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Thanks, I Hate It: Mad Max: Fury Road
🕑 Added 2019-01-12 02:18:44 +0000 UTCThere are impressive things in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road. The stunt work is astounding, for one. The scene in which Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) watches his soldier Nux (Nicholas Hoult) eat dirt while attempting to board a moving war rig and shouts with gleeful disgust “Mediocre!” before abandoning the kid to his fate is both hilarious and a genuine gut-punch. But the rest? The rest, gang, is bullshit.
If you’re going to reboot a beloved geek dude series of yesteryear, I strongly agree with the idea that you should make it about women. Fury Road, though, with its five immaculately beautiful and more or less interchangeable escaped concubines, isn’t so much about women as it happens to include women. Preferable to the alternative, sure, but it plays directly into the movie’s repugnant tendency to equate goodness with beauty and deformity—specifically congenital defects like Corpus Colossus’s (Quentin Kenihan) dwarfism and osteogenesis imperfecta, or the People Eater’s (John Howard) grossly swollen clubfoot—with evil.
By confining deformity to the film’s nakedly monstrous antagonists, Miller uses the lazy, bigoted shorthand of physical disability to communicate characters’ personalities. We know Immortan Joe is evil because of the warts and lesions covering his body, framed with ominous stillness from the chest down as he’s powdered and dressed before speaking to his people. There’s no face to focus on, just ugliness accompanied by menacing music. I don’t know what else to say about a movie where the bad guys are on oxygen and in wheelchairs and the good guys are Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron (whose disability is a war wound, not a birth defect), and a bunch of picture perfect magazine models.
Then there are the fat women, glimpsed once near the film’s opening and then again for a moment near its end. In the former appearance, they’re being milked. They’re literally being milked. As a fat woman I can’t tell you how much misery and self-loathing I felt while watching that in a packed theater, people’s giggles and exclamations of “ewwwww” ringing in my ears. That’s all fat women’s bodies get in Fury Road. We’re things not just in the movie but to the men behind the camera, as much as the oh-so-feminist graffiti in the brides’ vacated harem quarters begs to differ.
Ideological disappointment aside, the movie’s more-is-more approach to updating the spare, empty world of Miller’s earlier The Road Warrior and its companion films left me cold. Ten times as many trucks, bigger explosions, more fantastic acrobatics. If it had been in service to a new theme, a new plot, I might have been able to get my teeth into it, but here? It feels like a slice of cake with three times the icing it needs, sickly sweet and cloying. The overexposed reds and yellows which make up its palette only heighten the impression of Too Much. And what is it, in the end? Just a story about meatheads crashing into meatheads until the beautiful meathead is president of the wasteland instead of the ugly one.
Comments
Whit Barringer
Came here from Sean Collins's link this weekend, so apologies for posting so late on it. I was interested to see a take on this from you. I see some of what you mean about how women are depicted and the spectrum of ugliness to beauty being a spectrum of evil to good is fairly apparent. I think the evidence of that, however, is not the brides, but Max, Furiosa, and Nux. There was a take going around when the film first came out from a feminist writer saying she couldn't get behind a movie that didn't understand that the brides would be bigger, with child-bearing hips, etc, and that she took this to be a classic sign of fatphobia and the preference for beauty over practicality. Both with that particular critique and with yours here, I see the film explain this, though I buy it where others might not: these women are Joe's preference. He is one of maybe three people in this society that get to exercise any preference. Who, with his precious resources, did he choose to protect from the radiant elements, but these particular women. What you see as a critique of the film is what I think the film suggests is a critique of this society. So where's the fulcrum on the beauty spectrum in this movie? Is there anything in the middle that muddies the ugliness-beauty polarization in the movie? Furiosa is not ugly, nor is Max. They are dirty, but that's not the same thing. They are impaired, physically for one and mentally for the other, but those issues are not the same meaning as the ugliness that the film communicates about the War Boys, Joe, the other head dudes. And Nux, who is painted white and has "two mates," is just a *little* evil, as opposed to those with other deformities highlighted by his fellows and leaders. So I think you are right about the beauty spectrum, but I think the evidence is where the fulcrum on the spectrum is, and if it's Max, Furiosa, and Nux, then yes, the spectrum is too polarized. Perhaps the film thinks that their disabilities and Nux's white paint and two mates are enough to communicate some middle ground between these extremes, but if that's what it's attempting, it does not work.
Ian Alexander
. . .yeah, everything you said is spot on. Thank you for sharing the review and helping me engage with nostalgia and tinted memories
