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ljwritesI have been meaning to do a Mad Max: Fury Road post approximately forever since I've seen it (and you won't convince me there was a whole world, history, and civilization before it came out), but everything kept coming out as FTBRRLT MUST MARRY IT AND HAVE ITS BABIEZZZ. The only halfway coherent thoughts I got down were in a discussion with overlithe, so I decided to repurpose my comments into a blog post.
My thoughts on Fury Road are many and tangled, but one aspect among many is that it took and demolished common sexist tropes. Here are three major ones I can think of:
WARNING: ALL THE SPOILERS.
1. Girl power as a stand-in for liberation, or plucky girl/cool girl syndrome
This is the trickiest one to talk about because I do like powerful women. However, when badly done Action Girls and other powerful women characters are used to subtly devalue women and (traditional ideas of) femininity. This happens in particular when the narrative draws a line between the cool girl and the icky girls, where the cool girl is cool because she likes boy stuff unlike all those other icky girls who like girly stuff. The cool girl is a tomboy, yet conventionally attractive including being young, white, able-bodied, thin etc.
The not-so-subtle message is that individual women can be acceptable but only to the extent they're masculine in interest and boner-pleasing in appearance. Femininity is still icky, meaning conventionally feminine women and men who do feminine things still suck (double entendre intended, especially for the men). It's the same old gender policing with boobs slapped on as a concession to modern sensibilities, and they had better be nice-looking boobs.
If I were to imagine a movie to kick this trope's ass and forget its name, an action movie that is basically one long car chase/shootout orgy would have been near the bottom of the list. Yet somehow Fury Road manages it. The movie questions the very construct of hyper-violence through the characters of Furiosa, the Vuvalini, and the Wives. Furiosa's prowess was used in the service of an evil warlord, and the Vuvalini by their own admission are bandits--and, in a Fridge Horror moment, were probably bandits even before their land died, seeing how Furiosa recognized the man-trap from her own childhood. Yes, they get shit done (with style!) and their skills are absolutely necessary in such a grim world, but from their lives and the story it's evident that the violence is just that: Grim necessity, not something that places these women on a superior plane.
Better still, the more traditionally feminine women are not portrayed derisively. The Wives' non-violent strengths are actually portrayed as positive forces in the story and not weak-hearted girliness. When they pull Furiosa off of Nux and spare his life, when the Dag subtly reproaches the Vuvalini for their way of life, they are showing a different way. Their rallying cry, "Who killed the world?" reminds us that it's not enough for strong women to slip into the roles of strong men within the same structure of exploitation and violence. The structure itself needs to change, and the Wives in their diverse strengths (spirituality, compassion, nurture, cooperation) show that the skills of violence and domination are not the only ones that matter.
Best of all, there's no manufactured animosity between the Wives and the more action-oriented female characters, but rather real friendship between women of diverse strengths. Furiosa and the Wives make major life decisions and take enormous risks for each other, and their friendship is the movie's emotional core and the force that first pushes the story into motion. Angharad shielding Furiosa with her own body will stay with me as one of the great moments of women's solidarity in cinema history. By smashing the fake cool girl/girly girl divide and the bullshit enmity that often drives it, Fury Road does away with the gender policing and divide-and-conquer policy implicit in the trope.
2. Damsel in distress
This trope was not only undermined all over the place, it was mocked hard. The Wives were classic Damsel material, ripe for rescue by the strong-jawed hero, yet turned out to be anything but. What's truly demeaning about the Damsel trope is not that the rescued character isn't physically powerful enough to punch her own way out, or that she needs help; it's that she (and it is overwhelmingly she) has no agency. She is treated as just another MacGuffin, to be picked up and carried away at the whims of others. Hell, the One Ring, Lord of the MacGuffins, had more agency than the average Damsel.
The Wives, on the other hand, were clearly shown to have agency in their destinies from the first. Our very first glimpses of them, before we see the actual women, are the slogans of defiance they left behind: OUR BABIES WILL NOT BE WARRIORS and of course, WHO KILLED THE WORLD? We are told by the History Woman that Furiosa did not kidnap them; they begged her to take them. The Wives' determination to escape their sexual and reproductive slavery despite the comforts it provided them was what ultimately moved Furiosa and the story itself.
It should also be noted that there is a fundamental difference between characters objectifying women and the story doing the objectification. Immortan Joe treated his "wives" as literal objects, keeping them in an actual fucking safe in a moment rich with symbolism, yet the story belies that view from the very first. And while it's common enough for a man who enslaves women to be the villain, works of fiction that deal with sexual violence have the tendency to implicitly endorse the abuse with salacious descriptions and shots: As Donna Dickens put so well, “We’re going to abuse women on screen for your entertainment." And that's why the apologies for on-screen or on-page rape as being "gritty" and "realistic" and so on don't work, because these depictions are all too often about sexualizing the violence rather than the subjective experiences of the victims. Fury Road evades that trap by putting the focus on the rape survivors themselves without turning their suffering into a show.
And while the wives require help in their escape and survival, this isn't portrayed as demeaning or unusual. All the major characters give and receive help, and are not lessened by their need for each other. The Wives needed Furiosa's help to flee, Max needed Furiosa in the pivotal chase near the end to hang onto him and not let him fall to his death, Furiosa needed Max to give her first aid and save her life. In all of these scenes the characters relate as people, not as lord savior to object of salvation, making the relationships and events truthful and human.
The Damsel trope is also brutally satirized in the form of the Vuvalini naked-lady trap. Valkyrie's frightened helplessness in the raised cage, so obviously a performance for the male gaze and not an expression of a trapped person's own fear and panic, is immediately recognizable as a ruse. It's like Miller is sighing and asking the audience, why do you keep falling for this crap? Don't you know it's a pretext to rob you--of your money and your time, but also of your respect for other people and a realistic perspective of life itself?
3. Woman in the fridge/manpain
I have been told, in all seriousness, that the women in the fridge trope--where women's deaths are used for men's motivation--reflects the high valuation of women. It is similarly an article of faith among anti-feminists that male power over women reflects the great value of women.
Well, Fury Road has examples of the great, ahem, importance and value of women in a hyper-patriarchal society. We have a powerful and charismatic man in hell-bent pursuit of a beautiful woman, mourning mightily over her tragic death, and raging implacably for her loss. This is the stuff heroic stories are made of, right? The valuation of women can't get any higher than this, when a man risks everything he's ever built in his life, and his life itself, just to get his woman back.
Of course, that determined romantic hero, Immortan Joe, is a slaveowner and rapist, and the "value" he places on the Wives are as his chattel and breeders. Thank God, finally someone gets it.
You see, Mary Catelli and assorted anti-feminists, "valuation" and "objectification" are not mutually exclusive concepts. It's fully possible for someone to value a person in a way that has nothing to do with that person's wants or well-being. In fact, unrealistic idealization and constant compliments are a common tactic of abusers to hook victims.
This valuation-as-object can continue after death, as brilliantly detailed inthingswithwings ' essay on manpain and mashup video. Manpain is where the suffering and death of a male character's loved ones, particularly women, are used as a device to draw emotions and violence out of the male character. He can't cry for his own pain and trauma, oh no! Because he's a man! Rather his tears must have Important Reasons, the excruciating pain and death of His Woman being foremost among them, the more lurid and sensationalized the better. The woman's life has no significance, no sense, aside from its end giving him an excuse to angst and lash out with violence. This is something that Fury Road has in spades--for its main villain, that is.
I was particularly struck by how Immortan Joe had all the hallmarks of manpain on the death of his favorite, Splendid Angharad: Holding the dying body and screaming in grief, the long broody silence, the use of her death as justification for extreme violence. To Joe her existence was all about him, her body his possession, her baby his property, her flight a defiance, her injury a slight, her death a wrong done to him. I remember just being so relieved that finally someone took this trope, often reserved for woobie heroes, and put it squarely where it belonged: on an abusive, narcissistic slave-owner.
Contrast his reaction to the people who actually knew and loved Angharad, particularly the Wives. Their grief is messy and human, not an exercise in grandstanding self-regard. When Cheedo wants to go back to Joe, it's evident that it's really about wanting to go back to Splendid and the times they shared. The Wives constantly talk about what their late friend said and what she wanted, trying to live up to and continue her legacy.
In fact, as I said to overlithe, Splendid is very much a philosopher-martyr figure and the other Wives her disciples. She believed enough in her vision to die for it, and it is in her followers' actions and thoughts that she will live on. Joe valued her for her inborn attributes of beauty and fertility; the Wives valued her for who she chose to be, a teacher, a visionary, a friend. It is through these friends/followers and the changes they will make or die trying that she will become immortal, as anyone who has lived a life of worth lives on through the lives they touched.
These three, Plucky Girl, Damsel in Distress, and Women in the Fridge are the major tropes that Mad Max: Fury Road did an excellent job of dissecting along with a whole host of toxic assumptions about women and men. The best part is, as Charlize Theron (Furiosa) said, the movie didn't even have a feminist agenda; the story is feminist by way of being honest and truthful, simply by presenting women as people. I've read stories with feminist agendas and they tend to be dreary and moralizing as agenda-driven fiction tends to be. (Legend of the Last Princess, though a concept, is representative of the type.) The latest installment of Mad Max is driven not by agenda but by truth, and that's why it is among the best feminist films of all time.
My thoughts on Fury Road are many and tangled, but one aspect among many is that it took and demolished common sexist tropes. Here are three major ones I can think of:
WARNING: ALL THE SPOILERS.
1. Girl power as a stand-in for liberation, or plucky girl/cool girl syndrome
This is the trickiest one to talk about because I do like powerful women. However, when badly done Action Girls and other powerful women characters are used to subtly devalue women and (traditional ideas of) femininity. This happens in particular when the narrative draws a line between the cool girl and the icky girls, where the cool girl is cool because she likes boy stuff unlike all those other icky girls who like girly stuff. The cool girl is a tomboy, yet conventionally attractive including being young, white, able-bodied, thin etc.
The not-so-subtle message is that individual women can be acceptable but only to the extent they're masculine in interest and boner-pleasing in appearance. Femininity is still icky, meaning conventionally feminine women and men who do feminine things still suck (double entendre intended, especially for the men). It's the same old gender policing with boobs slapped on as a concession to modern sensibilities, and they had better be nice-looking boobs.
If I were to imagine a movie to kick this trope's ass and forget its name, an action movie that is basically one long car chase/shootout orgy would have been near the bottom of the list. Yet somehow Fury Road manages it. The movie questions the very construct of hyper-violence through the characters of Furiosa, the Vuvalini, and the Wives. Furiosa's prowess was used in the service of an evil warlord, and the Vuvalini by their own admission are bandits--and, in a Fridge Horror moment, were probably bandits even before their land died, seeing how Furiosa recognized the man-trap from her own childhood. Yes, they get shit done (with style!) and their skills are absolutely necessary in such a grim world, but from their lives and the story it's evident that the violence is just that: Grim necessity, not something that places these women on a superior plane.
Better still, the more traditionally feminine women are not portrayed derisively. The Wives' non-violent strengths are actually portrayed as positive forces in the story and not weak-hearted girliness. When they pull Furiosa off of Nux and spare his life, when the Dag subtly reproaches the Vuvalini for their way of life, they are showing a different way. Their rallying cry, "Who killed the world?" reminds us that it's not enough for strong women to slip into the roles of strong men within the same structure of exploitation and violence. The structure itself needs to change, and the Wives in their diverse strengths (spirituality, compassion, nurture, cooperation) show that the skills of violence and domination are not the only ones that matter.
Best of all, there's no manufactured animosity between the Wives and the more action-oriented female characters, but rather real friendship between women of diverse strengths. Furiosa and the Wives make major life decisions and take enormous risks for each other, and their friendship is the movie's emotional core and the force that first pushes the story into motion. Angharad shielding Furiosa with her own body will stay with me as one of the great moments of women's solidarity in cinema history. By smashing the fake cool girl/girly girl divide and the bullshit enmity that often drives it, Fury Road does away with the gender policing and divide-and-conquer policy implicit in the trope.
2. Damsel in distress
This trope was not only undermined all over the place, it was mocked hard. The Wives were classic Damsel material, ripe for rescue by the strong-jawed hero, yet turned out to be anything but. What's truly demeaning about the Damsel trope is not that the rescued character isn't physically powerful enough to punch her own way out, or that she needs help; it's that she (and it is overwhelmingly she) has no agency. She is treated as just another MacGuffin, to be picked up and carried away at the whims of others. Hell, the One Ring, Lord of the MacGuffins, had more agency than the average Damsel.
The Wives, on the other hand, were clearly shown to have agency in their destinies from the first. Our very first glimpses of them, before we see the actual women, are the slogans of defiance they left behind: OUR BABIES WILL NOT BE WARRIORS and of course, WHO KILLED THE WORLD? We are told by the History Woman that Furiosa did not kidnap them; they begged her to take them. The Wives' determination to escape their sexual and reproductive slavery despite the comforts it provided them was what ultimately moved Furiosa and the story itself.
It should also be noted that there is a fundamental difference between characters objectifying women and the story doing the objectification. Immortan Joe treated his "wives" as literal objects, keeping them in an actual fucking safe in a moment rich with symbolism, yet the story belies that view from the very first. And while it's common enough for a man who enslaves women to be the villain, works of fiction that deal with sexual violence have the tendency to implicitly endorse the abuse with salacious descriptions and shots: As Donna Dickens put so well, “We’re going to abuse women on screen for your entertainment." And that's why the apologies for on-screen or on-page rape as being "gritty" and "realistic" and so on don't work, because these depictions are all too often about sexualizing the violence rather than the subjective experiences of the victims. Fury Road evades that trap by putting the focus on the rape survivors themselves without turning their suffering into a show.
And while the wives require help in their escape and survival, this isn't portrayed as demeaning or unusual. All the major characters give and receive help, and are not lessened by their need for each other. The Wives needed Furiosa's help to flee, Max needed Furiosa in the pivotal chase near the end to hang onto him and not let him fall to his death, Furiosa needed Max to give her first aid and save her life. In all of these scenes the characters relate as people, not as lord savior to object of salvation, making the relationships and events truthful and human.
The Damsel trope is also brutally satirized in the form of the Vuvalini naked-lady trap. Valkyrie's frightened helplessness in the raised cage, so obviously a performance for the male gaze and not an expression of a trapped person's own fear and panic, is immediately recognizable as a ruse. It's like Miller is sighing and asking the audience, why do you keep falling for this crap? Don't you know it's a pretext to rob you--of your money and your time, but also of your respect for other people and a realistic perspective of life itself?
3. Woman in the fridge/manpain
I have been told, in all seriousness, that the women in the fridge trope--where women's deaths are used for men's motivation--reflects the high valuation of women. It is similarly an article of faith among anti-feminists that male power over women reflects the great value of women.
Well, Fury Road has examples of the great, ahem, importance and value of women in a hyper-patriarchal society. We have a powerful and charismatic man in hell-bent pursuit of a beautiful woman, mourning mightily over her tragic death, and raging implacably for her loss. This is the stuff heroic stories are made of, right? The valuation of women can't get any higher than this, when a man risks everything he's ever built in his life, and his life itself, just to get his woman back.
Of course, that determined romantic hero, Immortan Joe, is a slaveowner and rapist, and the "value" he places on the Wives are as his chattel and breeders. Thank God, finally someone gets it.
You see, Mary Catelli and assorted anti-feminists, "valuation" and "objectification" are not mutually exclusive concepts. It's fully possible for someone to value a person in a way that has nothing to do with that person's wants or well-being. In fact, unrealistic idealization and constant compliments are a common tactic of abusers to hook victims.
This valuation-as-object can continue after death, as brilliantly detailed in
thingswithwings ' essay on manpain and mashup video. Manpain is where the suffering and death of a male character's loved ones, particularly women, are used as a device to draw emotions and violence out of the male character. He can't cry for his own pain and trauma, oh no! Because he's a man! Rather his tears must have Important Reasons, the excruciating pain and death of His Woman being foremost among them, the more lurid and sensationalized the better. The woman's life has no significance, no sense, aside from its end giving him an excuse to angst and lash out with violence. This is something that Fury Road has in spades--for its main villain, that is.I was particularly struck by how Immortan Joe had all the hallmarks of manpain on the death of his favorite, Splendid Angharad: Holding the dying body and screaming in grief, the long broody silence, the use of her death as justification for extreme violence. To Joe her existence was all about him, her body his possession, her baby his property, her flight a defiance, her injury a slight, her death a wrong done to him. I remember just being so relieved that finally someone took this trope, often reserved for woobie heroes, and put it squarely where it belonged: on an abusive, narcissistic slave-owner.
Contrast his reaction to the people who actually knew and loved Angharad, particularly the Wives. Their grief is messy and human, not an exercise in grandstanding self-regard. When Cheedo wants to go back to Joe, it's evident that it's really about wanting to go back to Splendid and the times they shared. The Wives constantly talk about what their late friend said and what she wanted, trying to live up to and continue her legacy.
In fact, as I said to overlithe, Splendid is very much a philosopher-martyr figure and the other Wives her disciples. She believed enough in her vision to die for it, and it is in her followers' actions and thoughts that she will live on. Joe valued her for her inborn attributes of beauty and fertility; the Wives valued her for who she chose to be, a teacher, a visionary, a friend. It is through these friends/followers and the changes they will make or die trying that she will become immortal, as anyone who has lived a life of worth lives on through the lives they touched.
These three, Plucky Girl, Damsel in Distress, and Women in the Fridge are the major tropes that Mad Max: Fury Road did an excellent job of dissecting along with a whole host of toxic assumptions about women and men. The best part is, as Charlize Theron (Furiosa) said, the movie didn't even have a feminist agenda; the story is feminist by way of being honest and truthful, simply by presenting women as people. I've read stories with feminist agendas and they tend to be dreary and moralizing as agenda-driven fiction tends to be. (Legend of the Last Princess, though a concept, is representative of the type.) The latest installment of Mad Max is driven not by agenda but by truth, and that's why it is among the best feminist films of all time.
