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Review: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

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Furiosa holds the tenuous position of following up Mad Max: Fury Road, the defining moment of the 2020s. It would be hard to hold failure against it, but at the same time, for Furious to be anything less than sheer brilliance would be devastating.

So why the fuck is Furiosa a better movie than Fury Road?

Perhaps part of it is how Fury Road makes itself half of Fury Road‘s story. After seeing Furiosa, you’ll see Fury Road as the second part of a greater story about Furiosa. This franchise is no longer about the titular Max – it’s the story of Joseph from Genesis, a tale of a woman stripped of the Eden in which she was born, gouging the landscape in search of something new. There’s no Manifest Destiny because there’s no destination; these last two movies are the story of a woman’s cries of revolt in an endless desert.

And Furiosa explores this angle more than its predecessor, which was ultimately a triumphalist thrill ride. That’s by no means a flaw of Fury Road — it’s why everybody rightly fell in love with it. But Furiosa challenges the myth of the badass – as my girlfriend Janet pointed out, it asks “oh, you want the myth of a heroic girlboss? Well, here’s that with all the fucked up monstrosity that entails.” Moreso than Fury Road, Fury Road explores the contours of the patriarchal societies of the Wasteland. It has much more to say about the experience of the oppressed than Fury Road did. Hell, it’s more Biblical and difficult than Fury Road got in its best moments.

I don’t want to say much more because you really should just go watch this movie. Furiosa allows its protagonist to be an operator of the great mechanism of history, the “fifth rider of the apocalypse.” It’s beautifully structured, explicitly invoking Eden at the beginning and the end, and transcends its predecessors. This is as good as blockbusters get.…

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Even Furiosa

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Further to some objections I’ve had to my description of Mad Max: Fury Road as having reasonably good gender politics.  Trigger and Spoilers, obviously.

What Mad Max: Fury Road does – with its depiction of Furiosa – is to refuse to make violence the exclusive province of men, or to make men the only ones who are any good at it.  (Not unprecedented – but quite good.)  Furiosa gets to do all the trad-masculine things that Max does.  She’s just as good at them as him.  This, apparently, is a big problem for those kinds of insecure, reactionary misogynitwits who drivel on about how women are weaker than men.  According to such douchenozzles, this is just a scientific fact, and it’s not a man’s fault if he just repeats the incontrovertible findings of Science.  In actuality, of course, what such bigoted ninnies are actually doing is regurgitating some half-digested sociobiologistic bullshit.  They then accuse feminists (who control Hollywood in their ideologically distorted, bass-ackwards bizzaro world) of playing a dirty, emasculating trick and oppressing men by spreading the vicious civilisation-eroding lie that not all women need a man to open jars for them.

The thing is, there is a rational kernal to some of these complaints (wait).  The complaint comes as a response to a genuine threat (I said wait).  The genuine threat which is correctly perceived by the bawling manbabies is a threat to their privilege.  You see, when Furiosa beats up some man just as well as Max can (including Max himself), or shoots a gun just as well as Max can, or drives a car just as well as Max can, what is being done is that these traditionally masculine behaviours are being completely detached from masculinity.  And what is being detached from masculinity is violence.  So the threat to male privilege is about as primal as you can get: male privilege is threatened with losing its monopoly on violence.  Given that violence, in one form or another, is at the root of how all systems of oppression function, this could hardly be more threatening (at least within the confines of a mainstream popular movie).

This isn’t some submerged theme in the film that you have to hunt about for.  It’s front and centre.  The violence Furiosa excels at it specifically and explicitly a violent response to a patriarchy which itself openly functions through violence.  Most obviously, there is the implied violence of rape (and kudos to the film for not directly and unnecessarily showing sexual violence).  But there is also the structural violence.  The system is literally patriarchal, in that Imortan Joe’s fertility seems to be inextricably linked to his rulership – either materially or ideologically, or perhaps both.  He rules partly through his family.  It is stated that several members of his ruling elite – and his Imperators (bosses-cum-generals) – are members of his family.  Brothers, etc.  Several are sons.  They all seem ‘disabled’ in some way.  One seems unable to breathe without a mask and oxygen tanks. …

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Furiosa and Furiosa

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Well, it’s basically a two-hour chase sequence with a few pauses… but yes, it’s amazingly well done.  Old hand George Miller takes advantage of all the modern techniques – hyper-fast editing, CGI, etc – but he uses these things for storytelling purposes, not to show us how fast he can edit or how good his CGI is.  He never sacrifices the clarity of the visual storytelling.  The production and costume design has a gnarly, knotty detail and complexity.  The brazenly ironic and stylised salvagepunk visual world of the movie makes it like an 80s auteur film made on a vast budget and with modern techniques.  The result is jaw-droppingly good.  It instantly makes just about every other blockbuster movie of recent years look quaint and windy.  Mad Max: Fury Road makes Avengers: Age of Ultron look like a Cameron Crowe movie in which the assembled twee, privileged assholes play with action figures and make “boom” noises.

I’m not going to go into much political detail.  I’ve junked most of what I’ve been trying to write about this movie, largely because of this article at Jacobin, which says everything I was groping for, and lots more of interest.  It’s really good… though there are bits where I think the writer, Stephen Maher, goes too far.  (There are also a few snafus which suggest he didn’t quite pay enough attention to the plot.)

Read it?  Okay, then here are some caveats:

I don’t think Maher gets it exactly right.  The film certainly does buy into an orientalist narrative about the supposed sins of pre-modern and/or anti-modern civilisation, and yes this is inevitably tinged with Huntingdonism and Islamophobia.  In the film, patriarchy comes complete with a built-in death-cult, tribal masks, and a harem of the type sheiks always have in racist, orientalist Western fantasies.  But I think the film is less a defence of ‘our’ modernity in the face of such things and more an attempt to implicate modernity in the same supposed sins.  The death cult of the suicide bombers uses Northern European religious ideas (Valhalla), urges itself on with thrash metal music, and Joe decorates himself with Western-style military medals, etc.  Plus the Mad Max movies’ usual anxious appropriation of the camp and performative hyper-masculinity of biker culture.  It’s like the film is saying “see how awful we’d become if we degenerated in the face of a civilisational crisis… it’s buried inside our civilisation, waiting to creep back out… the seeds are already there, around us”.  This is all problematic in itself, but maybe not quite as bad as the review above makes it sound.

It’s still an awesomely entertaining movie (reason enough to see it and enjoy it) with reasonably good gender politics.

Much of a meal has been made of the gender politics of the film, usually through the medium of stories about assorted reactionary bumwipes crying about how it’s a feminist lecture instead of a manly movie filled with manly masculine manliness.  Firstly, this is crap.  Max gets to be incredibly masculine in all those stereotypical ways. …

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