Mad Max: Fury Road has already inspired some of the most intense fandom I’ve seen, and been part of, in years. I think it’s partially due to the sheer intensity of the sensory and emotional experience the movie delivers. But let’s be honest. A lot of it is due to Furiosa.
The character has already inspired an outpouring of fan art and cosplay. Even among movie fans who aren’t part of those scenes, people who love her REALLY love her. (And I wholeheartedly include myself in this category.) I can’t remember the last time that multiple, grown-ass adults on my Facebook feed had profile pictures referencing a movie character. Several of them–men and women–have this one:
Why has Furiosa inspired so much passion? I think a lot of it has to do with the way she blows a giant flaming hole in the standard images for women in action films.
While recent years have given us some fantastic action heroines, they tend to be confined within a few set tropes, with remarkably little variation.
Of course, by far the most common trope for women in action is still to be the person being rescued–to be the prize the protagonist, usually a man, gets at the end of the journey. There are whole franchises built around this concept. I think we can all agree that’s boring and not worthy of a blog post.
But even among women characters who have agency in action movies–as protagonists or as villains–there are still some basic patterns that recur again and again. In particular, there are three basic templates that a large majority of female action characters fall into. The point is not that these tropes, in and of themselves, are wrong. It’s that they’re often all there is.
1. The Girl Hero
This is the default trope for YA. Katniss in The Hunger Games, Tris in Divergent…you’ve seen it many times.
Katniss Everdeen, The Hunger Games
The Girl Hero is virginal (often unusually non-sexual for a teenager). She’s usually small or skinny, sometimes for a logical reason (Katniss grew up starving), sometimes not so much. She seems like an underdog, but proves to be surprisingly good at violence and/or have some unique skill, and through her bravery and grit takes on foes much bigger than she is.
Tris, Divergent
It should be said that plenty of male YA characters share these characteristics–Harry Potter is also small and skinny, a novice in the world of magic, but unusually skilled at a few things. He doesn’t win his battles through physical strength, but through cleverness and bravery. And there’s an understandable appeal in having a scrawny underdog, of any gender, turn out to be a hero, especially in a book or movie geared toward young people. But with a few exceptions (see: Tamora Pierce) the Girl Hero with these qualities is THE template for young women in action/fantasy/sci-fi/speculative fiction.
2. The Sexpot
When the Girl Hero grows up, she can be properly objectified as a different trope, the Sexpot.
Lara Croft: poster girl for this trope
You’ve all seen this trope in the many, many superhero and comic book movies that are currently squirting out of the studio pipeline. She’s that one token woman on the team with four guys.
Yeah, that one.
The Sexpot gets to fight–and sometimes even gets artfully bloody and dirty–but she has to do it in a latex suit and while appearing cool and sleek and having a good hair day. (She has long hair, so she can flip it, and so we’re extra sure she’s a girl.) Her fight style is extra bendy and flippy and maybe when we break out the slow motion. She may use her sexiness as a weapon (a la Black Widow) or it may be just a bonus quality. She can be powerful, but only if we can look at her conventionally attractive body move around in tight clothing while it’s happening.
3. The Ice Queen
The Ice Queen is almost always the trope for female villains. She sits at the top of some kind of power structure–a state or a criminal enterprise–issuing commands to her minions but rarely doing the violence herself. She’s probably got a sharp suit or a uniform and a severe haircut.
Delacourt, the villain of Elysium.
She’s allowed to be older than 35.
President Coin, Mockingjay
The Ice Queen has institutional power but rarely fights; physicality is the low pursuit of men in her world. She may be smart, crafty and manipulative, but she will not punch you in the face. She’ll snap her fingers and get someone else to do it, although she may sit on the edge of her desk to watch.
Jeanine, the villain of Divergent
Maya, Zero Dark Thirty–an Ice Queen protagonist, sort of
The point here is not that there’s no variation on these themes. And there have been iconic female action characters who stood totally outside them before. Alien’s Ellen Ripley and Linda Hamilton as the original Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, doing pull-ups on her mental hospital bed frame, come to mind as the most obvious.
But it’s striking how often the women that do exist in the thriller, action, sci-fi and speculative fiction film universe fall into one of these three boxes. Which is why any character who doesn’t map onto one of these templates is so exciting.
Here’s Furiosa.
She fights a hell of a lot. She does not flip her hair.
She’s intensely physical, but you never get the sense that her fights are choreographed to perform her sexuality for you. They’re choreographed for her to fucking win.
When Max shows up, they have a knock-down, drag-out fight with each other. Max doesn’t pull any punches. Why? Because he makes no assumptions that she’d be less lethal to him than a man. They beat the shit out of each other in a big, messy, grunty, scrabbly fight.
For significant portions of the movie, Furiosa is driving a truck, which means Charlize Theron is essentially acting from the biceps up. You literally cannot look at her boobs. You have to look at her face.
She gets to be dirty. Really really dirty. This picture alone highlights how weird it is that all the other women above are so clean.
She gets to be ugly and make weird faces in the middle of fighting.
She gets to yell and be angry the way one might be in the middle of a nonstop road battle when you’re full of adrenaline because you’re fighting for your life.
In short, she gets to look like an actual person who is actually fighting, instead of a statue that can do a back walkover with the help of a wire rig.
So it’s hardly surprising that she’s racked up a lot of fans. She takes all the images of clean, pretty, carefully sexualized women we’re used to seeing, even in action, rips them to shreds, sets them on fire and then drives over them with an 18-wheeler.
This is all even more remarkable given that Furiosa is played by an actress who is very feminine-presenting in her everyday life. Charlize Theron is one of the very few actresses who’s been allowed to pick roles where she radically changes her gender presentation.
Here she is in Aeon Flux, playing about the most Sexpot-y character imaginable:
Here she is in Monster:
I think there are a lot more actresses out there who could take on these kinds of transformations, radically altering the way they look, move, and perform their gender, the way male stars do all the time. But the equivalent depth and diversity of roles for women just doesn’t exist in Hollywood right now.
Furiosa’s popularity shows how starved we are for images of women who are actually powerful and physical in the same ways that men get to be in blockbuster after blockbuster after blockbuster. It’s not that all the images of women in action have to look like this–it’s just that we hardly ever see a female fighter who looks this way. Furiosa reminds us that there is so much more out there than we’re getting in terms of what women can do and look like on screen.
My last post, about Furiosa and how she’s different from so many women in action films, is kinda blowing up right now–which I think just proves my point about how hungry people are for a diversity of female characters.
But Mad Max: Fury Road is not just filled with awesome women. It treats its male characters in ways that I think can only be seen as deliberate attempts to undermine what we expect a male hero in an action movie to be and do.
Talking about tropes is a little different when you’re talking about the overrepresented group. The most basic trope for men in any genre of film is universality. Men–in the US, specifically white men–are the default protagonist. Men can be and do pretty much anything on film. Female characters, because there are fewer of them, are much more likely to be carrying the impossible weight of trying to represent everything about their gender, instead of just being characters with one of many possible stories.
Of course, within the action genre, there are certain expectations for the male hero. On the surface, Max seems to meet all of them. He’s buff and gruff–he barely says two words for the first thirty minutes or so of the movie. Physically, he’s the textbook picture of scruffy action masculinity.
I’ve got a cheekbone scrape to show I’ve been in a fight and also draw your attention to my eyes. Is it working?
But here’s where things get interesting. Because while Max may look like your typical action hero, most of what he does in the plot of the film is anything but.
The first sequence of an action movie is often a piece of action that may be only marginally related to the main plot, but shows the hero’s competence, skill and bravery, and primes the audience for the kind of action that’s going to come.
Think of the beginning of any James Bond movie ever. Or this:
Max definitely gets a propulsive action sequence at the beginning of Fury Road. But it’s the exact opposite of Indy sliding under the stone slab with a second left to grab his whip. Before the opening credits even roll, Max is chased down, crashes his car, is taken prisoner, tries to escape and fails.
Opening shot. I’m so alone.
The whole sequence that serves as Max’s character introduction is about how isolated, traumatized, vulnerable and trapped he is. He’s mute and feral, tormented by hallucinations of dead loved ones he couldn’t save, and outnumbered in the tunnels of the Citadel by manic War Boys. He immediately fails at the basic measures of competence in this world–escape from danger by fighting and driving–and is captured and enslaved.
He’s an animal in a cage, bound, muzzled, leashed and hung upside down (Max spends some key moments upside down in this movie) to be slowly exsanguinated. It’s the most un-heroic character introduction you can imagine taking place in this world.
Okay, this is definitely worse than being alone.
In the early parts of the movie, George Miller makes sure that some of the iconic symbols of Max’s power and identity from earlier films get taken away or fail him. His Interceptor winds up in the War Boys’ chop shop in the first ten minutes. When Max happens across a sawed-off shotgun very much like the one you might remember from earlier installments of the franchise…
…it doesn’t work. Max is even stripped of his signature leather jacket, although he eventually gets it back.
Worst day ever.
Furiosa gets a much more classical hero’s introduction. In a fantastically economical sequence, the film introduces her–mysterious but clearly respected and powerful, first fully seen behind the wheel–along with her antagonist Immortan Joe, and the War Rig itself, the truck that functions as both a character and a key location in the movie. We also learn important information about the ideology and physical layout of the Citadel; this is basically all the time the movie spends on exposition.
Structurally, Furiosa’s actions do the lion’s share of the work of driving the plot forward. A screenplay is built around a character pursuing a goal despite obstacles. Furiosa’s goal is obvious–escape to the Green Place with the Five Wives. She is the reason we’re watching this moment as a movie, as opposed to all the other days when she went on normal, non-movie-worthy supply runs to Gas Town and back. On this day, she makes a choice that sets in motion the action of the film.
Max enters Furiosa’s story not as a savior, but as an antagonist. He’s an obstacle in her path, stealing her truck and shooting at the people she’s trying to protect, waving a gun around, reacting not out of confidence or power but because he is scared and hurt and desperate, capable of thinking only of his own survival.
Furiosa–who’s as smart and strategic as she is skilled and brave–realizes that she can turn Max into an ally if she calms him down and helps him, and that having him as a member of her team is more useful than simply waiting to shank him when his guard is down. She offers him concrete aid (a tool to remove the muzzle from his face) and a powerful measure of trust (the secret code to start the War Rig) when he’s done nothing to deserve it. It works, and she essentially wins him to her side through de-escalation. And so Max becomes not the initiator of the main action, but an antecedent to Furiosa’s plan, already in motion.
And it turns out that they fight incredibly well together, as we see during the Rock Riders’ attack. Max drives, but Furiosa knows to use the truck’s plow to put out an engine fire with sand. Max reloads weapons for her and hands them up while she picks off attackers through the retractable roof of the truck. At one moment, he fires a pistol between her legs as she’s balanced on the seat and the dashboard, and neither one of them misses a beat. It’s Max’s first action sequence that feels classically heroic, and if we’re still unsure, the soaring music cue tells us so. We finally see Max’s full fighting potential–not as a lone warrior, but as part of a team.
Throughout most of the rest of the movie, Max and Furiosa share the main action beats equally. They’re pursued by three warlords: the Bullet Farmer, the People Eater, and Immortan Joe. They take down the Bullet Farmer together. Furiosa blinds him with an expert long shot steadied on Max’s shoulder, and Max skulks off into the darkness to blow up his car, in what would presumably be a major action sequence in most movies but doesn’t even merit screen time in Fury Road.
In the final, monster chase-battle that takes up most of the third act, Max goes after a secondary henchman, the People Eater, while Furiosa–gravely wounded at this point–attacks and kills Joe. We know this is the only way it can happen if she is to have a satisfying character arc, defending her team of warriors and getting the revenge she has wanted since childhood. Meanwhile Nux, who’s grown up wanting nothing more than martyrdom in battle, gets exactly that, but for the cause of revolution instead of tyranny. For his self-sacrifice he earns the privilege of driving the War Rig, the film’s hero vehicle, into a kamikaze crash that will ensure the safe passage of the rest of the team.
If the action is being driven by Furiosa’s choices, it’s worth asking why Max is there at all. And here is where Fury Road does us one better than just replacing a lone male hero with a lone female one.
Fury Road is a dual protagonist narrative. Max isn’t there just as a supporting character. But because Furiosa’s storyline does so much of the heavy lifting in terms of moving the plot along, Max is freed up to have a story that’s mostly about his feelings.
Of course, he does plenty of fighting–everyone fights in this world. But the main change his character undergoes from the beginning of the movie to the end is emotional. For Max, the movie is about re-learning trust and solidarity and the value of human connection, even if all those things carry the risk of grief.
In a world full of violent death, Max has shut himself off from caring about anyone and anything but his own survival, because that seems less painful. But it’s not. He’s plagued by trauma and guilt, which manifests itself in hallucinations of people he’s seen die. In the first act of the movie, these visions are a constant presence. They impede his progress at critical moments, punishing him for past failures he can’t undo.
Over the course of the second act, when Max is around people he learns he can trust, his flashbacks mostly disappear. He still has nightmares–this isn’t trauma that’s going to be healed overnight. But he has someone to tell him it’s okay when he jolts awake, someone we know is just as capable of protecting him as he is of protecting anyone. For the first time in a long time, he’s not alone, and that starts to matter to him.
As soon as Max separates from Furiosa and the other women, the visions reappear. But this time, they urge him forward, back into an alliance with Furiosa. They even save his life in battle. They serve a different purpose when he has something worth staying alive for.
In this context, Max riding up with a plan to capture the Citadel feels much less like a stereotypical action-hero-to-the-rescue moment, and much more like someone who’s realized they’d rather die fighting alongside people they care about than survive alone. He’s not doing it out of a chivalrous, self-sacrificing desire to help them. He’s doing it to heal himself.
This is also why the scenes of Max trying to save Furiosa’s life at the end of the film are so powerful. Healing and caretaking are often the provenance of women in the action realm, where taking care of wounds is a substitute for, or a prelude to, other forms of intimacy.
Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese, The Terminator
Matt Murdock and Claire Temple, Marvel’s Daredevil
The scenes of Max taking care of Furiosa are not just impactful because they’re a reversal of this trope. They are the culmination of Max’s entire journey over the course of the film. He cares enough not just to pump his own blood into Furiosa’s body, but to invest new levels of trust into their relationship (finally telling her his name) even thought he knows she might die. He’s decided the connection is worth the risk.
It’s not totally clear where Max is headed as we fade out on the movie’s final scene. But the last time we see him, he’s not alone.
