okay after a few days to chew on it i think here's what made me so deeply, resentfully uncomfortable about furiosa's long hair: it was a normative signifier. it broke the fourth wall, it broke the immersion, it broke the world she actually inhabited, in order to signal to US IN THE AUDIENCE that our culture's concept of womanhood was normal, correct, and relevant.
like, furiosa kept exiting these explicitly female positions-- she was taken from the green place, she rejected her position as dementus's daughter, and she escaped the immortan's harem. but again and again her long hair didn't mark the passage of time so much as it marked her AS A WOMAN, as a woman recognizable to us, as a girl, as a cisgender, heterosexual woman just trying to survive the expected cruelty's of man's world. it was meant to keep categorizing her as female in a way we all understand. long hair = girl, despite how dementus and the immortan also maintain long hair. unlike the men, though, her hair wasn't meant to be a symbol of power or freedom or even savagery, just that she was still a woman.
and i think that really bothers me because there was this whole time where, to survive, she became a boy, she lived as a boy, she didn't talk so no one would hear her voice, and whether or not she was masquerading as male or genuinely fluidly taking on a new gender in that life stage, she still somehow for some reason cultivated long and flowing hair, so at a dramatic moment we the viewers get the confirmation that yes she's certainly a beautiful woman, not a boy. she has a gender and it's our kind of gender! the normal kind! just your regular tough but beautiful woman's gender situation!
it bugs me. the furiosa of fury road, with her shaved head and powerfully confrontational violence, occupies a deliberately obscure gender space. she's got female pronouns but is macho as hell, she moves and acts and commands as a part of this intensely patriarchal structure, she's the exception that proves the immortan's rule, she embodies a ton of contradictions without explanation or apology.
a long haired furiosa feels like that apology. here's a furiosa that's younger, prettier, more reassuring, less confusing. here's a gender situation you can recognize: here's what women are and here's what men are! you already know this one!
here's a woman who takes power and commits violence without asking us any questions about how artificial, contextual, and permeable the laws of gender actually are. she's pretty even as she kills men, because she's not a man, because women aren't men, because women are beautiful. because women are for looking at and liking what you see. because what's the point of a woman you don't want to see?
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