Sometime in the near future, I’ll buy a ticket for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Find a theater, pick a showtime, refuse to log into Fandango (self-sabotage, I’m sure), get a seat close to the screen. And then there’s something else I have to do, too.
Now into my 30s, I’m reckoning with a pop culture landscape increasingly invaded by actors and pro athletes and pop stars in their 20s. It’s a magic trick every time. Just last year, I saw Minami Hamabe in Shin Kamen Rider and Godzilla Minus One, movies she filmed when she was, at the latest, 22 years old. And I think to myself, “What a fucking star. What a talent. What was I doing at 22? Oh, yeah…” I was having bad opinions about Mad Max.
I didn’t just dislike Mad Max: Fury Road, I made it part of my personality. Right off the bat, I was terribly embarrassed. Under my high school yearbook photo, the caption says something about how “I like movies, but only from the ‘80s.” This was 2011, in between the Michael Bay Transformers and Stranger Things. Everyone had ‘80s fever, especially the ‘80s kids on nerd podcasts with whom I wanted desperately to fit in (online). They’d talk about RoboCop and The Thing and Aliens not even with reverence, because their normalcy, the acceptance of these things – which I couldn’t even talk about with my own friends – was implicit. It was baseline. Of course Mad Max was part of that. The Road Warrior is part of the canon. Therefore, I am a Mad Max fan.
I go and see Fury Road and think, “Maybe I’m not a Mad Max fan.” Maybe it simply rode this weird nostalgia directly into my heart. It was, and still remains, one of the weirdest cinema experiences I’ve ever had. I knew that I was watching something incredible, but I wasn’t enjoying it.
The year 2015 was itself between GamerGate and the 2017 Me Too resurgence; the midst of my early feminist education. Not that, you know, I was only then learning how women were people, too, but that so much of my entertainment was laced with sexist themes and imagery. I was trying to reconcile my self with what I could easily visualize as my feminist self, if the former is a heterosexual male and the latter believes the fastest way to an equal world is to demand nothing of women, to desire nothing. So much to say, one of the most important things to me in fiction is the “strong female character.” I have very specific ideas about what that is, and while I feared those ideas would be threatened by this 2010s-era education, it wasn’t really. The Major and Samus and Machiko are still rock solid.
And Furiosa?
One side was calling Mad Max: Fury Road feminist and the other side was calling it… bad, for being feminist? We didn’t really have “woke” back then. In the movie, Furiosa escapes a warlord with his sex slaves in tow, and teams up with Max Rockatansky on the fury road to freedom. Cue the sandstorms and car chases and the wildest spectacle ever imagined – spectacle I could barely register because I was still hung up on “sex slaves.”
Furiosa and the women of Fury Road didn’t appeal to me at all. They weren’t particularly powerful in themselves, and Furiosa only ever drove a car and fired a gun. That’s the most basic “girl in an action movie” stuff ever. And the other women? They were sex slaves! This was my prejudice, or the mental block I couldn’t overcome. Part of the conversation around that time was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and men writing women whose strength required a traumatic backstory – usually that they were raped, and that’s why they’re tough.
That’s a bad trope, if “trope” describes an instinct in a male writer. But I took it one further. My strong female characters didn’t come from traumatic backstories. Okay, maybe Samus’s family was killed (by a space dragon), but she wasn’t raped. The very idea made me sick to my stomach. I could barely even think about sexual assault, to the point where it was easier to not think about victims of sexual assault, and when presented with fictional victims of sexual assault, my brain shut down as a defense mechanism. At the very least, I couldn’t consider them “strong,” and because I was a burgeoning male feminist, I could declare that the movie was, therefore, not “feminist.”
So it was two things: revulsion at the very premise of Fury Road, where women are enslaved by truly disgusting men, and the noise of the film’s celebration, which I simply didn’t agree with. Whether Tropes vs. Women or Rebecca Solnit, everything I was learning up to that point felt good, like I was becoming a better person, so to suddenly disagree with the mainstream? It wasn’t just about disliking a movie anymore.
Well, it’s been almost ten years. I’m an adult now, and I’ve been able to square that victims are often the strongest people in the world and that victimhood isn’t required to make fictional female characters “strong,” whatever that means. I have not, however, been even remotely tempted to revisit Fury Road. I’m sure I’d like it, but I don’t find its world appealing – the violent patriarchy where a heroine’s only verb is “escape” – just as I didn’t like the worlds of Game of Thrones or pre-Disney Star Wars. Of course, I’m fully aware that Furiosa takes place in the same world…
…but IGN gave it a 10/10!
The critics and fans are going wild – again. The noise is back, and the targeted marketing is difficult to ignore. I’ve had to wonder, is the prospect of action-heroine Anya Taylor-Joy really so bad? She’s a phenomenal actress, across weird indies and the biggest movies in the world. I won’t expect Night of the Operator levels of badass here, but maybe I’ll be able to enjoy the spectacle this time. Maybe I’ll even find out that I do actually like Mad Max, and that I wasn’t such a poser.
Or I’ll complain that I’ve been bamboozled into watching another Mad Max after two bad sequels in a row (my objection to Beyond Thunderdome is far less complicated). My God, I’d have to suffer an entirely new personality for the next ten years.
The Battle Beyond Planet X 