The road less taken

IF HOLLYWOOD represents the ash heap of culture, then Mad Max: Fury Road could be called an honest attempt to build castles out of the rubble. Jagged, dirty and stoically aware of the decay all around it, Fury Road manages to erect something truly beautiful from the cinders.

In addition to being gorgeously chaotic, unnervingly frenetic and set in a richly conceived world, Fury Road has also become the second major studio release in less than a month to provoke a wide-ranging conversation about feminism and the role of women in Hollywood.

While socialists should not shy away from our reputation as pessimistic killjoys in pointing out that we're still a long way from a gender revolution breaking out in the entertainment industry, we should, nonetheless, be unequivocal in our defense of this movie.

As popular culture--and particularly the geek-inclined wing of popular culture--has increasingly become a battleground between those who think women should be equal to men and those who pine for simpler times when wives were considered property, existing solely to pleasure their husbands, Mad Max unapologetically takes sides.

This transgression has been registered by knuckle-dragging "men's rights activists" everywhere, who bellow in horrified unison, "This isn't a straight-up guy flick made for men!" To which socialists should reply, following Marx's quip against those who were outraged about calls to abolish private property in the Communist Manifesto, "Just so."

These human colostomy bags are correct to point out that writer-director George Miller has made a feminist action movie. But more than that, feminism is so central to the fabric of his film that it is impossible to ignore. And everything about the film is stronger because of it.

That said, we would be remiss to focus solely on its feminism, as Fury Road is most certainly a big-budget action movie before it is anything else, and Miller's revelry in the excesses that come along with this fact shine through in almost every scene. Its scale is epic, its battles play out with circus-like acrobatics atop speeding cars, and its anxiety-inducing pace is amplified throughout by technical flourishes like the accelerated frame-rate during its foot chase.

Fury Road provides more or less everything that a genuine fan of the action genre could want from a summer movie. It has a fire tornado. It has a car made almost entirely out of amplifiers. It has a Tom Hardy hood ornament. And it has a flamethrower guitar.

A. Flame. Thrower. Guitar.

WHERE MOST summer blockbusters are content to survive on this sort of spectacle alone--offering only slight variations on the chase/implausible love interest/fight/repeat formula at least some of us have grown to know and love--George Miller takes the best the genre has to offer and transcends its worst defects. Most notably, and somewhat paradoxically in a movie almost defined by its hyperbole, Fury Road's storytelling is remarkably understated.

Many other reviewers have pointed out how the gender politics of the movie set it apart, but fewer have commented upon how effectively Miller gives complexity and depth to his post-apocalyptic world without saying anything about it. Some of this was no doubt imposed by the desire to make a two-hour-long chase sequence where the action drives a stripped-down plot. But with the exception of Max Rockatansky's (Tom Hardy) three-line opening monologue, Miller rejects exposition in favor of pregnant visual asides when it comes to developing the texture of his world.

This restraint, and its attendant confidence in the imagination of his audience, is the essence of good world-building, and makes Miller's wasteland feel like it's actually inhabited by its characters, rather than being one among hundreds of set pieces languishing in the back lot of some Hollywood studio. From the decision not to show any of the cruelty or abuse suffered by its women to the completely unexplained and utterly haunting stilt-walking raven people who appear in only one establishing shot, Fury Road offers dozens of opportunities for viewers to play a role in filling in the gaps intentionally left in the background.

This "less is more" approach is also applied with skill to its sparse, yet skillful character development. Though some reviewers have dismissed Miller's female characters in particular as shallow and one-dimensional because of their conventionally thin physiques, this pretty-shaming overlooks just how dissimilar they are to the objectified trumped-up extras most supermodels (and, really, most actresses) play in other Hollywood action films.

It is precisely because our first view of the escapees--gauzy bikini-clad beauties bathing with a water hose--is so formally similar to the typical cinematic voyeurism that subsequent scenes are so effective at driving home how much more there is to these women. In fact, as they first fight Max, then Nux (Nicholas Hoult), then Joe and all the war boys, never once do they slip into the sexist action-movie trope of playing the passive victim.

Culturally we are starved for strong, autonomous, fully formed female protagonists in films, action or otherwise, so it's easy to understand why so many are desperate to find feminist heroes in places where there are none. But Fury Road goes well beyond the basic requirements of non-sexist movie-making and gives us multiple and varied action heroines whose badass bravery in the face of violent oppression is rivaled only by their intelligence and compassion.

Ultimately, authorial intent notwithstanding, the drive to create a believable and richly developed world is the real source of Fury Road's much-discussed feminism.

Even Miller's decision to consult with Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler can be situated in this commitment to intelligent filmmaking. Their collaboration came about, as he has noted, when Miller heard Ensler interviewed on the radio, connected the dots to characters in his script, and solicited her help in providing he and the film's cast a better understanding of the experiences of trafficked survivors of sexual violence/slavery.

Others are correct to point out that Ensler's secondhand knowledge was hardly the most expert input available on the subject, but the fact that he brought her on at all is a cut against the grain. As feminist fans of action films, we should demand as much and more from every filmmaker--at minimum, no violent, abusive misogyny; ideally, eco-feminist protagonists who save the world through radical solidarity. The latter is pretty much what we get in Fury Road, though further defense of this reading requires a fair amount of spoilers--readers should consider themselves SPOILER WARNED.

ON PLOT alone, the movie scores a number of feminist points. Most notably, Fury Road is the story of Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), the stoic captain of an 18-wheel war rig, with Tom Hardy's titular character somewhat unwillingly (at least at first) along for the ride.

All the action is kicked off when Furiosa assists five sexually enslaved women escape from the war-worshipping misogynist patriarch Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and his prison/stronghold, the Citadel. An endless supply of water--and thus power--flows through the hollows of this desert-butte-turned-factory-of-war, where women are kept in bondage as either "breeders" or "milkers," boys are trained to crave violence and death by war, and the impoverished masses survive in its shadow despite environmental exposure.

As the movie unfolds, Furiosa is developed as a textured, believable rig captain with complicated motives and a dynamic arc. We see her trust in Nux (Nicholas Hoult) and Max develop into camaraderie and care, not sexy romance or dependence.

Once her dreams of lush female utopia are shattered, Furiosa is moved by Max's plea to abandon her backup "plan" of riding across the desert until supplies run out. Instead, she turns around and leads the femme survivors and their two "reliable" male supporters in a confrontation with the warmongering patriarchs in an attempt to liberate the Citadel from Joe's stranglehold.

Rarely do our action heroes or heroines look over their shoulders and, through collective action, choose joint liberation over a defensive life on the lam. The meaning and resonance of this decision is deepened by the fact that Mad Max gives up his well-provisioned motorcycle and, seemingly just for the sake of his own emotional recovery, voluntarily takes up someone else's fight.

This points to the way that the quality of the film's politics doesn't stop at the horizon of women's liberation. Perhaps even more important than its well-established feminist credentials for the specifically socialist defense of Fury Road is the implication of Max's exhortation to Furiosa alluded to above. Shortly after discovering the long sought-out Green Place to be a patch of toxic mud, Hardy's character mutters, "Hope is a mistake. If you can't fix what's broken, you'll just go insane." Max's words are meant to say that rather than launch an errant pursuit of another fraudulent utopia, they should all turn around and go try to take over the Citadel.

There are several components of this exchange worthy of note. First and most obvious, this admonishment of a stubborn yet vacuous optimism does not come from a gruff survivalist nihilism, but is rather a plea for a sober approach to the question of how to resolve their dilemma. Directly charging through Immortan Joe and his war boys offers bleak prospects, but overturning the existing order--as opposed to escaping to some mythic place beyond the sands--is the only certain way for Furiosa and the others to achieve peace and freedom.

Second, it is manifestly clear to all of the characters that whatever slim chance of success Max's plan might have depends entirely on all of them working together. This seems simple and straightforward enough, and yet every action movie that features a struggle against a tyrannical regime (admittedly an extraordinarily small sample set) seems content to offer an individualistic route to revolution. In contrast, Fury Road's climatic rebellion is unabashedly collective with everyone (including the war pups and "milkers" once they see Joe's claims at immortality exposed) playing a part.

But still more politically surprising and unique is the way Fury Road' deals with Splendid (Rosie Alice Huntington-Whiteley) and her pregnancy. Poorly written movies love pregnant women--impregnating women, then abusing them, is the easiest way for bad screenwriters to evoke emotional responses. If they're finally killed, often a salvaged fetus is their living father's new hope that maybe, despite that gendered violence, things are gonna be okay. But Fury Road crushes this disgusting narrative brilliantly.

At several points throughout the film, Splendid turns Joe's objectification of her and her pregnancy into a shield to protect herself and her crew, using his devaluation of her to save her own life while the rig is under attack. When Splendid does ultimately fall in battle, Immortan Joe rues the loss of his "treasure," yet commands that his son be cut out of her as she dies. Much to his dismay, Splendid's son is dead, too--no silver-lining on her maternal mortality--and the story goes on, the sister-wives markedly grieving, but also more determined to win their freedom, while Joe can't do more than contemplate his spearhead and hum a dinky tune.

SOME ON the left (one of the present reviewers included) have rightly lampooned the idea that socialists should take our political lead from capitalism's cultural commodities. While that remains, in general, a good rule for radicals to follow, we really could do much worse than to inscribe our banners with slogans suggested by Mad Max: Fury Road. Its vision of a female-fronted revolution, based on solidarity rather than misandry, offers contemporary audiences a conception of social change not so far off from our own.

That said, it should be conceded to some of Fury Road's critics that its feminism doesn't transcend its ultra-violence. True to the action genre, there's plenty of stylized weaponry (and weaponized vehicles), fight choreography, expendable soldiers and explosions. Furiosa is arguably one of its most skilled and unflinching fighters, which could be read as playing into a phony feminism, wherein female characters are merely given equal opportunity to shoot and explode people alongside their male counterparts.

The preceding should make clear the weakness of this claim, but it does beg the question: Why should we want to make $150 million carnivals of violence more feminist? The film asks this itself when the Dag (Abbey Lee Kershaw) expresses her disappointment upon learning about the gun-toting self-defense of the Vuvalini (the small band of lady elders forced to range the wasteland after the Green Place dies). The Keeper of the Seeds (Melissa Jaffer) explains that she's very committed to keeping life alive, and wouldn't kill "everyone she's ever met" if the conditions of survival didn't necessitate it. In other words, violence cannot always be avoided on the road to liberation, especially when one must confront violent oppressors.

Yet even if we can make small political criticisms here or there (or even some big ones, like the movie's almost all-white cast--a failing especially troubling coming from an Australian director)--there are already signs that Fury Road is provoking self-reflection among at least some geeks about their views on women.

This fact should lead us to readily admit that the furor around Fury Road proves, once and for all, that big-budget action films, with more explosions than dialogue, are probably better vehicles for opening important debates than even the most sophisticated works of revolutionary agit-prop. Put differently, as far as these reviewers are concerned, Bertolt Brecht has got nothing on George Miller.

Thirty years and two Happy Feet movies later, Miller has managed to revitalize and improve upon the franchise that made him famous. In the process, he has provided those of us interested in salvaging what's worth saving in the summer action movie genre a glimpse of what cinema could be.

We would be utterly mistaken to hope that Fury Road marks the beginning of the eco-feminist-big-budget-car-chase sub-genre. But we can, at least, now say that the building blocks for creating a new Hollywood can be found by sifting through the ash.