3 Brief Points on Mad Max: Fury Road

Three brief points on Mad Max: Fury Road:

• Joss Whedon, I understand, has something of a reputation as a feminist, but, never having watched Buffy or Firefly or Serenity, I know him primarily as one of several directors of superhero films: and whatever feminist reputation he has, he’s been coasting on it. Avengers 2 has two major emotional beats to make the characters — gods, supergeniuses, and professional killers — “relatable” to an audience not comprising same – the perfect house in the country with the perfect kids and the perfect wife, waiting Dorigen-like, while her husband adventures, and, then, the grand reveal of Black Widow, which is that upon her graduation from Assassin U, she was sterilized (for other opinions, see here for starters; edit, and then see this for more readings that I don’t agree with). This Focus on the Family, on its preservation and its loss, would fit neatly into any “real man, real family, do it all for your children and your wife” story. It’s garbage.

  Mad Max, BY CONTRAST (just in case you didn’t see this coming), focuses on the particular violence that women face, namely, a violence focused on their bodies and on the control of the future. Immortal Joe is immortal — he thinks, he hopes — because he controls his genetic line, his property, his self; and when the Imperator Furiosa¹ runs off with his brides, one of whom is visibly pregnant, Joe shouts something about RETURNING HIS PROPERTY. His wife; his child; his future; his property, “stolen” from him by an avenging woman. Here’s a film where the man who wants his kidnapped family back is the ENEMY. The great enemy of Mad Max is, then, the enemy of reproductive rights: now that, I’d say, is a feminist narrative.

  But also, as Nicole also observed last night, what about the Milk Maids? Why weren’t they rescued too?

• Each of the male heads of each citadel has his own infernal branding: the head of Bullettown wears a judge’s wig constructed from a packed bandolier, while the head of Gastown wears a black business suit, and complains quantitatively, like a capitalist, about the waste of resources in the hunt for Joe’s brood and breeders. If the capitalist master in Snowpiercer is sleek, a gadget-head, well-fed, cosmopolitan, and the head of a conspiracy, with everything arranged well in advance, the capitalist in Mad Max is a properly horrifying figure of the erotic core of capitalism, and of the corporeal excesses of biopolitics rather than the neatness of the sovereign: his suit has been cut out to expose his nipples, which he rubs often as he grouses about the hunt. Like the Wife of Bath, he knows that the trade in money and the trade in bodies is also a trade in desire. There’s nothing attractive here; it’s just attraction itself.
• Last point: on this (late) morning’s run, I suggested to Alison that Mad Max is a far superior film to Snowpiercer, and she pointed out the “I would have thought this was obvious” (her words) point, which is that Snowpiercer is at least organized around the rescue of a black child. Among the set of White Action Films, here we have one, at least, which argues that Black Lives Matter.

For further thoughts on feminism and Mad Max, see David Perry’s review here. And, edit, now also see Samuel Delany’s essential fb quick review.

^{1. (whose mixed-gender name may deserve its own unpacking [a point inspired by a comment on the need for Imperatrix Furiosa somewhere in this comment thread)↩}