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)