Some of the familiar Fury Road vehicles are likely to return as they have been spotted on the move recently.

This is the most ridiculous, mind-blowing resource you could ever want. There’s even a second of the 2002 script. It’s so strange to read - it’s like a parallel universe Fury Road. There’s enough that it still feels like coming home, but so much is different is just feels….weird. 

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Mad Max Fury Road is full of names: weird, inventive, evocative names. But it also uses them brilliantly. There’s so much information packed into what names are spoken, when and how.

Names and titles are a classic way of revealing hierarchy. Joe is named repeatedly, and each time it shows his relationship with the person naming him. Nux’s “Immortan! Immortan Joe!” is all about his godlike status. The Organic Mechanic’s “Joe” is deliberately casual, not actively disrespectful but certainly not worshipful. 

Then there’s the ongoing tension in what Joe calls Angharad: “Splendid” most of the time, reverting to her proper name at moments of stress, when he really needs her to listen. In the canyon scene, he goes from “Splendid, that’s my child, my property” when he’s trying to rebuke her to “Angharad! Get out!” when he realises she’s at risk of hitting the rock.  It’s implied that she rejects “Splendid” – certainly the other wives only ever call her Angharad. (More generally, the wives use each other’s names simply, to get each other’s attention: I don’t get any sense of hierarchy from it.)

Other names are hardly ever spoken. Furiosa doesn’t call the wives anything. Charlize Theron has said this was because she is trying not to get emotionally attached.

On screen, Furiosa explicitly uses names to form connections. When she asks for Max’s name, it’s a deliberate attempt to achieve emotional engagement, because she needs him on side. And it’s rare for her: not only does she not name the wives, she doesn’t use the war rig crew’s names, either. In a movie that keeps its dialogue sparse, every word counts - and every omitted word counts, too.

Within the Citadel hierarchy, war boys don’t get named by anyone but each other. “I’ve got a war boy, running on empty,” says the Organic Mechanic. An imperator later uses exactly the same phrasing to introduce Nux to Joe: “I’ve got a war boy, says he was on the war rig”. It suggests that, from the top of the Citadel hierarchy, war boys are seen as interchangeable. One describes Nux as if he were a machine; the other - “says he was on the war rig” - implies his lower status, framing his evidence as hearsay. It’s clearly a huge honour for Joe to ask Nux his name. It’s also the only time we see a Citadel full-life acknowledge a war boy’s name.  

War boys in this film are both abusers and victims - terribly fragile, desperate for attention from the powerful class that exploits and uses them, not questioning its values. They go unnamed by their superiors, but they name each other as often as possible: “Morsov!” “Slit, what’s happening?” Though Nux shouts “Crew, out of the way!” at Ace - maybe they don’t know names beyond their own crews, or maybe he just doesn’t recognise Ace from behind.

They use names to encourage each other. Just look at the way they all shout Morsov’s name before witnessing him. “Witness me” is a plea for affirmation: see what I’m doing, make it mean something. Witnessing is an act of performative masculinity - I liked @bookishandi‘s post on witnessing Nux’s death. But it’s also framed as an act of mutual support (which I think is why it’s taken off so much in fandom).  Morsov’s death - which is really the viewer’s introduction to “witnessing” as a concept - is part of a scene that shows us the war rig crew working smoothly together.

The exception is Slit, who tries to undermine his colleagues instead, shouting “Mediocre, Morsov!” rather than “witness”, or telling Nux that Joe wasn’t looking at him, “He was scanning the horizon”. And of course Slit is the most insecure of the lot, begging for any scrap of attention: “I got the blood bag’s boot! Take me, I got his boot!”  

Imperators, and others from the Citadel’s powerful classes, are clearly known by their names. “Furiosa, she took a lot of stuff from Immortan Joe”, for instance. There’s no sense that war boys give this recognition to anyone not at the top of that hierarchy. The war boy who tells Nux about Furiosa talks about the wives as things - “stuff”, “prize breeders”. Nux’s own reaction to the wives - “so shiny, so chrome” - sees them as objects rather than people. And of course he goes on calling Max “blood bag”, even when he thinks they’re on the same side. It’s not a conscoius insult; it clearly doesn’t occur to him that Max might mind - any more than Nux minded the way the Organic Mechanic or the imperator talked about him.

Then there’s the scene when Furiosa greets the Vuvalini. Here’s what she says:

“I am one of the Vuvalini, the Many Mothers. My initiate mother was K.T. Concannon. I am the daughter of Mary Jobassa. My clan was Swaddle Dog.” 

This is a speech proving her identity, but how she does it is so revealing. She doesn’t use her own name at all. Instead, it’s all about a web of relationships, of connections, the ways in which she belongs. (She’s also proving that she belongs by demonstrating knowledge of Vuvalini society.) She lists her initiate mother before her birth mother – her place in the community before her lineage. Her tenses are interesting, too. Her clan was Swaddle Dog – she’s left, the clan may no longer exist, she’s talking about the past. But when she talks about being Vuvalini, it’s “I am”.  Even though she’s asking for recognition, it has none of the war boys’ neediness – she’s naming what she is, how she chooses to see herself. She’s not seeking approval or affirmation. 

And though the Vuvalini team work is smooth, they do it without shouting names – to the point where most of the Vuvalini characters don’t have names at all (which is very unhelpful for fandom, George). Citadel naming is intensely hierarchical, about who does, and doesn’t, get respect. Vuvalini naming is about community, identities built up through choices and relationships.

None of the people, including the villains, call Furiosa a “bitch” for all I can remember, which is a common thing for movie villains to say to a female protagonist. The villains only call her a traitor. None of the people in this movie use a character’s gender as an insult. This is great.

I think the director not only didn’t sexualize the female characters, he also set up an terrible yet interesting world where sexualization is probably too much a luxury to even exist.

Take the wives as an example, they are called pretty and precious by Immortan Joe and the War Boys only because they are not only fertile but also have no developmental deficiency, which is a rare thing in that world, not because they are, well, sexy.

Even though the wives are kept as “sex” slaves, and rape were involved, but they are not “sexualized” both in the eyes of the audience and the movie characters. Not in a way “Slave Leia” is sexualized in Star Wars anyway, which is obviously to please the male audience and the male villains. 

The wives are reduced to objects for their “functions”, not because they are eye candies. Everybody else in the movie are objectified in the same, almost animal level kind of way: fertile female as breeder and milk producer (the scene is shot clearly not because “hoho male audience must love to see some big titties”, but to show mother milk is a precious nutrition source (which is true) only the high commanders can have); male as cannon fodders with short life span, their value not more than dogs; healthy captives and probably non-combatants as blood donor (Max was captured and forced to donate blood to the War Boys). It’s kind of like how we keep the cows for milk, oxes for steaks, and dogs to hunt. There’s nothing “sexual” in it despite it’s all about survive and reproduce. You can say everyone is fair in this terrible way.

I’m pretty sure it’s a directorial/authorial decision rather than something inherent in the world, given how the rest of the post also points out things attributable to storytelling choices rather than the world itself. The movie not only didn’t dwell on sexual violence but also didn’t use the ‘camera’s gaze’ in a sexual way on the wives (there were no lingering shots on breasts/legs/ass, there was just the prominent pregnant belly and the highlighting of the chastity belt). The belly, the belt, and the wives clothes highlighted that they were sexualized by the men in power, but the story itself didn’t reenact this violence on them.

Neither can you argue that the gauze bikini’s are in the movie for the benefit of a the movie’s male audience. Even when they are literally bathing together, we don’t see any water running down chests while the models arch their backs and run their fingers through their hair and sigh pleasurably. Instead we see a bunch of women perfunctorily rinsing off legs and feet, looking exhausted. When they see max, they take on fearful, closed off expressions, and project fearful, closed off body language. 

The movie makes it quite clear both that the villains went out of their way to sexualize these women, and that the filmmakers went out of their way to humanize these same women.

Moreover, the reason Imperator Furiosa is not sexualized by the villains is not because the men don’t objectify women, but rather because Furiosa has taken great pains to make herself genderless under their gaze.

From Entertainment Weekly:

It was Theron herself who unlocked the image of the androgynous warrior—a woman who has escaped the fate of other women by erasing her gender.

“I just said, ‘I have to shave my head,’” Theron recalls. Furiosa is a war-rig operator living in a place where all other females have been enslaved as breeding and milking chattel. But Furiosa is barren and therefore of no value to the despot Immortan Joe and his soldiers. She is considered worthless. ”They almost forget she’s a woman, so there is no threat,” she says. “I understood a woman that’s been hiding in a world where she’s been discarded.” [x]

The reason we don’t hear the villains using the overtly sexist and objectifying language we’re used to hearing in these kinds of movies is not because the villains are “egalitarian oppressors” who objectify all persons equally. 

It’s because their perspective is not part of the movie’s narrative. The movie is not told from the point of view of sexist men. The movie is not pandering to an audience of sexist men. 

This is a story about sexists, told by non-sexists.

I know it’s a bit confusing, because we’re so used to seeing stories about sexists told by sexists. We’re so used to sexism being portrayed in a certain way, that when it’s portrayed in a different way, it’s hard to recognize.

So let me clear something up – when a man calls a woman a bitch in a movie, that is not the filmmaker’s way of showing the audience he is sexist; that is the filmmaker’s way of showing the audience that his sexist point of view is worth hearing.

I’m gonna say that again:

I just met Jenny Beavan and am going to watch a panel on costume design at Industry Workshops in London. :3

Before the Dirt - The Cars of Mad Max Fury Road on Behance by John Platt

So I’ve been re-watching Fury Road and something struck me;

Tom Hardy’s Max is just really non-threatening. Now, that’s weird on a surface level because in story he’s presented as very dangerous. But here’s the thing about the kind of men we’re used to seeing in action movie; They are threatening in their masculinity.

The capitol A Action hero is a fixture in our cultural awareness. Almost without fail this hero is a man (if you have a woman in the role of action hero, it’s almost always proceeded by her gender. She can’t just be the action hero, she is very clearly cast as a FEMALE action hero.) So our male Action hero  is a badass. He’s dangerous, he’s brooding, he’s tough as nails. Sometimes he’s sarcastic and witty, sometimes he’s a moody stud. Point is, despite cultural changes that we see with our Action heroes as different pop culture trends change the flavoring, these men are all pretty much cut from the same mold. And here’s the thing about your typical Action hero; They have this underlying current of threatening masculinity. To put it bluntly, your typical Action hero is really all about cock. They’re intimidating to both their male peers and the women who are cast opposite them. They are toxic masculinity distilled onto our screens.

Now, in recent years we’ve been seeing more varity in our Action heroes. More emotion. Of course, there have always been exceptions (Luke Skywalker is one of the most note worthy male heroes to break this mold, and I think it’s worth noting that he’s often called whiny. Hell, when I was a little kid I loved him, but as a young teenager I thought he was lame. Now I realize that this might well have been because he wasn’t acting like your typical male hero. Maybe that scared me on some level) Anyway, let’s get back to Hardy’s Max. In story he  starts out as frightening, but he is never threatening in the way of your usual Action hero. He’s feral, dangerous, and unpredictable at the start of our story, but he doesn’t have any of that toxic masculinity.  So, we have a mad Max who is dangerous, and seems mad, as it were.  But there’s none of that hyper male Action hero posturing.

Hardy’s Max is a flawed man whose past has almost driven him past the point of no return. To the other characters in the movies he initially seems to be  feral (they don’t have the benefit of hearing his inner thoughts) Max is a frightening, but he’s not a masculine he-man. In fact, the characters in the movie who fall close to what we’re used to seeing in Action heroes are the warboys and their leader. The culture espoused by Immortan Joe is hyper masculine and toxic. The young men who idolize him seem like extreme versions of what we’re used to with our heroes. They’re brainwashed into a society built on toxic masculinity and objectification, and the heroes of the story are the ones fighting against this idea. Interestingly, Furiosa has a lot of traits of your traditional Action hero, but it’s coupled with compassion and self reflection, not because she’s a woman, but because  she’s  a person. Like Max, she is fighting to regain her humanity through helping a group of young women fight for their freedom from a world of toxic masculinity.

So, again back to Max himself. As the movie goes on he regains his sense of self. A big theme int he movie is the objectification and commodification of human life. We see this with Immortan Joe’s ‘wives” as well as with the brainwashed warboys and the use living humans as ‘bloodbags’ and ‘milkers’ Max starts the movie literally strapped to the hood of a car as a hood ornament/living blood bag.  Max is reluctant to help Furiosa and the ‘wives’ at first, but we see him change in a brief period of time. He  regains his humanity through helping others and coming to terms with his own demons. Hardy’s Max is dangerous, but he’s also vulnerable, undeniably so. We see his fear, we see what haunts him, and we see him struggle to survive, and then struggle to come to terms with his past in order to help others have a future. This sets him apart from Mel Gibson’s Max, and in my opinion makes him the better of the two. By the time Max starts really showing his human side, we see a man who is compassionate and half broken, a man who relearns himself by helping others.

Another notable aspect of Max is his relationship with Furiosa. Usually when your typical Action hero is paired with a STRONG INDEPENDENT WOMAN in a movie, there’s this ongoing dynamic of ‘but you’re a girlllllll’ There isn’t respect, because the heroes of the story are acting out the deeply felt internalized misogyny of our own society. They can’t interact as equals because in our cultural minds they are inherently unequal. They are defined by their rigid gender rules, and they act this out like they’re children on a playground crying about cooties. And of course, there’s usually the sexual element, with the heroes constantly griping at/disrespecting one another while it’s played off as repressed attraction all along.Fury Road never once does this. Max and Furiosa are two flawed and broken people trying to survive. There isn’t a split second where Max stops to wonder how a GIRL can be so tough. Once they’re established as allies, they immediately move into a working relationship built on mutual respect and trust. Two scenes come to mind. Firstly, the initial canon chase when Max first shows himself as an ally. There’s one notable moment where Furiosa is standing up out of the roof and Max hands her a gun. That doesn’t seem important, but there’s something about that gesture that’s very c cinematically important. It shows us that they’re a team now, and it shows us that they trust each other. The second notable scene is the “Don’t breathe” moment in the night bog. Max has previously seen that Furiosa is a good shot. He knows that she is the one to trust with this task, so he hands her the gun and lets her use him as a rifle stand. It’s a moment with no dialogue that speaks volumes.

via INTERVIEW - MARK NATOLI, METAL MAESTRO ON MAD MAX: FURY ROAD

Hardy Friday

Mad Max Fury Road

Part 3 of 4

Behind the Scenes

This movie should have been called “When Jake met Tom”. The beginning of such a beautiful friendship.