I couldn’t resist weighing in on the conversation surrounding the treatment of “feminist” themes in Mad Max: Fury Road (the one thing I love more than action movies? Ranting about action movies). The overall discussion seems to turn on the differences between liberal and radical feminism. Most of what I’ve read favors the liberal view, that the movie is feminist, and unfortunately the few dissenting radical voices are, I feel, not articulating their argument very well, falling into the old stereotype of the humorless left and also reacting too strongly to elements in the film that have nothing to do with the conversation at hand (like color grading). In this particular interest (and I of course haven’t read every review out there), there’s a lot of shouting from the radical side and not enough clear analysis. Much has been made of director George Miller’s cardinal sin of employing the help of an official representative of feminist women, Eve Ensler, to help manage the unwieldy task of treating women characters as human beings. This falls outside of the viewing experience, though, so I’d like forget about that for the time being (but come on. If you were making a movie about racism in the U.S., would hire one black person – heck, how about a whole team of black people as advisors!? Or would you admit that you have no idea what you’re talking about and walk away?). Let us also put aside any discussion of what a hypothetical radical feminist post-apocalyptic movie free of gender binaries would look like. For now, I simply want to argue that even by the very lenient standards of liberal feminism, Mad Max: Fury Road’s gestures towards feminism (how it handles it’s themes of fighting the patriarchy and emancipating women) are hardly laudable and that the terms with which the film deals with women’s rights, as with liberal feminism, are purely superficial.
1. Charlize Theron’s character Furiosa immediately jumps out as something we can point to as a feminist move made by the film (Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome from 1985 had an imperious female lead in the form of Tina Turner as well. That movie cast the woman as villain, which could be construed either as an extension of the age-old misogynist Abrahamic narratives that ranged from the writings of Saint Jerome to the femme fatales of film noir or as the product of a mentality that accepts women in their totality, one that provides the possibility of female figures spanning the ethical spectrum. But that is a discussion for another, maybe nerdier post). Furiosa not only enjoys a privileged position in the hierarchy of the Citadel, but is also proven an exception to the enculturation of allegiance to the settlement’s pharaoh-esque ruler Immortan Joe. This is made clear when it’s revealed that she desires to redeem herself for profiting off of a system that exploits her fellow women by rescuing Joe’s captive brides, known as “breeders.” Furthermore, Furiosa is a fully drawn character and in fact the screenplay’s narrative is structured around her, not the titular hero. So here we have something that, while not entirely absent from the media landscape, is still sadly today a relatively scarce thing: A strong female lead. All good so far, except that this is Max’s movie in the end and it is Max who makes the difference at each critical turning point in the film. If not for Max, where would Furiosa and the breeders be? Dead in the desert. So essentially, if Furiosa is, structurally speaking, the protagonist of the narrative, this narrative is all about a woman hero being saved by a man. So upon closer inspection Furiosa actually does little to truly challenge traditional gender roles.
2. The “breeders,” the captive brides of Immortan Joe, seem to exist solely be fought over, as the means to Furiosa’s redemption, and to themselves proclaim that they are not “things.” Entertainment-wise, I found these characters to be the least compelling elements of the film. Any specificity given to them seemed perfunctory at best and they are, in terms of typage, distinguishable only by hair color and ethnicity and relative level of passivity. In several instances these women aid our heroes in battle and one serves as the love interest of a turncoat Warrior Boy (or whatever the pasty bad guy soldiers are called), which ultimately leads nowhere either emotionally or dramatically or structurally. They are, therefore, there to serve a narrative purpose and to infuse the proceedings with feminist credibility (i.e. the threat of rape, imprisonment, and oppression towards women is not merely depicted as a fact of life in this dystopian future, but is the very locus of the narrative conflict). Either that or to soften the contours of the plot which in outline could be considered rather bleak: A few renegades attempt to save the sex-slaves of a tyrant in a post-apocalyptic future. Unfortunately, by dint of the fact that they exist simply to preform narrative and ideological functions within the movie, the characters are ironically reduced, structurally speaking again, to mere “things” rather than transcending into the realms of imaginative existence within the minds of the audience like well written characters do. The role of the characters within the narrative is the same as their role within the fictional world therein: They are essential, but purely functional objects. So by trying to foreground a social conflict (either out of pure intentions or to lighten up the proceedings and to avoid alienating maybe half the ticket-buying audience), the movie winds up perpetuating one. The breeders, whether in the fictional space of the movie or as functions in the structure of the narrative or in our conception of them within the social discourse beyond, are still subjectivized by the patriarchal order; in other words this movie and it’s “feminist” themes participate only within the confines of a patriarchal discourse. Feminism, or any emancipatory ideology, cannot be defined only in opposition to oppressive systems but must posit and practice alternative values. (ALSO, let me just say that pointing out that she is a super model is not in and of itself a criticism, it seems pretty obvious to me that Rosie Huntington-Whitely’s professional credentials had more to do with her casting than her acting skills. And so, yes, I’ll say it, the camera objectifies these women throughout, specifically in one big cringey joke that you can’t miss).
3. The only other women in the movie besides Furiosa and the breeders are obese women who are milked like cows and glimpsed early on in the film and then later when they are liberated. From a nerdy perspective, if civilization collapsed and after generations the descendants of survivors constructed a new social order, it’s perfectly logical to imagine within this fantasy that certain strains of our patriarchal culture would survive in much the same way those bits of car and military cultures seen throughout the film did. From a non-nerdy perspective, this kind of movie is not about the future, but a reflection of our own time. The thing is, though, that it fails to accurately conceive of the conflicts of our time in the first place. It overlooks the full dimensions of these conflicts, while embodying a different kind of conflict. The “breeders” are handled with kid gloves: There’s no explicit confrontation with the fact that they were enslaved and raped their entire lives and so the movie doesn’t really acknowledge the actual material basis of feminism and only speaks of their situation in terms of principles (again reducing the feminist argument to abstraction, rather then acknowledging the full and corporeal magnitude of feminist issues). Rape is strongly implied, but remains a taboo left unuttered and in this way the film is offensive by omission. Obviously a more graphic depiction of their life would have been offensive in an entirely different way and no doubt was sidestepped because this is supposed to be a fun summer movie. The fat women’s situation, on the other hand, is presented bluntly and without reservation. This not only exposes the implicit qualification the movie makes about victimhood, but, much more offensively, the implicit qualification it makes about women’s rights: Beautiful, child-bearing super models are worth defending and fighting over, fat women are not. In other words, only women performing the right kind of function and filling the proper mold merit the central position in the fight for equal rights. In terms of victimhood, one could argue that the fat women in this world have relatively better lives than the super model breeders because they aren’t raped all the time. But this raises some icky questions: A. How do they produce milk if they are not inseminated in some way? Maybe artificially, but then this throws into relief the very physicality of the oppression of women; oppression begins and ends with control over bodies and so rape or no rape, these women are just as oppressed and exploited as the next. B. If this is supposed to be a fun action movie in which we cannot talk openly about the horrific nature of rape, captivity, domination, and oppression, in which the fun would be spoiled were we to dwell on the reality of gendered violence, why has this become a primary focus of our conversation around the movie? Why am I right now talking about degrees of rape? Why did rape come into the equation in the conception of the movie in the first place? If you can’t confront rape without either ruining the fun or demeaning the reality of rape or transgressing some boundary of decorum, then why go there at all?
4. Mad Max: Fury Road is still a totally awesome movie for reasons I may address some other time (Outlaw Vern does an excellent job in his initial review and so does Anthony Lane. I love that these guys have so much in common). I admit to having a fondness for the kind of stripped down and elemental macho action flick this one aspires to. It should be said, though, that that type of movie, from The Naked Prey to Apocalypto to The Road Warrior itself, usually stomp all over the fine problematics of representation and that their very insensitivity is part of what gives them their punch. Movies of this stripe and action movies in general can perform the cathartic function (and usually a reactionary ideological one too, depending) of stripping bare all such concerns. They distill rage, suffering, and angst down to a point-A-to-point-B narrative of pure reflectionless emotion while entertaining a myth of primitivism that is a welcome reprieve from the intractable complexity of the real world. At their best these blunt objects can still be full of nuance, revelation poetry, and imagination (as are the three aforementioned examples), but those currents I liken to the ripples on a sheer rock face and only add texture to their otherwise monolithic edifices. To hamper such an experience with what are obviously creative decisions by committee and what can only be described as lazy solutions and concessions is to rob Mad Max: Fury Road, by rights a member of the pantheon of badass cinema, of its animating primal life force. That’s not to say that a badass movie can’t be feminist, but that badassism by its very nature cannot be wishy washy in any department and that a badass feminist movie might simply be insensitive to other issues. So not only does Mad Max: Fury Road screw up in the feminist department (and for the record I’m a radical feminist and I can’t help but point out that equating the Vuvalinis, the hard fighting matriarchs, with “mother earth” further perpetuates the gender binary of women being the more nurturing, more sensitive, more in touch with nature, fertility-godess yin to the goal oriented, action-oriented male yang), but it kind of screws up in the badass department as well.
