Adventures of a Cultural Omnivore: 2015

Each December, I try to put up a post on the best media I encountered throughout the year. This year, my omnivorous appetite for culture concentrated on music more than anything, but I did all right in other categories as well.

 

Books

I didn’t neglect fantasy (George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire) or science fiction (Warhammer 40K), but as usual, the classics made the biggest impression. Joseph Conrad’s portrayal of the British Empire in Heart of Darkness connected in my mind with W.E.B. Du Bois’s comments on colonialism and racism in “The Souls of White Folk,” and I almost got around to a whole series of posts on it (previous post). Honorable mentions would include Franz Kafka’s The Trial, for its absurdist take on the workings of bureaucracy, and Hemingway’s Men Without Women. Every time I read Hemingway, I wonder why, if he had such an impact on English style, more authors don’t write like he did.

 

Comics

I would recommend He-Man and the Masters of the Universe from DC Comics to anyone who enjoys fantasy, and I would highly recommend Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham’s run on Miracleman from the Nineties, now being brought to digital format by Marvel. However, nothing could top Ms. Marvel this year.

Kamala Khan is a Pakistani-American high school girl and a Muslim. After a weird gas gives her the ability to stretch her body, she starts fighting Jersey City’s bad guys and, completely without permission, adopts the name Ms. Marvel, which once belonged to her idol Carol Danvers, currently known as Captain Marvel. For her costume, she redesigns a burkini.

 

 

Kamala gained a lot of press as DC’s first Muslim character with her own title, and her cultural and ethnic background is important, but she’s also just a high school girl running the teenage gauntlet and trying to figure out who she wants to be--and it isn’t anybody but herself. She doesn’t have her parents’ roots in Pakistani culture, she isn’t as religious as her brother, and she isn’t like the other kids at her typical American school either. She has squabbles with peers and falls in and out of love and is painfully self-conscious and unsure of herself.

Literature is full of cookie-cutter caricatures along those lines, but writer G. Willow Wilson brings Kamala to life in ways that resonate across cultural and generational divides, and Adrian Alphona’s art is unique, effective, and frequently hilarious. Together, the two serve up everything from typical superhero exploits to tear-jerking drama--and at least one moment among the most powerful I’ve ever read.

Early in Volume 1, Kamala’s powers are fluctuating wildly and she suddenly finds she has transformed to look exactly like her hero Captain Marvel, a classic buxom blond beauty whom Kamala sees as perfect. But a mere 23 pages into the series, I had already come to understand and care about Kamala so strongly that I only wanted her to be who she is--a short, sometimes clumsy brown-skinned girl with unruly black hair. That’s part of her beauty, and watching her turn white felt wrong, wrong, wrong.

 

 

I was so impressed by Kamala Khan, and have been so unimpressed with most of the 2016 presidential candidates, that I even whipped up a couple memes featuring her. Nothing mind-blowing, but feel free to share:

 

I love it when she embiggens her fists:

 

Movies

Early in the year, I continued a stretch of films from director Jean-Luc Godard. Then after my son started leaving the house each day for kindergarten, I was actually able to hit the movie theater every now and then! Spectre and Star Wars: The Force Awakens were both excellent, but it was Mad Max: Fury Road that inspired me most. The result was a series of blog posts examining the movie from the perspectives of feminism, Christian myth, and Marxism:

     Mad Max Feminista

     Jennifer Blood Feminista
     Mad Max: Of Hawks and Doves
     Mad Max: Out of Eden
     Mad Marx: Frederick Road

 

Television

I also found the time--I have no idea how--to watch more TV this year. Penny Dreadful and Outlander were entertaining, while Supergirl was just the fluff I was looking for. The show has problems, but Melissa Benoist isn’t one of them. She’s fairly wonderful, and watching her deal with her life as Kara Danvers is one of the highlights of the series. Meanwhile, Game of Thrones continues to engross and Syfy appears to have a quality space opera in The Expanse. However, Mad Men really was the best show on television, and the question needs to be asked: Has there ever been a better show on television?

 

Video Games

The only video game I played this year, aside from a little Relic Run (Tomb Raider) on my iPhone, was Silent Hill: Downpour. I felt like it was a return to form for home console games in the series, after Homecoming was so bad GameStop salespersons encouraged me not to buy it. I should have listened. Downpour doesn’t try to break or even bend the template for Silent Hill, it just tries to get it right and succeeds.

 

Music

This year, I learned that scores of bands I’ve never heard of are pumping out some incredible metal: Barren Earth, Khemmis, My Dying Bride, Tribulation, Krisiun, Avatarium, Sylosis, Sulphur Aeon. However, the bands that really struck a chord with me this year lay in a completely different direction. One was Siouxsie and the Banshees. I can’t believe I didn’t discover them earlier. They belong in the company of alternative music greats like U2, R.E.M. and The Cure, and you may put “Night Shift” on my list of coolest songs ever:

 

Then one morning I put on some Jefferson Airplane and Grace Slick’s voice in “Somebody to Love” electrified me. Of course I’d heard the song countless times, but this time I really heard it. Now Jefferson Airplane is an obsession. I’m still just wading in, but the water promises to get deep as I explore more of their music and the movement out of San Francisco that they were a part of:

 

And there you have my favorites from 2015. Let me know yours. This cultural omnivore is always looking for something else to eat.

 

Related posts:

Twilight of the Cultural Omnivores
Best in Comics 2014
Best in Music 2014
Best of Books 2014
Best in Movies, Video Games, Comics 2013
Best in Music 2013
Best in Books 2013

Mad Marx: Frederick Road (5/5)

Note: This is the final post in a series analyzing Mad Max: Fury Road. Links to previous posts can be found at the bottom of this one.

One of my favorite lines in Mad Max: Fury Road comes when The Dag says that because the dictator Immortan Joe owns all the water at the Citadel, he owns everyone who lives there. This speaks to the Marxist in me (previous post), so I can’t refrain from taking a closer look.

 

Class Struggle

When, deep in the desert, a ragtag band of escapees from the Citadel finds their green paradise has succumbed to the desert, Max suggests they go back and seize the Citadel:

The Vuvalini: What's there to find at the Citadel?

Max: Green.

Toast the Knowing: And water. There's a ridiculous amount of clear water. And a lot of crops.

The Dag: It's got everything you need, as long as you're not afraid of heights.

Keeper of the Seeds: Where does the water come from?

Toast: He pumps it up from deep within the earth. He calls it "Aqua Cola" and claims it all for himself.
The Dag: And because he owns it, he owns all of us.
Keeper: I don't like him already.

In Marxist theory, every society throughout history has been divided into oppressors and oppressed. Ancient Rome had its patricians and plebeians, and the Middle Ages had its lords and serfs. In Marx’s day, the masters were the bourgeoisie and the slaves were the proletariat. The bourgeoisie owed their status to being capitalists--those who possessed the means of production. Proletarians had nothing but their labor, so they worked for the capitalists. Marx predicted that one day the proletariat would revolt, resulting in a society in which the means of production are owned by all and used for the equal good of all.

In Fury Road, the oppressors are Immortan Joe and those who appear on the Citadel balcony with him. It is they who possess and control the water. The oppressed are everyone else who must work or beg for water from Immortan Joe. They are the haves and have-nots in George Miller’s post-apocalyptic vision. Since water is necessary for life and the have-nots have none, their lives are no more their own than a factory worker’s life was his or her own in Marx’s day. In our own day, the 99% are slave to the 1%’s dollar and generally grateful for the opportunity, for the oppressed must always rely on their oppressors for what little they have.

In “The German Ideology,” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels explain how material circumstances such as the division of labor give rise to inequitable social divisions supported by a superstructure of religion, philosophy, ethics, etc. The oppressed exploit this situation to preserve their own status, and because material circumstances and superstructure (diagram) are a kind of matrix within which everyone exists, even the oppressed accept the status quo. One of the most depressing observations of the Marxists in the Frankfurt School was how even criticism of the status quo is often carried out according to the paradigms of the status quo. Thus, the status quo always wins (previous post).

From “The German Ideology”:

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”

Immortan Joe, like any good oppressor, plies ideology. Early in the film, he briefly opens his aquifer, raining water upon the people who have gathered to catch it in tin cups, earthen bowls and open mouths. Within moments, he cuts off the flow and declares:

“Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!“

In other words, “Trust me, you’re better off this way.” The oppressor always tells the oppressed this. The Nazis hung signs reading “Work makes you free” at the entrances to concentration camps. Christianity teaches that “the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10) and “blessed are the meek” (Matthew 5:5). In America, we learn as schoolchildren that while capitalism does result in economic inequality, it is the best way to ensure a rising standard of living for more people. Despite the obvious falsehood--American society exhibits rising income and wealth inequality, stagnant wages coupled with increasing prices, a shrinking middle class, and swelling ranks of the poor--few today, even those who still claim the labels Marxist, communist or socialist, can see a way to seriously undermine the system.

 

Division of Labor and Commodification

The film holds much more that makes Marxism an incisive interpretive tool. For example, the division of labor in Fury Road is stark, with some serving solely as soldiers while others are mere child-bearers and milk producers. We also see a military general, an accountant, a medic, slaves and the work of agriculturists. Any film’s characters would have professions, but not any film would show with such clarity how their fortunes in society and their worldviews stem from their professions.

According to “The German Ideology,” division of labor and specialization result in a work force of people who feel alienated from their own major lifetime activity and its produce. Once upon a time, a mason, for example, was privy to a craft and accompanying secrets that bound him to his work, made him special, and rewarded his effort. By contrast, the unskilled laborers that so concerned Marx could do little more than perform a narrow band of rote tasks and were therefore expendable and replaceable by just about anybody. In today’s world, most workers, skilled or not, are of no value whatsoever when the company’s profits or a superior’s own job are on the line. This takes a psychological toll on workers, separates them from their own lives, and makes them less than a whole person:

“ . . . man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape.”

Fury Road illustrates this wonderfully. The War Boys are little more than living weapons, showing slight emotional depth beyond the desire to kill for their lord. The Mothers, in order to produce their milk, have lives restricted to a cell and connected to machines. And is it reaching too far to say that Imperator Furiosa symbolizes this, having lost her arm in service to Joe?
 
Commodification is another Marxist theme detectable in Fury Road. In Marxist theory, the forms of economic intercourse in any given epoch greatly influence how people treat each other. Commodification describes how we treat other people in these modern times. We treat each other like things from which we derive profit or suffer loss, rather than as the rich individuals we actually are. In this light, the Wives’ message “WE ARE NOT THINGS” holds import beyond that of a feminist declaration.

I have discussed the feminist slant in Fury Road in previous posts, and even this theme works synergistically with a Marxist critique, for radical thinkers have long connected patriarchy and capitalism. This, however, is something about which I know too little, so I end this series of posts here, feeling as if, despite the film’s minimalism, I have barely scratched the surface of Mad Max: Fury Road.

Previous posts in this series:

Mad Max Feminista (1/5)

Jennifer Blood Feminista (2/5)

Mad Max: Of Hawks and Doves (3/5)

Mad Max: Out of Eden (4/5)

Have a Holly Jolly (and Consumerist yet Discerning) Christmas

 

These days, we’re all savvy and jaded enough to see through the misdirection of television commercials. Nonetheless, a passage about advertising in the following video caught my attention. The video is part of a series called The School of Life and summarizes the thought of Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno. It covers a lot of ground, but it isn’t long. I recommend watching the whole thing, but watch for the bit about advertising, which begins at 4:10.

 

Here's the part that jumped out at me:

“When they’re trying to sell us something, advertisers show us the thing that we really want and then connect it to something we don’t actually need. So we can see an advert showing a group of friends walking on a beach chatting amiably or a family having a picnic and laughing warmly together. These adverts show us these things because they know we crave community and connection, but the industrial economy prefers to keep us lonely and consuming, so at the end of the adverts, we’ll be urged to buy some 25-year-old whiskey or a car so powerful that no road would ever let us legally drive it at top speed.”

Advertisements do many things and one of the things they do is show us something we need in our innermost being in order to sell us something that we don’t need. Coming up with examples is easy, especially in this season when every business and corporation this side of the Industrial Revolution is trying to cash in on Christmas and financial news reports constantly tell us it is our duty to shop in order to drive up holiday sales.

Consider this Coca-Cola commercial:

 

This advertisement is full of much that we all want and need. The words kindness and joy appear in written form. We see young couples holding hands, children playing, families bonding and friends smiling. Everyone looks physically fit. A red balloon takes flight from a vending machine and drifts over a quaint plaza. Christmas gifts fall into strangers’ hands, thereby linking disparate lives against the alienating forces of modern life. The community comes together and marvels, and we are encouraged to share that old Platonic concept the Good.

Which one of us does not want such communion with our fellows? Who would pass up a chance to fall in love again? Which one of us would not like to exude such physical and spiritual well-being? Who among us does not hunger to reclaim the sense of magic we held in our youth? Who would not like to rise like the Charioteer in Plato’s Phaedrus commanding his winged steeds to climb ever higher, leaving the earth below to see with clarity the Forms and even the light of the Good?

Coca-Cola’s marketers show us these things because we need them. And they do this to sell us something no one needs: a carbonated soft drink.

Philosopher Slavoj Zizek talks about Coca-Cola in the documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012):

 

For Zizek, when Coca-Cola offers us “The Real Thing,” it is offering to give us l’objet petit a, the object cause of desire described in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. The objet petit a is what we think we want, but it doesn’t really exist, so we forever circle but never grasp it. You may think you want that new car, promotion or paramour, but once you have it, are you sated? Of course not. The object cause of desire switches to something else, so you stay driven, struggling for satisfaction that, due to the makeup of our psyche, is impossible.

Pringles is so sly that its classic advertising slogan explicitly states this, keeping the objet petit a in a cycle focused solely on its own product, from chip to chip: Once you pop, you can’t stop.

But are all advertisements merely a satisfying spin on a product that ultimately provides little satisfaction? Isn’t it possible that a product satisfies what its advertisements promise? Here’s a recent commercial for the video game Star Wars Battlefront:

 

Open with palpable estrangement: a man sits bored at his desk dreaming of his childhood. Once upon a time, he and his buddy drew pictures of their action figures, they had lightsaber battles with flashlights, and they dressed up as Star Wars characters for Halloween. Those were the days . . . Then suddenly his buddy shows up in an X-Wing, he busts out of his office, boards his own fighter with its own astromech copilot (R2D2 no less!), and goes to take out some Imperial AT-ATs.

At first, this appears to be no more substantial than the Coca-Cola commercial. On that reading, this commercial offers what you really want--friendship, adventure, a sense of purpose and fulfillment--while actually offering you cheap entertainment.

But wait!

In today’s world, a video game can actually be the medium through which people connect. Through online and cooperative missions, Star Wars Battlefront allows players to meet and play with strangers, or play together with your favorite mop-headed childhood buddy. And while the adventures are all virtual, this has always been the nature of storytelling and takes nothing away from the magic. Star Wars and other franchises are no less inspiring to many than the plays of Euripides once were to Athenians, or Beowulf to the Anglo-Saxons. Star Wars Battlefront isn’t exactly necessary, but it has the potential to facilitate some things we truly need.

I’m more skeptical that a can of Coca-Cola can be as successful at slaking spiritual thirst, but perhaps I’m being too harsh. How many cans of Mr. Pibb have I enjoyed with friends over tabletop RPGs, sharing laughs and having a hell of a time? The beverage was a part of that, a part of our subculture, our fraternity.

As usual, I see the value in multiple perspectives, but that can be a good thing. I guarantee you will watch television this Christmas season, see the same commercials over and over until you want to start chucking nutcracker soldiers at the screen, and spend too much money on crap for yourself and others. In today’s world, you can’t help but be a consumer, which is to say a stooge to the boob tube, but you can also remember to check yourself, see through the haze of price tags and twinkling lights, and seek a holiday experience that holds something more authentic.

 

When the World Loses a Voice

 

"The world was losing its voices—the ones that mattered anyway."

 When I heard that rock singer Scott Weiland had been found dead on his tour bus, I immediately thought of the above line from a short story I wrote on the day Norman Mailer died. Weiland’s cause of death was cardiac arrest. He was 48.

Like many music lovers, I was thrilled when pop music began to give way to alternative music, especially grunge, in the early Nineties, and the band Scott Weiland fronted was an important part of that movement. The first song by Stone Temple Pilots that I remember hearing was “Plush” (1993). It showcased Weiland’s throaty vocals and was one of a string of hits I would hear countless times on local alternative radio stations in the years to come.

 

Weiland’s voice was one that established a place in my life. Soon after STP’s sophomore album Purple (1994) came out, a friend and I ducked out of a church sleepover--after a day of tearing down houses destroyed by flooding--to go see STP at the state fair. Those were the days when they would bring out a couch, rocking chair, side table and lamp for a cozy acoustic set midway through the show. Laid-back. Stripped down. Just chilling. This was part of the zeitgeist.

And it was exquisite.

Not long before, the world had lost another one of its voices when Kurt Cobain committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a shotgun. I was sitting with friends in a college lounge when another friend (the guitarist in a band for which I tried to and occasionally succeeded at playing drums) came in and told us the news. We were all shocked, but Cobain had been a personal hero for him, so he took it the hardest.

It’s a moment I’ll never forget, just like I’ll never forget the first time I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” In my corner of the world, Nirvana had yet to break when the song was released in 1991, but MTV had a late-night program which I remember showing videos for The Posies, Frank Black and others, many of whom would soon be eclipsed in the public eye by bands like Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana.

It was on this program that I first heard and saw the video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and it resonated with a rebellious streak in me. My high school’s dances were quaint affairs in the gym, with oldies like “Unchained Melody” by The Righteous Brothers getting the couples out on the floor. Good memories, but “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” with its fuzzy guitars, banging drums, mumbled lyrics, smoky atmosphere, creepy janitor and anarchy cheerleaders delivered a subversive thrill.

Cobain may have mumbled many of his lyrics as if he didn’t give a fuck, but as his life and death showed, he gave too much of one, something which I suspect was also true of another tragic hero from those days. Alice in Chains is probably my favorite of the bands I’m mentioning in this post, so it was lead singer Lane Staley’s death by drug overdose in 2002 that most deeply affected me. By then, I was a working adult and felt like an important piece of my youth had chipped and fallen away.

Staley’s voice had been with me since I had picked up Facelift (1990) on cassette from the local music hole-in-the-wall one day while out trekking around town with a friend. Soon after, AIC played second to last on the main stage at Lollapalooza (previous post). The band was just beginning to perform songs from its second studio album Dirt (1992). On the heavier songs, sweaty masses seethed on the hill behind where I sat with a couple friends, and a constant barrage of tossed bottles and other refuse arced back and forth overhead.

The point of these recollections is that Cobain, Stayley and Weiland were a part of my life, and depending on your music tastes, may have been an important part of yours, too. That’s why their deaths affect us so much and we offer tributes to them on social media, even though we know their lifestyles were often less than model.

 

Weiland’s troubles with alcohol and drugs, and his shaky relationships with bandmates, are well documented. His family life was also troubled. Immediately after his death, his ex-wife Mary Forsberg Weiland wrote a piece for Rolling Stone cautioning against glorifying his death:

"In reality, what you [the fans] didn't want to acknowledge was a paranoid man who couldn't remember his own lyrics and who was only photographed with his children a handful of times in 15 years of fatherhood."

Nonetheless, glorify we will. We will celebrate troubled artists in all fields--Jack Kerouac and David Foster Wallace, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Marilyn Monroe and Heath Ledger, Amy Winehouse and Scott Weiland. But hopefully we will celebrate them not as saints but as flawed individuals who brought beauty into the world, a beauty that entered our lives.

So, when the world loses voices that you love, post R.I.P. messages on social media, buy a T-shirt, download an album, or find some other way to pay tribute--for you celebrate your own life as well as theirs.

 

Mad Max: Out of Eden (4/5)

Note: This is Part 4 in a projected five-part series analyzing Mad Max: Fury Road. Links to previous posts can be found at the bottom of this one.

 

Interpretation often involves using different lenses, not only to highlight present features but also to give a tone to the subject. For this post on Mad Max: Fury Road, I’m going to use a biblical lens: the Christian myth of fall and redemption.

 

Out of Eden

The tale of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden begins a scriptural cycle that relates the fall of man. Once, man and woman lived in paradise. They were near God and knew no shame or suffering. The only act forbidden them was eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but they--of course--do exactly that, causing their creator to cast them out, consigning them to a life of tribulation. Man must sweat for his bread. Woman must suffer in childbirth. Never again shall either know the bliss from whence they came. (Genesis 2:8-3:24)

The opening narration of Fury Road raises this theme:

My name is Max. My world is fire and blood. Once, I was a cop, a road warrior searching for a righteous cause. As the world fell, each of us in our own way was broken. It was hard to know who was more crazy: me or everyone else.

The fall in the world of Mad Max is one of ecological disaster brought on by war. In the first film, the old world--a green one where people enjoyed domestic bliss and a relatively orderly society--is still visible.  It is gone by the second film, and by Fury Road, so estranged are the characters from plant life that the War Boy called Nux refers to a tree as “that thing over there.” Yet many characters still yearn to return to the world before the fall. In Fury Road, Imperator Furiosa tells the Wives that she will take them to “the green place.” Alas, she finds this paradise--one endangered in our own world--no longer exists.

The Book of Genesis has no shortage of tales blaming humanity for its own problems. Consider the story of Cain and Abel, which I also detect in--overlay onto?--Fury Road. Cain was a sheepherder and his brother Abel was a tiller of the soil. Cain was angry when God showed respect for Abel’s offering but dissed his own, so he slew his brother and lied about it to God. For this, God punished him. Turning to the KJV, because it always sounds the coolest, we find the following:

And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand; When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth. (Genesis 4: 9-12)

Just as Cain killed out of envy, so the powers of the earth in Mad Max warred over natural resources. Furthermore, Cain and his descendants, like those who have inherited the sands in the film, are cursed to a life coaxed from barren soil. Cain’s progeny are forced to wander, like the scavengers in Mad Max who cruise for a bite to eat, a quart of fuel, a piece of flesh.

Further along the downward spiral of human being, Genesis tells of the Tower of Babel. Humankind, in its vanity, sought to erect a structure that would reach to Heaven. For this presumption, the Almighty declared he would “confound the language of all the earth.” No longer able to communicate, the children of men gave up their endeavor and scattered to the four corners of the earth. (Genesis 11:1-9)

While almost everyone speaks English in Mad Max, the Buzzards in Fury Road speak Russian, Latin pops up here and there, and the War Boys have developed their own, sometimes unintelligible, slang. And who, having seen Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, can forget the curious speech of the Lost Tribe? As Mad Max’s world continues to spin, its denizens will continue to wander, they will further group by language, and new lingos will evolve.

 

Back to Eden

Could, however, the way through be the only way out of this post-apocalyptic nightmare?

Christian theology teaches that while suffering may seem to discount the existence of a benevolent and all-powerful deity (previous post), God has a plan. In the end, all of creation will be redeemed through the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. I haven’t gone digging through the Mad Max films for Christ-like figures--novelists and screenwriters love those, so they may be there--but personal redemption is a clear theme of the series.

Max Rockatansky’s struggle for redemption runs through all the films. He begins the series as a highway officer in the Main Force Patrol. He fights crime by day but at night goes home to a wife and child. When highway marauders kill his family, he blames himself--in his words, he is “haunted by those he could not protect”--and falls into madness as the world crumbles around him.

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome both hold out the hope that Max will recover his humanity, but at the beginning of Fury Road, he has gone feral. His hair and beard are long, he’s filthy, he stomps on a lizard and jams it in his mouth. For most of the film, he barely speaks, and when he does, his speech is clipped and broken. It’s as if he’s forgotten how to speak, how to connect with other human beings.

Furiosa is another character seeking redemption. We know because she says so:

 

She cannot have risen to drive a War Rig for the despot Immortan Joe without having committed some unsavory acts along the way. The movie tells us little other than that her soul is in a bad way, and she sees helping Joe’s Wives escape as a means of atonement.

Later, as the heroes discuss taking over the Citadel where Immortan Joe rules, Max raises redemption again:

Keeper of the Seeds: I like this plan. We could start again, just like the old days!

Max: Look, it'll be a hard day. But I guarantee you that a hundred and sixty days’ ride that way, there's nothing but salt. At least that way we might be able to . . . together . . . come across some kind of redemption. 

Turning the Citadel into a new home, where there is water, agriculture and safety, would mean redemption for Furiosa and Max--and a return to humanity’s Edenic origin. The very scene of Furiosa’s shame, Max’s imprisonment, and the Wives’ hell of rape and forced impregnation would be transformed into the closest thing to Heaven. And where, in Christian teaching, is the Kingdom of Heaven established?

On earth, of course--the erstwhile den of sin. (Revelation 21:1-4)

Personal redemption is one thing, but does director George Miller have plans for his entire creation? Does he have a way to reverse what nuclear war and environmental collapse have wrought? A way to remove all that sand or at least push it back? A way to fill the seas with water? To bring forth fruit from the earth? To gather the scattered human race back into civilization?

I don’t know, and I’m not sure I’d be interested in that story. Everybody knows that what happens between birth and death--between Fall and final Grace--is where life happens. That’s where it all goes down and you either face it . . . or go mad.

I love connections between different canons, but am I discovering what is in the text or am I putting it there? As my citations from the movie illustrate, Fury Road leaves no room for doubt on some of these points. I suspect, however, that I have also colored the material with the tint of my lens, and it wouldn’t surprise me if readers have thought at times along the way, “He’s totally forcing that into the movie!”

But that doesn’t matter. We can only access a text--a book, a painting, an sci-fi film--through our experience of it, and experience requires both object and subject. Both bring something to the table, and the play between them is the stuff of interpretation.

 

Previous posts in this series:

Mad Max Feminista (1/5)
Jennifer Blood Feminista (2/5)
Mad Max: Of Hawks and Doves (3/5)

 





 

Mad Max: Of Hawks and Doves (3/5)

Note: This is Part 3 in a projected five-part series analyzing Mad Max: Fury Road. Links to previous posts can be found at the bottom of this one. The first three posts deal heavily with feminism, while Parts 5 and 6 will explore other topics.

When I wrote my first two posts on Mad Max: Fury Road and feminism, I was too easy on Feminist Frequency founder Anita Sarkeesian for saying the film is not feminist. Upon a second viewing, the feminist message in Fury Road is even more obvious. However, rather than list all the evidence for this, I would like to focus on the contrast between men as warlike and women as peaceful that runs through the film.

The villain Immortan Joe keeps young women prisoner in a giant safe. They are known as the Wives and serve as breeders for his children. By now, anyone who has seen the movie or paid attention to the buzz knows that when they escape they leave behind the message “WE ARE NOT THINGS.” With the Blu-Ray to pause, I was struck by the other messages that appear briefly: “WHO KILLED THE WORLD?” and “OUR BABIES WILL NOT BE WARLORDS.”

Both of these messages point to men as responsible for war--and this has been a recurring theme in real-world feminism over the years. The world of Mad Max is a post-apocalyptic one, and Fury Road tells us the world died due to wars, most likely nuclear, over resources. The Wives’ answer to the question of who killed the world is obvious: men did. Men cannot refrain from conquering territory, as well as women, through force.

“OUR BABIES WILL NOT BE WARLORDS” echoes this condemnation. Immortan Joe’s children become, like most men under his rule, soldiers known as War Boys, and what they lack in emotional complexity, they compensate for with focused bellicosity. Stoked on blood transfusions and the cult surrounding their leader, they are pure, gleeful aggression:

Point and shoot.

On the other hand, the film portrays women in terms of maternal characteristics--with some of their roles, as in our own world, imposed. The Wives give birth. Another group of Joe’s prisoners known as the Mothers produce milk. Like the stereotypical housewife of the Fifties, they stay at home--think April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road or Betsy Draper in Mad Men--while the men go out to business or battle. True, Imperator Furiosa, the true star of Fury Road, is the baddest of Joe’s badasses, but for this, she seeks redemption.

Men bad. Women good. We’ve heard all this before.

So it is refreshing, and stands out, when Fury Road challenges these depictions of men and women. When the War Rig in which Furiosa and the other escapees are fleeing becomes bogged down, Max grabs some explosives and struts out into the dark toward their pursuers. The Wife known as Toast the Knowing asks, “Whattaya suppose he’s gonna do?” Furiosa replies, “Retaliate first.” She assumes, her disappointment obvious, that Max is going to repay violence with violence--in the manner of retaliatory nuclear strikes--instead of doing something more productive for the group.

 

 

Max surprises her by coming back with gear they sorely need. Max did fight, but not out of bloodthirst. His motives were altruistic for the benefit of his new family. This is an unmistakable insertion on the part of the filmmakers to show that men are not always merely road warriors: sometimes they too care about hearth and home.

The film also makes a point of contradicting the assumption that women are peaceful. Furiosa and co. encounter old women living in the desert who have survived by killing men. An old sniper known as Keeper of the Seeds says, “Killed everyone I've ever met out here. Head shots all of them--snap! Right on the medulla.” The Wife known as The Dag is at first scornful of this. She replies, “I thought some of you girls were above all that.”

These scenes make a point of contradicting the Wives’ assumptions--and our own, indoctrinated as we are by feminist critiques that often paint in cartoonish strokes--that men are brutish while women are compassionate.

Mad Max creator, screenwriter and director George Miller is to be commended for a movie engaging in feminist discourse through what at first glance is the type of blow-’em-up traditionally branded “guy stuff.” His genius, however, is on full display as at the same time he critiques feminist tropes and, characteristically, subverts them. To view Mad Max: Fury Road as merely, in Sarkeesian’s words, “a cinematic orgy of male violence” is an accurate statement of her own assumptions going into the theater, but is a questionable summarization of the movie.

 

Previous posts in this series:

Mad Max Feminista (1/5)
Jennifer Blood Feminista (2/5)