REVOLUTIONARY ROAD WARRIORS: Epic Redemption in the Radical Mainstream
Power is everywhere therefore nowhere, diffuse rather than pervasively hegemonic. ‘Constructed’ seems to mean influenced by, directed, channeled, as a highway constructs traffic patterns. Not: Why cars? Who’s driving? Where’s everybody going? What makes mobility matter? Who owns a car? Are all these accidents not very accidental?
-- Catharine MacKinnon, “Sexuality”
Is that the wind or just a furious fixation? As the New Vuvalini become the redemption for Immortan Joe’s Citadel in a righteous inferno of bullets, gasoline, and phantom-making limbs, so is Mad Max: Fury Road an improbable antidote for the humdrum wasteland of automatic, suspended (dis)belief in 2010s masculinist blockbusters. What’s more, the movie doesn’t seem designed as a neoliberal feminist vehicle -- it's after something way more crazed. Its conception and execution are absurdly satisfying to WITNESS! given the troves of summerfare that don't even consider -- and definitely don't champion -- women (as warriors, as guardians, as revelatory/opaque figures/subjects). George Miller’s anti-patriarchal politics are elevated by an affective register of sincerity, which edges the camp rather than the metaleptic, to sensitize us to his bizarre and all too imaginable perverted dystopia. This means we get grandiose, epic depictions of gross anxieties and power dynamics without the conservative impulse (hey, Marvel Cinematic Universe) to self-reference and indulge continuity.
Opposed to the decadent expository industrial metagenre (the summer blockbuster, superherofied and streamlined), Fury Road relies on immersive, anti-expositional storytelling (ala Akira) to craft characters and settings that resonate as meaningful without feeling overdetermined. We’re in Max’s mad world with just as little bearing as he has, and we come to care (no normo) for Furiosa and the Wives as he does, without anything spelled out. Within and without the confusion, a survival drive to propel them toward the only future worth living in, a revolution that lets them up. It’s the rare post-9/11 blockbuster that uses its heightened status (heightened in its Event as blockbuster sequel and in its delirious tonal pitch) to tell a radically politicized story, one that to me reads as an unambiguously non-liberal, anti-capitalist feminist epic.
... Woman inherits the Earth From the first, when Charlize Theron’s Furiosa receives equal billing with Tom Hardy’s Max, Fury Road keeps its central politics in order. I think more than having a "strong female lead," which is an unremarkable and at this point correct decision on a corporate/marketing level, Fury Road features a hero who is strong, determined, feminine, and the embodiment of the film’s ethics and action.
In the first major setpiece, we’re watching Furiosa think, her darting eyes shadowed and scanning for threats. Our hero’s first act of defiance is merely a redirection, a detour that reroutes the entire flow of traffic in that stretch of the Wasteland, and eventually U-turns on what was supposed to be a one-way street. She drives the movie’s momentum forward, unflinchingly, out of the firestorm of Joe’s Citadel into her fantastic vision of the Green Place. Furiosa is never sexualized, her dialogue is focused on her mission (not romance), and her pain is allowed to show on its own, for herself, screaming at the sun. Furiosa’s imagination and courage and refusal to be dominated fuel the Wives ideologically and affectively, along with their caretaker Miss Giddy’s, “You cannot own a human being.”
Furiosa’s most important haul is the Wives, looking for hope (which Max believes is a mistake until he realizes a way to make it work, now that he’s not alone). The Wives and the last of the Many Mothers -- thanks to the direction of Eve Ensler (seriously) -- are actually given detectable interiorities and have discernible relationships with each other. Though the already sparse dialogue is cryptic and/or heightened, the direction and performances are strong enough to pick up their characterization. Nested in the banter between the wives is the standout line, “Not a necessary kill!” which immediately distinguishes the Wives’ vision for peace, antithetical to the merciless power they were raised under. This is further realized at the salt desert, when the Dag is skeptical of “snapping” people until the Keeper of the Seeds convinces her there had become no other way. In the Old World medicine bag, she reveals the seeds and life that their violence is protecting (automatically) out of self-defense, even if they retaliate first. The Vuvalini were a utopian separatist community that the spoiled Earth all but eradicated and forced into violence, renewed with glorious purpose by Furiosa’s cunning and Max’s madness.
The characters are allowed to interact and care for each other outside the compulsory Hollywood heterosexual matrix. Max and Furiosa are a defiant Thelma & Louise-styled team born out of necessity, taking the wheel from each other as required, carrying the other when they’re endangered. The closest thing we get to romance is the relationship between Nux and Capable, whose interactions (barring the kiss on the cheek that didn’t read erotic anyway) are decidedly caregiving. With her assured vision of a better future, she quiets his war-poisoned masculine martyr consciousness, saves him from meaningless self-destruction. Not once is dialogue wasted on the mechanizations of conventional love, which helps reveal a world where romance has become a superfluous device for heteropatriachal control. The whole world is already in Joe’s hands, thanks to his aquamonopoly. The only coupling required is to meet his possessive sexuality and tyrannical reproductive futurity. His highness is undone gradually as women’s bodies and his “property” within them begin to fight back and assume power.
Splendid’s pregnant stomach guarding her protector, mother’s milk to wash away blood, Furiosa’s engine-grease warpaint-eyeshadow, the milking mothers unleashing the torrent from the Citadel. Fury Road’s feminist imagery throughout reminded me of Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig -- a similarly dazzling and hallucinatory story of the screaming violence and collective power of women required to drag utopia out of dystopia. This is all very second-wave, essentialist-empowerment, which never feels anachronistic within the internal logic of Fury Road’s regressive/prophetic hyper-male-dominated world, which realizes the “full force” of sexual expression:
“The typical sexuality which is tacitly accepted remains deeply Freudian and essentialist: sexuality is an innate sui generis primary natural prepolotical unconditioned drive divided along the biological gender line, centering on heterosexual intercourse, that is, penile intromission, full actualization of which is repressed by civilization. Even if the sublimation aspect of this theory is rejected, or the reasons for the repression are seen to vary (for the survival of civilization or to maintain fascist control or to keep capitalism moving), sexual expression is implicitly seen as the expression of something that is to a significant extent pre-social and is socially denied its full force.” (MacKinnon)
Following the dominant assumption of sexuality’s pre-social immanence, Miller creates a Citadel arising from sexuality’s post-social (apocalyptic), and then constitutive, force as a central axis of political control. To overthrow the patriarch is to disrupt the sexual dynamics of the entire society is to revolutionize. Furiosa’s return does not signal reformation, but radical redistribution of resources and freedom from sexual slavery.
But why would she do that, Dad? Our revolutionary heroines combat a pregnant nation-body of white maleness, that, thanks to a visceral representation of abstract masculinity just as piercing and nuanced as the film’s manifold-feminist depiction of women, draws us closer to the warped world of Max.
This bizarre future is not nearly as unimaginable as it might be (we recognize the structures, the deadly repetitions of want and war). The immediacy of the viewer’s experience with the fallout in part hinges on the movie’s eerie projection of (male) power’s anachronistic/undying mechanizations onto a heightened post-apocalyptic landscape. With its pulp subversion of the classically (post-9/11) terrorist villain and superpatriarchal perversion of fatherhood, Fury Road undoes so much of the unreal realism of hypercapitalized reproductive futurist blockbusters like Age Of Ultron and Furious Seven (both of which made me cry, though).
Miller portrays an institutionalized terror that feels much more familiar, entrenched, and therefore menacing than the renegade individuals of most action blockbusters (especially ones centered on revenge). Here, the heroes seek revenge/redemption over and against The Powers That Be, unraveling the repetitive, forceful action of That Be.
The movie also relishes in the “petty family squabble” of its three ruling brothers, featuring some of the most absurd, disturbing relationships since Texas Chainsaw Massacre (which also, not unintentionally I think, had an all-male family). The People-eater from Gas Town is the bookkeeper, rendering capitalist desire a cannibalistic fetish so consuming he’s eaten himself into immobility. The Bullet-farmer from the Bullet Farm declares himself a judge, blinded and holding machine guns for scales, firing aimlessly with no regard for the Wives he’s supposed to be protecting. And Immortan Joe is the everyman-father refigured as godking warlord, your average Joe elevated to an absurd pinnacle of toxic masculinity. The close-up of his son Rictus Erectus applying his belt, where the skull sigil is seating over Joe’s groin, conveys the society’s fetishistic worship of male power.
The deification of Joe is the key to his power and overthrow, because once his mortality is proven, the oppressed of the Citadel have no reason to worship. Despite the War Boys’ fanaticism, they too recognize how they were controlled and that they have the ability to change the way things are (just as Nux was able to rework his shame and self-loathing into courage).
Let! Them! Up! The movie portrays the ethics of precarity as a revolutionary ethics that does not grieve the overthrown, but revalues and champions the oppressed, while refusing to propagandize individualism (as the music swells, Max’s most triumphant moment is a negation; he gives us the same turned back we’ve seen throughout the series). When Joe’s body is presented, the entire population of the Citadel participates in its revolution. The War Boys lift the elevator to raise the Vuvalini up, the milking mothers unleash the torrent from the Earth, the masses gather and are raised by the Wives onto the platform. The victory isn’t just personal redemption for Furiosa and the Wives and Max, it’s the uplift of the oppressed, which is a rare, special vision for a blockbuster.