleasant surprise to many, myself included, largely because it contains all the elements to be something very different. As a blockbuster summer movie about fast cars and violence, it could have justifiably, from a viewer’s perspective, considering the genre it is in, said absolutely nothing about the objectification of women, sexual violence, and misogyny. Perhaps it could potentially have done more with these themes having taken them on in the first place, but as an action-adventure movie, it is working against the limits of its genre. Get too cerebral and the frantic pacing and intense action sequences that make it a Mad Max film would be lost. To say that it does enough (and could reasonably do no more) is not a statement I am prepared to make. I do not actually know what the limits are. I only know that Fury Road does a respectable thing, in spite of its genre, in tackling these issues in the first place.

I wish we lived in a world where simply including a number of women and giving them a rudimentary level of individual character and small roles to play in the plot was not something that deserved this level of praise. I still think Fury Road is quite good with its women and a great film overall, but this should be the minimum standard for inclusion and characterization. It is exemplary only because it is largely alone in including women like this. We deserve better—more female protagonists, more thorough treatment of women’s issues, more complex and nuanced takes on sexism and society. These subjects need not be the focus of every film or even of a Fury Road sequel, but ideally we should reach a place where we no longer have to react with surprise when a movie actually has women onscreen in a capacity other than as passive victims or rewards for the protagonist to receive after overcoming some adversity. For the time being, however, we have to give credit where credit is due, and while Fury Road might not offer an in-depth discussion of sexism in society, it at least works with the elements that it has and within the limitations of its genre to produce a movie with a message.

Furthermore, while Fury Road does paint in typically broad strokes given its genre, I do think there is nuance to its depictions of women and what it ultimately says about something very much like feminism. For example, while the movie does not necessarily point an accusatory finger at the audience for their complacency with sexist systems, it does ask the question, “Who killed the world?” The question is never answered in the movie, and it is open-ended enough to be applicable to any number of issues. Superficially, it asks who is responsible for turning the world into an ashen wasteland. More specifically, it asks who is responsible for the fall of the world culture and the descent of mankind into savagery. Who, the brides are asking, more specifically still, is responsible for the ill-treatment they have received? Immortan Joe is never offered as the definitive answer to this question, though the brides ask it of Nux, who denies the involvement of Joe and his war boys. The question is vague, the finger pointed not so directly at any one culprit, but it does suggest that Fury Road is interested in more than just killing a single evil man. This could easily be nothing more than pseudo-intellectualism at work; however, again, the question is never answered explicitly, meaning the audience must answer it for themselves. Reminding viewers of this fact later in the movie would help drive the point home if the filmmakers were trying to make it really stick.

All that being said, I believe Fury Road does a much better job of commenting on the issues of feminism, empowering women, and even allyship with its ending. As I suggested before, the film is not the subtlest of texts to read. When the final shot of the movie is of the women of the film ascending (using Immortan Joe’s elevator), it is hard to miss the symbolic meaning the creators are reaching for; however, while this final scene could be read as only pro-woman, without greater depth, I think that it is actually loaded with interpretative potential. Visually, it is a feminist scene, and not just because the women are ascending literally and metaphorically.

This final scene with the elevator echoes one much earlier in the movie when Immortan Joe is still in charge. In that earlier scene, after Joe’s war vehicle is lowered, peasants try to cling to the elevator as it is raised again, only to be kicked back down by the guards. Conversely, as Furiosa, the remaining brides, and the last of the Vulvalini begin to rise, they pull the peasants, men and women, up with them, signaling not just the rise of women but also of the working class and the other oppressed members of the society.

Although feminism can be strictly focused on women, it can also deal with issues of femininity and society or of any characteristic that has been denigrated by masculinist norms. Theoretically speaking, the power imbalance that exists between men and women also has a lot to do with the relationship between masculine and feminine qualities. Because many of the institutions and systems we consider normal parts of our society were founded by men and based on masculine virtues of objectivity, strict individually, and competition, the converse of those values is considered weak and less desirable—the feminine. There is an argument to be made that anyone in the superior position in society is in a masculine role, while anyone who is subservient or lesser takes on something of the feminine. So-called sexual politics are not only restricted to relationships between men and women; they also influence what is considered strong and good and what is considered weak or lesser. The working class can thus be considered feminized as they are dominated by the upper class; therefore, when we talk about feminism, in a sense, we are not just talking about promoting women but femininity and the feminine in general as we try to break down masculinist hierarchical structures that consider anyone feminine, in a feminine position, or possessing qualities thought to be feminine as inferior. Thus Fury Road can be considered feminist in the sense that it ultimately elevates not just its women but also its working class who are as much Immortan Joe’s property as the brides, though in a slightly less explicit way.

Immortan Joe is not just a misogynist; he is also a capitalist and symbol of the military-industrial complex. Joe claims ownership of the brides, we learn, because he also controls the water—trickle-down economics literalized as he stands high above the ground and pulls the levers to pour water down on the peasants. Joe is not just claiming the brides because he is a man; he claims them because he has a controlling percentage of the area’s resources as well (its de facto capital). Joe is the head of the military, as well as the society’s religious leader. Physically, the citadel from which he rules is positioned in a crude triangle with both “Gas town” and “Bullet town,” suggesting the monopoly that Joe has on the material and spiritual lives of the women and men under his rule. Although this status as a sort of uber-capitalist makes Joe no less cartoonish as a villain, it does add further interpretative depth to the film and makes it more of a feminist text than it might seem at first.

Such a reading gives new resonance to those areas where Fury Road does seem to be painting by the broadest of strokes. The matrilineal women warrior clan to which Furiosa belongs, the Vulvalini, have a cringe-inducing name (nearly “the lineage of the vulva”) and represent the tired old myth of the female Amazons: a clan of warrior women who don’t need no men and are self-sufficient apart from society. Once again, on the surface, the Vulvalini look like reductive examples of feminist principles—namely, the idea that if women could just break off and form their own group free of all men, they could prosper. The way that the Vulvalini are in touch with the earth and also offer such lines as “One man, one bullet” suggests that Fury Road is generalizing heavily. Women are more in touch with the earth because they are more maternal. Also, women hate men and use naked bait to lure them into snares.

Taken as they are, the Vulvalini are a real mark against Fury Road as a piece with some depth to it; however, one must consider the way that these characters appear in the story initially before changing as the plot progresses. Fury Road debunks the myth of the Amazons by having the Vulvalini, though ostensibly green-thumbed, fail as farmers. Similarly, as a clan of only women, they are down to only a handful of members. When Furiosa, her charges, and her people try to strike out further on their own, away from the society of Immortan Joe, Max presents them with another option. Redemption, he suggests, does not lie in splitting off. That way will ultimately lead to their deaths. Instead, the only way to thrive again is to go back to the citadel. Yes, Joe must die (violence is required), but the larger implication of this decision is that the problems of women and the oppressed cannot be resolved by separating them, with or without their choosing, into their own individual groups. To stop oppression, the problems must be solved at their root in society.

To protect themselves women they must also stand with the rest of the oppressed. They do not just free the brides from Joe’s tyranny; they also liberate the peasants and ostensibly the remaining war boys. The zealot Nux discovers that dying blindly for an ideological state apparatus is not as glorious as he thought. Even Max finds redemption in abandoning his lonely travels to collaborate with others for the greater good. The characters, both male and female, are enriched and uplifted through their shared effort. Working to improve the lot of women in the world, argues Fury Road, will naturally lead to working to improve the lot of other oppressed groups and the downtrodden—not because women are so special in and of themselves (see the case of the Vulvalini and their decline) but because working for the better treatment of women entails working against the systems that also oppress many different groups of people. Although Immortan Joe certainly serves as a symbol for these systems, his death does not entirely resolve the issues of the society. The film ends with the women and peasants rising in the elevator, but there are guards, war boys, and one of Joe’s sons waiting for them at the top. Whether the sequel will build on this ending or not remains to be seen, but as it currently stands, Fury Road ends with hope as well as the suggestion that fixing the citadel will take time and negotiation. Joe’s death ends the movie, but it does not solve all of society’s problems.

Notably, Fury Road also ends with Max’s quiet departure from the scene of the celebration. Tom Hardy’s portrayal of the character is just excellent all around. His gruff, clipped way of speaking, the way that he jerks and reacts physically to things, and the way that he is practically crying when he finally tells Furiosa his name as she is close to death communicates to the audience that he is a deeply troubled individual in ways that no amount of violence can resolve. The closest he comes to finding a measure of peace is in helping Furiosa. The interplay between these two is excellent as well. More than one person has pointed to the moment when Max hands off the rifle to Furiosa so that she can make the shot he cannot as not only a great example of Theron and Hardy’s onscreen chemistry and nonverbal communication but also as the perfect way of summing up Fury Road’s take on women and empowerment. At no point is anything approaching “girls rule, boys drool” or “women are from Venus, men are from Mars” expressed. No one is called incompetent because of his or her gender.

Instead, Fury Road is about collaboration between all members of a team to succeed where any one of them would have failed on their own. Nux, Max, Furiosa, and the brides all contribute to the success of their cause, and no one of them is considered lesser for his or her contribution. They all have their moments of weakness, and they all rise above their individual shortcomings as a unit. Rather than promoting a single bad-ass hero who kills a lot of people, Fury Road showcases a team effort. Theron and Hardy both receive top billing for their roles in the credits, though her name is slightly higher on the screen than his, and even the design of the two characters is similar. They both have their prominent shoulder guards on opposite sides, for example.

As an ally to Furiosa’s cause, Max exemplifies the sort of behavior that real world allies of oppressed groups sometimes neglect. Max never steals focus from the cause of the women. He supports them all the way, but once he helps the wounded Furiosa from the vehicle before the gathered people of the citadel, he disappears into the background. It is not Max the people will respond to; it is Furiosa. Max’s disappearance into the crowd at the end of the film is not only consistent with his character (the road warrior: the man destined to roam from place to place) but also suggests that he knows who the real hero of the day is. Rather than try to make his own contributions known, Max steps back to allow Furiosa, the brides, and the Vulvalini to take the place they fought and nearly died for. In this sense, Max is a good ally. He joins Furiosa’s cause, which not only precipitates his release from captivity but also drives the plot of the entire film, he gives his all to help, but he does not try to co-opt the spotlight. Real world allies should take note of Max’s behavior. When all eyes are turned on him, he redirects attention to Furiosa. Rather than promote themselves, good allies direct those with questions to voices belonging to the oppressed group.[5] Fury Road has more to say about empowerment and social justice than it may seem, but at its heart it is still pro-woman, and it never loses that focus.

As a final thought before closing out this analysis, I should also address the film’s treatment of its female characters as subjects. Another important assertion that Sarkeesian makes in her assessment of the film is that “As a film Mad Max absolutely adores its gritty future. The camera caresses acts of violence in the same way it caresses the brides’ bodies. ‘We are not things’ is a great line, but doesn’t work when the plot and ESPECIALLY the camera treats them like things from start to finish.” Once again, I have to disagree. I am surprised that I do given the way that action movies usually treat their women, but I do.

“Caresses” is a strong term (and an evocative one) that does often capture the feeling communicated through the cinematography of many films that the female bodies onscreen are meant to be ogled: the extra attention paid to buttocks, the way the camera mimics the real life motion of a man giving a woman the “up-down,” scanning over the limbs and torso. It is such a common feature of many movies that we are largely unaware of it. The camera presupposes a heteronormative male gaze and does its best to replicate it for the viewer—to give the ostensible straight, male audience what it wants to see. However, as someone who digs deep into visual rhetoric and has become keenly aware of (and even resentful towards) films that try to manipulate an audience, I can say that Fury Road is inoffensive in comparison to other movies in the genre. Other than the scene where the brides are washing themselves off and removing their chastity belts, which is seen through Max’s eyes since this is his first introduction to the women, I did not notice anything like a “caress” happening. I did think that the romantic attachment that abruptly forms between the disgraced stowaway Nux and one of the brides was eye-rollingly typical, though it was so understated that I was willing to pretend it did not exist. And the fact that Miller and company resisted the urge to pair Max and Furiosa romantically did a lot to restore my goodwill toward the film.

This is not to say that we never see a shot framed around Theron’s butt or linger on a bride’s midsection or see a chunk of thigh intruding into a shot that is dominated by ammunition; however, I found the effect to be far from excessively sensual. The brides are scantily clad in translucent white (expect to see a lot of nipple), but they could have been even more exposed (a la Princess Leia in Star Wars), and it is in these moments of creative restraint that I think Fury Road truly proves itself to be a film with something approaching a brain. Miller could have gone crazy with the brides’ attire; he could have probably shown us close-ups of the Vulvalini’s “bait” or even focused more heavily on the large-chested women hooked into Immortan Joe’s milking machines. But he does not do these things. He does not caress his women, or his violence. Similar moments of restraint also appear during the film’s bloodier moments. We could have seen more of the surgery to extract a baby from its dying mother’s womb than we actually do. At one point, Max goes off on his own to destroy a war machine, but all we see is an explosion in the distance and some blood (not his own) on Max himself. When Immortan Joe’s face is ripped off by Furiosa, much of the violence is hidden rather than showcased. We later see the mutilated Joe uncovered before the people of the citadel, but the movie could have easily been more explicit than it is. The only conclusion one can draw from these deliberate decisions not to put breasts and gore front and center in the film is that Miller, while he focuses heavily on carnage, does not want those elements stealing focus. Fury Road is graphically violent but not debaucherously so, and I would never describe it as sexual or even sensual.

The one thing that Fury Road does consistently caress are its vehicles. I may be exaggerating when I say that we spend more time looking at the “assets” of the machines than of the human characters, but I also think not by much. It makes sense for the camera to spend so much time with the vehicles in the film, as they play such large roles in the plot that there is rarely a shot to be found without one occupying a prominent position. Still, the camera loves these machines. It loves to show them plowing through the wasteland, traveling in a pack, gaining ground, pulling alongside one another, ramming and interacting amongst themselves while fostering interactions between their human drivers. The camera loves to watch them explode too, and the final violent act of the film is the explosion of Furiosa’s tanker. While Nux is also killed in this scene, we linger not on him but on the tanker as it tumbles and breaks apart, individual pieces of metal like the familiar steering wheel flying at the screen (no doubt to be enhanced for 3D viewing experiences).

If there is a sensual element to Fury Road, it is the movie’s orgiastic love of its galvanized metal cast. Nux’s death is distinctive not just because he is a main character but because he is also driving another main character we have developed a fondness of and regard for over the past two hours. Similarly, the destruction of the iconic Mad Max car early in the film, followed by a long absence and a quick return in the final act (only to be destroyed again) is meant to evoke something like an emotional response in the audience. The car is an integral part of who Max is and how he has been presented in the past. Losing the car symbolizes a break from tradition for the film as well as a break in Max, in who he is. He struggles to tell Furiosa his name. He cares for her, yes, but he has also lost an essential part of himself. What is the road warrior without his car? Likewise, Furiosa’s tanker, while less well known to the audience, is both a vehicle and an integral part of the team and the story. While (hopefully) few people will react to the “death” of a vehicle with the same intensity that they react to the death of a beloved human character, the way that Fury Road gazes fondly on its vehicles, delighting in their fire-spewing lives and in their bittersweet, violent deaths, suggests that it cares about them. It caresses them but ultimately empowers its women.

Notes:

[1] Although this ought to be self-evident, let me officially offer a disclaimer here. Obviously there are various interpretations of what feminism is and what it means to say that something is “feminist.” When I talk about aspects of Fury Road that I think are feminist, I label them as such based on my own reading and opinions. My feminism probably looks different from that of other people. I am not arguing that my interpretation (of the film, of feminism) is right where others are wrong. Rather, I propose an interpretation—one among many.

[2] https://storify.com/wire2k/anita-sarkeesian-on-mad-max-fury-road (Pop culture critic Anita Sarkeesian’s tweets about Mad Max: Fury Road. These were compiled by someone other than Sarkeesian for ease of access.)

[3] Prior to writing this review/analysis of Mad Max: Fury Road I had started an essay specifically discussing women and violence (and the work of author Gillian Flynn). Since I am also using some of Sarkeesian’s words there, I do not want to belabor the point too much here—at least where the issue of women committing violent acts and whether that actually constitutes feminism or not is concerned. I will link that second essay here when I finish it.

[4] http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/06/03/opinion-fury-road-sets-the-standard-for-female-representation (A great piece on Mad Max: Fury Road’s characterization of its female characters—one, which, in some ways, serves as a powerful rebuttal to Sarkeesian’s assertion that the film simply “lets some women participate as equal partners in a cinematic orgy of male violence.” As the author of the linked article suggests, Fury Road actually shows women demonstrating strength, admittedly in the midst of much male violence, in various ways. Some, like Furiosa, are combatants, but others help the group and demonstrate strength in other ways. Some of the brides are notably anti-violence.)

[5] One good example of bad allyship can be found in the issue of the phrase Black Lives Matter versus All Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter became a rallying cry for black protestors in Ferguson with a clear focus on a particular issue: police brutality and misconduct in their more than frequent interactions with African American citizens. Although the notion that “All Lives Matter” seems like a positive one—suggesting that everyone is important and no one deserves this mistreatment—it steals focus from the social issue at the heart of Black Lives Matter. It takes the importance of the events in places like Ferguson and Baltimore and dilutes the message. Those protests are about very specific problems facing a specific group of people, and although I have suggested here that social justice for one group ought to lead naturally into justice for all, it is also important to emphasize the fact that in real world situations of iniquity, focus and emphasis are important, especially when specific events are being actively protested.