So, I am almost 5 years late to the party, but the one thing I can’t stop thinking about (that’s a lie, there’s at least 5) is when Nux kissed Capable’s cheek.
Like, I just slumped back in my chair and went damn.
The movie definitely deals with theme of humanity in various ways. Reclaiming your right to be your own person, as the wives do. Trying to reclaim what has been taken from you, like your home and independence, and how to deal with the times when there is nothing to reclaim and you have to keep on fighting.
And definitely, reclaiming humanity.
Both Max and Nux (I could comment on the name parallels here) start feral and crazed, focused only on their own goals - survival and glory, because survival is never a possibility for Nux.
Names play a huge role in portrayal of this. Max, who got rid of his muzzle and started talking more, is asked what his name is. He asks if it matters. He doesn’t think of himself as a man, doesn’t think of him as something permanent and tethered. Furiosa ‘names’ him anyway. (Interesting to note that Furiosa has obviously kept her name all the way through her 7000+ day journey.) And there’s this soft, surprised if a little amused look on his face - Really? But he has been named and taken out of the rabid, impersonal soup he’s been slowly struggling out of. He tells his own name in perhaps most explicitly tender moment in the film, trying to tether her to him, to life, bringing himself fully as a person in the narrative, going you ‘named’ me, now know my name and be here.
Similarly, Capable asks Nux for his name (at which point, he becomes a ‘party’ member) and he reveals both it and that he has named both his tumors. A small act revealing very human need to ‘befriend’ the inevitable so it’d be less scary, showing his want for companionship. If they have names, he can argue with them and not be ‘alone’.
Which, in a way, brings me back to the cheek kiss.
We don’t learn much about Citadel. But it doesn’t seem like a warm place of affection. We only briefly see families, a faint imprint against the cruelty of all the women kept for breeding.
So, this simple gesture, it’s overwhelmingly human in the way this softness, gentleness transcends everything, how it’s something we as humans find in us. Did Nux ever witness a cheek kiss in his family or someone else’s, amid all the awfulness that’s Citadel? It’s not sexual, it’s merely affection, appreciation. And if no one taught him that, it was still in him. In his journey to reclaim his own humanity. And it’s so very soft, warm and human.
I am still not dealing with fact there wasn’t even a brief hand touch for their good byes.
