Finally got Mad Max on dvd and sat down to watch it with my partner (who never got a chance to see it at the cinema).
Here are some semi-coherent thoughts from a classicist:
By using the term ‘imperator’, the comparison to Rome is invited.
Immortan Joe, The Bullet Farmer and The People Eater as a triumvirate.
Men, emperors, concerned to make themselves gods even before they die. The imperial cult.—
The mother’s milk, the women treated as cattle – Hera, Io, once again, the “Greek impulse to see female sexuality in terms of cows.” (Padel, 1992: 121), though perhaps it’s not such a specifically Greek impulse, in the end. The ‘humanisation’ of the rapist, the playing down of rape: the mental and emotional abuse on top of the physical abuse. The wives have it good, Immortan Joe tells them. If you ignore the slavery and the rape. Io will have it good, Prometheus tells her – Zeus will impregnate her with a gentle touch. Nevermind that it’s still rape. Nevermind that she has been dragged from her home and family and chased across the world until eventually she finds a place she can settle down. Just one more woman racing through a hostile world desperately looking for a place to call home.
—
The Citadel = agriculture
Gas Town = commerce
The Bullet Farm = warWho killed the world? Ask the wives. Men like Immortan Joe, the camera tells us, framing him in front of their written question. The world ended. There was an apocalypse. Where are the four horsemen? What happens to them afterwards? This would not be the first work that has replaced their horses with cars. (Good Omens, Supernatural).
the Bullet Farmer (The Bullet Farm) as war
Immortan Joe (the Citadel) as famine
The People Eater (Gas town) as pollutionBut Death is always different. Death is not like the others. (again, Good Omens, Supernatural). Death is Furiosa, and Death comes even for her brother horsemen, in the end.
—
Mad Max as Odysseus – the City Sacker, but an Odysseus without hope. And Odysseus who cannot return home no matter how far he wanders. There is no Penelope in this world – no woman beset by men trying to force her to take their hand in marriage, whose only hope is to hold them off until her husband returns. No. Instead these women are Medeas and Amazons. In this world the suitors already took them. They could not hold them off. And now they will not wait for a man to save them. They will save themselves or die trying.
—
Furiosa as Persephone? She left and the Green Place died. Now she returns to the Many Mothers – the Many Demeters, who hold the seeds, who are ready to replant and revitalise the world, to make the crops grow again, if only they could. She cannot revive the Green Place with her return, but she can take them back with her to a new Green Place, her city, a city of Famine and Death. In the post-apocalyptic world, the borders and boundaries break down – the imaginary borders of countries, the borders between the world, between Olympus, and the earth, and Hades. Now Hades is the Green Place. Persephone no longer ocillates between her roles, she is both, all the time. Time has no meaning in the post-apocalypse. Season are one more boundary that has disappeared.
mad max fury road
more Mad Max Fury Road thoughts
-I love how much you see the Wives looking after each other and being friends. I think a lesser movie would have had them break down and be stereotypically ‘catty’ to each other as the pressure builds, but it didn’t! None of them comment on each other’s looks or call each other gendered slurs or anything!
-I sometimes think about the fact that Max has that massive tattoo on his back with him most likely for life and I get sad.
-I wonder when the Wives scrawled ‘We Are Not Things’ etc on the wall. If it was just before they left than they were cutting things rather tight. Maybe Miss Giddy wrote it.
-The very obvious cuts on Angharad also make me sad, especially since we can assume (and Rosie H-W said in an interview) that she made them herself.
-I kinda wish they’d left in that scene where Miss Giddy is left with Angharad’s body in the desert, because without it you’re really left wondering what happened to her.
-I bet the People Eater is an Actual Cannibal, and that’s why he’s got so many diseases.
-I absolutely LOVE the ‘mourning’ gesture the Vuvalini do. It’s like a gesture of…catching someone’s soul in mid-air, or something. I also love how Furiosa and the Wives are kinda hesitant to use it at first, because they’ve most likely never seen it before/have forgotten it, but then start using it as the movie goes on.
-Also, Nux’s death is such a great scene precisely because of Capable’s use of this gesture. It’s like he doesn’t make his move until he knows his soul is safe in Capable’s hands. Oh Nux.
-As much as I’m okay with Furiosa’s story not having a sequel, I kinda want to know what happened next. Did she have to watch her back for fear that Immortan Joe still had a few living supporters out there? What arrangements did she come to with the Bullet Farm and Gas Town? How did she ensure that everyone was treated equally after generations of the opposite being the case? Luckily, I bet fanfiction can fill me in
What kills me about Furiosa telling Max the code to start the rig is that just a few minutes previously that’s the ONLY thing that kept Max from leaving them in the dust to their fate in his panic to escape. Yet Furiosa makes a decision to give Max the code and give him the power to completely screw them over if he wanted to. But he doesn’t because Furiosa reads him correctly and in giving him that level of power back actually causes him to calm down since he knows someone just gave him a huge amount of responsibility in something he’s not even really sure what’s going on about, but this person is treating him like a human and acting like he’s part of the team and Max is so obviously taken off guard that he doesn’t even question it and is just like “yes ma’am” and starts helping her. Yes Furiosa is a bad ass, but her brilliance in this moment isn’t beating the crap out of Max or outwitting him or forcing him to do anything, it’s realizing he’s acting like a trapped animal because he thinks he IS and she gives him an option to act like a human, which he does without hesitation. She doesn’t hold it against him that he just held them at gunpoint and Max in return just immediately throws his weight in with the group.
Furiosa ultimately accomplishes her goal partially because she makes a decision to treat a person who had been treated like a commodity (just like the wives) up to that point as a rational, functioning human.
I think it’s arguable that this is the entire point of the film: We Are Not Things. Not just women, but all human beings. Immortan Joe only sees commodities, not people: women for milk or heirs, men for battle to protect his empire. For crying out loud, the entrance to the Wives’ living area is a bank vault door!
But the Wives and the Vuvalini refuse to treat anyone as an object. They may be forced to kill, but they won’t do so needlessly. It struck me that Joe announces Furiosa by her titles, her symbols of power, but she announces herself to the Vuvalini in terms of family: who she is, who her mother was, where they came from. Furiosa and Max are struggling to retain their humanity in a world that doesn’t seem to value it. Their way out is not escape, across teh sand flats, but redemption: going back to those who have been treated as objects, who have treated others as objects, and showing them a better way.
Dammit, this film gets better the more I think about it.
My favourite part about this scene is that when she enters the code, he’s watching her- he’s ALREADY memorized it. It’s her trusting him that makes him think about how crucial this mission is, how he needs to trust her back. And when she shouts “fool”, the Rig is moving within less than a second- he’s already prepared for the worst and he knows to be ready in case things go sideways, he knows he has to help them and that he’s going to have to gun that engine either way. From the point on where Furiosa makes that split second to trust him out of her last desperation, and they both realise that’s all they have left at that point- that trust is the only way they’ll survive.
There’s this split second in Fury Road when you think (possibly are deliberately led to think?) that Furiosa is going to shoot Cheedo for trying to run away. And I suspect that many lesser movies would have had her do exactly that: shoot dead the girl with Stockholm syndrome because There Is No Place For Weakness In The Wasteland, that sort of thing. (You know the one.) But that doesn’t happen! Instead this moment becomes important for Cheedo’s own character development! And I am so pleased about that.
Well played, movie.
Mediocre! George Miller confirms Furiosa will not star in the Mad Max sequels. http://www.themarysue.com/charlize-theron-mad-max-sequels/
(Source: https://www.instagram.com/)
“Conversations with George Miller” Part 2: Mad Max Trivia
Stuff I learned about the Fury Road world from George Miller, Nico Lathouris and Brendan McCarthy today at the Sydney Graphics Festival.
– Angharad is the true ideological opponent of Immortan Joe. He represents a toxic ideology of death, while she represents life, the alternate way of living. As the instigator of the Wives’ escape, and the one who came up with “We Are Not Things” she was the most revolutionary of them because she saw the potential for a new way of living, and she saw clearly that “what killed the world” was a way of life that glorified killing, something that even Furiosa participated in
– “We agreed – no unnecessary killing” was due to the fact that Angharad and Furiosa had actually argued about their worldviews before leaving – Angharad realised that the ideology of killing needed to end if they were truly to escape Joe’s influence, Furiosa believed that killing was necessary in the wasteland because you wouldn’t survive otherwise. They compromised with “no unnecessary killing”.
– Nico Lathouris said (and I quote) that Fury Road was about “dismantling the patriarchy” and central to this idea is the fact that the economy on which Immortan’s rule was based (the ownership of water and people) was dismantled also by the end (water made available to the Wretched for free, slavery ended)
– Actually Lathouris is an awesome guy, he talked so much about feminism in this event and talked specifically in regard to Angharad that her vision for a feminist utopia “seems initially naive” only because “it requires men to make such a shift in their perception and behaviour” but that ultimately her vision came true, if not in the way she expected and not while she was alive.
– The reason Max doesn’t go up into the Citadel at the end is because “he hasn’t earned it yet” in terms of his own journey. (Which implies maybe he will later?) I really like this because 1) Furiosa clearly has earned it because this story was about her and her journey really, and she has achieved her arc, whereas Max has achieved a major part of his arc (fixing what’s broken) but he hasn’t achieved all of it yet.
– Max’s muzzle is a garden fork.
– Furiosa can read, having learned from the Many Mothers. But Angharad and the Wives are more educated than she is,, having read all the books that remain from before the apocalypse. That taught them to question the structure and foundations of their society – something that (initially) Furiosa doesn’t think to question.
– Capable can identify Polecats and Flamers because 1) Furiosa prepped all the Wives on things they might encounter in the Wasteland before they left and 2) from the room where they were imprisoned, the Wives could look down on the desert and see fights and things that went on.
– Toast can drive and load a gun because she grew up in the Wasteland rather than the Citadel. She was taken probably as a teenager as her family passed through the Citadel (possibly to trade?)
– War Boys wear black and white paint because they know they are halflife, and their worldview is centred around death. They are trying to become like skeletons. They worship cars because cars are “immortal” in comparison to them, (also because they can fix cars and they cant fix themselves). White paint is a symbol of being halflife. You paint yourself white if you have a terminal illness. So people like the Imperators are full life, but presumably if you later found out you had a terminal illness and you were working for the Immortan you would start to paint yourself white.
– War Boys were initially going to all wear penis gourds. But then George Miller thought “hang on this won’t go down well on screen” :P
– Some of Max’s buttons are Australian 10c coins.
– According to George, there are no War Girls. But he immediately followed that assertion with the qualifying statement that the world no longer “belonged” to him but to everyone and that everyone would have different interpretations so if you have a War Girl OC basically you have his blessing.
– Everything in the wasteland is multi-purpose. So there are shopping carts attached to the sides of some war vehicles for people to sit in.
– The decorative nature of things like the cars, steering wheels etc. are a reflection of the fact that even in really poverty-stricken cultures there is an artistic imperative and appreciation of beauty, so even “junk” is fashioned into art and the body is marked as a form of art and also fetishisation.
“For a star to be born, there is one thing that must happen: a gaseous nebula must collapse.”
Day 5: Cheedo
i find it incredibly strange that all the mentions i’ve seen about mad max and disability have centered entirely around furiosa’s one-handedness, but not on max’s mental illness.
max is, disabled. he is deeply, deeply mentally ill. he has auditory and visual hallucinations and is skirting the edge of non-verbal. when the dag says “i thought you weren’t crazy anymore,” it’s doubly funny because in no universe is he ever not going to be crazy. it’s just that with his new family, he has one hell of a support network and is able to be something resembling functional. his mental illness is not pretty or convenient, just like furiosa’s lack of an arm is either of those things. but it’s a part of him, and his coping with it is a part of him, just like her prosthetic arm is a part of her.
#BIG DISABLED FAMILY DRIVING THIS WAR RIG OFF INTO THE SUNSET#punchbuggy flamethrower the movie
(via gatheringbones)