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| Jasin Boland/Warner Bros. |
The good news is, Mad Max: Fury Road is all of these things. It's so damn good, in fact, that it has infuriated men's rights dopes, impressed even the stuffiest critics, and successfully revived a bloody, R-rated '80's action franchise in the PG-13 superhero-saturated 21st century...all while upholding the unique western-hero-meets-leather-clad-post-apocalypse mythology that made Mad Max special in the first place.
Yes, Mad Max: Fury Road is a brilliant "feminist playbook for surviving dystopia", but it hasn't shed it's iconic western hero backdrop in order to be so. And that's a good thing.
The Mad Max franchise was born out of a time when the Western hero was being re-appropriated through what we now would call "genre mixing". The most iconic example is Han Solo, the resident space-western outlaw of Star Wars. Two years later, first-time Australian director George Miller would create a futuristic Western of his own, albeit a much more apocalyptic one. In the place of Harrison Ford's swashbuckling Han Solo we find Mel Gibson's unhinged Max Rockatansky, a road-Marshall-turned-anti-hero seeking vengeance for the death of his family in a future that looks and feels a thousand years behind our present.
Mad Max's limited budget left it up to the viewer to fill in the blanks of the film's apocalyptic "wild west" outback; a world much more successfully fleshed out in 1981's The Road Warrior. With it's post-apocalyptic punk aesthetic, The Road Warrior created a new cinematic genre, but the film's archetypal Western tale of the hardened gunslinger helping the helpless and thereby reclaiming his humanity is the crux of the film's cultural success. In order to break new ground, it's often necessary to look inquisitively back to where you've been before. The brightest frontiers are successfully traversed with a winning blend of the old and the new. In the case of the original Mad Max trilogy, the Western hero needed to trade in a poncho for a leather jacket and a horse for a muscle car in order to survive.
And in Mad Max: Fury Road, the Western hero must join forces with a Western heroin to survive the ongoing battle against the evil forces of hetero-patriarchy. At the beginning of the film, we find Max (now played by an extra-mad Tom Hardy) roaming the Wasteland as usual, until he is captured by the minions of Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), the tyrannical patriarchal leader of a civilization called the Citadel. Max escapes and eventually joins forces with Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) to free Immortan Joe's slave wives and move on to greener pastures.
It was the perfect move, really: re-re-branding the post-apocalyptic sci-fi Western into a feminist post-apocalyptic sci-fi Western. Critics and audiences alike have even argued that Furiosa is the protagonist of Mad Max: Fury Road while the titular hero takes a supporting role...but it's not quite as simple as that. If anything, the hero and heroin are co-leads in the picture. The girl power-driven plot and emotional crux of the film belong to Furiosa to be sure, but it is Max who remains the embodiment of rough-and-tumble Western heroism in a post-apocalyptic world--a world we know through his crazed eyes.
This isn't the first time that the iconic hero of a Western has taken a narrative passenger seat so another character can drive. Take a look at For a Few Dollars More, the second film in Sergio Leone's 'Dollars Trilogy'. The film stars Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef as rival bounty hunters who eventually join forces in search of "El Indio", one of the most wanted fugitives in the Wild West. Though Eastwood receives top-billing in the film's promotional material and opening credits (as he does in the other two 'Dollars' films), the story really belongs to Van Cleef's Colonel Douglas Mortimer, who seeks "El Indio" in vengeance for raping and murdering his sister. Eastwood's 'Man With No Name' is originally looking for "El Indio" only for the bounty, but eventually helps Mortimer exact his vengeance, taking to the sidelines in the film's climax where Mortimer and "El Indio" stand off for the final showdown. Though Mortimer's vendetta ends up being the driving narrative force of the film, The Man With No Name remains the icon of the piece, as he does in the third film of the 'Dollars Trilogy', The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (even when the camera shifts focus onto the other two leads).
As a post-apocalyptic Western, Mad Max: Fury Road follows this same narrative pattern. Max's motivation, much like The Man With No Name, is survival. Furiosa's motivation, like Mortimer's, is personal vengeance against the forces of destructive masculinity. By drawing from the Western cinema that came before it, Fury Road allows it's titular hero and icon to sit shotgun so that the character who needs to be in the driver's seat can do so; thereby giving birth to the Feminist Post-Apocalyptic Western. Fury Road is what feminism should be all about. It shows us that patriarchal oppression is bad for women and men. And it works because the film doesn't abandon it's mythology in favor of politics. Instead, it re-appropriates the mythology in order to successfully present thoughtful, insightful, and helpful feminist ideas. The archetypal Western hero joins forces with the 21st century heroin, and everybody wins.
In the wake of Fury Road's success, George Miller has promised more Mad Max films to come. It's not likely that every forthcoming chapter in the Mad Max saga will be a particularly feminist one, but that's probably ok. The franchise has already shown that it can take it's mythology and make something new, useful, and relevant. Here's hoping it continues to do so.
Yes, Mad Max: Fury Road is a brilliant "feminist playbook for surviving dystopia", but it hasn't shed it's iconic western hero backdrop in order to be so. And that's a good thing.
The Mad Max franchise was born out of a time when the Western hero was being re-appropriated through what we now would call "genre mixing". The most iconic example is Han Solo, the resident space-western outlaw of Star Wars. Two years later, first-time Australian director George Miller would create a futuristic Western of his own, albeit a much more apocalyptic one. In the place of Harrison Ford's swashbuckling Han Solo we find Mel Gibson's unhinged Max Rockatansky, a road-Marshall-turned-anti-hero seeking vengeance for the death of his family in a future that looks and feels a thousand years behind our present.
Mad Max's limited budget left it up to the viewer to fill in the blanks of the film's apocalyptic "wild west" outback; a world much more successfully fleshed out in 1981's The Road Warrior. With it's post-apocalyptic punk aesthetic, The Road Warrior created a new cinematic genre, but the film's archetypal Western tale of the hardened gunslinger helping the helpless and thereby reclaiming his humanity is the crux of the film's cultural success. In order to break new ground, it's often necessary to look inquisitively back to where you've been before. The brightest frontiers are successfully traversed with a winning blend of the old and the new. In the case of the original Mad Max trilogy, the Western hero needed to trade in a poncho for a leather jacket and a horse for a muscle car in order to survive.
And in Mad Max: Fury Road, the Western hero must join forces with a Western heroin to survive the ongoing battle against the evil forces of hetero-patriarchy. At the beginning of the film, we find Max (now played by an extra-mad Tom Hardy) roaming the Wasteland as usual, until he is captured by the minions of Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), the tyrannical patriarchal leader of a civilization called the Citadel. Max escapes and eventually joins forces with Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) to free Immortan Joe's slave wives and move on to greener pastures.
It was the perfect move, really: re-re-branding the post-apocalyptic sci-fi Western into a feminist post-apocalyptic sci-fi Western. Critics and audiences alike have even argued that Furiosa is the protagonist of Mad Max: Fury Road while the titular hero takes a supporting role...but it's not quite as simple as that. If anything, the hero and heroin are co-leads in the picture. The girl power-driven plot and emotional crux of the film belong to Furiosa to be sure, but it is Max who remains the embodiment of rough-and-tumble Western heroism in a post-apocalyptic world--a world we know through his crazed eyes.
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| Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef in For A Few Dollars More (1965) |
As a post-apocalyptic Western, Mad Max: Fury Road follows this same narrative pattern. Max's motivation, much like The Man With No Name, is survival. Furiosa's motivation, like Mortimer's, is personal vengeance against the forces of destructive masculinity. By drawing from the Western cinema that came before it, Fury Road allows it's titular hero and icon to sit shotgun so that the character who needs to be in the driver's seat can do so; thereby giving birth to the Feminist Post-Apocalyptic Western. Fury Road is what feminism should be all about. It shows us that patriarchal oppression is bad for women and men. And it works because the film doesn't abandon it's mythology in favor of politics. Instead, it re-appropriates the mythology in order to successfully present thoughtful, insightful, and helpful feminist ideas. The archetypal Western hero joins forces with the 21st century heroin, and everybody wins.
In the wake of Fury Road's success, George Miller has promised more Mad Max films to come. It's not likely that every forthcoming chapter in the Mad Max saga will be a particularly feminist one, but that's probably ok. The franchise has already shown that it can take it's mythology and make something new, useful, and relevant. Here's hoping it continues to do so.
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