Further, it is Furiosa’s commitment to protecting her passengers at all costs that keeps the film’s momentum going.ĭon’t mess with the Many Mothers But one badass main female character is hardly new to action, right? What does Fury Road have that the Terminator franchise doesn’t have? Or Alien? More women, as it turns out. Her bold attempt to take Joe’s “wives” away from him and take them with her to the “green place” where she was raised (and stolen from as a child) is what truly sets the action in motion. ![]() She is the impetus that drives the story forward. Why would we dedicate ourselves to a genre that regularly dismisses and limits us for the benefit and of men?* And though it’s only really the Warboys who call out to be witnessed, the presence of women in the film is indeed an announcement, one that is impossible to ignore.ĭespite the name “Mad Max” and the initial focus on Max (Tom Hardy) himself, the story of Fury Road really belongs to Imperator Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron. So it’s not surprising that women have historically not been the largest consumers of action films, as they often don’t feature prominently in the genre as anything more than at-risk wives/daughters/girlfriends, sexy villainesses, or nameless, voiceless bodies draped around the hero to display how awesome he is. ![]() We all look for ourselves in the media consume because to see ourselves and be seen by others is to know we are real. Go see this movie.) What a great, concise metaphor for media representation. In preparation for Valhalla, they are made shiny, like chrome. The Warboys spray chrome on their mouths before they sacrifice themselves for glory. Some oft-uttered phrases by Joe’s “Warboys” are “Witness me!” and “I am awaited in Valhalla!” These boys go happily to their deaths, content to merely have been seen (and therefore glorified,) to have been made real in the eyes of the powerful and proven to have purpose. The people clamor for Joe’s favor and the deeply fanatical will follow him into war with a smile on their face, if he so much as looks at them and acknowledges their worth. In the mythos of the post-apocalyptic hellscape that serves as the setting for Fury Road, the people worship “Immortan Joe,” because he is the one who controls the means of survival. But perhaps the best example of how the portrayal of women in Fury Road stands to positively affect representations of women in media comes not from audience reactions or box office sales, but from the film itself. I have heard from many women that simply knowing female characters exist in Fury Road as subjects and not objects was enough to get them to the theatre, and that says a lot about the dearth of options for women interested in exciting action films. That’s not to deny the film’s appeal for women, however, as Fury Road is certainly very feminist in the sense that it puts women on nearly equal footing with men, in a genre that has traditionally been rooted in the concept of masculinity. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, but I do think the reviews that fall over themselves to praise the film as a groundbreaking feminist work may be slightly reaching. After hearing many things about Mad Max: Fury Road and how wonderful and feminist it is, I finally got around to seeing it myself.
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