longwhitecoats

Slightly spoilery post title is under the cut.

Stuff Can Do Two Things: A Mad Max Meta

Many people have written very eloquently elsewhere about the film's major themes, what it got right and wrong, and how it's in dialogue with other genre films. This meta is more focused and personal: it's about why Imperator Furiosa means so much to me as a character, and why this movie felt very high-stakes to me in a way that few recent movies have other than CA:TWS.

I genuinely expected the third act of this movie to take place in the salt flats and beyond. I thought it was setting up some discovery of a new culture, maybe, or else it would end in tragedy with everyone breathing their last in the wastes. (In part, that was because of a vague spoiler I saw on Facebook, which I guess just teaches me that I should never read Facebook. TAG YOUR SPOILERS FFS.) I absolutely did not expect Max to suggest that they turn around, and I absolutely did not expect Furiosa to agree to it.

That's because the rest of Furiosa's arc made perfect sense to me: if your world is fucked to hell, you grab the few good people left and you get the hell out. Furiosa burned all her bridges leaving the Citadel (hell, she literally dropped a bridge on the hunting party). She was gone for good, spending all the resources she had in order to make it to her destination: all the bullets were counted for a one-way trip; she dropped a whole fuel pod and burned any goodwill she had with the people living in the canyon just to escape it. Which is why when she found the Vuvalini and discovered that her home was gone, it made perfect sense to me that her solution was to just keep running.

Remember, this is Max's solution, too. He just runs and runs and runs. There's no until, no endpoint. He just keeps running. So for him to be the person to say, "Hey, I feel you on this, but actually, maybe your home is the Citadel and you should fix it instead of saying to hell with it"--that astonished me.

And it terrified me. I think a lot about sick systems and broken communities and flawed governmental structures, and how unfixable they are, and how sometimes all you can do is grab the few good people left and get the hell out. Even in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, [MAJOR SPOILERS] the solution is to pull up the whole system, root and branch, and burn the fucker down. [END SPOILERS] The idea that it's possible--that it's even an option--to return to the broken system you come from and actually make it functional felt both daunting and weighty with real-life implications.

But then I thought, you know, this whole movie is really about how, in the immortal words of Jake Peralta, stuff can do two things.

Doubled functions and doubled identities are everywhere in Fury Road. Think of the Valkyrie in her tower, apparently helpless and crying one moment and shooting down a war rig the next; think of the Green Place itself, turned into a bog, where a tree that might once have given shade and nourishment during its life instead saved Furiosa's war rig by its death. There are the women forced to give breast milk to the Warboys who later release the (actually life-giving) water to the Wretched. There's the way the Splendid Angharad describes bullets--I think Toast says she calls them "death seeds" when she's counting them in the leather handbag? Which is an amazing mirror for the actual seeds that get carried in a different leather handbag later. There's Angharad herself, who becomes the primogenatrix of a new civilization not through the birth of a child, but through the endurance of her ideas of a pacifist, green society.

And there's Furiosa.

The Toast's review of this movie writes:
"has there ever been, by the way
a post apocalyptic movie
with a legend of a green or a safe place
where the safe place turned out to be real?
because I feel like it’s only ever mentioned
so we can see the main character have a big mental breakdown when they realize THEY ARE THE SAFE SPACE
and there will be NO REST FOR THEM"

While I love the Toast, I think that Imperator Ortberg is wrong on this one. I don't think Furiosa realizes she is the safe space. We've seen that she can't really keep any individual passenger safe; as Max points out, continuing to run isn't going to protect anyone meaningfully. His point is emphatically not that she is the safe space -- if she were, she could've run off to the salt flats with a tally-ho. His point is that there is a space which could be made safe. A space which is currently doing one (bad) thing, but has the potential to do something else, if they're willing to fight for it.

That Furiosa, who has spent basically her whole life destroying shit, agrees to this--that blew my little mind.

This is what I think Furiosa means when she says she's looking for redemption. We don't know what she thinks she needs to be redeemed for, but we do know some of what her life has been like. She's an Imperator. She drives a war rig. Her major problem-solving tools are shooting things, running from things, and setting things on fire. For someone like that to choose, instead, to accept the broken place they come from as a home and then decide to fix it is both politically powerful and personally inspiring to me. Imperator Furiosa can do two things: she can run -- or she can build.

That means a fuckton to me.