Mad Max: Fury Road

George Miller’s return to Mad Max is — who would have expected? — a great feminist film.

The landscape is unrelieved aridity and machinery, the dryness of the sterile male. The monster machines are technology without humanity, so they represent male power at its worst. The horde of pale bald humans connote another kind of sterility. The men’s only skin growth are boils and tattoos.  

Hence the evil kingpin’s obsessive pride in having impregnated one of his “breeders” and his determination to recover the harem when they are swept off by Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). The ruler is a pustular ruin who’s encased in a shell of medals and plastic armour to conceal his venereal decay. He survives on a breathing machine. He monopolizes the water and doles out occasional spates to keep his subjects dry, enslaved and grateful, awed by his pretence to immortality. That Imperator will disprove.The tyrant’s son Ritcus Erectus bears another name redolent of futile macho power, as he celebrates his stillborn baby brother “perfect in every way” — but dead. The society’s emblem is a stark grinning skull.

Theron plays the heroine bald and flat-chested, eschewing the conventional heroine’s beauties. The women she saves are young, insecure, their nipples outlined flat behind the white wisps they wear. In contrast, the tyrant’s production line of milking mothers are swollen grotesques. In a world sans water the characters live on mother’s milk, a reminder of the — but here abused — natural primacy of the feminine. 

As the heroine’s name suggests, she is both angry and driven — an imperative fury. Her character’s name provides the film’s subtitle. The narrative road is the woman’s fury. She is enraged at the male power that reduces woman to milking machine and breeder. There is no indication of sexual pleasure, except for the one girl’s loving caress of the reformed thug. Imperator resolves to save what girls she can from their strictly reproductive service.

Hero Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) is maximum hardrock but he starts imprisoned, both caged by the villains and boxed in by the trauma of having failed to save his wife and child a few films ago. His fights with Imperator are even. As their relationship grows away from their initial distrust and violence there is not a single word of sentiment or romance. Necessity breeds a tentative trust, which eventually grows to include his initial enemy, Nux. 
     The film ends with the hero and heroine exchanging a wordless nod across the distance between her settling in as new ruler of The Citadel (a reference to the brutish male military academy) and his disappearance in the crowd, off to seek his own solitary redemption. Miller eschews their romantic coupling because these women don’t need to depend on men. Imperator’s home community may have lost the green and richness she remembers from childhood but its women are tough, competent survivors. The oldest carries a satchel of seeds that will bring a new fertility to the blowing sands once Imperator frees the water the first ruler hoarded.  

     Of course this is a very violent, loud, sensational film. But at its heart is the reminder of the feminine upon which our species’ survival is far more dependent than upon male power. That lesson justifies this sensational fable — and compels us to overlook its pervasive improbabilities: the characters’ survival without food and water, the monster technology they have somehow managed to construct post-apocalypse, and the characters’ rebounding from such violent assaults. It’s a fable, a feminist fable, nestled within the strut of macho blockbuster.  So Max washes a killed foe’s blood off his face with mother’s milk. Our feminine is the great cleanser.