Furiosa — where’s all that hatred going?
I LOVE the Mad Max franchise. I’ve watched Mad Max 2 over a dozen times. My favourite line in any movie still, is Bruce Spence (the Gyro captain) saying… “me and the snakes, playing Mahjong and takin’ tea...”
But Furiosa — a Mad Max Saga, kind of snuck up on me. Somehow, I missed the marketing until the week of release. Anyway, I eagerly got myself to the cinema to see it, and came away with very mixed feelings.
I’m going to try and unpack them here because they speak to something much larger than this movie.
Firstly, there were some highly entertaining aspects. The histrionic Chris Hemsworth interpretation of Dementus was engaging. And Mad Max films never fail on dogged car chases and anarchistic flavours. Even when the plots started to bloat in Beyond Thunderdone and Fury Road, the essence of the original Max movies remained.
But Furiosa… well to me, it seemed tone deaf for our time. The abuse of Furiosa as a child at the hands of maniacal men, was creepy and unpalatable. And despite her eventual revenge on them, I feel it remained problematic.
For a start, it took up a large part of the screen time, so we don’t get to meet the young-adult-Furiosa early enough to really connect with her. And as the child-Furiosa, she seemed to be off screen a lot.
But it was Furiosa’s (understandable) intense hatred for her abusers that sucked the zeitgeist into a black hole. I know it was a set up for who she becomes in Fury Road, but there are so many ways to portray the rise of a strong, arse-kicking woman in a world like this. Being the vicitim of abduction, grooming, molestation, and goodness knows what else (a lot of which was implied, not explicit), just perpetuates the idea that men have power over girls and women. It feels like a dated and inappropriate premise.
Clearly, I’m not saying this kind of behaviour doesn’t happen. We all know that violence against women and children and intimate partner violence is only escalating, especially in Australia. But a woman doesn’t have to be a victim of misogyny, fuelled by payback, to find the strength to survive. Even in the Mad Max-verse.
And the whole cutting her arm off. Fuck that.
Isn’t it time we tell more stories where men do not take advantage of girls and women? Come up with another motivation, for heaven’s sake. How else will we change these dangerously self-perpetuating narratives?
And before anyone implodes over this — I’ve done exactly what George Miller did. The main character in my cyberpunk series, Parrish Plessis, was motivated by the same kind of experiences: assault, coercive control and the like…And you know what… I wish I could rewrite that. She didn’t have to experience that kind of trauma, to become a powerful force. Even for dramtic tension.
I’ve got no issue with an underdog story. But for women, it generally relates to how they’ve been poorly treated by men. While we keep writing these scenarios, we give the idea oxygen.
And like I said… fuck that…
