Postfeminism in Mad Max

2015 saw the revival of an old trilogy; that of the iconic Max Max. Fury Road, this new installment in the series, offers a stark and surprisingly postfeminist change. It puts a woman at the center of the story, one that gets to overthrow a patriarchal tyrant. By comparing this radical change to the three older (1979) movies, and taking into account that they were all- including Fury Road- written by the same director, it's easier to see a cultural shift.

The original Mad Max was about the stereotypical macho post-apocalyptic survivalist lone wolf. In the words of Noah Berlatski from The Establishment, "Director George Miller’s series is devoted to manly men beating their manly chests while grunting and butting chests and cars and other manly bits. Tough guy, glowering-cowboy-biker-machismo and leather, and guns, and brutal death in gladiatorial combat: That’s what Mad Max was originally all about, not feminism." The various communities into which Max drifts in the second and third films are also anchored by women and the associated children. Men are sometimes in charge — but all-male communities in these films tend to be gangs, not civilizations. Men man the barricades of civilization to protect women from the barbaric manly hordes amidst the grinding of gear shifts, biceps, and gender stereotypes. 

Fury Road is a radical break. In this post apocalyptic world women are characters can hold on their own. They are on the forefront of the story and Max is an unlucky bystander that gets caught up in the mess, eventually helping Furiosa and the other characters escape from slavery. Fury Road is a film that actively deflates one of misogynists' most treasured fantasies (and boy did they cry out in displeasure when the movie came out). The apocalypse is supposed to be a place where women’s freedom goes to die, yet this movie turns that trope on its head. Immortan Joe’s harem of women are actively fighting for their freedom. “WE ARE NOT THINGS” they write on the walls of their prison. 

“Fury Road,” explains Adi Robertson from The Verge “explicitly balances Max's journey with a story about women and women's agency. The real threat is that even the women who are everything anti-feminists smugly predict — enslaved, fragile, sheltered — can be brave and competent.” There's a feminist concept usually summed up as "the patriarchy hurts men too" — men die in war, men die in all manners relating to their expected gender roles, pushed into high-risk jobs and defined by their earning capacity. It's the idea that our gender stereotypes end up limiting everyone, not just women. Fury Road plays this out very literally. Villain Immortan Joe's patriarchal society privileges and is run by men. His "warboys" seem well above women in the food chain, set to enter Valhalla when they die. They're also short-lived, interchangeable, and desperate for approval. Nux, a young, brainwashed warboy, has a fragile and violent masculinity that makes him deadly, but the moment he slips up, he loses everything. "Who killed the world?" Is written on the walls of the vault prison, and and it is said by Angharad just before she threw out Nux from the war rig: 


Angharad: Breeding stock! (relating to them)  Battle fodder! (relating to him)

Nux: No, I am awaited!

Angharad: You're an old man's battle fodder!

Angharad: Killing everyone and everything!

Nux: We're not to blame!

Angharad: Then who killed the world?

This line is directed at the ruthless dictators and their brutal followers based on power and aggression, incarnated by Immortan and his admirers. Directed toward the system that led to the war-torn, nuclear-bombed, water-lacking and dystopian world they're now in.


Maybe most importantly, the movie doesn't just try to avoid making women's subjugation titillating (think Game of Thrones), it rarely gives the audience the satisfaction of seeing it at all. And that's a huge step. George Miller created characters that are empowered. Not victims, or sideckicks, or damsels in distress. The women here, though they have been terribly wronged, are intelligent, fierce, strong and yet still loving and compassionate. 


It doesn't end there. Fury Road takes feminism a step further into Post-feminism, showing Max and Furiosa as equal partners.

In this scene Max fails at hitting his target twice in a row and so accepts that his female companion, Furiosa, should take the shot because of her superior skill. it is uncommon for the male hero of an action film to hand the reins over to a woman when women generally are the overly-sexualized sidekick in this genre. But it's not just women-empowerment. It's equality. Max and Furiosa treat each other with equal respect, not blind but not influenced by the gender of each other. They treat each other more like brothers in arms. They work in powerful, seamless teamwork. "Throughout the film, Max works with Furiosa as a partner. She doesn’t forbid him to participate because of his gender, or claim superiority. He, in turn, doesn’t patronize or condescend her, or challenge her authority because he sees her as lesser, and extends the same common courtesy to the film’s other females." - Cinemablography.

 Max also serves as a good intersectional feminist role model for men because he never acts entitled to receive sexual favors from Furiosa or the wives as compensation for his assistance, and never makes unwanted sexual advances on a woman. In fact, Max never makes any sexual advances. He proves that women and men can just be friends and\or work together without things becoming physical. It's beyond feminism; it's post-feminism.

(Examples: The roles they play are equal in stance. They help each other, and in one scene Max even plays the nurturing role as he fights to save Furiousa's life.)

Blade Runner: A Post Modern Example

Visiting a film site for Ridley Scott's 1982 Blade Runner reminded me of what post-modernism exemplified; the media-saturated world where the line between reality and media was ostensibly blurred. Where human, replicants, real and manufactured are virtually indistinguishable. Replicants themselves are pastiche; replicating humans, yet being synthetic. Los Angeles in the future is bleak and decayed, a vision devoid of hope. Truth and facts are temporal and subjective. It's a world where science, technology and progress has all but failed society and allowed for the future to be nothing but a polluted, over-crowded industrial dystopia where the rich escape off-world. The future does not realize an idealized. aseptic technological order. The way that postmodernism reflects society's feelings of alienation, insecurity and uncertainties regarding identity, history, progress and truth are displayed starkly in this world composed of a patchwork of styles and fads, with no past or future to mark or solidify its history, and no present to hold on to. It's a society of spectacle and visuals, devoid of any depth. A society replete with identity crisis; the city itself doesn't have an identity (it looks like Hong Kong, Tokyo or New York; it could be anyplace), and replicants don't do either. They have no past to speak of, and a future where only death approaches.

Blade Runner contains post-modern aesthetics as well, showing a hybridity in cultures, clothes, and everything in between.  Even the language is pastiche: "city speech" is a "mishmash of Japanese, Spanish, German, what have you." The postmodern aesthetic of Blade Runner is thus the result of recycling, fusion of levels, discontinuous signifiers, explosion of boundaries, and erosion. The walls of Deckard's apartment are reminiscent of an ancient Mayan palace. Pastiche, as an aesthetic, incorporates dead styles; it attempts to recover past history. The Tyrell corp building resembles Egyptian pyramids, rather than a high-tech modern building. It's bicolage.

The narrative itself (whether emotions are programmed or humanity manufactured, and what separates human and machine when the line is so unclear) is postmodern. Postmodern philosophers like Jean Baudrillard ask the same questions about the hyperreal, and dealing with a world ripe with imagery over the individual. Pastiche and the exhibitionism of the visual celebrate the dominance of portrayal and the replacement of the portrayed in the era of postindustrialism. The postindustrial society is the "society of the spectacle," living in the "ecstasy of communication." Addressing this aspect of postmodernism, Jean Baudrillard speaks of a twist in the relationship between the real and its reproduction. "The real is not what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced . . . the hyperreal . . . which is entirely in simulation." In the narrative space of Blade Runner "All of Los Angeles . . . is of the order of hyperreal and simulation."

The narrative "invention" of the replicants is almost a literalization of Baubrillard's theory of postmodernism as the age of simulacra and simulation.

Blade Runner, as a film, utilizes visual media and quotes from all sorts of sources, be it Pulp Fiction, Chinatown-like neon streets or Greek, Roman and Mayan architecture, time, history, high/low culture and the relationships and differences between them are in a state of confusion.

There is, at all times, a pervading sense of dark irony and self-awareness that reminds us of the current, post-modern era of cynicism.

Monster Theory

The monstrous body; a metaphor for the cultural body. The physical shape of cultural unease, constraints, fears and taboos. Cohen asserts their connection with places and periods of times. The monster is a projection of the society that engenders them, revealing and waiting to be read. The fact that it is made up of a society's fears and anxieties means that it will be ever-present, never to fully disappear though it might have been seemingly defeated. Society will always fear something.

So what makes a monster monstrous? Difference. It is within human nature to fear what is different. To think of it as danger. Those who are most likely to be turned into monsters are those who are different and threaten the society set by white men; women and those of another ethnicity. Whether it be Native Americans (turning them into monsters within stories to fuel the political machine that was Manifest Destiny), black people (whose only difference was skin color, yet were seen as savage and inferior), or homosexuals. Monsters are scapegoats of what society shuns. A strict Christian society with hard values and morals will have many monsters enumerating anything from sexuality to interracial marriage. When a society is well (financially speaking), and popularly conservative like it use to be, most monsters tended to be vampires; the opposite of what a society is (order, monogamy, laws, rules, morality). Vampires represent a breakdown of traditional morality and sexuality, a rejection of religion (there's a reason you can ward off a vampire with a cross), and the seduction and corruption of the innocent. Part of the whole concept of vampires is that they're not just sexy as hell, but aren't too picky about which warm hole they decide to probe. Zombies, popular during times of societal and economic turbulence, represent anything that threatens the survival of civilization, whether it be viruses or consumerism; it depicts the fall of civilization to that of mindless walking corpses that consume and assimilate everything in their way.

Monsters also represent repressed desires. Monsters are free and oppose all the laws that society imposes. The monster's very existence is a refusal of boundaries. Sometimes we love monsters. We WANT to be the monster. And while speaking of boundaries it is imperative to note that monsters have always existed outside boundaries to ward off curiosity and exploration as well. Monsters were always charted and depicted in drawings of maps where land and sea was uncharted and unexplored- warning off others through fear of death or worse. One risked attack by monsters guarding borders. Monsters are a tool to limit society and, in a way, controlling it. Monsters punish people for not following society.

It is easy to see what people in a certain society or time tough and feared. It is reflected by the monsters they create; by the “children” they gave birth to.

So why does difference (ergo, monsters) equal fear? Cohen wrote that "Difference outside the system is terrifying because it reveals the truth of the system, its fragility, its relativity, and its morality..." Monsters show us how easy it is to break down the structured societies we've built to feel safe. In order to understand and decode a society, one look at the monsters they've created will be revealing enough.