In 2015, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road imagined a future apocalypse of fascism, patriarchy, environmental collapse and bad ass gothic road wars to the tune of classic rock riffs. Ten years on, and that far future—minus the cool vehicles and substituting the Village People for the classic rock—looks like it’s reached back through time and grabbed us by the blood bag.
The unholy speed with which we’ve caught up with Miller’s war rig of dystopia is disheartening, to say the least. But driving so close alongside him also means that the road he sees forward feels even more relevant, and even more like hope, than when the film was first released. Fury Road offers very specific ideas about how, with whom, and where to fight—ideas that (like the war boys say) we’d do well to witness.
Like the other Mad Max films (though without too much in the way of reference to them), Fury Road is set in an indefinite future of ecological collapse. Semi-delusional loner Max (Tom Hardy) is captured early on by the war boys of Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). Soon after Max’s kidnapping, Joe’s war rig driver, Furiosa (Charlize Theron), takes off on a supply run. Unknown to Joe, though, Furiosa has stolen his enslaved “wives” or “breeders” in hopes of escaping with them to a Green Place she knew in her youth. Joe sends his troops out in pursuit, including a sick war boy who takes Max along as a forced blood donor. The crazed chase—complete with explosions, violent woundings and an incredibly loud soundtrack—roars across the screen for the next two hours.
Part of the reason that Fury Road feels so ominously relevant is of course because the seeds of our current metastasizing crises were all already sprouting twisted limbs when the film was made. A drier, hotter, poisoned world has been visible on the horizon for decades.
The villainous Immortan Joe reads now like a Trump analog, even if he is more physically fit, more competent, and is decked out in a Vader-esque headpiece that puts Trump’s hair plugs to shame. But these echoes of the orange one aren’t magical prescience. They’re just an indication that the religious fascism of the right had congealed long before our current nightmare showed up.
Joe’s bellowing insistence that his “wives” are his—and crucially, that their unborn children are his—is a pointed illustration of how patriarchal control of women’s bodies includes both sexual and reproductive coercion. The fanatical war boys, desperate for even a glance from Joe as they race towards glorious death in war, are an equally blunt depiction of how men are controlled and exploited by the same patriarchy that controls and exploits women. One gender serves as breeding factories, the other as cannon fodder.
The system of control works in part through force; Joe has lots of guns and is willing to shoot those who get in his way. But Joe has a monopoly on the firearms because he has a monopoly on resources. There is no water except what he intermittently pumps from underground wells, distributing it in dribs and drabs to his desperate subjects.
Joe’s empire is, then, built on enforced and artificial scarcity. Which mirrors—and explains—the current administration’s obsession with curtailing aid of virtually every sort, from cancer research to food aid to global vaccine aid. Denying people life-giving help makes them desperate and easier to control. And you can twist the knife further by blaming them for needing the essentials which you are hoarding. “Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you and you will resent its absence!” Joe tauntingly tells his bedraggled, starving people. You can hear RFK Jr.—who’s spent years shamefully trying to discredit vaccines—using the same tone to explain that if you had just fed your kids right, they wouldn’t have died of measles.
Joe’s control of resources, guns and war boy bio-power makes him seem invincible and undefeatable—much as there seems no real way out of our current fascist nightmare. Max warns Furiosa late in the film that hope is a trap which will drive you insane; a blind struggle for survival, at any price, is the only viable path. One of Joe’s wives, Cheedo (Courtney Eaton), in a moment of desperation, translates that into a more direct argument for collaboration and fealty. “We were his treasures! We were protected, he gave us the high life! What’s wrong with that?” she shouts as she runs back towards the arms of her enslavers.
That’s obviously not the film’s last word though. Instead, Miller, amidst the kill shots and explosions, does argue for hope located not in a distant Green Land, but in solidarity and unlikely alliances. Furiosa risks her life and her own escape to bring Cheedo and the other wives with her. In turn, Angharad (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), Joe’s (very pregnant) favorite uses her own body to shield the war rig when Joe is about to destroy it. Feminist sisterhood, led by women, is crucial to resistance.
The resistance also includes people who seem at first either indifferent or actively hostile. Max and Furiosa start as antagonists, but manage to find common ground in their hatred of Joe and fascism. The group even picks up a disillusioned war boy, Nux (Nicholas Hoult), partly because he falls for Capable (Riley Keough), and partly because he comes to realize that Joe’s promises are hollow. It’s not exactly Liz Cheney finding her soul after January 7, but there are parallels.
Perhaps the most painful and important insight of the film, though, is its vision of where resistance has to take place. Initially, Furiosa plans to escape Joe by running. It’s not a bad plan as these things go. But in a world in the throes of ecological collapse and facing an antagonist who has the resources and the will to chase you most anywhere, there turn out to be precious few places to flee. The Green Place of Furiosa’s youth has turned to dust and mud; the mothers she hoped to rejoin have been reduced to a handful of fierce but elderly women, hoarding a purseful of seeds.
Max suggests an alternative—go back to Joe’s seat of power and fight together on behalf of all those he’s enslaved. The last half hour of the film shows Furiosa, Max and their allies retracing their path, rushing back into the belly of the beast to make their stand for their home at home.
It’s a difficult and costly approach, but it’s also, the film suggests, the only one. You have to defeat fascism or it will come after you, and to free yourself, you have to free everyone. We have only one planet, only one people and only one road. A decade ago Max and Furiosa warned us, we can’t leave any of those in the hands of Immortan Joe.
