Mad Max in the Castle of the Grail Maidens
Mad Max: The Fury Road, dir. George Miller (Kennedy Miller Productions and Village Roadshow Pictures, ©2015)
Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University (harty@lasalle.edu)
This, the fourth installment in director George Miller’s Mad
Max franchise, is neither sequel nor prequel nor remake. Rather, it is simply a continuation of the
eponymous hero’s quest for meaning in life, albeit a continuation in which he
plays a decidedly secondary role. Just
before the final credits as the screen fades to black, the following title appears:
“Where must we go . . . we who wander this Wasteland in search of our better
selves.” The quotation is attributed to
the “First History Man,” an attribution—the source is the screenwriters themselves—both
puzzling and problematic depending upon how gendered the word man is meant to be. Fury
Road is, at its heart, a radical regendering, if not queering, of the Mad
Max franchise. Bits and bobs, small (a
wind-up music box played by the Feral Kid in the second film) and large (the
preciousness and scarcity of gasoline), reappear in Fury Road from the three earlier films: Mad Max (1979), The Road
Warrior (1981), and Mad Max Beyond
Thunderdome (1985), but Fury Road
is a very different kind of film about very different issues.
Decidedly less plot driven than its three predecessors, Fury Road in the main consists of two
extended chases, one away from and one back to the Citadel, the castle-like
base of the tyrannical Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), a disfigured hunk of a
man who recalls the Humungus in Road
Warrior. Joe enslaves the remnants
of humanity in a vast wasteland by controlling the supply of water, oil, and,
interestingly, mother’s milk, as he sets out to breed a progeny to ensure
dynastic continuation of his control. He
has already fathered two sons, one a horribly deformed dwarf ironically named
Corpus Colossus (Quentin Kenihan) and the other a mindless hulk of an automaton
named Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones), and Joe keeps a Harem of five women to
impregnate to bear him even more sons.
Joe’s army consists of white skinned genetic mutant fanatics called War
Boys, who regularly require periodic blood transfusions from captives who have
been turned into human blood bags.
The earlier three Max films had been less than subtly
homoerotic. The leather uniforms, souped-
up cars and motorcycles of the first film gave way to outright homosexual couplings
and torture scenes in the second to a gay icon, Tina Turner, as female lead in
the third. Fury Road is devoid of any
hint of the homoerotic; indeed, there is very little sex at all in the
film. But the central character, who
constantly upstages Tom Hardy’s Max Rockatansky, is Charlize Theron’s Imperator
Furiosa, whom we later learn is a member of a matriarchal tribe called the
Vuvalini. With her almost-shaved head
and prosthetic right arm, Furiosa is a match for anyone, male or female, and
her actions drive the plot. She decides
to rescue Joe’s five brides—“We are no man’s property” reads a slogan painted
on their Harem chamber wall. She devises
a plot to exchange oil for safe passage through enemy lands, she rescues Max, and
she is the character who finally comes to seek redemption—and unlike the three
previous films in the franchise, Fury
Road, is, in the final analysis, a film about finding redemption—by
returning to the “Green Place.” She
queers the franchise in a number of other ways.
Her title “Imperator” is the masculine form in Latin, but her name,
“Furiosa,” is the feminine, and that name recalls the hero of Ludovico Ariosto’s
early sixteenth century epic poem Orlando
Furioso, another character bent on rescue and redemption, who abandons his
leader. While Joe’s five brides may
dress in at times admittedly ridiculous variations on wedding dresses,
Furiosa’s outfits are decidedly non-gendered, and her hair style and grease-painted
forehead further queer her identity.
Paul B. Sturtevant has recently discussed the ways in which The Road Warrior is and is not a Grail
film and Max himself is and is not a Grail Knight (“A Grail or a Mirage?
Searching the Wasteland of The Road
Warrior,” pp. 173-186 in The Holy
Grail on Film, Essays on the Cinematic Quest, ed. Kevin J. Harty.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015). Fury Road is much more decidedly a Quest
film. The Grails here are several:
water, gasoline, mother’s milk, the elusive Green Place, the Valhalla that Joe promises
his young followers, even Joe’s Harem who are referred to as “breeders.” And the Grail questors are many: Max,
Furiosa, the Mad Boy Nux (Nicholas Hoult) who eventually abandons Joe and joins
Furiosa in opposing him, and all the Vuvalini.
And both the presence of the Vuvalini and
the film’s conclusion in which the matriarchy trumps the patriarchy as the
Citadel, like the now-lost Green Place before it, becomes a gynotopia are what most
radically queer the Max franchise.
As the film opens, Max is alone, haunted by memories of his
daughter and wife, whose death he was unable to prevent earlier in the films in
the franchise. His meditative moment
literally lasts just a moment, as he is immediately captured by a marauding
group of Mad Boys and turned into the most-prized of blood bags because he is O
negative, once thought the blood type of those who were safely universal donors. The film never quite explains what is wrong
with the Mad Boys, but their anemic appearance, their lack of body hair, and
their regular need for blood transfusions suggest some kind of fatal hemolytic genetic
disorder and their tumor-like lumps suggest some form of cancer. That there are no old Mad Boys also suggests
that their life span is decidedly limited. In addition to frequent transfusions, they are
further sustained by their rabid devotion to Joe who rewards them by spraying
their mouths with chrome-colored paint, which presumably induces some kind of
high, and who promises them glory in Valhalla if they should die fighting for
him. Religion in the film is at best murky—later in the film, one of Joe’s
brides prays for deliverance while admitting that she has no idea to whom (or
what) she is praying. In Norse
mythology, Valhalla is, of course, the heaven that welcomes warriors who die
weapon in hand, but the youthful unswerving fanaticism of the War Boys who
keenly expect paradise in exchange for martyrdom has contemporary echoes not
easily lost on moviegoers today.
Max and Furiosa cross paths when she decides to liberate
Joe’s brides—the Harem being yet another nod to contemporary religious issues—and
to return with them to the Green Place of her youth. Since the mythological quest in general and
the Grail quest in particular are always fluid, just who plays which role in a
retelling of either quest can vary. If,
in the earlier films, Max was Perceval like, it is tempting, at first, to
follow Chrétien’s lead and see Furiosa as Gauvain (Gawain) to Max’s Perceval,
but given the narrative arc of the film, it is Furiosa who better fits the role
of Perceval and Max, that of Gauvain. In
Chrétien, while the narrative tracks the parallel adventures of both knights,
it eventually comes to focus solely on those of Perceval. So too in the film, Furiosa becomes the final
focus—the Imperator of the Citadel—as Max fades into the crowd at the end of Fury Road, perhaps to return in future
films, perhaps not.
As I indicated earlier, Fury
Road queers the Mad Max franchise, but it also queers the Grail quest. There are five Grail maidens locked in a
castle and in need of rescue, and that castle is the main repository for three
of the film’s Grails: gasoline, water, and mother’s milk. Elsewhere in the
castle, women are literally milked by machines for their breast milk. And
Furiosa’s War Rig is stocked with gasoline and with mother’s milk. In one telling scene, Max washes the blood of
those whom he has just killed from off of his face and hands in a bucket of
mother’s milk—pace Freud! Fury
Road’s Max is as taciturn as his franchise predecessors, and it is Furiosa
who asks him the key question—“what is your name?”—to which she receives no
immediate reply—again in the legend, it is Perceval who must ask a question. Eventually he will tell her his name is
“Max.” The first word of the film’s
subtle nods to Furiosa, and it is Furiosa who is intent upon seeking redemption,
specifically by returning to, or ultimately by reinventing, the Green Place. At first, in the franchise, Max is looking
for revenge; here, he has settled for looking for meaning in life. It is
Furiosa, who heals all wounds, though she does first need a transfusion from
Max, and her final act is to unleash the healing waters of Aqua Cola from deep
within the Citadel, as she and her Vuvalini sisters recreate the Green Place on
its site. Joe’s Harem are also hardly
blushing brides. Despite their peculiar
names—Toast the Knowing, The Splendid Angharad, Capable, The Dag, and Cheedo
the Fragile—each holds her own in a number of battle scenes. But it is Furiosa who becomes the Perceval
figure in what is admittedly a fascinating, and perhaps brilliant, queering of
the traditional Grail quest.
Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University
