a non-spoilery review of Mad Max: Fury Road

[edenfalling]

I saw Mad Max: Fury Road yesterday, and intend to go see it again on Thursday or Friday.

It's not objectively the greatest movie, I think? I mean, it's a damn good action movie! It's basically a two-hour car chase scene with occasional pauses for breath, punctuated by intense fights and explosions; the characterization and world-building is done mostly through background visuals, body language, and implication. But you know, it's not aiming to be anything other than a damn good action movie. Which is cool. The world can always use more damn good action movies if you ask me. :-)

As for why people are saying it's great and deep and important...

Um. How to phrase this?

Okay. The thing is, I love action movies. I love action movies A LOT. I am so there for chases and fights and guns and knives and explosions and the rules of physics and biology being overwritten in the service of "Dude, wouldn't it be cool if?" propositions.

But with almost every action movie in the world, there's a little niggling sense of, "Yes, but..." in the back of my mind.

"Yes, but where are the women?"

Where are the women among the heroes? Where are the women with speaking roles? Where are the women in crowd scenes? Where are the women in the backgrounds of organizations? Where are the women just getting on with their lives? Where are the women who have any contact with other women?

With Fury Road, I didn't have to ask that question, because THE WOMEN WERE RIGHT THERE ON-SCREEN. I'd say about a dozen with speaking roles, and they had their own arcs and their own goals and they talked to each other, and they didn't exist to glorify the male characters or to serve as sexy inspiration (whether living or dead). Some of them were traditionally action-movie badass (with guns and fists and cars and whatever), and some were not, and that's okay because there were enough women on-screen that no single character had to bear the burden of representing ALL women. They could just be themselves, who they would logically be in their positions. Some were young and gorgeous, some were middle-aged, some were old, and they were all treated LIKE PEOPLE, not sexy lamps or dumb jokes or burdens -- just like men always get to be treated.

So it's not that Fury Road is a great movie with a deep message. It's just that for once, it's a movie in a genre I love that doesn't punch me in the face with one hand even as it clasps the other and takes my money. Instead, this movie pulls me in for a hug and says, "Welcome home."

I love it so much for that.

(And I think I am retroactively even more annoyed about all those past face-punches than I was at the time. Dammit, people, PUT WOMEN IN YOUR MOVIES. Do you see how easy it is to do? Do you see how it doesn't spoil the adrenaline rush at all?? Do you see how you don't have to invent contrived romantic subplots to "justify" putting in a single woman as a narratively useless love interest??? Do you see how much money I am willing to give you in return???? ARGH!)

Comments

[rthstewart]

EEEE. So glad you enjoyed it. I've seen it twice and enjoyed it more the second time. The meta, analysis, reviews, and discussions are SO GOOD. I really enjoyed it. My 16 year old son really enjoyed it. I've seen dude bros in the theater, and women, alone and daughters with their mothers taking their pictures afterwards. I really enjoyed it. In that scene with the many mothers? There are... 12 women? 7 of whom have names? And as you say, with so many women, no single one needs to carry the whole film. For a film with so little dialogue, it's amazing how much character Miller was able to squeeze in. I feel about Furiousa and Mad Max as I do about Ripley and Aliens, Star Wars and Princess Leia, and Sarah Connor -- it was pivotal, monumental, extraordinary.

No, it's not a perfect movie by any stretch, but it's a very good, very enjoyable one.

[edenfalling]

The characterization in the movie is a really good example of "show, don't tell" -- you figure out who people are by watching what they do, and particularly how they interact with other people around them.

And I don't think I've EVER seen that many women on-screen at the same time in anything that wasn't, like, a wedding-themed chick flick. (I'm not counting giant crowd scenes, where even if you have a skewed men-to-women ratio, you'll still get at least a hundred women in your gathering of tiny ant-like bodies. *wry*) And then they all spoke, too, at least once. I was so happy about that! :-)

[mme_hardy]

"Some of them were traditionally action-movie badass (with guns and fists and cars and whatever), and some were not, and that's okay because there were enough women on-screen that no single character had to bear the burden of representing ALL women."

That is so desperately important. When you have more than one featured female character, some of them can be weak, some can die, some can be evil, and it's OKAY because none of them is The Woman. (Same for non-white representation, obviously.)

The one hilarious thing is that I went to see it because I R A Feminist, and I realized twenty minutes in that I was waiting for the plot to kick in. Duh, self, this is an action movie, the action *is* the plot. I'll definitely be buying the DVD for the adrenaline rush.

God. When I remember my childhood, and the most badass woman I could find was a crossdressing girl in THE BLACK ARROW whom the hero despised for cowardice until he realized she was a girl and she was suddenly brave. I am so glad my daughter had Aerin-sol, and Aeryn, and all Tamora Pierce's heroines, and ... Women need heroes too. (end rant)

e: Also, and my husband who is a feminist overall just didn't get it, *there wasn't one rape threat. Not one.* It was clear that Furiosa and her gang were escaping from Infinite Rapeworld, but during the plot of the movie there wasn't one threat of that. It was an action movie.

[edenfalling]

I think you really need three female characters to get the full effect -- two can easily get split into the Good Girl and the Bad Girl, but with three they start feeling really individuated. But we definitely have more than three women in Fury Road, so yay!

Hmm. Let's see, badass fictional women I remember from childhood... Well, depending on your definition of badass, Tenar from The Tombs of Atuan, Nita Callahan from So You Want To Be a Wizard, Cimorene from the Enchanted Forest Chronicles (also Morwen and Kazul, so multiple awesome female characters on-page simultaneously!), Alanna from the Lioness Quartet (though mostly book 3, which I found and read as an effective standalone several years before I knew it was part of a series), Aerin and Harry from Damar, Mickle from the Westmark trilogy, etc. I'd also include Narnia and Oz, because they so often have female protagonists, setting the badass question aside. And my parents, back when they still read picture books to me, carefully altered the genders of various characters to put more girls into the stories; they also named some of my earliest stuffed animals FOR me to ensure that they were female.

And yes, I didn't notice the lack of rape threats at the time -- though in a way, trying taking the Wives back IS an implicit rape threat -- but the lack of leering and verbal or gestural sexual threats was very refreshing, and also I think a wise choice because it would have distracted from the narrative line of the movie. It's about cars and explosions and guns and partnership and hope and escape/return, amen, the end.

[marmota_b]

Swallows and Amazons. Most emphatically Swallows and Amazons. Those books had the first female characters I actually related to in a characterisation sense, not just "Lucy is the youngest like me" (as much as I like Narnia, too).
Also, practically anything by Astrid Lindgren. And Tove Jansson, especially her later books (where the character I related to the most happened to be male, but certainly not because there weren't females to choose from).

Interesting thought from your parents about naming your toys! Because the oldest toys I have are this dog and puppy that I made into a father and son, even though the adult was supposed to be holding/hugging the puppy... I think it had something to do with the fact that "dog" is male in Czech, so little about 3 year old me could not imagine a female name for something defaultly male? The abundance of bears among toys meant the same thing. In fact, most toys were of animals that happened to be default male. And now that I try to recall the female animals... *sputters incoherrently as many implications of female Beast representation among human children rush into her mind* *goes back to the fact that the Czech translations of Narnia were better at it than the original because of default genders*

[edenfalling]

Oh yes, Astrid Lindgren! I loved all the Pippi Longstocking books I was able to read, and I keep meaning to find a copy of Ronia the Robber's Daughter since it sounds like something I'd enjoy. I suspect I skipped the Swallows and Amazons series because it's neither fantasy nor centered around horses or other animals, which were the two main themes of my childhood reading. But enough people have recommended them that I think I should probably at least sample them now in my adulthood.

As for the toys, the lack of grammatical gender for English nouns should, in theory, make it easier to NOT default animals to male... and yet, we do that anyway. *sigh* So my parents were making a deliberate choice to go against that cultural pattern when they bought a stuffed Tyrannosaurus Rex -- which is one of the most default masculine animals imaginable, considering the teeth and the whole "king of the tyrant lizards" reputation -- and named her DeeDee. *grin* (True story: she still stands on my dresser and guards my sleep, thirty-some years later.)

[marmota_b]

I've made a post out of the Narnian defaults, by the way.

My sleep is guarded by Míšánek the he-panda (which alternates between default female for panda and default male for the bear part), Howard Jansson the he-marmot (from my avatar; marmot is default male, which is one of the reasons I go by Marmota; but he actually got his first name before he got to me and I liked it; the surname was also given by a friend) and Mamul the he-woolly mammoth (actually named by my sister).
There's also Tum-Tum the he-tiger and many a variation on "Míša", which is the Czech "Teddy" for bears. But I also have Sinda (a mis-hearing or possibly a Czech version of Cindy in Yogi Bear) - who's actually wearing a dress and whom I wanted really, really badly because female bear. And another panda I also wanted really, really badly, because then she could be the female panda I came up with as a friend for my existing male panda, nevermind that they look nothing alike because Míšánek was made by my aunt. :D
So I didn't always have the presence of mind to just simply go against the grain of the language, but I did want some female toys... Actually, Mamul was also made by our aunt, and if I remember correctly, later we found out she'd intended him to be female. So an argument could be made for a trans character. :D

In other news, I think I've just heard thunder.

[edenfalling]

You also had imaginary toys? That's awesome! My sister and I wrote up a family tree for all our teddy bears at one point, which included at least four bears we didn't actually own. :-)

We also had an arguably trans bear. Our grandmother sewed a homemade version of a Care Bear -- specifically Good Luck Bear -- but Vicky and I didn't know anything about Care Bears so we just named him Green Bear for his color. Later on, when we made the family tree, we renamed a few bears whose original names seemed too undignified, which is when he picked up the name Springfield. And then later yet, we decided we had too many male bears, and it seemed simpler to switch one to being a female bear than to talk our parents into buying two or three completely new bears. So Springfield became a woman... or at least, we tried. The change never quite stuck, though he didn't go back to being uncomplicatedly male, either; the end result was more of a male-leaning genderqueer teddy bear. Life is weird sometimes!

(Did you get rain?)

[marmota_b]

That's funny, and awesome, hearing about other people's similar toy stories! :D

We had a storm on Saturday, another on Sunday, today it was much colder and downcast and now it's raining gently and, it seems, quite persistently, so a resounding yes on that account! I just hope it won't turn into three weeks of rain. :-)

[marmota_b]

Also, a further stressed recommendation of Swallows & Amazons. Do yourself a favour and check those books out; they're among those that stand out the most from my childhood and those I love returning to.

[rosaxx50.livejournal.com]

With Fury Road, I didn't have to ask that question, because THE WOMEN WERE RIGHT THERE ON-SCREEN. I'd say about a dozen with speaking roles, and they had their own arcs and their own goals and they talked to each other, and they didn't exist to glorify the male characters or to serve as sexy inspiration (whether living or dead). Some of them were traditionally action-movie badass (with guns and fists and cars and whatever), and some were not, and that's okay because there were enough women on-screen that no single character had to bear the burden of representing ALL women.

Yessss. I loved that there were older women and WOC positioned as mixed-raced Aborigines, and I especially love that Furiosa is just so... explicitly presented as her looks not mattering. Because in 99% of action films and TV shows, even where the female character(s) has her own great arc, she still fulfills the critera of conventional attractiveness. And Charlize Theron is gorgeous, but Furiosa's shaved head, muscular frame, along with never mattering because of how she looks (to either the hero or the villain) challenges that.

I'm definitely going to see the film again, myself. Maybe I'll drag some more friends along.

[edenfalling]

Yeah! Like, Tom Hardy's a handsome man, but that's not relevant to the story (except insofar as audiences like looking at attractive people), so he's not glammed up or anything. He's just there being badass and his good looks are incidental. And Charlize Theron gets treated exactly the same way: her attractiveness is entirely incidental and neither her clothes nor the camera ever draws attention to it in any way.

Hell, even the Wives, whose beauty is narratively relevant and whose clothes were clearly chosen (by Joe) to emphasize a sort of fragile/feminine aesthetic, aren't framed and shot as sexual objects. Like, I was kind of expecting some lingering camera work on ~supple limbs~ and whatnot when we first see them washing off in the desert... but no, they're just people washing themselves, and Max himself is a lot more interested in the water and the truck. And then later, when the Valkyrie is naked in a tower or wearing a kind of flimsy shift, the camera treats her as a human being instead of a source of titillation.

I've seen some works that attempt an equal-opportunity approach to sexual objectification -- that is, they use the standard male-gaze camerawork on female characters, while also objectifying some male characters with tight clothes, butt shots, gratuitous shirtless scenes, etc. -- but it's really refreshing to see a movie that goes the opposite direction and doesn't sexually objectify anyone at all.

(The movie was just as good the second time, FYI!)