Mad Max: Fury - the Road to Redemption

Have some fun, and watch one of the blockbusters this summer. Life is not all work.

The dark abyss created by George Miller in all of its Mad Max films, based on a dystopian western road movie, developed in its latest iteration Mad Max: Fury Road, an unlikely but marvelous feminist attitude, turning a group of five female sex slaves into leaders of a new generation.

The newest installment is not a homage to the original 1979 film Mad Max, but more a retelling of the best version in the trilogy of Mad Max films: The Road Warrior.

The original Mad Max narrative from 1979 is a western tribute laced with outlaws and Max, the lone gunman to uphold a world of order that has passed for a phase of moral hedonism and tribal law. Max wearing his leather skin like a cocoon, is a lone warrior of a lost cause and at the end of the film is more like Toecutter, the films nemesis than an officer of the law.

The vast openness and the motorcycle squadrons swarming against Mad Max chariot, undermine the fake layers of western happiness and self-realisation, counterbalancing the security and emotional excess of our daily lives.

Women are seen as bystanders for the sanity and satisfaction of men and become swift roadkill in a testosterone driven death inferno.

 The inspiration for Mad Max, was actually not rooted in fiction but came from George Millers experience as a trauma doctor, treating victims of car crashes and seeing their horrific injuries. This leaves the original Mad Max still rooted in some reality, parts of society still functions, trains are running and executive powers are assumed but fall to the roadside during the film.

Hence,in the second film Mad Max : Road Warrior, we have now entered a much more cynical toxic landscape. We have only masculine survivors, scavenging for resources in a barren landscape.

The film is annotated in the beginning by a great quote outing the post-apocalyptic world, by the brute, archaic survivor:

 “My life fades. The vision dims. All that remains are memories. I remember a time of chaos… ruined dreams… this wasted land. But most of all, I remember The Road Warrior. The man we called “Max.” To understand who he was, you have to go back to another time… when the world was powered by the black fuel… and the desert sprouted great cities of pipe and steel. Gone now… swept away. For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war, and touched off a blaze ..”

Hopelessness thrives in this episode, and Mad Max is adrift with no cause, just his survival. He no longer is looking for something, but wants to determine his own end. He holds no mercy, and becomes a stone called remorseless killer.

This makes him an übermale, a sexual monster with no outlet, filled with testosterone and hate.

Women,on the other hand,have been banned to the sidelines as figureheads for rape or quick deaths, when exposed to the bandits of the Humungus clan.

The Humungus clan itself is a gay troop of punk and bondage marauders, devoid of emotion and caroling each other in a sarcastic destructive self-hate pattern. The clan clearly is enlarged as a band of Freudian masculine “Id’s” that want to mate in a world of superegos.

Like sperm trying to impregnate something, but with no outlet turned desperate and violent.

The emptiness of their fictional status embraces death not as painful but as a way out. This allows the film to be a harbinger of Zombie and end of world films like “ The walking dead” and “World War Z”. The Humungus gang is still Human but their interaction is primal and zombie like.

This brings us the the newest opus of Mad Max called “Fury Road”.

One initially presumes this to be a refreshed reproduction of the “Road Warrior” and one can see stark similarities: toxic landscapes,the quest for water, short live span of the motor boys that need blood transfusions to stay alive, and relentless barrages of metal husks chasing each other in this Road rage race. Even the new adversary (Immortan Joe) is the same actor (Hugh Keays-Byrne/ Toecutter) as in the first Mad Max with a bad case of excema and a Zombie breathing mask.

However, we have turned a new chapter, degrading Mad Max to a drifting cowboy, hunted by his visions: “ It was hard to say who was crazier, me or everyone else.”

His behavior is no longer that of a lone wolf, subduing all against order - Instead he becomes a tool serving the brides of “Immortan Joe” to escape chastity into freedom.

 The women besides Max are being the only healthy beings in a toxic environment. They hold the key to bringing back society, but their alluring looks and wits hold the power and all the cards at stake. They are using Max as the blunt male organ that he is and to thrust a path to freedom and he willingly obeys.

However, the power lies within Splendid (Charlize Theron) and her gang, empowering the feminist ideal, and any blossoming affair between her and Max is quickly subdued through bodily harm.

This allows this type of genre to inhale a breath of short lived air. Instead of a dystopian future, we have rebirth under new rulership. Max falls into the male genre, the last generation of leaders, but make way now for a generation of partners and leaders, that have the chance to change the apocalypse.

We become ethical through desire and falter as men. At the end the women take over their old hunting grounds, all the alpha males are dispatched and only male drones are left to serve.

Even Max is overwhelmed and drifts out of the picture in the crowd of the commoners. The century of the female has begun.

References:

Mad Max. Dir. George Miller. Perf. Mel Gibson, Joanne Samuel, Hugh Keays- Byrne. 1979. Film

Mad Max: Road Warrior. Dir George Miller. Perf. Mel Gibson, Bruce Spencer,Michael Preston. 1981. Film

Mad Max Fury Road. Dir Geoerge Miller. Perf. Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron,Nocholaus Hoult,, Hugh Keays- Byrn. 2015. Film