Kyle Buchanan’s Blood, Sweat & Chrome, published by William Morrow in February, chronicles the not-to-be-believed making of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) from conception to release through interviews with its cast and crew, and celebrates the inspiring creative imagination of the filmmakers, who defied the odds to create a contemporary classic—a movie as singularly visceral as it is stunningly visual.
But much like the nonstop action in the movie itself, the adulation expressed in the book never pauses to interrogate Miller and company’s moral imagination. Let’s fix that, shall we?
I abhor nostalgia, particularly for the 1980s and ’90s, but I’ve recently found myself revisiting many of the films and television shows of the latter decade, the period during which I first knew I wanted to be a cinematic storyteller, when earnest star-driven Oscar dramas like Forrest Gump (1994) coexisted with, and even prospered alongside, paradigm-shifting indies à la Pulp Fiction (also ’94). Those days are gone and never coming back—the institution formerly known as Hollywood is now the superhero–industrial complex—but I’ve wondered if some of those works, so immensely popular and influential then, have stood the test of time?
Yet my informal experiment has been about much more than seeing if some old favorites still hold up (and, by and large, they do); it’s about understanding why they worked in the first place—and what storytelling lessons might be learned from an era in which movies existed for their own sake, as complete narratives unto themselves rather than ephemeral extensions of some billion-dollar, corporately superintended brand.
In an entertainment landscape across which there is so much content, most of it deceptively devoid of coherence or meaning—a transmedia morass I’ve come to call the Multiverse of Madness—the secret to studying narrativity isn’t to watch more but rather less. To consume fewer movies and TV shows, but to watch them more selectively and mindfully. Pick a few classics and scrutinize them until you know them backwards and forwards.
In college, I spent an entire semester analyzing Citizen Kane (1941), from reading multiple drafts of its screenplay to watching it all the way through with the volume turned down just to appreciate its unconventional cinematography. That’s how you learn how stories work: Study one or two movies/novels per year… but study the shit out of them. Watch less, but do it far more attentively.
That is, admittedly, a counterintuitive mindset in our Digital Age of automatic and accelerating behaviors, whereby post-credit scenes preemptively gin up anticipation for the next movie (often through homework assignments) before we’ve had a chance to digest the current one, and the autoplay feature of most streaming services encourages and enables mindless TV binge-watching.
But the quarantine, unwelcome though it may have been, did offer a pause button of sorts, and we are only now beginning to see some of the ways in which folks exploited the rare opportunity to slow down, to go deep, that it offered. One such project to emerge from that period of thoughtful reflection is entertainment journalist Kyle Buchanan’s recently published nonfiction book Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of “Mad Max: Fury Road”:
In April 2020, as the pandemic swept the planet and the movie-release calendar fell apart, I began writing an oral history of Mad Max: Fury Road for the New York Times. Without any new titles to cover, why not dive deeply into a modern classic on the verge of its fifth anniversary?
Every rewatch over those five years had confirmed to me that Fury Road is one of the all-time cinematic greats, an action movie with so much going on thematically that there’d be no shortage of things to talk about. I had also heard incredible rumors about the film’s wild making, the sort of stories that you can only tell on the record once the dust has long settled.
Kyle Buchanan, Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of “Mad Max: Fury Road” (New York: William Morrow, 2022), 337
A movie two decades in the making, Fury Road, the belated follow-up to writer/director George Miller’s dystopian action-film trilogy Mad Max (1979, 1981, 1985) starring a then-unknown Mel Gibson as a wanderer in the wasteland—the Road Warrior—began its long journey to the screen as a proposed television series in 1995 when Miller won back the rights to the franchise from Warner Bros. as part of a settlement from a breach-of-contract suit he’d filed over having been fired from Contact (1997).
Eventually inspired to do another feature instead—“What if there was a Mad Max movie that was one long chase,” Miller pondered, “and the MacGuffin was human?” (ibid., 31)—the ensuing production was plagued with one near-terminal roadblock after another. The behind-the-scenes story told in Blood, Sweat & Chrome is as thrilling, in its own way, as that of Mad Max: Fury Road itself.
We May Need Another Hero
After persuading Gibson, an international superstar at that point as well as Oscar-winning director with an eye on his next ambitious project, The Passion of the Christ (2004), to reprise the role of Max (for a $25 million payday), 20th Century Fox greenlighted Fury Road, scheduled to commence production in May 2003 in the Republic of Namibia. But the unforeseen economic fallout and prohibitive insurance/shipping restrictions in the wake of 9/11 put the project into turnaround…
… until the success of Miller’s animated movie Happy Feet (2006) prompted Warner Bros.’ interest in a new Mad Max, which it wanted to produce in conjunction with Happy Feet Two (2011). Fury Road was at long last a go…
George Miller And Mel hit a little turbulence in his life.
ibid., 66
In the wake of Gibson’s DUI charge (made more scandalous by sexist and anti-Semitic remarks uttered to the arresting officer) and accusations of domestic violence by his then-girlfriend (supported by audiotape recordings of his explosive outbursts), Mad Max: Fury Road hit a new snag: It’s marquee star, the actor who’d created the role of Max, was reputationally radioactive.
After an exhaustive search, Tom Hardy assumed the title role, with Charlize Theron cast as the female lead, Imperator Furiosa, and the props department went to work building the extensive vehicles and weapons in preparation to shoot the film in Broken Hill, Australia in 2010… when record rainfall turned the parched salt lakes into a lush garden paradise:
Doug Mitchell [producer] We were basically defeated, because how the fuck are we going to shoot it there? It was meant to be a world denuded of vegetation, and you can’t have someone shoot a film and try to rub it out in CG. It was like, Okay, we’re screwed.
ibid., 107
With the support of the studio, Miller and his producers put the production on hold for a year until Broken Hill could return to its naturally desiccated state, but when that didn’t happen, the project once again appeared doomed. (And that Happy Feet Two subsequently bombed at the box office didn’t help matters, either.) Fury Road seemed like a film fated to go unproduced.
George Miller There are many stories of which I was very passionate, and I have screenplays half-written, or fully written, that I was really, really keen on. But as time goes on, you finally ask yourself the question, Do you really want to do it? Does it feel relevant to you? And it’s interesting, the ones that fade away.
ibid., 57
Ditto. When I left L.A. last year after two decades, I had notebooks full of story ideas, boxes of research materials, and drafts of unsold and/or unproduced screenplays I was sure I’d revisit at some point—that I would repurpose as novels. But when it came time to pack them up and put them on a truck—to carry them all the way across the country and then make room for them in my brand-new home, with the fresh start that it represented—I realized my passion for most of those projects had long since abated, and that I was more interested in new ideas I’d been developing, so I left those copious materials behind in a Dumpster.
By contrast, the horror novel on which I am currently putting the finishing touches began life in 2007, after a trip to Ithaca, New York, inspired an idea—about a municipal animal-control officer whose community is being terrorized by a creature in the woods—and went from a short-film project that stalled in preproduction to a feature-length spec screenplay both my managers and agents vehemently hated and refused to represent, but over a period of fifteen years, the concept never loosened its hold on my imagination.
Some stories just demand to be told; they call to the storyteller, insistently and persistently. You can’t be talked out of them, convinced that after the final “no” will at long last come a “yes.” For George Miller, Fury Road, though furious (and infuriating) the road to realization had indeed been, continued to be that kind of project.
The Road of Trials
With Australia out of contention as a filming site, Miller and his collaborators arranged, against the wishes of the studio, for Fury Road to be shot in Namibia, the location they’d originally selected over a decade earlier, though Warners cut their shooting schedule by four weeks. The production then spent the next nine months there, where it endured adverse environmental conditions, studio meddling, talent meltdowns (without a traditional screenplay from which to work—more on that in a minute—the actors could only take it on faith Miller’s gonzo vision would translate onscreen into a coherent story), and unprecedented production logistics given the extent of practical stuntwork the film incorporated:
Colin Gibson [production designer] All the action had to be real, the [actors] had to be able to perform, and they had to be their own stuntmen and -women. The hair can’t stand up on the back of your neck—not for me, anyway—watching Vin Diesel drag a three-ton, square-block safe down through miraculous right-angle turns on the street.
ibid., 181
The arduous production took its toll on everyone. Hardy and Theron nearly came to blows, requiring an intermediary (accomplished producer Denise Di Novi, a veteran of many early Tim Burton films, was flown in). Miller turned seventy during filming, and was growing thinner and more exhausted with each day. The film was overbudget and behind schedule. The nightmare-scenario stories continued to pile up, making their way from the set to the studio on the other side of the world:
David White [sound designer] Imagine being at Warner Bros. and you’ve got this fucking crew that’s costing you a fortune out in the desert somewhere in Africa, and you’re looking at the dailies and it’s a bunch of people not talking! They’re going, “What the fuck is this film about?” It’s really very difficult for someone to grasp it. . . .
Colin Gibson There’s a lack of control you have when you’re sitting in Los Angeles and six hundred people are wandering the desert with what’s left of your money.
ibid., 244–45
Jeff Robinov, the president of Warner Bros.’ film division, went to the trouble and expense of personally flying to Namibia to give Miller a hard deadline to have the shoot wrapped, which meant scrapping the bookending sequences at the Citadel—only the setup and resolution of the story, for however important those might be—all to meet some arbitrary end date.
George Miller Every filmmaker I’ve ever spoken to who’s worth anything has had a very dysfunctional relationship with studios. Great films or breakthrough film franchises ultimately resulted because the filmmaker, of course, knew way more and was much more invested than the studio executive at the time, who was trying to assert their authority over what they perceived was a dysfunctional or disastrous process.
ibid., 23
Or, put more succinctly still:
George Miller The problem is, when someone’s committed to making a film, they’re thinking about it every waking hour and even processing it in their dreams. If you’re a studio executive, you tend to think about it for ten minutes on a Wednesday.
ibid., 250
A change of guard at the studio eventually allowed for the opening and closing sequences to be filmed, but corporate interference—compelled by all the bad buzz surrounding the troubled shoot—continued into postproduction, when Warners coordinated an endless series of test-screenings, hoping to make sense of a film it didn’t understand, before finally commissioning a competing cut, prepared by editors previously unassociated with Fury Road, to go head-to-head with Miller’s—and may the best version win.
Mark Sexton [lead storyboard artist] Basically, the feedback was that everybody hated the studio cut. It was loud, it was noisy, it wasn’t very satisfying, it was incoherent. And George and [editor Margaret Sixel]’s cut was greeted with, Oh my God, it’s fantastic!
ibid., 288
With the director’s creative instincts validated per the studio’s own tried-and-true metric for commercial potential, Fury Road was ultimately completed as Miller had envisioned and released in 2015 to unanimous critical acclaim (it received a standing ovation at Cannes), commercial success ($374.7 million in worldwide receipts), and Oscar recognition (ten nominations, six wins). Twenty years after its inception, and thirty since the previous Mad Max movie, Miller’s Little Project That Could wasn’t merely a hit—a lightning-bolt blockbuster that flashes and fades between eyeblinks, like The Rise of Skywalker or Jurassic World or any of the utterly indistinguishable Transformers films—but a rare cultural phenomenon:
J. Houston Yang [marketing] Which would you say has a bigger pop-culture footprint, Avatar or fucking Fury Road? I think that its impact is undeniable, and it is 1,000 percent the kind of thing that inspires young filmmakers and blows them away.
ibid., 307
It is inspiring, indeed. Where the creative process is concerned, the story behind the story is often as compelling as the movie itself. To wit: Prior to Blood, Sweat & Chrome, I had, by complete coincidence, only just finished reading The Making of “Tombstone”: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Modern Western (2018) by John Farkis, a scrupulously researched account of the troubled production of Tombstone (1993), an improbable box-office success—and, more miraculously still, a genuinely great Western that might arguably even be a near-miss masterpiece—given the conditions under which it was made, as tenuous and chaotic in their own way as Fury Road’s was.
You Called Down the Thunder—Well, Now You Got It
With Tombstone, accomplished screenwriter and first-time director Kevin Jarre set out to make the most historically accurate cinematic depiction of the Wyatt Earp legend to date—shifting the traditionally climactic Gunfight at the O.K. Corral to the midpoint and instead structuring the third act around the Earp Vendetta Ride that ensued—but the inexperienced filmmaker soon found himself overwhelmed by the scope and complexities of the project.
Under pressure to deliver the movie ahead of Kevin Costner’s competing epic Wyatt Earp (1994), Jarre was fired a month into filming, and cartoonishly boorish action-movie hack George P. Cosmatos (Rambo: First Blood, Part II) was hastily recruited to get the production back on track, with star Kurt Russell effectively “ghost-directing” the movie every step of the way under the intense heat of both the Arizona sun and the panicked executives in Hollywood. Tensions ran high, to say the least.
The finished product, accordingly, is the work of three different directors, each with their own priorities and creative sensibilities, and yet somehow the movie succeeds spectacularly; it’s the best of all worlds, benefitting from Jarre’s attention to detail, Cosmatos’ instincts for action, and a powerhouse performance from Russell, perfectly complemented by Val Kilmer’s hypnotic turn as sickly sidekick Doc Holliday. Tombstone feels in every way like a big Hollywood movie, colorful and kinetic, which is really the highest compliment I can pay it. Somehow, despite everything, the elements cohered.
Mr. Farkis’ The Making of “Tombstone,” as its prosaic title suggests, reads like a college textbook, full of long, dense paragraphs, many of them stacked with quoted recollections from the film’s sundry cast and crew, pages-long numbered lists of scripted-yet-unfilmed scenes, date-specific production schedules, and detailed budget breakdowns. Chapters often end abruptly, with no author commentary or summation, and new chapters begin with lengthy italicized digressions that supply historical context for the true-life events dramatized in the movie, but don’t necessarily correlate to the subject of the chapter itself. It’s a fascinating account, to be sure, but requires the reader come to it with an already-healthy interest in Tombstone, if not near-encyclopedic familiarity with it.
Blood, Sweat & Chrome, by contrast, plays like a slickly produced making-of documentary included as a supplemental feature on a DVD or Blu-ray. Mr. Buchanan introduces each new topic clearly and briefly, and expertly strings together “sound bites” to form a cohesive narrative, with occasional authorial interjections to provide greater context or to indicate a segue, much as the voiceover narration in a featurette would. It’s always clear who is speaking and what their role in the production was. Even a casual fan of Fury Road will be entertained by the vivid recollections of the cast and crew, and one needn’t be a devoted cinephile to come away from Blood, Sweat & Chrome with a deeper appreciation for the film itself and the creative process in general.
Underneath the Hood
More than anecdotes from the set, entertaining though they are, it’s Fury Road’s unorthodox creative development, detailed in Blood, Sweat & Chrome, I found most fascinating. Miller broke the back of the story with Eric Blakeney, an American screenwriter who’d served as showrunner on 21 Jump Street and had initially been hired to develop the proposed Mad Max syndicated TV series, and Brendan McCarthy, a British comic-book artist. Together, they worked to evolve a narrative from Miller’s elemental premise—a Mad Max movie that was one long chase, with a flesh-and-blood MacGuffin—and how Max himself, operating on the assumption middle-aged Mel Gibson would be reprising the role, figured into it.
Though the scope of Fury Road is massive, the film’s postapocalyptic plot is boiled down to its barest essence: Nearly the entire movie is told on the run as drifter Max Rockatansky (Hardy) joins forces with the determined driver Furiosa (Theron) to spirit five young sex slaves to safety. Along the way, they are aided by the zealous turncoat Nux (Nicholas Hoult) and pursued across the desert by a staggering armada of vehicles commanded by the warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who wants to reclaim his harem of “Wives” and murder his rogue lieutenant Furiosa for freeing the young women in the first place.
But while Fury Road initially appears to be a simple car chase stretched to feature length, there is plenty going on underneath the hood, and the subjects that Miller smuggled into all that spectacle were subversive and unexpectedly powerful: How often do you see an action movie that tackles up-to-the-minute issues like environmental collapse, female empowerment, and resource hoarding by the rich?
ibid., 5
We’re going to discuss those themes and what Miller—what Fury Road—has to say about them shortly, but first a quick overview of how Miller and McCarthy (sans Blakeney, who was fired from the project when his workstyle clashed with McCarthy’s) went about breaking the story: Rather than writing a conventional screenplay, the movie was plotted on a sequential array of 3,500 storyboards. While McCarthy and Peter Pound, principal vehicle designer and storyboard artist, helped Miller develop the film’s visual language, Nico Lathouris, “a drama coach and creative philosopher” (ibid., 58), was brought in to identify the character motivations and thematic subtext of each scene.
In the hands of Lathouris, a sequence like the car chase through a toxic storm acquired profound metaphoric resonance: The storm became the physical manifestation of Max’s troubled mind, with each lightning strike symbolizing a synapse that fired anew. If Max could break through all those clouds of toxic dust, he would no longer be a passenger in his own life, diminished by years of trauma and wasteland-induced insanity.
ibid., 61
Though the film’s dialogue is sparse, and little if any of the copious biographies Lathouris brainstormed—not merely for the main characters, Max and Furiosa, but also for the Wives and the War Boys, the fanatical frontline soldiers in Immortan Joe’s martyrdom military—is ever explicitly conveyed to the audience, the performances and the production are greatly enriched by his meticulous creative contributions; the audience senses the depth of detail in Fury Road’s futuristic world even when it isn’t outwardly apparent onscreen:
Ben Smith-Peterson [stunt performer] Probably 80 percent of the stuff that they truly worked on for this—the details of things and backstories and books and bibles—so much of it doesn’t get seen in the movie, but it comes across.
ibid., 332
The same is true, as it happens, of Tombstone: Though many of the subordinate characters’ actions and motivations are, often to the chagrin of the very fine actors who portrayed them, unintentionally ambiguous—a consequence of cuts to Jarre’s quixotically voluminous screenplay—the sense of Tombstone as a lived-in place, with myriad ongoing dramas happening along the periphery of the Earps’ narrative spotlight, is nonetheless palpable. Though we can’t always know what drives the other characters, we intuit that they know—and the actors who embody them know—where they’re coming from. One doesn’t need to see the bottom of the ocean, after all, to recognize that it runs deep. Such is why Fury Road, a car-chase movie with minimal dialogue, resonates so emotionally:
Nico Lathouris [screenwriter] You’re dealing with a very powerful, potent piece of real estate, which is a story. We could have just done the surface, and that would have been easy—it would have been what most people do. But if you want to get beneath the surface, it’s a serious job.
ibid., 63
In light of all the attention Lathouris invested in the movie’s subtext, what should we make of the themes for which Fury Road is so celebrated: ecological collapse; resource depletion; toxic patriarchy and its restorative antidote, feminism (Eve Ensler, human-rights activist and playwright of The Vagina Monologues, served as a consultant on the film); survival at the cost of one’s humanity (the same ground on which The Walking Dead ostensibly treads)? Given that Miller keeps going back to this world, enriching its complexity of detail with each return trip, what does he have to say about those themes, and how have his thoughts on them evolved alongside the postapocalyptic world of his best-known creative accomplishment?
George Miller I wondered why I was always attracted, despite my better instincts, toward making Mad Max movies, and then I realized it’s a wonderful world to play in. Even though it’s set in a dystopian future, the stories allow you to go back into the past—in the case of this film, almost as a medieval world, really. The behaviors are much more elemental, the dominance hierarchies are much more obvious in the way that the few control the many, which is the constant in human history. Ultimately these films are really about who we are today, referencing the past. Their first aim is not be cautionary tales or speculative. They basically look at who we are.
ibid., 211
Indeed—they do look at who we are now more so than who we might be were civilization to collapse. But there’s a difference between exploring a theme and exploiting it, the latter of which typically just affirms the status quo rather than challenges it in any meaningful way. For all of its stated thematic ambition, does Mad Max: Fury Road inspire our better angels—or ratify our baser instincts?
An Inconvenient Truth
In recent years, I’ve grown wary of dystopian fiction, which, the more I scrutinize it, seems to invariably serve as libertarian wish-fulfillment fantasies of a world where it’s every man for himself, there’s no problem that can’t be resolved with a firearm, and you never have to pay taxes again. Seldom is the fall of civilization ever really received as an unwelcome event, merely as a license to indulge one’s most primal impulses, be it therapeutic violence (The Walking Dead), reckless driving (Death Race 2000), urban gunfighting (the Snake Plissken movies), or—in an instance of truly astonishing cynicism, even by the nihilistic standards of this subgenre—fantasy roleplaying by way of an ’80s-themed MMORPG, created by a narcissistic technocapitalist unironically hailed by the storytellers and other characters as a cultural hero, while the world at large goes to hell in a handbasket (Ready Player One).
Much has been made of Fury Road’s ecological themes—with Furiosa absconding with the Wives from the extractive hellscape of the Citadel, all of its natural resources monopolistically controlled by the patriarchal Immortan Joe, in the hopes of escaping to the “Green Place of Many Mothers,” a lush and fertile oasis presided over by the Vuvalini, a maternal tribe of women warriors—and Miller even received an Environmental Media Association Lifetime Achievement Award in the wake of the film’s theatrical run, but how does all that square with the story’s subtextual messaging?
Zoë Kravitz [cast, “Toast the Knowing”] The storyline is so simple: We’re trying to get to the Green Place, and if that doesn’t exist, then we have nothing. George’s connection to that story really was the thing that got us through this shoot. He is so tuned in to humans’ destruction of the earth and what that means and will lead to.
ibid., 329; emphasis mine
A destination is often viewed as secondarily important to the journey itself, and that’s certainly the case here. Accordingly, the objective of the characters in Fury Road, both the heroes and villains, means a total reliance on automobiles—shitloads of them:
Colin Gibson There were 88 separate vehicles that all had stories and character arcs, but there were probably 130, 135 altogether: three War Rigs, two Gigahorses, doubles and triples, exploding objects, et cetera.
ibid., 201
And each of those vehicles was lovingly and painstakingly personalized, as detailed in Chapter 20, “Shiny and Chrome,” down to the smallest detail; each told the story of its driver:
Colin Gibson Why do these people invest so much of their love in turning [their vehicles] almost fetishistically into a thing of art? Well, it’s the only thing they done got.
ibid., 203
Sure. But is the movie really critical of this society’s culture of car worship, or sympathetic to it? Because it seems like the production crew that built those vehicles took just as much pride in them, and as much glee from their exacting assembly, as their onscreen drivers did:
Peter Pound If you’re a petrol head and you know what it’s like to be in a garage with hot rods and engines roaring around you, you know that when that workshop was set up at Villawood, we were in heaven.
ibid., 85
Right. Even Miller seems to appreciate (though not, notably, in Blood, Sweat & Chrome) the problematic vehicle—no pun intended—Fury Road is for an environmentalist agenda:
“Well, we’ve taken the fetishizing of cars to a religious point, which is definitely a commentary on car culture. The thing is, I love silent films, which were very much driven by chase and action. I see them as pure cinema. So that’s my conflict: I really do like action movies, even though I worry enormously about the degradation of the planet.”
Steve Hawk, “Fury Road: All Your Darkest Environmental Nightmares Come True,” Sierra Magazine, April 9, 2015
Such is why storytellers must exercise at least as much moral imagination as they do commercial imagination: because story is indeed a potent piece of real estate, upon which bad ideas and questionable values can be (often unconsciously) nurtured and fortified. Fury Road’s subject-genre conflict reminds me of François Truffaut’s famous assertion that “Every film about war ends up being pro-war.”
Of the four Mad Max films, only one doesn’t qualify as a proper road movie, and it is, unsurprisingly, the least celebrated entry in the franchise: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). That cockroaches and car culture were pretty much the only things to survive the speculative societal collapse on which these stories are predicated seems less like a critical condemnation of contemporary values than it does a soothing reassurance of their permanence.
From the profligate burning of fossil fuels that powers our vehicles, to the asphalt-concrete conversion of ancient ecosystems to accommodate them, to the symbols of socioeconomic status for which they function and individual agency they empower—in both the real world and the dystopian landscape of Mad Max—is anything more everyday emblematic of our capitalistic contempt for the natural world than the automobile?
Henry Dray [transport manager] We did about 1.8 million U.S. dollars. The amount of fuel was ridiculous. A full-sized tanker would come to set pretty much every day.
Buchanan, Blood, Sweat & Chrome, 206
To say nothing of the emissions generated just to get all those vehicles to Namibia in the first place:
Dean Hood [unit production manager] We had to lease a freight ship that was two million U.S. dollars to load up 120 vehicles. Every piece of equipment that we would ever need for the whole film, we had to take with us.
ibid., 111
I mean, that’s a hell of a carbon footprint to leave behind for a movie supposedly “so tuned in to humans’ destruction of the earth and what that means and will lead to,” no? Not only does Blood, Sweat & Chrome decline to put that question to the filmmakers, but for as much as Mr. Buchanan prides himself on his deep-dive account of the making of Fury Road, he fails to even touch upon one of the more ironic and hypocritical controversies associated with the production:
Namibian environmental groups are furious with the makers of the new Mad Max film, claiming they they’ve seriously damaged the fragile ecosystem of the Namib Desert—a region that is undergoing severe stresses as a resulte [sic] of climate change. . . .
Jon Henschel, an ecological scientist hired by the Namibian Coast Conservation and Management (Nacoma) Project to study the damage the environment suffered from the film crew, found that parts of the desert until now untouched by vehicles had been driven over, leaving tracks—in one area a “ploughing device” had been used. Even worse, to try and level the tracks as they left, the crew had dragged nets across the ground, ripping out small plants.
Ian Steadman, “Fragile Namibian deserts ‘damaged’ by Mad Max film crew,” Culture, Wired, May 3, 2013
The filmmakers treated the delicate Namibian landscape, estimated to be fifty to eighty million years old, as a resource to use and abuse toward their own ends—namely, mass entertainment for Western audiences, to affirm Western values. However noble the artistic intentions, opportunistic exploitation was the means and ends to them. Sounds suspiciously like the m.o. of Fury Road’s vainglorious warlord Immortan Joe, doesn’t it?
And yet the storytellers conclusively punish Immortan Joe for his sins with death, and the dissolution of the War Boys cult that worshipped him so fanatically. Should we take that to mean Miller full-throatedly condemns the extractive entitlement and patriarchal values Immortan Joe represents? To know for sure, one must measure the final fate of the villain against that of the story’s hero.
Gone in 60 Seconds
Max Rockatansky, be it in the visage of Gibson or Hardy, is the protagonist of this franchise—the only recurring figure across the four movies. If he’s the hero, the one with whom we are intended to empathize, what do his closing actions tell us about how we are meant to interpret the message of Fury Road, “an action movie with so much going on thematically”?
George Miller Max is a universal archetype—the lone warrior in the wasteland looking for some sort of meaning.
Buchanan, Blood, Sweat & Chrome, 139
Agreed. He’s an itinerant antihero, a self-described “road warrior searching for a righteous cause,” cut from the same cloth as Kuwabatake Sanjuro from Yojimbo (1961)… the Man with No Name from A Fistful of Dollars (1964)… the Mariachi from Desperado (1995). The strong, violent type.
So, what meaning did Max, who’d initially counseled Furiosa that “hope is a mistake,” find on the Fury Road for us to ponder, after having subsequently risked his neck to instead help her face Immortan Joe’s army and prevail, thereby retaking the Citadel, with its abundant supply of water and produce, and establishing it as an egalitarian Green Place for all?
George Miller All the way through the shoot, I thought, Max will go up there with Furiosa and the remaining Wives, and there we be a new disposition. But it was much better for Max to go off into the wasteland in search of himself, just as he always did. It’s an ending that fits with the rest of the movie much better.
ibid., 275
Christ, far be it from me to second-guess Miller’s preternatural creative instincts but… does it? In search of meaning where, exactly—the infinite expanse of arid desert he soberly dissuaded Furiosa from venturing across in a futile search for nonexistent salvation? What Max does at the end of the movie—the final choice he makes at “the inflection point between oppression and liberation” that he directly helped effectuate—cues the audience as to the lesson we’re meant to take from the story itself. Wouldn’t a hopeful message, a prescriptive dénouement, have him staying at the Citadel—taking part in a communal redemption narrative rather than insisting on being the subject of his own? (Again.)
George Miller We tried, but it would have been very cheesy had he gone up there and they lived happily ever after.
ibid., 274
If only our storytellers, every so often, had the courage to be corny. The “happily ever after” to which Miller dismissively refers is the part of the story where the real work begins: the slow, frustrating process of reestablishing civilized, self-governing society—precisely the stuff the Mad Max movies have never been interested in exploring. Why would they be? What’s fun about that? The wasteland might be barren and bereft of hope, but at least you can drive your car as fast as you want. Civilized society, after all, imposes speed limits.
Accordingly, Max—who, let’s not forget, once earned his living as a government-employed highway patrolman—doesn’t even bother to bid farewell to Furiosa, save a parting glance from a safe distance, lest he get roped into a complicated conversation about what comes next:
George Miller It made sense that Furiosa alone ascends to the top of a dominant hierarchy. The question becomes, What is she going to do with it?
ibid., 297
But Max leaves—and the movie ends—before the consequences of that question can be even preliminarily considered; he will never know, or have any say in, the new societal structure that coalesces around the Citadel under Furiosa’s (presumably compassionate) leadership. He doesn’t give so much as a moment’s thought to the question Miller poses above, and the audience, correspondingly, takes its moral cues from the story’s main character. Max moves on from the events of Fury Road as soon as the end credits roll, same as we do, all of us perfectly happy to have gone along for the ride, sure, but there’s a 3:40 showing of Furious 7 in theater 5 we can still make if we hustle…
Max’s decision, though perhaps archetypally consistent, is intellectually counterintuitive; that the intended resolution didn’t “feel like” the proper end to a Mad Max movie could’ve been—I would argue should’ve been—taken as a sign that Fury Road’s narrative aspired to something more psychologically nuanced and, ultimately, more pragmatically hopeful than boilerplate Oil Crisis–era exploitation cinema. It was a story that was asking for more moral imagination than Miller—or even Max himself—was willing to invest in its “up-to-the-minute issues,” as Mr. Buchanan classifies them.
Eve Ensler [consultant] It’s a neofascist moment in this country, verging on authoritarianism, which was certainly a major theme in Mad Max. I thought we were moving away from that insane patriarchy, the worshipping of the father and the surrendering of the will to him, and to see some of these young men who follow Trump, I find it chilling.
Richard Norton [cast, “The Prime Imperator”] I look at the emotion of the Trump base, and they’re fucking War Boys. They don’t care what he does, what he says, whether he lies. They’re like War Boys in that they will do anything for him.
ibid., 329
Yeah. And as we’re learning, voting Trump out doesn’t by itself eradicate the moral pestilence that empowered him in the first place. Reformation takes time, and applied effort. Even with a new leader whose heart is in the right place—and we certainly got that with Biden—there’s no small degree of trying and failing in democracy (thanks for nothing, Senator Manchin), and everyone has a part to play; there are no solitary heroic saviors in that kind of narrative.
Therefore, the closing shots of Fury Road, with Max shoving off to God-knows-where-now and “Furiosa alone [ascending] to the top of a dominant hierarchy” suggests the stubborn endurance, not the hopeful extermination, of the patriarchal values upon which the dystopian society of Mad Max is structured and beholden.
What a sanguine message it would’ve sent had Max ascended that platform, too. But, alas, he is as much an immutable product, perhaps even unwitting agent, of the very patriarchy he helped topple, same as Miller and company are products-cum-agents of the extractivist Western mindset their celebrated—and indeed sublimely entertaining—film is ostensibly, if rather dubiously, intended to critique.
Sure, Max can be persuaded to join a noble crusade now and again—he stepped up, however reluctantly and provisionally, in The Road Warrior, Beyond Thunderdome, and Fury Road—but that doesn’t make him willing, as his archetypal cousin Han Solo was, to fundamentally challenge his beliefs or, more to the point, change his self-serving behaviors, on a permanently ongoing basis.
Given that, of course he heads out, yet again, into the blighted badlands on some vain, macho, ill-defined quest for “meaning,” when he had every opportunity to remain at the Citadel and help make meaning—to model for his fellow male petrol heads what a reformed road warrior can and should look like. To paraphrase Captain Jack Sparrow: If you were searching for a righteous cause… that was it.
But Max misinterpreted the destination as yet another waystation, and onward he drove in accordance with the uncontested tropes of the dystopian-fantasy genre to which he is interminably consigned. There must be a word to concisely describe such an illogical, irrational, asocial, obstinate, pessimistic choice…?
Ah, yes: madness.
That cracked me up that they had to wait a year for the land to dry out and become parched again. Non-film people don’t think about those things at all. It was interesting to get a peek into the film’s making and the challenges it faced, as well as to read through your criticisms, Sean. I didn’t care for the movie but also didn’t study it or watch it more than once. I actually reviewed it on my blog – the only movie I’ve ever reviewed ( https://mythsofthemirror.com/2015/09/05/36-plots-and-mad-max/ ). It was interesting to think about the destructive/careless treatment of the Nambia landscape in a move about the results of the destructive/careless treatment of the landscape. Makes me scratch my head. Fascinating post, my friend.
Thanks so much, Diana, for lending me your attention so generously. The original intention for this month’s post was simply to publish a pithy reaction to Blood, Sweat & Chrome — an 800-word review — but, as always seems to happen, once I started typing, I found I had more and more to say about the topic at hand! I’d kind of danced around the subject of Fury Road‘s environmental hypocrisy in a few previous posts — “Changing the Narrative” (June 25, 2018) and “Challenging Our Moral Imagination” (May 25, 2020) — without ever really doing a deep-dive critique of it, so this seemed like a good opportunity to organize and express my thoughts and (conflicting) feelings about the film.
Look — I enjoy the movie! It’s hell of a fun piece of cinematic spectacle, for sure. But I also find it morally problematic, for all the reasons I went into above, and not nearly as intellectually enlightened as its devotees seem to insist. These days, it seems, everything is binary: You’re either a superfan or you’re a hater. (Same goes for politics, whereby you’re expected to reside on one end of the ideological spectrum or the other, with no room for moderate positions on anything.) And while I’ll occasionally express my wholehearted enthusiasm (Scream) or contempt (Ready Player One) for a particular piece of entertainment, most of the time I can find things about any movie that I both admire and rebuke, which was certainly the case when I recently appraised the Mariachi trilogy and Young Indiana Jones.
And that’s what I did here. My visceral response to Fury Road is a positive one, but my intellectual reaction isn’t quite as rhapsodic. I think the movie warranted a more critical look “underneath the hood,” so that’s what I provided here, for whatever it may be worth. (Not much, I’ll venture. I don’t see this humble post catalyzing much of a renewed reappraisal of Fury Road‘s subtext/thematics.)
And thanks for that link to “36 Plots and Mad Max.” I’ve studied and discussed Polti’s Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, but I ultimately find them less helpful than Blake Snyder’s ten genres. For students of Save the Cat!, the Mad Max series performs an interesting pendulum swing, genre-wise: Mad Max (1979) is a Superhero story, but for Mad Max 2 (1981), Miller shifted genres to Golden Fleece. With Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), he returned once again to the Superhero story model, and then back to Golden Fleece for Fury Road.
I find it anecdotally interesting that the two Mad Max movies that adhere to the GF narrative model — The Road Warrior and Fury Road — are the more critically celebrated and culturally influential entries in the franchise. Both of them are very elemental, goal-driven car-chase movies in which Max is less of a character than an archetype — a single-minded agent of action, the laconic vagabond he becomes in the third act of the first film. Who knows — maybe that’s indicative of a broader problem with Max Rockatansky himself: that he isn’t, ultimately, a very deep character, which is why he appears resistant to even a modicum of emotional growth. Max seems like a complicated character because he barely speaks, but maybe that’s just because he has nothing intelligent or meaningful to say? Perhaps the reason it “feels right” to send Max back out into the wasteland at the end of every adventure is because the longer he sticks around, the more apparent it becomes that he’s actually a pretty shallow dude?
Same could be said for the Mad Max movies, much as I enjoy them: They seem like they have a lot of layers, but when you really investigate what the filmmakers have to say about those themes, it’s nothing particularly insightful or encouraging. I genuinely admire the creative spirit that animates these films, and I do enjoy them on a strictly visceral level, but let’s not pretend this is the thinking person’s sci-fi series. It appeals to a cultural sensibility that first gained purchase with the Baby boomers: i.e., the automobile as an extension of one’s identity. And given the particular challenges we face as a society and civilization right now, that’s hardly a notion worth propagating.
Thanks for popping by, Diana! It’s always a delight to hear from you!
SPC
“Deep down, he’s shallow.” — Peter De Vries
Love that!
Yeah, I think Max is more of an archetype than a fully realized character in his own right. Like Boba Fett and Darth Vader, the more he talks, the less interesting he becomes. Which is probably why, after the first film, Miller kept his dialogue to a bare minimum.
I’m sure you won’t find it surprising, Sean, that I keyed in on the human factor in all this.
In some ways, we all wind up being hypocrites. We say we are kind and “not into drama,” and yet we keep up with and gossip about celebrity breakups, custody battles and botched plastic surgery for our own entertainment. We think ourselves exceptionally patient until someone edges us out getting onto the highway. We click “Like” all day on inspirational memes that pop up on social media, but we never actually take time to ponder them in self-reflection or to make any changes accordingly.
I think what you’ve illustrated here is the same thing on a grander scale. And I’ve been struck by it a lot lately, on both the grand and small scale. (I have much to say in my new book about the personal and global detriment that comes when we lose track of our why in life. One entire chapter the ease of maintaining duplicity—and the relative difficulty in doing the hard work of introspection regarding motives or purpose—when everyone is clapping loudly at the end result regardless.)
On that note, I do love that you reflect so deeply about the entertainment you consume, considering the personal and societal implications rather than simply “hitting ‘Like'” and moving on to the next.
Absolutely, Erik — ditto to all of that. I guess you could say there are two types of hypocrisy: passive and active. It’s the latter — the much easier of the two to commit — that takes skill and self-awareness to recognize in ourselves and reform.
In my momentarily forthcoming response to dellstories, I’ll explain why I think we can extend George Miller a little grace for Fury Road‘s arguably passive hypocrisy. I only wish Miller had at least reconsidered the fate of Max at the end of the movie — and I’ll outline a scenario demonstrating how I think he might’ve accomplished that — and I also think Blood, Sweat & Chrome author Kyle Buchanan could have challenged Miller with some questions about whether Fury Road explores ecological themes or merely exploits them. Buchanan could’ve put a temporary pin in the effusive fanboying to challenge his own moral imagination — and Miller’s. But I guess that’s what I’m here for!
Here’s a quick anecdote about how I had my own moral imagination challenged, with direct consequences for a project into which I’d invested much time and passion. After my career imploded, I spent a few years writing a novel called Escape from Rikers Island, a mashup of the prison break and zombie outbreak subgenres about an unarmed NYPD Gang Squad detective who is forced to team up with a dozen violent gangbangers — that he put behind bars — when they find themselves under lockdown at the sprawling detention center during an epidemic that mutates the inmate population into feral, cannibalistic savages. This was very commercial stuff.
Anyway, I spent a couple of years querying and pitching EFRI to prospective agents/editors to no avail — I couldn’t get anyone to read it — so I put it in a drawer while I went to work on other projects (I’ve since completed a novella and another full-length novel), figuring that I’d amass a portfolio of fiction, with EFRI being one of the manuscripts I would eventually revise and publish once I had a few more pieces of work to my name.
And then the George Floyd murder happened, which inspired an impassioned essay in which I called for the immediate cessation of all “hero policeman” stories. That essay came pouring out of me — I wrote it in a day and a half, and it sometimes takes me that long to write a Christmas card — and I consider it the best post on this entire blog; I meant every word of it then, and stand by every word of it now. But — on the subject of active hypocrisy — how did what I wrote in “Forget It, Jake, It’s Tinseltown” square with EFRI? Could I in good conscience put another “hero cop” story out into the world — even one that was inherently very critical of racist policies like Broken Windows?
I couldn’t. It wasn’t even a hard decision to let that project go, despite all the sweat I’d invested in it. It wasn’t that I’d lost faith in the quality of the material, only that I felt it would be socially irresponsible to publish it, given its glorification of the “hero detective” archetype, something I had irrevocably come to see as pernicious if not outright immoral.
On top of that, there’s an actual humanitarian crisis happening on Rikers Island right now, and it just doesn’t feel ethical to me to exploit that setting for a genre story. I’m not suggesting EFRI is an ill-intentioned project, I’m only saying I think it’s perhaps best left unpublished. While it certainly meets the standards of commercial imagination on which I pride myself, I can no longer vouch for its moral imagination. I’ve had to let it go.
And I am 100% okay with that. Instead, I just finished a novel about an animal-control officer (as mentioned in the essay above), which is a profession I’ve never seen represented heroically in a work of fiction, let alone a genre piece! I can’t say more about the project at present, other than it is about honorable civil servants and university academics working in nonviolent cooperation to resolve an (admittedly fantastical) public-safety crisis. That’s a better message for the post-COVID, post-Trump world of 2022, methinks. If I’m going to blog about morally imaginative storytelling, after all, I feel I must practice what I preach.
And truthfully, it was way more fun writing about an animal-control officer! We’ve all seen a zillion stories about cops, and you always worry that you’re writing scenarios/dialogue from an episode of Law & Order you watched in the middle of the night and filed away in your subconscious, you know? But since no one, to my knowledge, has ever written about the procedures and pleasures and frustrations and challenges of working at a municipal animal shelter, I got to do something completely new and different. It’s a world that I have firsthand knowledge of, too, having volunteered for a few years at the East Valley Animal Shelter in Van Nuys, California. And I used the story to promote the kinds of prosocial values I think we need more of in our works of commercial fiction.
All of that is to say that forcing myself to think more deeply — and write cogently — about the stories other people tell has made me a more conscientious storyteller myself. That’s the gift this blog has given me — in addition to the friends I’ve found through it, like yourself!
SPC
Yes, Sean, it has stuck with me that you set aside EFRI due to realizations gained in self-reflection. I don’t know if Hollywood would ever do such a thing. In fact, I wonder (and if I were a worrier, I’d worry) about whether you even can have a conscience when you serve certain roles in the entertainment industry, because you already know that profit must prevail; and how could you keep pursuing that sole end goal and still leave room for thinking about the ramifications of it, knowing that you wouldn’t be able to act on any realizations you had if they would cost a dollar? That isn’t a judgment. I don’t know anyone deeply into the business. But I imagine it must be a difficult tightrope to walk.
I’m looking forward to reading your new work!
You know, I have many conservative relatives who absolutely despise Hollywood because they see both the town and the industry as a bastion of progressive values. In other words: Because George Clooney and Harrison Ford support liberal causes and candidates, they assume their movies are embedded with those same “socialist” values.
They’re not. While it is true that the overwhelming majority of folks in the film industry are liberals/Democrats, the lion’s share of Hollywood movies are, contradictorily, pure conservative and/or libertarian propaganda. Hell, the highest-grossing film franchise in history — the one we let our children watch on the premise that it’s merely “harmless entertainment” — is predicated on an uncontested ethos of Randian individualism and free-market neoliberalism:
Yeah. And I guarantee you the filmmakers at Marvel are all card-carrying Dems who don’t see the conflict that exists between what they profess to believe and the morals they’ve encoded in their movies, because they haven’t tempered their commercial imagination with sufficient moral imagination.
I know a few conservatives who also happen to be horror aficionados, and they hate — absolutely despise — Jordan Peele’s Get Out. And I was trying to figure that out, because that film doesn’t go after conservatives at all; in fact, the target of Peele’s ire are lip-service liberals — like the kind that populate Hollywood. It’s liberals who (deservedly) get raked over the coals by that movie! So, I just couldn’t figure out why these conservative critics hated it so much…
And then it dawned on me: because Get Out represents a Black filmmaker using the horror genre to explore social-justice themes. Traditionally, horror has been about affirming Christian and/or patriarchal values — one cannot consider Dracula, The Exorcist, and even Halloween without acknowledging that — but Get Out had no interest in doing that. So, they wrote it off as a piece of shit, this despite the fact that the libs take a bruising in that movie.
So, to all my conservative friends, relatives, and acquaintances who hate Hollywood: Guys, Hollywood is, for the most part, doing your work for you. Just say thanks.
And thank you, Erik, for the encouraging words about the new novel. Plans are currently underway to put some heat on the manuscript, but, one way or the other, it will be published. I’m eager to have this one out in the world! Stay tuned…
>Study one or two movies/novels per year… but study the shit out of them. Watch less, but do it far more attentively
You and I discussed that in your post Artistic Originality, The thread beginning w/ “Of course, it’s not enough to sit back and just mindlessly watch/read something.”
I suggested this very tip
–
>Fury Road’s subject-genre conflict reminds me of François Truffaut’s famous assertion that “Every film about war ends up being pro-war.”
That quote was my first thought when I read this section
I want to present the full quote for greater context:
“I find that violence is very ambiguous in movies. For example, some films claim to be antiwar, but I don’t think I’ve really seen an antiwar film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war. To show something is to ennoble it.”
― François Truffaut
We discussed something similar regarding stories about the police
See also:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DoNotDoThisCoolThing
However, I do want to mention that, just as no person is perfect, no story is perfect. Any story, no matter how noble or well-intentioned the creator, can have problematic elements, can present themes completely opposite to the ones the creators wanted to present
This does not mean we shouldn’t question these stories, though. The more we learn about unintended messages, the better we can make our own messages. Just because you can’t be perfect doesn’t mean you can’t improve. In fact, because you are not perfect, you can ALWAYS improve
–
Also, I mentioned these in your post Changing The Narrative, but I think they bear repeating:
In Vaal’s article 5 Televisions Shows I Want to See Happen (http://www.descendantsserial.paradoxomni.net/5-televisions-shows-i-want-to-see-happen/), the fourth one is A Post-Apocalyptic Non-Dystopia
and
What Really Happens After the Apocalypse
https://www.tor.com/2018/11/14/what-really-happens-after-the-apocalypse/
Dell,
I’ve got a ton of responses to your excellent comment, so let me see if I can’t take them one at a time and try not to go off on too many long-winded tangents! (No promises.)
* * *
Yes, I must admit I’d forgotten about that exact discussion we had on “Artistic Originality.” One of the challenges of blogging for years on end about the same set of concepts and themes is that sometimes you don’t know if you’re developing those ideas or just repeating yourself! In this particular instance, I suppose I could argue that the point merited reiteration because the practice of methodically deconstructing a single story stands in such stark contrast with the way modern mega-franchises encourage automatic and accelerating behaviors — the consumption of more, ever faster.
* * *
The “Do Not Do This Cool Thing” article on TVTropes (love that site) is something I could expound on in a series of half-a-dozen blog posts, so I’m gonna try to be disciplined and keep my response as concise as possible.
Many stories just flagrantly invoke that trope. Case in point: After 350 pages of orgiastic nostalgia for all-things ’80s in an immersive VR simulation, Ernest Cline has the fucking brass-balled nerve to end Ready Player One with an earnest lecture (delivered via a malignantly narcissistic technocapitalist, at that) about how we shouldn’t prefer fantasy over reality, that you won’t find true happiness anywhere but the real world. Eat shit, Ernest, you insincere hypocrite.
Now, I have given considerable thought to whether Truffaut’s assertion about war films applies to other genres, as well. Are all police stories ultimately pro-police? Probably. (I hear interesting things about We Own This City, though.) Are all stories about organized crime ultimately pro-mafia? I’m not sure — that might require a closer, case-by-case examination. I might argue that GoodFellas does an exceptional job of sidestepping the “Do Not Do This Cool Thing” tripwire by purposefully seducing you into the romantic world of its mafia family for the first hour, only to twist the whole experience at the midpoint into a stress-inducing pressure-cooker of violence, betrayal, and coke-fueled paranoia. You spend the first half of that movie loving behind a gangster right alongside Henry Hill… and then the second half desperate to be released from that movie so you can get back to your nice, quiet, boring, law-abiding life.
I completely agree with you: We can extend a little grace to both storytellers and their stories when they fall short of creative and/or moral perfection. I won’t forgive Ready Player One for its hypocrisy because I think it’s an utterly immoral story with a condescendingly disingenuous takeaway; that story — and its author — can go fuck themselves. But despite some shortcomings, I can find lots of things to praise about The X-Files (admire its aversion to tidy endings, really don’t care for its trust-no-one ethos), Hamilton (every major female character is narratively positioned in relation to her romantic association with the protagonist), Tombstone (deeply moving story about male friendship, even if the movie’s three female characters of significance are borderline caricatures), Young Indy (as committed as it was to portraying historical figures — mostly men — with accuracy and dimension, it seldom extended the same courtesy to Indy’s girlfriends-of-the-week), and the Mariachi trilogy (a series so infectiously fun you’re willing to overlook its cartoonish violence, simplistic vigilante justice, and de rigueur use of women as objects of sexual jealousy between men so they have an excuse to trade gunfire in the streets with impunity). As you say: Stories, like people, are complicated, and can rarely be classified as merely “good” or “bad.” They tend to require careful, open-minded consideration.
You know, I was reading an article on Mythcreants the other day, “Five Mediocre White Men From Big-Budget Stories,” and I was again reminded that Chris hates The Orville — and specifically MacFarlane’s Captain Ed Mercer — with the same passion that I hate Game of Thrones. Haha — I love opinionated passion, even when I disagree with it! For reasons I’ve discussed elsewhere, I think MacFarlane has made an admirable effort with Mercer to challenge the reductive portrayals of masculinity in our pop culture (he’s a more complex character than he appears at first glance…), along with the individualistic and patriarchal values they represent (… who is genuinely interested in hearing other points of view and stress-testing his assumptions and beliefs). She feels otherwise — and her reasons for that are entirely valid and not entirely unpersuasive.
But if I were to elucidate a key difference between my blog and Mythcreats, I might suggest — and Chris and Oren might very well disagree or at least present a nuanced counterargument — that I only ask storytellers to be morally imaginative, whereas Mythcreats seems to insist on our storytellers being morally immaculate. Perhaps that’s inaccurate or unfair of me, and I welcome a response from Chris and Oren, if they care to engage me on this in good faith.
Here’s how George Miller could’ve endowed Fury Road with a little more moral imagination without changing a thing about the plot. At the Break into Three, when Max convinces Furiosa that the only path forward means taking the road back — to the Citadel — a quick exchange of dialogue like this might’ve been included:
That’s what we used to call the “bad version” in my old writers group — an off-the-cuff suggestion, not necessarily a polished scenario — but you get the idea. Then, once they’ve returned to the Citadel with Immortan Joe’s corpse, Furiosa looks out on the huddled masses and sees Max disappear into the crowd, as expected. But wait! As the platform ascends, Max hops up on it beside her, and they share a knowing look — a we’re-in-this-together acknowledgment of solidarity.
Same story, same plot even, only now Max has a true character arc, because he’s made the same life-altering choice Han Solo made when he came back at the end of A New Hope to join the Rebellion. I’m not suggesting that one little alteration would’ve made Fury Road a nuanced meditation on extractive entitlement and patriarchal values, but at least it would’ve suggested the possibility of more hopeful days to come. A willingness to try. Cheesy? I don’t know — perhaps. Would that have been so bad?
But Miller refused to take the (fury) road less traveled, which is, alas, par for the course in dystopian circles, which goes to your final point, Dell, about postapocalyptic fiction that pushes back against exploitation or pessimism:
Anyway, my man — great comments! Hope I didn’t break my promise to keep this pithy, but I trust you’ll grade me on a curve.
SPC
> I had my own moral imagination challenged
I hear ya! I’ve had more than one idea w/ a heavy anti-science them, even though I’m STRONGLY pro-science. And more than one ableist idea, even though, I hope it goes w/o saying, I’m STRONGLY opposed to ableism
We all swim in the sea of the media we consume and have consumed. GIGO
>Mythcreants seems to insist on our storytellers being morally immaculate.
It certainly seems that way at times. But I suspect their reasoning is the same one I mentioned: By holding yourself to a high standard, you can do better than you might have done otherwise
> If I ever say a setting is perfect, it means I’ve finally sold out to Big Author and I’m writing articles from a private island somewhere. – Building Three Parts Dead – Oren Ashkenazi
>On a personal level, it’s always helpful to find flaws in the stories we love and strengths in the stories we hate – How We Can Beat Defensiveness – Chris Winkle
Well said. I think when I originally latched onto the idea of moral creativity — of exercising moral imagination in fiction, and not merely commercial imagination — what I liked about the concept was its flexibility. It isn’t a set of hard-and-fast rules or step-by-step guidelines: do this; definitely don’t do that. No. Instead, it asks the artist to look within, and to critically examine (forgive the gender-biased pronoun) his work with an ethical eye, not merely a creative/commercial one. Because we are all susceptible to the GIGO reflex — all of us! And when we deny ourselves the creative convenience of leaning on tropes, we not only produce more socially responsible fiction, but we actually produce better stories overall!
As I said to Erik above, by writing a story set in the profession of municipal animal control, it wasn’t like I could lean into tropes, either consciously or unconsciously, about that world or the people who occupy it like I might’ve with the police world of EFRI, because it really hasn’t been portrayed in fiction outside the “evil dogcatcher” stereotype of Lady and the Tramp — and I definitely made sure to subvert that. (Though I do hear there’s a Kim’s Convenience spinoff called Strays that has Shannon as the administrator of a city animal shelter.)
And even though the heroes of my story (the Animal Control Officer is the protagonist, his faithful sidekick is the Animal Care Technician at the shelter, and his brother is Chief of Staff at City Hall) bicker with each other constantly and have spirited disagreements in the course of their adventure, the one characteristic I made absolutely sure to avoid in all of them was incompetence. I didn’t want the comedy or suspense to come from the fact that any of them were maladroit or corrupt or anything like that. I figured it would be challenging enough for them to resolve the story’s central conflict without making them needlessly inept at or unqualified for their jobs — and I was right.
So, one effective way to avoid clichéd tropes is to write about people and/or professions that are traditionally underrepresented in fiction. Forget the moral reasons to no longer write about “hero cops” or “mad scientists” — there are plenty of creative reasons to avoid those kinds of tired narratives! I’ve never had more fun in my entire professional life than writing that Animal Control story. It’s exactly the kind of horror/comedy I love, in the vein of The Lost Boys and Shaun of the Dead, but it isn’t in any way derivative of those works because it’s set in a place and profession that I basically had to build myself.
And thank you for linking to those two Mythcreats pieces, both of which I’d missed. (They publish a lot of material and I can’t always keep up with it, plus I tend to skip the RPG-centric stuff because that’s outside my purview.) “How We Can Beat Defensiveness” is especially encouraging, because it demonstrates a flexibility that is sometimes lacking in Chris and Oren’s articles. Case in point: A few years ago, Oren posted a really fascinating book-to-film comparison of Interview with the Vampire after having both read the novel and watched the movie for the first time, back-to-back. I could take issue with a few of his points, but overall, I thought it was a really compelling analysis. One of the readers left this (excerpted) comment:
To which Oren replied:
I gotta tell you, I thought that was a deeply obnoxious comment that smacked of, “Well, we’re just more enlightened and have more refined taste than the people who read this shit back in the 1970s.” He may not care for Interview or Dune, but readers weren’t “tricked” into liking them because they didn’t know any better, or didn’t possess sufficient perspicacity to recognize how “subpar” they are, especially in light of subsequent works in the same genres that would be produced half a century later. Both of those novels were game-changers that moved their respective genres (horror and sci-fi) forward by quantum leaps, and provided a foundation upon which later authors could build, refine, and improve some of the concepts and ideas presented in them, such as the ecological themes in Dune and portrayals of homosexual relationships in Interview. But Chris, to her credit, pushed back on Oren’s response:
Right! This is a point I often have to (gently) broach with the young climate activists I mentor when they get impatient with Xers and boomers who are making a good-faith effort to challenge their own moral imaginations, but who haven’t arrived at some of those epiphanies as quickly or as fully as Gen Z did: You didn’t emerge from the womb enlightened. Yes, you are more sensitive — at a much younger age — to issues of institutionalized racism and disaster capitalism than we were, and that’s a great thing! But don’t interpret that to mean you know everything. It’s every generation’s responsibility to help further progress in our shared project of civilization.
So, in the words of Ted Lasso (quoting Walt Whitman): Be curious, not judgmental. Which is not to say younger adults like Oren can’t critique — i.e., attempt to extract lessons from — works of art from before their time, but I would strongly advise against thinking you’re somehow smarter than those writers/artists/storytellers who preceded you. We know what we know — and think what we think — about narrativity because of them, in one way or another. As such, I would second Chris’ assertion that “it’s always helpful to find flaws in the stories we love and strengths in the stories we hate.” Curiosity — not judgment. It’s the number-one principle to live by.
Yeah, like I said elsewhere, I don’t have to agree w/ ANYONE 100%. That applies to you and Mythcreants
If we have to agree on everything 100% w/o even considering what is said then this isn’t a learning experience; it is a cult. If you believe that everything you say is 100% true, then you are not capable of learning
Feel free to disagree.
Exactly! It’s a conversation! Christ, I don’t always agree with myself! I’ve said plenty of things in older posts (as well as in the comments sections) that no longer reflect my current views in that I’ve either refined my thoughts or, alternatively, come around to an entirely different perspective. That isn’t hypocrisy; it’s just personal intellectual evolution — which is a good thing! Such is why I won’t emend or delete older posts; this blog is a Record of Me. I’ve only arrived at many of my current (and ever-evolving) beliefs because I expressed and discussed them here. To that end, I’m so grateful to everyone — yourself included, Dell — who’s ever challenged me in good faith with a different opinion or perspective, and in the process inspired me to refine or sometimes completely rethink my own.
Same goes for Mythcreants, I would imagine: You can see how Chris’ views on certain issues have evolved over the years — how she’s more flexible about some positions and more resolute about others, like the Hero’s Journey, than she once was. And kudos to Chris and Oren for their willingness to challenge and debate one another on their own site when the circumstances warrant. The fact remains, we’re all story geeks here, and we are all social-justice advocates. That’s what we have in common, and that is a very solid foundation! Our differences — where we’re from, our educational backgrounds, our generational cohorts, our professional experiences — are what leave room for each of us to grow, and to learn from one another. I don’t view any post on this blog as the Final Word on anything, merely an opening salvo.
I’m so happy that somebody else (a lot of somebodies, apparently) loves this film as much as I did. That Dali-esque scene in the desert is so haunting. And speaking of being haunted, I was fine with the ending. I assumed it was because he was still haunted by Glory and didn’t feel worthy of staying. I can only hope that if The Dome is ever made into a film, it will be worthy of a Sean P. Carlin analysis😊
Hey, Suzanne!
I think there are a few reasons Max’s final actions, for me, ring false — the main ones I covered under the Gone in 60 Seconds subheading above — but perhaps the movie’s garbled messaging is owed to a narrative issue with Fury Road that is often overlooked, but was actually briefly addressed by fired screenwriter Eric Blakeney in Blood, Sweat & Chrome:
Blakeney’s right. (He wrote some of my favorite episodes of 21 Jump Street, including the absolutely haunting installment “Swallowed Alive,” in which the team is sent undercover in a juvenile detention center, and “High High,” which could’ve almost been a crossover with Fame.) Much like Han Solo in A New Hope and Jack Sparrow in The Curse of the Black Pearl, Max is not the protagonist of Fury Road; he’s the sidekick. Furiosa is the main character, but she doesn’t really have much of a transformational arc the way Luke Skywalker and Will Turner did, and the theme of a story is always in direct correlation to the arc of its hero. So, whatever Fury Road is trying to say about its themes remains somewhat ambiguous, because precisely what Furiosa learns from the experience is unclear, and Max ends up back at square one, as always. But my takeaway, based on what little information the movie provides, isn’t a particularly hopeful one.
I will say that The Dome doesn’t serve as libertarian wish-fulfilment the way so many dystopian fantasies do. It’s far more comparable to Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games in that it aspires to be a sociocultural critique — a self-preventing prophecy. Miller states repeatedly in Blood, Sweat & Chrome that he doesn’t consider the Mad Max films to be cautionary tales, and I think that is entirely evident when you look critically at the social issues he chooses to explore in contrast with those he opts to ignore.
Thanks for popping by, pal! Hope you’re enjoying some glorious spring weather in Toronto akin to what we’re experiencing down here in New York!
SPC
You’re right–I never thought about it like that. Although in terms of the franchise, I’ve always considered Max a “Littlest Hobo” kind of character, you know, always destined to be on his own. And thanks for your kind words about The Dome–I’ll happily take the comparison to Collins! Now if only the weather up here would get even a little warmer…
Max is an itinerant antihero, for sure. And much like his cinematic cousins the Man with No Name and the Mariachi, it can often be hard — if not impossible — to tell which adventures occurred in which order, or how much time has elapsed between the current movie and the previous one. The Mad Max franchise denies viewers the satisfaction we’ve been trained to take from subjecting movies to forensic fandom.
For instance, In the original Mad Max from 1979, Mel Gibson’s young son is killed by Toecutter’s gang, and yet in Fury Road, Tom Hardy seems to have flashbacks to the violent death of a daughter. Is this a continuity error? No, it’s just the way mythic storytelling works (i.e., not the way Marvel storytelling operates).
On the subject of mythic storytelling: Any plans to return the world of The Dome…?
We’ve been having an unseasonably cold spring here in New York, too. (And I didn’t really know what to expect from spring, as this is my first one in 20 years!) I just keep reminding myself that in a month I’ll be sweltering, so I should enjoy the cool air while it lasts!
Couldn’t have said it better myself:
garthgender:
garthgender:
garthgender:
I’m sorry but it’s the funniest fucking thing to me when people on here are like “let adults have our own spaces” and then you look in their top used tags and it’s all like. Disney cartoons for babies
I don’t even disagree with the idea that there are places online where children shouldn’t be (fucking DUH??) but I don’t think the owl house fandom is one of them
30 year old tumblr users will walk into a daycare and be like “I can’t stand these entitled minors”
https://bogleech.tumblr.com/post/682896554866147328
I’ve got contemporaries who keep all their toys (Transformers G1 reissues, SDCC-exclusive collectables, etc.) up on a high shelf in Plexiglas display cases in their den, as well as their comics and graphic novels meticulously bagged and boarded, and have explicitly — and unironically — told their kids not to touch any of that stuff on the basis that it “isn’t for children.” Oh, the days when dads only had their Playboy collections to keep out of reach of the minors in the household…