I have always loved the post-apocalyptic genre of book or film for its speculation on how people will endure the collapse of society and how they will rebuild a new one amidst the ruins of the old world order. Yet problematic to the genre is its frequent collapse into a spectacle of violence, sanctioned by the scarcity of resources. Casual and brutal violence is routinely exchanged between characters as they compete for resources in the wastelands of the post-apocalyptic world. Consider the last season of AMC’s The Walking Dead in which Rick displayed little conscientious objections to violently overthrowing a fellow community in order to preserve what resources it provided. Even after the end of the world, the violent logic of capitalism endures proving that it is indeed “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Fury Road confronts this imaginative flaw within the genre through a feminist perspective while sustaining all the engrossing grotesquerie, madness and grit we adore post-apocalyptic worlds for.
The villain, Immortan Joe hordes the precious resource of water and enslaves people to serve his will. Men either serve as industrial laborers are indoctrinated into his person War Boy cult, believing that a violent and glorious death will send them to Valhalla while women are raped to provide him with offspring or are milked like livestock for their “mother’s milk.” This is society stripped bare of humanity, reduced to the lust for power and driven by the fear of starvation; be it from lack of food, water, or meaningful death. This is a hyper-masculine, hyper-capitalist society of the post-apocalypse if there ever was one, where everyone is dehumanized into a resource within the economy of scarcity: women are reduced to their breasts and wombs, men into blood and hired muscle. Even Tom Hardy’s Max, the expected hero of the film, is a mere “blood bag” for a good portion of the film; he lives only to sustain the War Boys on their mad chase after Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa into the desert wastes. As Tom Hardy’s Max narrates, he is “a man reduced to a single instinct: survival.” Quite the emasculated, deconstruction of the hero we expect from the genre.
Furiosa, however, is not here reduced to Max’s romantic (sexual) object of interest, as are female characters in action-oriented genres, but she is his equal and the central protagonist of the film. Max is positioned in the literal passenger seat of the narrative, frequently dependent upon Furiosa for his survival and subservient to her command, as she drives them onward towards salvation and redemption. Not since Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley have we seen a female character with this much presence and power on display in a male dominated genre of film. Of Joe’s emancipated brides, a few stand out. She is literally taking on the patriarchy of Immortan Joe: seeking to liberate his breeder-brides and return them to her own lost matriarchal band, the Vulvani. Together they hope to defeat Immortan Joe and take his Citadel for themselves, sharing its resources openly and hoping to plant the seeds, literal and metaphorical, for a more peaceful and prosperous future. Subtle, this movie is not. But the end of the world rarely is.
Yet it appears that the idea that water is a human right, women are more than resources, and are just as self-sufficient and driven as men is too controversial for some. Aaron Clarey, writing for MRA blog Return of Kings in a post titled “Why You Should Not Go See ‘Mad Max: Feminist Road'” says he “ fears that male viewers of the film will be “duped by explosions, fire tornadoes, and desert raiders into seeing what is guaranteed to be nothing more than feminist propaganda, while at the same time being insulted AND tricked into viewing a piece of American culture ruined and rewritten right in front of their very eyes.” Never mind that Mad Max is an Australian franchise. Men’s Right Activists aren’t known for the concern for honesty. Clarey is convinced that this film is “the vehicle by which [Hollywood] are guaranteed to force a lecture on feminism down your throat. This is the Trojan Horse feminists and Hollywood leftists will use to (vainly) insists on the trope women are equal to men in all things, including physique, strength and logic. And this is the subterfuge they will use to blur the lines between masculinity and femininity, further ruining women for men, and men for women.” The feminism of Fury Road will not undermine anyone's capacity to enjoy the other sex, but it will make explicit that women's enjoyment of men is not synonymous with men enjoying women as mere things.
Ironically, Clarey’s anxiety over the emasculation of his beloved franchise necessitates the belittlement of men. Men, Clarey warns, will be “duped” by the spectacle of violence, apparently too dim-witted to pick up on the message of the film; a film franchise which George Miller has apparently ruined through the apparent betrayal of his own masculinity. Clarey ignores that it is Miller’s own franchise. Apparently men only have agency insofar as that agency is only devoted to the cause of “heterosexual, masculine men.” Otherwise, they are fraternal traitors. In order to sustain the ill-conceived illusion that men are simultaneously superior to women, yet threatened by feminist films, the MRA movement reduces men to a pathetic caricature of itself. Fury Road is aware of this contradiction inherent in patriarchy and critiques it throughout the film. Patriarchy promises masculine empowerment but actually confines men to cycles of self-destructive violence. Like Immortan Joe’s army of War Boys (War boys, not men), who crave immortality through a violent vehicular death, Clarey and fellow MRAs sacrifice their own integrity for the illusion of victory.
The complaint that the film is an exercise in feminist propaganda is misleading because it depicts feminism as an ideology foreign, if not incompatible, with the genre and as a narrative we must be seduced into. The status quo of patriarchy which is pervasive in media, especially in the action oriented genres of science fiction and fantasy, needs no propaganda for its ideology. Or rather, since every form of media is an ideologically constrained representation of reality, it is dishonest to qualify some as propaganda or others as not. Fury Road, sans Furiosa and her rebellious and revolutionary feminism, would be just as propagandistic as actual film with her in it; albeit many would fail to recognize this since they assume that men are entitled to the genre more than women much as it is believed that men are entitled to most everything before women. Critics are even less entitled to this complaint given that the film genre is fantastical, not historical. Of course it is not realistic, since the assumed reality of patriarchy is the problem. When an ideology is so entrenched in one's understanding of reality, it may take the exaggerated proportions of fantasy to provide an effect critique of that ideological content. Thankfully the apocalypse of Fury Road has not yet times occurred. But if men are unwilling to confront the violence of patriarchy in the way the film does, the end may eventually come. As one character in the film rhetorically asks: “Who killed the world?” we can only answer: men. If society is a patriarchy, then the apocalyptic collapse of the world belongs to revolutionary feminists, not reactionary misogynists.
This article is also available at A Feast For Nerds
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