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.
