Mad Max Meets the Rape-Revenge Flick on 'Fury Road'
When I first settled into my cushy, faux-leather seat in my local AVX theatre to watch the fourth installment in the Mad Max franchise, Fury Road, I was fairly unexcited. This wasn't because I didn't think the film would be any good. I had seen the other Mad Max's, and thought it would just be more of the same. Killer car chases, Max making brooding faces at the glaring Australian sun, and hordes of feral men shooting at each other to the blaring of rock music.
Mad Max: Fury Road delivered on all fronts.
What I hadn't anticipated was how the franchise would transform itself into a stellar rape-revenge film headed by lethal heroine, Furiosa, played with gripping intesnsity by Charlize Theron.
Bow down, bitches
Fury Road revolves around Max only in that he propels the film's main message ("Survival is the goal") forward throughout its two-hour run-time. The real plot of the film centers instead on Furiosa's quest to bring five young women to safety, women who have been kept as Wives by Immortan Joe, leader of a dangerous army cult. Certain shots of Immortan Joe's rule in this post-apocalyptic wasteland are terrifying, including one sequence showing him tantalizing his people with water only to remove it before their thirst has been quenched, and another depicting more of his wives strapped to breastpumps and generting 'Mother's Milk' used to fuel his army of War Boys.
Not to mention Immortan Joe's gorgeous mug itself:
~*~*~*Australia's Next Top Model~*~*~*
When I first saw the Wives, I was upset. The thought that these women could remain so beautiful in the middle of a post-apocalyptic wasteland actually made me break out in a cold sweat and start thinking about how my own skin could never be so luminous in the desert heat.
I mean, look at them. They are the most beautiful and diverse group of women I have ever seen. Their hair colours basically form a rainbow of human beauty:
"This desert sand is a great exfoliant."
I immediately (and wrongly) assumed they would be used only as sexual objects.
Turns out, they had already been used as literal sex toys and birthing vessels, and they were hella done with that.
From the moment they cut off their toothed chastity belts, locked onto their lady parts by the generous Immortan Joe, I was hooked, and pleasantly surprised.
Fury Road isn't just an action movie--it is, at its heart, a rape-revenge film aimed at taking back a female agency lost to these women.
The whole, "women are nothing but birthers and sex objects" is not an unfamiliar trope to the post-apocalypse/dystopian film genre. Productions like A Clockwork Orange and even the earlier Mad Max films paint rape as an unfortunate outcome of the fall of society.
I was watching Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior the other day, and was disturbed by the general lack of women in the film coupled with the film's depiction of rape. The first time we see a woman, she is being raped on the side of the road, graphically and explicitly. Adding to the scene's disturbing nature is the fact that the viewer sees this scene through Max's telecope, giving it all a voyeuristic quality.
Again, I'm not saying that this type of scene is glamourized in films like Mad Max 2, but it is problematically depicted as a logical outgrowth of a dystopian society. Why is rape seen as something that has to happen in these fictional worlds simply to demonstrate that they're corrupt? And why does no one help these women?
With the controversial Game of Thrones episode airing this past Sunday, showing the rape of young character Sansa Stark, these questions are more pertinent than ever. That television program, far from depicting a futuristic society, depicts a fantasy world. Yet, rape is often used, once again, as a device to demonstrate the corruptness of the world in question. In Westeros, the fictional world of Game of Thrones, rape is consistently viewed as simply part of the way the world works. What it fails to see, is that there is a difference between gratuitous rape, and rape that gives a character a motivation, that pushes him or her to their limits and calls for a change in the way these worlds function.
This is what Mad Max: Fury Road gets right.
Furiosa and the Wives take matters (and weapons) into their own hands, turning fiercely on their abusers and refusing to be kept down as rape victims are sex objects.
The Reclamation of the Vagina, circa 2057
The film is a joyride of two hours, and will have you cheering for the Wives' victory. They reveal themselves to be intelligent, headstrong women who are, like Max and Furiosa, looking only for revenge.
If only more action movies could approach both genders with such nuanced complexity.
For now, however, we can take a trip down Fury Road, and that's more than enough.
I give this film 5/5 Wives with a Cause
