Mad Max – Bitch Flicks

Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘Near Dark’: Busting Stereotypes and Drawing Blood

Both brutally violent and shockingly sexy, ‘Near Dark’s influence can be felt nearly thirty years later on a new crop of unusual vampire dramas that simultaneously embrace and reject the conventions of the genre. … Yet among all these films about outsiders, ‘Near Dark’ will always have a special place in my heart for being the one to show me that as a filmmaker, I was not alone in the world after all.

This guest post written by Lee Jutton appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

There were many reasons why I felt like an outsider while studying film and television production at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Some were related to class; I felt as though everyone around me had more money (and fewer student loans). Some were related to my lack of practical production experience; prior to film school, I had never operated a camera apart from a few silly movies starring action figures. Some reasons, I am willing to admit, were inside my own introverted, antisocial head. However, it was my taste in film that really made me feel as though I did not belong at a school with “arts” in its name. I like action movies packed with stylish fight sequences, zombie movies so gory that every frame is splattered with brains, and science-fiction movies crammed with special effects. As a writer and director, I aspired to be Peter Jackson, Edgar Wright, Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie and Robert Rodriguez all rolled into one frenetic package, which makes you feel a bit awkward when everyone around you worships at the art-house altars of David Lynch and Terrence Malick. It’s also a bit awkward when you realize that all of the directors you look up to are men.

When I was in my final year at NYU, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director. This was already a big deal, but it was all the more important to me because she had won it for directing The Hurt Locker, a tense, literally explosive drama about a troubled bomb diffuser in Iraq. Here was a woman making films that were dark, disturbing, visually compelling and packed with action — all things I aspired to include in my own work — and getting recognized for it by the Hollywood establishment. Delving deep into Bigelow’s wide-ranging oeuvre, which includes Soviet submarine thriller K-19: The Widowmaker and Keanu classic Point Break, inspired and reassured me while I was struggling to pinpoint my own identity, both as a filmmaker and a woman.

My favorite Kathryn Bigelow film, and the one I feel the most kinship with as a filmmaker, is her second feature, Near Dark. Released in 1987 at the height of a bloodsucker boom led by The Lost Boys, it manages to stand out from the pack thanks to its improbable but incredible combination of the vampire genre with that of the Western to create one weird, pulpy masterpiece. Before watching Near Dark, I primarily expected to encounter vampires in eerie, overcast Eastern European locales filled with fog and ancient history; to encounter them smashing across the broad, sunburnt plains of Texas in a battered motorhome was shocking and refreshing. Near Dark’s vampires are never referred to as such, nor do they have the chivalrous manners and old-fashioned elegance of many of their forefathers. Rather, they’re a marauding band of leather-coated drifters who wouldn’t be out of place in the world of Mad Max, coated liberally with blood, sweat and dirt. Both brutally violent and shockingly sexy, Near Dark’s influence can be felt nearly thirty years later on a new crop of unusual vampire dramas that simultaneously embrace and reject the conventions of the genre.

Near Dark opens with a close-up of a bloodsucking creature, but not the one that you expect — it’s a mosquito, hovering on the arm of farm boy Caleb Colton (an achingly young Adrian Pasdar) until he smacks it away. Driving into town to meet some friends, he spies an innocent-looking blonde pixie of a girl emerging from a shop while licking a vanilla ice cream cone. What follows is an all-American meet-cute laden with vampire innuendo that poor Caleb just cannot comprehend.

“Can I have a bite?” Caleb drawls, oozing earnest Southern charm.
“A bite?”
“Yeah. I’m just dying for a cone.”
“Dying?”

The girl, Mae (Jenny Wright), is not just any pretty girl. She’s a honey trap, luring unsuspecting victims into the clutches of her nomadic vampire family. Caleb behaves as though Mae is the prey, the object to be pursued and hopefully won; little does he know, it is entirely the other way around. When he tries to impress her with a lasso, she grabs hold of the rope herself and reels him in, shocking him with her strength. “I haven’t met any girls like you,” Caleb says, attempting to flatter her. “No,” Mae replies in a tense voice, “You sure haven’t.”

The instant, almost animal attraction between Caleb and Mae is obvious, and they share a long, romantic night driving around the Texas plains before Mae begins to panic that she won’t be home before sunrise. Caleb assumes she’s only afraid her daddy will punish her for being out all night, and coyly asks for a kiss before she goes. What he gets is far more than he bargained for — a passionate, hungry kiss, sure, but one that culminates in a nasty bite on the neck and the sight of his bright red blood dripping down Mae’s white chin as she hops down from his truck.

Soon it is morning, and Caleb finds himself staggering across the fields towards his father’s farm, weakened by the harsh rays of the rising sun, with telltale smoke sizzling up from his slowly roasting skin. Before he can make it to safety, he is scooped up by Mae and her gang in their motorhome. They’re ready to suck him dry — that is, until Mae mentions to the others that she did a bit more than just reveal her true nature to him. By biting him, he has become her responsibility –and potentially, her mate. Furious, the rest of the vampires reluctantly agree that Caleb can stay alive a little bit longer and be given the chance to learn to live like one of them. In other words, to live by the cover of darkness, luring (usually via hitchhiking) and killing innocent people without hesitation in order to survive.

“What do we do now?” Caleb, dumbfounded by his new immortal status, asks Mae.
“Anything we want, until the end of time,” she replies.

During Caleb and Mae’s first meeting, Caleb oozes confidence and plays at dominance, the way most boys do when trying to win over a girl. However, once he becomes a vampire, the reversal of stereotypical gender roles is striking. Caleb becomes entirely dependent on Mae. It is only her attraction to him that keeps the rest of her family from killing him on the spot, and it is only her willingness to kill for him and allow him to drink her own blood that keeps him alive in the days that follow. Caleb needs Mae, and because of this, their intimacy grows in new and bizarre ways. In one particularly passionate scene, Mae bites open her own wrist and clutches Caleb’s desperate, hungry head to her while he feeds, until he almost kills her in his fervor.

Despite his obvious need to consume blood, Caleb cannot bring himself to take a life, whereas the other vampires seem not only to kill to live, but also to live to kill. They’ve survived so long by any means necessary that they don’t hesitate to wipe out the entire clientele of a rundown roadside bar for both food and fun (a scene of creative carnage that rivals the equally deadly tavern scene in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds). The gang includes Jesse (Lance Henriksen), the charismatic leader who fought for the south in the Civil War; Jesse’s mate, Diamondback (Jenette Goldstein), whose big blonde hair and skintight ensembles can’t help but remind you of another iconic Eighties femme fatale, the android Pris in Blade Runner; Homer (Joshua Miller), who was turned as a boy and perpetually struggles with having an ancient brain trapped inside a child’s body; and the particularly vicious Severen (a delightfully unhinged Bill Paxton), who introduces himself to Caleb by informing him, “I’m gonna separate your head from your shoulders. Hope you don’t mind none.” They all speak in a bizarre, stylized version of Southern dialect that drips in menace and the occasional old-fashioned turn of phrase that comes from having lived long enough to take credit for starting the Great Chicago Fire. But Mae, the youngest of the vampires, is different. She kills to keep herself alive, but she seems to take a lot less sick joy in it than the others, and the more time she spends with Caleb, the more their heartless behavior seems to turn her off. By being with Caleb, she is reminded of what it was to be human — after all, she was one herself not so long ago.

Near Dark doesn’t have much in the way of plot; Caleb is dragged around Texas by the vampires, the timer on his existence counting down faster and faster, while his father and little sister search for him. The pulsating beat of the awesomely Eighties electronic score by Tangerine Dream adds to the urgency. It all culminates in an explosive finale with numerous characters meeting horrific ends via spontaneous combustion under the cloudless blue Texas sky — beautiful, and without mercy. There’s a happy ending that some might think a cop-out, as it goes against traditional vampire lore. Yet, rejecting traditional and expected vampire tropes is one of the things that makes Near Dark such a memorable film. Nothing about it is expected. It breaks all of the rules and makes up its own along the way. This Southern-fried story of young love, lust and lost innocence has as much in common with Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show than any Dracula movie.

Today, Near Dark’s legacy lives on in films like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, from another promising woman director, Ana Lily Amirpour. In a film described as “the first Iranian vampire Western,” Amirpour brings vampires to another unfamiliar locale — this time, a dead-end Iranian town called Bad City. Here, a nameless bloodsucking girl (Sheila Vand) prowls the dark, empty streets in a chador, using her deceptively delicate and feminine appearance to lure and attack men who abuse women. Like Mae, she is much stronger than she initially appears. Independent film icon Jim Jarmusch also recently experimented in the vampire genre with Only Lovers Left Alive, which stars Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as an ancient, moody, bohemian couple holed up in rundown Detroit. While less of a direct descendant of Near Dark than A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, ones feels that this sexy, slow-moving story could not have been told without its more frantically passionate predecessor. Here, the horror aspects of the traditional vampire story take a backseat as the film explores how love can be powerful enough to survive enough dark moments to fill multiple lifetimes. The loneliness inherent in being immortal seems to be the one constant among all vampire films, even the most untraditional ones — and yes, even Twilight. Yet among all these films about outsiders, Near Dark will always have a special place in my heart for being the one to show me that as a filmmaker, I was not alone in the world after all.

Lee Jutton has directed short films starring a killer toaster, a killer Christmas tree, and a not-killer leopard. She previously reviewed new DVD and theatrical releases as a staff writer for Just Press Play. You can follow her on Medium for more film reviews and on Twitter for an excessive amount of opinions on German soccer.

Can a Dystopian Society Be Redeemed? Lessons from ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’

And, although The Citadel is ruled by powerful men with disabilities, we understand it to be a fundamentally ableist society. Immortan Joe is questing for a “perfect” son and has clearly chosen The Wives for their beautiful, unblemished, able bodies in an attempt to breed one. We understand that this is a patriarchy in its most extreme form where women have no personhood at all.

This guest post by Gabrielle Amato appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

Often, dystopia is about exposing where we’re going wrong and giving us a reason to course correct by showing us the worst case scenario of consequences. Human folly is a common undertone in dystopian fiction, especially sci-fi and horror, showing us an exaggerated form of the suffering we will have to endure if we cannot change. In Battle Royale, we see a world where the criminalization of youth has lead a society to fear its own children so much that middle-schoolers are forced to murder each other. In I Am Legend, a proud doctor informs the world that she has cured cancer using an engineered virus, but her hubris is our downfall. The virus kills 90 percent of the population and turns the other 10 percent into ravenous zombies. In Fahrenheit 451, rampant anti-intellectualism produces a world where books are illegal.

Mad Max: Fury Road is less about illustrating for us what consequences await if we don’t change our ways and more about what we must do once those consequences befall us. It’s about whether or not society can, as Furiosa hopes, be redeemed. Fury Road shows us a quick sketch of our situation: the world is a barren, wind-blasted desert; Immortan Joe controls the water and the people, using women to breed and feed an army of War Boys who maintain his grip on The Citadel by sacrificing their lives in battle. The driving plot of the movie is Furiosa and The Wives looking for a way out of this oppressive dystopia.

Although Fury Road does not show us how we arrived here, it does a very good job of identifying exactly who and what is wrong with society. Women are livestock, used for breeding and milking to maintain Immortan Joe’s army. With the exception of Furiosa and her honorable position as the driver of a massive war rig, the only place we see women in The Citadel is within Immortan Joe’s chambers, imprisoned there for his use. In the chase through the desert, The People Eater frequently refers to The Wives as “assets” to be protected.

The Wives have been specially chosen to breed a “perfect” son

When The Wives flee their chambers, they leave behind two explicit messages: “we are not things” and “our babies will not be warlords.” Immortan Joe’s patriarchy doesn’t only objectify and exploit women. Though only older boys are sent riding to war we see many War Pups, boys who haven’t reached puberty yet, some barely more than toddlers, in The Citadel.

Indoctrination starts early for boys in The Citadel

Though these War Pups are too small to drive and fight their faces are still painted like skulls, their little bodies pressed into the service of Immortan Joe. In The Citadel little boys do not enjoy a childhood. They have no experience and therefore no concept of compassion or kindness or human connection. The moment they are useful they are put to work and, more importantly, begin receiving the brainwashing that will eventually render them into fanatical War Boys willing to die at the whim of their leader. Women are livestock and boys are weapons.

It doesn’t matter how the world got this way, but it does matter who made it this way because those people are still in power. Who Killed The World? The implication is clear; it was the patriarchy. It was men like Immortan Joe, The People Eater, and The Bullet Farmer who even now continue the same destructive habits. Resources are tightly controlled by these men to satisfy their greed, and only doled out to others if it will serve the masters. Immortan Joe goes so far as to stage the ceremonial release of water down onto The Wretched just to display and revel in his own boundless power.

It’s a surprisingly explicit reference to the connection between power and abuse: Immortan Joe positions himself as a savior figure while at the same time turning the blame for the suffering of The Wretched back onto their own “addiction” to water. The systematic oppression of The Citadel is denied.

So what can Furiosa and The Wives do under these circumstances? Their first strategy is one most of us would choose. If the place where you live is terrible, you leave it behind. You try to find a new place, a green place. But escaping isn’t so easy. When Furiosa’s war rig breaks down and the fugitives realize that they are being pursued, Cheedo has a crisis of courage. She runs off across the sand toward the coming army, insisting, “We were his treasures. We were protected. He gave us a life of luxury, what’s wrong with that?” Cheedo has learned to survive as an object, and still believes that the best possible life she can hope for is one with the meager privileges of being chosen as the treasure of a powerful man. Although they are far from The Citadel, Cheedo has not left it yet. But it isn’t only Cheedo’s internalized oppression that conspires against these women. When Furiosa at last brings her companions to a place she remembers, the remaining Vuvalini they meet tell her that The Green Place is now barren. Even that piece of earth has gone sour like all the rest. Now there are only two choices left: keep running and hope to stumble across an oasis or return to the only place they know to be capable of sustaining human life.

They cannot escape this dystopia and find a utopia; the former must be refashioned into the latter. Mad Max: Fury Road shows such a remaking of the world is possible by first showing such a remaking of people. When Capable discovers Nux stowed away on the war rig she treats him like a person. She is kind to him and when she touches him she does so with tenderness. This is the first time that Nux has experienced human interaction that isn’t based in violence, as far as we can tell. Early in the film we see that his relationship with other War Boys is based on masculine posturing and competition. In a moment when he is vulnerable, lost, and humiliated Capable meets him with compassion and empathy, and we see how quickly it changes him. Having his humanity validated immediately turns Nux’s loyalties – he doesn’t want to be a thing anymore.

When Cheedo reaches for Rictus Erectus from the hood of the war rig we wonder if she has given up hope once and for all. But instead she uses her own fragility as a trick, and we understand that she has changed too.

Even Cheedo, so fearful that she wanted to turn back, has decided that it is better to risk everything for the chance to be a person than to return to being a treasure. She doesn’t want to be a thing anymore either. It is through the transformations in Cheedo and Nux that we see how Furiosa, the Vuvalini, and The Wives will transform the entire Citadel.

“Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland in search of our better selves?”

At first, The Wives leave with Furiosa because, as she tells Max, they are looking for hope. But Max knows that hope is a mistake; you have to fix what’s broken. It’s Furiosa’s desire for redemption the reveals the right path. The fact is, it is too late to avert disaster. We are already living in an oppressive patriarchy that treats women like breeding stock and men like weapons, and our environment has already been drastically altered by global warming. But there is no green place we can escape to. We cannot leave society and we cannot leave the planet; this is what we’ve got to work with. Further, even if we could run away to some hidden oasis to form our utopian feminist society, who would we leaving behind? Is it right to abandon the War Pups, the Milking Mothers, and The Wretched to save ourselves? Mad Max: Fury Road teaches us that the only way out of the dystopia is through it. You must choose to remake it, and yourself, into something better.

Gabrielle Amato received her BA in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College where she focused on women’s studies. Currently she works in violence prevention, and in her spare time attempts to write useful and interesting articles about feminism, pop culture, and rape culture.

‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ Allows Audiences to Both Enjoy and Problematize Hypermasculinity

As the evil dictator of the territory he occupies in a post-apocalyptic world, he demands more and more gasoline (which is in rare supply), while withholding water from his starved and sickly citizens. He also has a collection of women that he imprisons and uses for breeding purposes. In this single character we see some of the worst aspects of rampant hyper-masculinity condensed into one truly horrifying man.

This guest post by Elizabeth King appears as part of our theme week on Masculinity.

When I went to see Mad Max: Fury Road, I didn’t know anything about the film except that it was supposed to be “really, really good.” After leaving the movie theater, I was completely stunned. The film takes such a unique approach to a very common Hollywood action plot that it would be difficult not to be impressed with the creativity of Fury Road’s director, George Miller. Fury Road is also stunningly self-aware, and that alone makes it stand out in its genre. But the true creative genius is that the film includes all of the problematic, hyper-masculine core elements of action movies, but they are portrayed in such a way that audiences are not merely entertained by those elements, they also cannot help but to recognize them as problematic.

Hallmarks of a typical action movie are scenes and characters that include violence, destruction, bulging muscles, fire, fast cars, and attractive (but mostly irrelevant to the plot) women. Action movies revel in and glorify hyper-masculine imagery, particularly violence, and have little to no self-reflection regarding the destruction, havoc, and exploitation that results from uncritically embracing hyper-masculine values. Titles like Die Hard, The Matrix, and Terminator quickly come to mind as exemplars of this type of entertainment.

In Fury Road, oppressive violence and exploitation are personified in the legion of antagonists: the war boys and their villainous leader, Immortan Joe. Immortan is almost too perfect in this regard. As the evil dictator of the territory he occupies in a post-apocalyptic world, he demands more and more gasoline (which is in rare supply), while withholding water from his starved and sickly citizens. He also has a collection of women that he imprisons and uses for breeding purposes. In this single character we see some of the worst aspects of rampant hyper-masculinity condensed into one truly horrifying man.

What’s more is that Immortan Joe and his warboys all drive huge, emissions spewing, weaponized vehicles, designed to easily rip across their barren desert landscape and kill their enemies in many creative ways. They thrive off of consumption, exploitation of resources, and find glory in killing. They are (of course) all armed with excessively rigged-up guns, and when their war party of cars is assembled, the image is so on the nose that it is almost comical. There are entire scenes that are so overly masculinized that they become absurd.

But this is, in large part, the beauty of the film. Fury Road delivers all the high speed vehicles, bloodthirsty men, car chases, and explosions we want and expect in action movies, but these images are intentionally presented in such an extreme manner, rendering them absurd; the audience can’t help but have their exhilaration filtered through criticism. Fury Road is not escapist like so many other films in the action genre. On the contrary, it uses the spectacle of action tropes as a means of calling attention to the problems with those tropes.

The character of Max also fulfills many stereotypical masculine traits. He is stoic, quiet, a loner, and not afraid to wield a weapon. Much of his dialogue is grunting. While he demonstrates many masculine qualities, these traits are not pushed to the extreme limits like they are with Immortan Joe. In addition to being gruff and stoic, Max is also cooperative, level-headed, and willing to defer to the expertise and skills of women. Max’s masculinity is nuanced. It is the product of the state of the society he lives in, but he does not buy into the oppressive/ destructive narrative.

Max demonstrates that masculinity can embraced without it necessarily being brutish or a force force for destruction. Compared to Immortan and the warboys, Max’s character communicates that masculinity itself is not what creates oppression, but when the core features of traditional masculinity go unchecked and become dominant (a la Immortan Joe), it can only spell disaster.

Elizabeth King is a freelance writer based in Chicago, Ill. She is a feminist, environmentalist, and ice cream enthusiast. You can find her on Twitter @ekingc, and read more of her work on her website: www.elizabethcking.com.

Off the Fury Road and Without a Map: Masculine Portrayal in the New ‘Mad Max’

Wrapped in a hypermasculine Trojan Horse of violence and war custom is a heady lesson about the dangers of ceding to those expectations, and about the road away from them and toward something like redemption. Here is a film where women are shown to be men’s combatative equals. Even more so, it is a film where the only way the men can escape their own oppression is to join up with, and occasionally defer to, these women.

This guest post by Zev Chevat appears as part of our theme week on Masculinity.

In our generation, action dominates the box office with bombast, containing enough C4 to blow up a major city, and enough stuntpeople to populate it. While it’s high entertainment, it may seem like the last place to find social progress, let alone a challenge issued to its own core values. Yet this summer’s first great critical and commercial success has done the seemingly impossible, uniting powerful messages about gender and society with enough explosions to bring people into the megaplex seats.

While much hay has been made, and rightfully so, about the women in Mad Max: Fury Road, it was the men who began to catch my interest on a second viewing. Tough, monosyllabic, and utterly capable on the surface, the main men of Fury Road are also deeply flawed individuals who have been poisoned by the expectations placed on males in their (and, therefore, our) culture. Wrapped in a hypermasculine Trojan Horse of violence and war custom is a heady lesson about the dangers of ceding to those expectations, and about the road away from them and toward something like redemption. Here is a film where women are shown to be men’s combatative equals. Even more so, it is a film where the only way the men can escape their own oppression is to join up with, and occasionally defer to, these women.

By diverging male heroes from the narrow path that action movie precedent has carved for them, and eschewing the trappings of toxic masculinity for emotionally mature character growth, this film is striking out into new, more complex territory. Critics and audiences alike have responded with enthusiasm, crowning Fury Road an instant cult classic, and lauding the potent mixture of images and ideas that set it apart. For, although Fury Road’s most obvious addition to the conversation is its women, especially Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, the portrayal of its main men is just as radical, if more quietly so.

One of the biggest complaints from opponents of Fury Road is that Max (Tom Hardy), though ostensibly the title character, is not only upstaged; they say, he’s also barely a character at all. But, if he seems like non-existent person that’s because, for much of the film, the things that make Max himself, both material and mental, have been taken away or buried far underground. Max Rockatansky’s journey, it could be said, regards the mastery of himself, rather than the domination of others. Fury Road is about many things. Among them is Max’s arc, one in which a man in shellshock re-gains his humanity through cooperation, empathy, and compassion.

First, the cooperative aspect, the lowest-hanging desert fruit on the thing-I mean tree. What gets Max that semblance of redemption he’s seeking is not simply overtaking the enemy with superior skill, though that plays a part. Nor is it taking up the mantle of despot at the film’s conclusion. Instead, the normally lone male warrior must team up with a group of women – some warriors, some escaped “Wives” – if he is to survive the coming onslaught.

Though initially combatants (their brawl upon meeting is one of the film’s most interesting set pieces), and highly suspicious of one another, Max and Furiosa quickly develop a strong respect, and trust. Recognizing Max’s reaction to her questions as evidence of trauma, Furiosa extends an olive branch of mutual trust when she tells him, “I need you here, you may have to drive the rig.” By saying, essentially, that she needs to trust him, so he better be trustworthy, Furiosa begins to help Max emerge from his shell. This is a reversal of the common trope of the in-control man who must bring a damaged woman into the fold. Here, it’s Max who has baggage, and who needs to meet Furiosa halfway. He does, and the two begin to work in deadly tandem almost immediately thereafter.

Through his interaction with the group of escaping women, not just their hard-bitten commander, Max becomes gradually more human. When it looks like Splendid (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), one of the Wives, has been bashed off the rig by a rocky outcrop, she reappears, smiling from behind the curve of the truck’s cab. Max gives her the thumbs up and, it appears, the first expression approaching a smile from him. He cares about what’s happened to this member of their group; he’s thinking about all of them, and no longer just himself. The extension of Max’s compassion culminates when Max speeds out into the salt flats after the group of Wives and Vulvalini, and convinces them to turn back instead of driving to what may well be their deaths.

All this puts Hardy’s Max in stark contrast to Mel Gibson’s taciturn cop, who swooped in to help a group of survivors in The Road Warrior. Gibson’s Max needed no one, and while he was not without heart, he was allowed to show little change. By the time he saunters off into the post-apocalyptic sunset, Hardy’s Max has not so much softened –there being no place for softness in Miller’s hyperviolent and hard world – but expanded, from bludgeoned bloodbag to being a man.

This path, though evident in Max, is even more obvious when it comes to the character of the War Boy Nux, played with glee and a certain amount of sensitivity by Nicholas Hoult. Nux is a product of a tyrannically patriarchal society, who, through equal interactions with women, instead of domination of them, has a change of heart. His turn from emotionally barren war pup to white hat with a mind of his own is, even more so than Max’s, a tale of remarkable self-mastery. As some have perceptively pointed out, the men under Immorten Joe are treated like disposable commodities, determined to find glory at the end of their “half-life.” Their entire lives are built not around heroic deeds and deaths, but around the witnessing, the verification by other men, of those deeds. In an era without written history, the men need someone to see what they do, to affirm their reality. When Nux’s chain catches on the War Rig and he falls in front of Immorten Joe, his leader, the loss of face represents a greater failure, a systemic one. Adhering to the warmongering patriarchy has led to Nux’s decline and, in a sense, exile. Abandoned by the very things that propped him up, Nux devotes himself to the cause of the Wives after Capable (Riley Keough) shows him compassion. Nux is a man so bereft of affection and touch that, when Capable puts her finger to his lips, he keeps them absolutely still in mild terror. Here is Miller’s theme writ large: that patriarchy controls us all equally, and can prove venomous regardless of gender.

As the War Rig tears a furious path of destruction through the desert, it may seem as though such sentiments are secondary, if present at all. Yet Fury Road, and films like it, are pushing the envelope of social themes as much as you can in an action movie without dissolving the very genre in a vat of metatextual acid. Sci-fi blockbusters such as Pacific Rim (where masculine angst is overridden by a literal meeting of minds), and Edge of Tomorrow (where ego must be cast off in favor of cooperation), as well as the classic Terminator 2 (where survival depends on trusting and following a strong woman) are all successful examples that are threaded with many of the same concerns as Miller’s opus. But none present their thesis as clearly as Miller does his. Here is a brutal world that has entrapped and broken men as well as women, where the way to salvation is couched in qualities outside the typical action hero mold. The lone man blasting his way through the enemy will not lead to triumph. It is only together, with care in and joint effort with women, that a man may “come across some kind of redemption.”

Zev Chevat is a writer, artist, and animator who specializes in feminist discussions of film and media. In addition to Bitch Flicks, he has written extensively for TheMarySue, Bitch Media, and Animation World Network. Follow him on Twitter @zchevat, or on tumblr at justchevat.tumblr.com.

Sweet Nectar of the Matriarchy: Breastmilk in ‘Fury Road’

Immortan Joe sampling the goods with milk mothers and their machines in the background

This is a guest post by Colleen Martell.

Liquids abound in the otherwise dry landscape of Mad Max: Fury Road: precious gasoline (or “guzzoline”), scarce water, spray-on chrome, blood transfusions, and stolen mother’s milk. A dystopia wrapped around a feminist utopia, Fury Road has been cheered by women’s rights supporters and action film lovers alike. The film’s nightmarish post-apocalyptic world is characterized by a patriarchal power that exploits women’s reproduction and consolidates resources, leaving many in abject poverty. Hard to imagine, I know. It’s no surprise then, that the film was boycotted by MRAs. While rape and forced procreation are the most obvious examples of women’s exploited reproductive labor, breastmilk recurs throughout Fury Road as a symbol of that oppression. We view women imprisoned in milk-pumping machines, much like harrowing images of factory dairy farms. And unlike sex and sexuality, which are left conspicuously out of the film’s uprising, redemption is symbolized through human milk: “Mother’s Milk” anoints Max’s (Tom Hardy) face after his first proactively selfless act in support of Furiosa (Charlize Theron) and the “Five Wives,” for example.

We live in a culture that has a complicated relationship with breastmilk: on the one hand, there’s an almost fanatical love of it as a healing substance, and on the other, fear and disgust so intense that mothers are routinely shamed for public breastfeeding (it’s supposedly “unsanitary”). Fury Road dramatically and imaginatively reproduces this stance toward breastmilk. The Citadel’s inhabitants worship Mother’s Milk–they chant these words, among others, before Furiosa’s supply run to Gas Town (the implication is that the city exports milk in exchange for gas and therefore it is central to their economy)–but we also see that the women providing milk are chained to breast pumps with their mouths covered, holding sad, filthy baby dolls in their arms meant to stimulate milk production. Women the producers are unsanitary and devalued; the milk they create is holy. Holy and commodified, of course: it’s meant to sustain the patriarch Immortan Joe, his sons, and anyone else he deems worthy, and to keep the hierarchical structure going through trade with neighboring patriarchal cities.

Feminist breastfeeding scholars point out that we already live in a world in which breastmilk is a commodity. Linda C. Fentiman argues that human milk is “marketed both literally and figuratively, as a good for sale, a normative behavior, and a cure for a variety of contemporary social and medical problems.” Pediatricians promote breast is best, nonprofit milk banks and milk sharing organizations are popping up everywhere, and even for-profit formula companies use breastmilk in their scientific studies. All of these benefit people; rarely do they financially benefit those providing their milk. In response, Fentiman proposes we make more explicit the market value of breastmilk, because this would recognize women’s labor in milk production. Why not let mothers quantify and sell their milk? Why not give nursing mothers more economic power within the system as it is?

But others, like Fiona Giles, encourage us as a culture to “waste breastmilk.” Our intense fear of “the leaky body,” she says in Breastmilk: The Movie, means that we often treat women’s bodies as “monstrous.” Shaming nursing mothers is one example of how society strives to keep women’s bodies controlled and neat and orderly. Breastmilk (and pregnancy and menstruation, for that matter) threatens to make the leaky body public. Yet at the same time, we have public health campaigns praising human milk as “liquid gold” and dictating diet, sleep, behavior, and more to protect and champion this substance. The conflicted message here, which Fury Road so vividly amplifies, is disgust of the body itself while praising what the body produces. And so why don’t we push back by pouring it everywhere? “Let’s throw it around,” Giles says. “Let’s do what we feel like in it. Have baths. Who cares?” This has a double effect: refusing bodily shame and rejecting the idea of milk as something precious and rare. Or to use Giles’s terms, wasting human breastmilk moves us from a “scarcity model” to a “plentitude model.” In the scarcity model, we see fear of insufficient production, rhetoric that links “good” behavior with breastfeeding, individual responsibility for failure or success in infant nourishment, and anxious hording of backup milk. But why not operate from a place of abundance instead? Resist the system as it is and disrupt “orderly” (read: controlled) public spaces with leaking breasts, unpredictable bodies, and shared milk?

Furiosa, the “Wives,” the Vulvalini, and Max’s triumphant return to the Citadel finds the once chained-to-their-pumps milk mothers now opening the floodgates and pouring water down on the people below. It seems likely that our sheroes and the milk mothers will move forward on the “plentitude model” – bathing in an abundance of sweet, thick human milk, sharing water access, and growing green things from heirloom seeds – rather than continue in the scarcity model exemplified by Immortan Joe, with the milk mothers as capitalists profiting from their own production. In other words, the film suggests these women will build a new economy altogether; I hear echoes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist utopia Herland (1915) and philosopher Luce Irigaray, who writes a wildly fascinating theory about the feminist power of liquids in This Sex Which Is Not One (1977). For me the promise of this new economy is the film’s most cathartic gesture.

Cathartic, but not perfect. It isn’t human milk that flows at the triumphant end, but water drilled from deep in the earth. Does the milk mothers’ liberation come at the cost of the earth’s resources, I wonder? Or are we meant to conflate maternal women with the earth? Both troublesome suggestions. And of course as controversial as mothering is in our culture, a maternally centered revolution remains less threatening than would, say, any gesture toward sexual pleasure at the heart of the uprising. If we are disgusted by maternal bodies, we are downright terrified by sexually empowered women’s bodies.

Yet, regardless of what happens next in the Citadel, Fury Road’s use of breastmilk both in its oppressive and resistant visions demonstrates that when we talk about human breastmilk we aren’t just talking about feeding human infants, personal choice, or love and bonding. We’re also talking about economics and labor, and our societal fear of unpredictable, leaky female bodies even while society commodifies what those bodies produce. Fury Road concretely and imaginatively re-connects bodies with human milk, making milk-producing breasts very much public. Although the film’s ending is more symbolic than prescriptive, the final scene suggests that prosthetic-free Furiosa, the seed-wielding Wives, and the water-pouring milk mothers are no longer outliers in an otherwise orderly society, but are now the source and foundation of society’s structure. This enables us to imagine a world in which the leaky body is not an object of shame or fear, but instead a source of power and creation.

Colleen Martell is a writer, literary agent, and lecturer of public health and women’s studies based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. There’s a place for both breastfed and formula fed babies in her feminist utopia. She tweets about bodies at @elsiematz.

Call For Writers: Masculinity

Our theme week for June 2015 will be Masculinity.

Masculinity is a pervasive concept in our culture, setting the tone for our entertainment, our politics, and our interpersonal lives. This is because masculinity itself traditionally belongs to men who are, to quote blogger Twisty Faster of I Blame the Patriarchy, “the default human.” Femininity is often defined in contrast to masculinity, as if the two modes were binary. The traits typically ascribed to masculinity (physical strength, aggressiveness, rational thinking, and stoicism) are then seen as absent from the feminine and opposite of the traits typically ascribed to femininity (nurturing, emotional, physically weak, and irrational).

Some examples of different permutations of masculinity include the chivalrous, but monosyllabic type like Luke from Gilmore Girls, the sexually potent, brimming with physical prowess action hero types like The Rock or Vin Diesel from all The Fast and the Furious films, or the destructive hypermasculine types depicted in the dystopian fossil fuels focused Mad Max: Fury Road. In many ways, the toxic embodiment of masculinity is the strong-arm of patriarchy.

While masculinity can often be associated with power and male privilege, the expectations associated with masculinity can be limiting and oppressive just as any prescribed gender role can be oppressive. We sometimes see this in narratives involving gay and/or sensitive men (The Karate Kid) who don’t “measure up” to the expectations of masculinity. However, with the greater visibility of genderqueerness and as more people begin to see gender on a spectrum, the embodiment of masculinity is becoming similarly malleable and open to interpretation (Pelo Malo, Orange is the New Black, etc).

Feel free to use the examples below to inspire your writing on this subject, or choose your own source material.

We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know which film you’d like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts, and we respond to queries within a week.

Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.

If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.

Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).

The final due date for these submissions is Friday, June 19 by midnight.

The Killing

Pelo Malo

Gilmore Girls

The Karate Kid

Outlander

Mission Impossible

Terminator

Beautiful Boxer

Hannibal

Ghosts of Mars

Queer As Folk

Psycho

Boys Don’t Cry

Big Trouble in Little China

Raiders of the Lost Ark

The Fast and the Furious

Mad Max: Fury Road

Death Wish

Orange is the New Black

Game of Thrones

The Shipping News

‘Mad Max’: Fury Road Is a Fun Movie. It’s a Solid Action Flick. But Is It Feminist™?

However, I’d argue that ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ contains more critique of patriarchy and entrenched inequality than critics or even some fans have given it credit for.

Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron in 'Mad Max: Fury Road' — *Mad Max: Fury Road*

This guess post by Rebecca Cohen previously appeared at Rebecca’s Random Crap and is cross-posted with permission.

Many who devote ourselves to the struggle for gender equality want to claim this movie as our own. Others have said feminists need to demand more from our entertainment than Mad Max: Fury Road actually delivers.

To wit:

Feminism doesn’t simply mean women getting to partake in typical badass “guy stuff.” Feminism is about redefining our social value system.

— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) May 19, 2015

Mad Max‘s villains are caricatures of misogyny which makes overt misogynists angry but does not challenge more prevalent forms of sexism.

— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) May 19, 2015

A lot of modern feminist readings of media boil down to 1. Is there a lady? 2. Does she do something cool? It’s a weakening of the theory.

— Sarah Argodale (@sarahargodale) May 19, 2015

I really don’t get how anyone could sit through 120 minutes of pure violent spectacle and leave believing they saw a critique of violence.

— Jonathan McIntosh (@radicalbytes) May 19, 2015

They’re right. Our culture glorifies violence, equates strength and power with violence, and attributes that strength and power to men. While violence may sometimes be necessary in self-defense or in rebellion against oppression, the glorification of violence is distinctly patriarchal. We can’t fight patriarchy’s values by adopting them. We can’t simply substitute a woman in the place of a man, giving her strength and power according to patriarchy’s narrow definition, and call it feminist. There’s nothing revolutionary about masculine power fantasies, even with a woman at the center of them.

But. They’re also wrong. They’re wrong about Fury Road and exactly what’s going on in that movie.

I want to say, as a side note, that there’s nothing wrong with fantasies of violent rebellion against violent oppression. When you experience the frustration of being dehumanized and marginalized and discriminated against, you need catharsis. It’s exhilarating. It’s fun. It’s necessary. But, OK – maybe if we want to narrowly define what makes a “feminist film,” we can say it’s not, strictly speaking, feminist.

However, I’d argue that Mad Max: Fury Road contains more critique of patriarchy and entrenched inequality than critics or even some fans have given it credit for.

Yes, the villains are caricatures, or at least, they’re cartoonishly exaggerated – as everything in the movie is. The whole thing is basically a cartoon. But we don’t have to read the movie so literally. To say that a narrative must literally portray the dismantling of realistic social and economic systems is setting the bar too high. A message about social justice, like any message, can be conveyed symbolically or subtextually. Science fiction has always done that. Sometimes a flame-throwing guitar is NOT just a flame-throwing guitar. Well, OK. It’s just a flame-throwing guitar. But some of the other stuff has meaning.

Fury Road depicts a patriarchal society controlled by a small and very powerful elite. It’s not accidental that all the warlords in the movie are older white men. They even have ailments that make them each of them physically deformed and weak – Immortan Joe has visible abscesses all over his back and requires an apparatus to breathe – highlighting that their power doesn’t rely on their own physical strength. Their power is systemic. They control others through religion/ideology (promising the War Boys honor and entry to Valhalla) and hoarding of resources (most obviously water). The 1 percent, if you will, keep the rest of the population in line by forcing them to rely on whatever meager allowance of resources the warlords dole out. Men and boys are exploited for labor and as foot soldiers. Women are exploited for their sexual and reproductive capacities. No, it’s not subtle, but it’s not empty action movie nonsense either.

The narrative is driven (heh) by women exercising their agency. It’s easy to see the central plot as an old, sexist trope: rival characters battling over possession of damsels in distress. But Fury Road turns the trope on its head; it’s the damsels who engineer their own escape. “We are not things” is the memorable line, but their scrawled message, “Our babies will not grow up to be warlords,” is the key to understanding Fury Road’s critique of patriarchal systems. The “wives” want more than just escape from sexual slavery; they want to stop contributing to the oppressive systems around them. The repeated question, “Who killed the world?” implies a larger critique as well – it was a male-dominated society which created this apocalypse and men who are responsible for current conditions.

Another trope that gets turned on its head is the contrast between society and wilderness. Traditionally wilderness is understood as a dangerous place for women, who are too weak and vulnerable to withstand its dangers. They need the protection of society. But in Fury Road, society, i.e. The Citadel, is the dangerous place. The women experience relative safety only when they reach the wilderness. The Vuvalini, Furiosa’s matriarchal tribe, may struggle to survive in a barren wasteland, but they’re still better off than women living under the protection of a warlord, who protects them only from other men. Away from male-dominated society, they’re safe.

The most feminist yet least talked about aspect of the film might be Nux’s story. He starts out happily ready to die in glory on behalf of Immortan Joe, but he learns that there’s another way. When Capable discovers him hiding in the War Rig, she treats him with tenderness instead of vengefulness. Nux discovers something to live for, rather than something to die for. He finds a bit of the redemption Max and Furiosa are also seeking.

Ultimately, Furiosa’s rebellion isn’t just an escape or revenge fantasy; instead we see an exploited people liberated. So the film asserts the need to overturn oppressive systems, and depicts a whole society benefiting from feminism – men and women alike.

Of course, there are problems. Nux’s rejection of warrior ideology might be more powerful if he had been allowed to live. Instead, he simply dies for a better cause, and the movie misses the chance to affirm that death isn’t really glorious. Also the “wives” aren’t the developed characters they could and should be. The narrative revolves around them, yet they barely assert individual identities. It’s hard to accept the claim that they’re “not things,” when they’re beautiful but rather anonymous for most of the movie. The role of the Vuvalini is also a bit disappointing; they appear in the narrative, strong and capable, possessing nearly forgotten knowledge and values… only to die one by one. They might as well have been wearing red Star Trek shirts.

So maybe this isn’t a feminist movie? Fantasy violence probably doesn’t help dismantle patriarchy. It really doesn’t. But then again there is more to Fury Road than that. It offers more than a tough woman killing cartoon misogynist bad guys. There is a narrative about social structures and the nature of power.

OK. In the end, we’re not going to liberate anyone from oppression by driving fast and skeet shooting motorcycles. Action movies are not ever going to be a serious and meaningful way to talk about feminism, in the strictest sense. But perhaps we should differentiate between a feminist movie, and a movie feminists can really enjoy. Fury Road is definitely at least one of those two things.

Rebecca Cohen is the creator of the webcomic The Adventures of Gyno-Star, the world’s first (and possibly only) explicitly feminist superhero comic.