The feminist-revolution movie of the year is here, only not in the place you’d expect it: “Mad Max: Fury Road.”
The title character is actually a secondary figure in the movie, which is not really about the wanderings of post-apocalyptic tough guy Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy). It’s really the story of a feminist revolt led by Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), who works as a top lieutenant to warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), a raging nutjob being held together with plastic shields and who has air hoses coming out of his skull mask, which is accessorized with horse teeth.
Furiosa has been sent out on a run to load up her tanker truck with gasoline, but instead she has filled the hold with stolen property: Immortan Joe’s harem. These sister wives, clad in diaphanous white, represent almost the sole connection to civilized life before nuclear apocalypse left everything a barren wasteland.
The women, leaving behind graffiti reading, “We are not things” and “Who killed the world?” (Answer: men, obviously), run off hoping to restart a normal life in the verdant, distant world Furiosa remembers from childhood.
Along the way they angrily pry off their sawtooth-lined chastity belts. Later they run into a motorcycle gang/feminist collective called, somewhat suggestively, the Vulvani, and shoot it out with Joe’s troops, the Warboys. In a touch that shows an appreciation for a feminine quality of guarding and advancing life amid so much death, one of the Vulvani has a secret keepsake box. It’s full of seeds. Full of the future.
Feminists such as my colleague Sara Stewart complained that “Avengers: Age of Ultron” was sexist. Often you hear women complain that there should be more female superheroes and that they should kick as much heinie as the boys do.
This is a bit reductive. “Fury Road” actually goes a step beyond that and expends some thought on what the actual place of women might be in the world it imagines. After the apocalypse, what then?
A return to the savagery that obtained for most of history. Brutality, enslavement, institutionalized rape. Genghis Khan. A de-civilized world in which sheer physical strength and aggression determined each person’s place in the hierarchy would not work out to women’s advantage. Women would become property.
In a Marvel film, though, the wives’ solution would be to go all Black Widow on their captors, or at least for Furiosa to simply bust in and shoot up the place.
That isn’t what happens in “Fury Road.” Theron’s character is tough, but she’s primarily a driver, not a martial-arts champion. In a scene in which Max tries to take out their pursuers with a huge gun, she turns out to be the better shot, but the reason is that she uses her head: He made the mistake of trying to fire the weapon unsupported, but she cleverly uses Max’s shoulder as a tripod to stabilize it. The film doesn’t pretend that Furiosa has the same muscle power as Max and the boys. But she is wily and resourceful.
A blog post titled “Why You Should Not Go See ‘Mad Max: Feminist Road,’” at a site called Return of Kings (“a blog for heterosexual, masculine men . . . women and homosexuals are discouraged from commenting here”), complained that “feminism has infiltrated and co-opted Hollywood, ruining nearly every potentially good action flick with a forced female character or an unnecessary romance sub-plot to eek [sic] out that extra three million in female attendees.”
The post, which has drawn more than 1,200 comments, added that “men in America and around the world are going to be duped by explosions, fire tornadoes, and desert raiders into seeing what is guaranteed to be nothing more than feminist propaganda, while at the same time being insulted AND tricked into viewing a piece of American culture ruined and rewritten right in front of their very eyes.”
(In other words, the writer of the post hasn’t even seen the film yet.)
I admit I am a bit taken aback to see Max reduced to a supporting character in the relaunch of “Mad Max.” But it’s not like Max (and the other guys) don’t get to participate in some truly spectacular orgies of violence.
Still, the ultimate purpose of what everyone’s up to is preserving the freedom and dignity of the liberated women, whose well-being is essential to any possibility of re-launching a sophisticated civilization where barbarism is no longer the order of the day. It’s a much more mature and thoughtful basis for a blockbuster than, say, all the silly talk about magical amulets in “Avengers: Age of Ultron.” “Mad Max: Fury Road” is the rare action blockbuster that fully acknowledges the importance of women.