Rising Together: A Response to the Return of Kings’ Dismissal of Mad Max: Fury Road

By Adam J. Pearson

Warning: this article contains a few spoilers. 

Return of Kings recently published an article entitled “Why You Should Not Go See Mad Max: Feminist Road” that alleges that the film is a work of feminist propaganda posing as a “guy movie.” To quote the article:

I have read the article and seen the film and I’m just going to say it: this article is a load of horsehockey. And it’s an unjust reason to oppose a film that is cinematically groundbreaking, profound in its intellectual implications, visually stunning, and tremendously entertaining.

Mad Max: Fury Road is not a work of ‘feminist propaganda.’ This charge is a grave oversimplification of a complex work of cinematic art. The film does not exist to further an agenda, as works of propaganda do, although it does not shy away from exploring issues of oppression, resistance, and liberation.

The film is a story about men and women working together to take down a tyrannical regime that oppresses both of them. It is an underdog story that pits a small group of men and women against the vast might and superior firepower of an oppressive dictator named Immortan Joe. In this respect, the film is indeed consistent with the fundamental goal of contemporary intersectional feminism, namely, to empower men, women, and non-cisgendered individuals to work together to deconstruct systemic oppression in all forms (sexist, racist, ageist, ableist, homophobic, classist, etc.). However, the claims that the film is somehow anti-men are totally unfounded. It’s not. It’s an attack on oppression, not on men. And a visually spectacular one at that. 

Trying to frame Mad Mad: Fury Road as a film with an agenda of oppressing men and raising women up to dominate over them is a total mischaracterization. What it does do is show oppressed people, male and female alike, uniting to tackle oppression together. In the end, a tyrant is toppled and Furiosa, Max, and their surviving freedom fighters, men and women alike, empower the people by giving them access to the vital resource of water that had been denied to them for so long. Mad Max: Fury Road honours its female heroes alongside its male protagonists; it gives them equal respect and consideration and equally pivotal roles in a revolution against oppression that includes them both and allows them to unite and rise together. Far from a fault of the film, as some anti-feminist critics may claim, this is a great strength.

It seems to me that some anti-feminist men are upset that Max listens to Furiosa and considers her input, rather than simply telling her what to do. Or that the sagely elderly women who are the last remnants of the Green Place are given a depth of character that parallels the complex attitudes of the former slave wives of the brutal tyrant Immortan Joe. “We are not things!” cries out one of his  former brides as she brandishes a shotgun at the patriarch who once used her as a sex toy and baby-generator. Her resistance and rejection of objectification as an assertion of her agency are inspiring. Equally inspiring is the way in which the women from the Green Place attempt to preserve the seeds of growth and plant life in an otherwise desolate and dreary desert racked by war and pollution. They travel in search of fertile land and fend for their lives in a hostile world.

As a male viewer, I found myself empathizing with their plight and admiring Max’s decision to support their cause rather than go off on his own as he was tempted to do. I did not feel like my masculinity was “under attack” by the film-makers, but rather that the film was fostering a positive and responsible sense of masculinity that is not challenged by the empowerment of women. In this sense, Mad Max: Fury Road offers an alternative to the hegemonic patriarchal masculinity embodied by Immortan Joe, which seems tremendously insecure in comparison. As exemplified by his behaviour, Max clearly does not feel like his masculinity is challenged by the empowerment of Furiosa and the Many Mothers from the Green Place. Whose masculinity is healthier and more inwardly secure, Max’s or Immortan Joe’s? With a little reflection, the answer seems quite obvious.

It may be that anti-feminist critics who champion the Return of Kings’ dismissal of the film are upset that Max is not a male hero saving a weak damsel in distress, but rather a man fighting for freedom as an equal alongside women who face oppression from the same forces as he. However, the old Super Mario saving a powerless Princess Peach motif is a tired trope and I welcome its burial in the wake of Mad Max: Fury Road‘s alternative model of equal empowerment for all. Confident men and women working together for their mutual liberation is a trope I can get behind, not only in film, but in social life as well.

Moreover, it’s worth underscoring that Max himself has long been a victim of the oppression of Immortan Joe; strapped to vehicles racing into war, his blood was pumped out of his body and into the veins of their drivers. Is is so surprising that he emphasizes with fellow victims of oppression and feels inspired to join their cause? Is this idea so offensive and troubling to anti-feminists, who tend to place themselves at war, not with the intersectional feminism that is currently practiced, but with a straw-man (or straw-woman) version of feminism to which no one actually adheres?

Indeed, it seems that not much has changed since 1979 when James McCausland, a screenwriter behind the original Mad Max film, developed the world of the story based on his observations of the 1973 oil crisis‘ effects on Australian motorists:

Yet there were further signs of the desperate measures individuals would take to ensure mobility. A couple of oil strikes that hit many pumps revealed the ferocity with which Australians would defend their right to fill a tank. Long queues formed at the stations with petrol—and anyone who tried to sneak ahead in the queue met raw violence. … George and I wrote the [Mad Max] script based on the thesis that people would do almost anything to keep vehicles moving and the assumption that nations would not consider the huge costs of providing infrastructure for alternative energy until it was too late.

—James McCausland, writing on peak oil in The Courier-Mail, 2006^[3]

Read More from Adam Pearson at http://philosophadam.wordpress.com/