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)