oh no
OH NOO
It’s about a man running away from his better self, and his better self catches up to him. It’s about a man that is ‘apart from,’ at the beginning; he becomes a part *of* at the end. The premise of it was that what’s broken is healed by love only. So these are organizing ideas that underpin not only the story, but how it’s going to be made and produced. In trying to articulate them, eventually, even as far as production, those ideas began to subtly change the choices that were made about the story. Not so much the storyboards, but the actual way the movie was made, and therefore what might be in any one of those hundred and fifty thousand frames.“
…
“For the character of Max, we had a little slogan written above the Electro-board, which said, ‘Engage to heal,’ which means, as you become engaged, healing can happen, emotionally and spiritually.
The Art of Mad Max: Fury Road, regarding underlying themes and Max’s characterization (via superhumandisasters)
A War Rig Of One’s Own: A Very Long Post On Fury Road’s Feminism
[Better phrased portions of this are now part of a longer essay in Issue 31 of Bright Wall/Dark Room]
When Mad Max: Fury Road was finally released and critics collectively exploded, one of those booms sounded like a thousand people all shouting “FEMINISMMM” while doing a wheelie. And when I watched it, holy crap I agreed so hard it was like my heart had turned into a sun.
Since then, my love & respect for this movie and what it represents has only grown. Fury Road stands for an old form of movie-making, where action and the movement of real human bodies in front of a camera is what tells the story – a tradition that arguably reached its most glorious, shiny & chrome heights with my love Buster Keaton in the age of silent comedies. But Fury Road, it takes this old classic form and its old mythic hero Mad Max, and with them tells a story that’s socially progressive in content as well as form, and humanist down to its bones. It paints a terrible no-good future in brilliant color, saturated with whackadoodle detail as beautiful as it is perverse – but a world whose brokenness can be healed if we only recognize one another as equals, as people who ALL deserve respect. We are individuals possessed of heart & strength. We Are Not Things. And when we know that, and we support each other, we can save the world.
Inextricably from both its message and its method is this movie’s up-front feminism, and no one has been able to convince me otherwise. Because yes, people have tried. In the inevitable Tall Poppy backlash that emerged after the dust settled a bit, a fair number of women began to speak out against the idea of Fury Road as a feminist film. I genuinely think I’ve eaten up every single Mad Max article, interview, infographic, review, podcast, and thinkpiece that I’ve come across in the past month, and because I’m continually worried that my feminism isn’t good enough, I was eager for these critiques of Fury Road’s politics – dreading a light that might be shone into a dark corner I had missed, but preferring that to keeping my head buried in the bright orange sand.
However, instead of having my passion checked by Cold Ugly Truths, I’ve been baffled by some of the weirdest critical arguments I’ve ever heard. In fact, some of the negative points I have read & listened to, from respected female critics and journalists, honestly seem to be describing a different movie than the one I’ve watched. And I mean literally that: a movie with a different plot. How is that possible.
But I’m not here to devolve into a point-by-point analysis of things I’ve seen wrongly reported, or specific rebuttals to some suspiciously sexist arguments I’ve seen some critics make, because that would just be pedantic & huffy and just… not the track I want to take. Or at least not further than this.
What I actually want to do, the reason why I’m writing this monster of a post, is to celebrate an aspect of Fury Road’s feminism that I’ve yet to see talked about in much detail. Yes, this does run as a counter-point to the people arguing that this movie is barely feminist at all, but I want to make a positive argument as much as I can. I want to, hopefully, spotlight another thing we can talk about in our continuing (& so valuable) discussions of Fury Road’s gender politics: that this is a film where the female characters get not only a lion’s share of the narrative, but complete narrative arcs that are their OWN, independent of men.
Sound good? You bet it does. LET’S DELVE A BIT, shall we.
[Extra major spoilers for Mad Max: Fury Road to follow]