(Or, considerations on how to become an older woman of some badassness, in a not-yet apocalyptic world) –
“One bullet” need not mean a weapon’s projectile, but rather, one sentence, one comment – choose your words wisely, carefully, make them count, for they can strike and wound swiftly.
Bring the green with you. Create and build, don’t let that spark, that seedling of an idea, a notion, or belief, wither and die.
Foster the stories, nurture the names, remember where you came from even if it was a harsh land. Find the love in your lineage, even if you must turn over rock and stone, and bring that love to light.
Support one another regardless of your differences for you share a collective journey with other women and have walked some miles on the same hard road. Attacking without reason or warrant, making jabs and barbs, only undermines your efforts and your spirit.
Age doesn’t dictate your level of strength. Rather, it’s measured by the fire in your eyes and the wings in your soul.
Do what you must to survive, scrape together all that you can to endure, but pack light, and practical.
Recognize that there is power in self, even in the most desperate and difficult of times. But there is also power in numbers, in a sisterhood that can be a mighty army, with heads held high to catch the sun.
Toast trades away her Wife whites the first chance she gets. Within the first week of the New Citadel she’s wearing a patched and greasy shirt, swapped with a wide-eyed kitchen worker for the flimsy white linen, a pair of War Boy trousers, and the leather moccasins Eves had been carrying tucked in her storage bags since there was no one left alive among the Vuvalini with small enough feet to fit them. She puts tools in her pockets and her gun in a holster and accumulates enough belts that they seem to be spawning amongst themselves.
Capable keeps her cloth, fashions a practical blouse with long sleeves to keep her skin from burning in the sun. She makes underwear and a wrap for her breasts and a scarf to keep the sand out of her mouth or her hair tied back while she works in the infirmary. The remainder gets turned into bandages.
Dag makes a clever wrapped dress out of a Vuvalini shawl, turns scraps into pockets that are full of seeds and pebbles. She twines lizard bones into her hair, and when her daughter is born, her whites get shredded for nappies and burping cloths.
Cheedo, born Wretched, saves everything. But on top of her whites that flow like morning fog she adds a red-and-ochre scarf and a leather vest stamped with leaves and flowers. (Janey tells her the names, and how they used to grow in the Green Place, and which ones might be among the newest seedlings Dag is planting up above.) She lets the old women show her ten different ways to braid her hair up, and when she starts writing history, not on her skin but in bound sheafs of hemp-paper, she is rarely without a pen behind her ear and a bottle of ink in her pocket.
Furiosa takes off the sigil and chains, hands them over to be melted down into something useful without a second thought. She mostly doesn’t wear the grease, except when she thinks it will tip the situation in her favor. She changes nothing else.
“Oh, this was Mellie’s, it would fit you, child,” says Eves, extracting a linen tunic from the depths of a bag during an evening of sock-darning and hair-braiding.
“I don’t need anything,” Furiosa says. Her once-white wrapped top stopped being anything more than a shirt to her long ago, and she’s practiced in tugging it off and pulling it on with one hand. Changing her clothes won’t change the past.
“If you decided to grow your hair out…” Janey muses another night, smoothing a fine woven headband across her knee.
“It’s practical this way.” Nothing to get caught in a fight or an engine.
The Vuvalini give gifts. It’s an honor to receive a gift when no one has anything, a sign of connection to the tribe. The Wives and the Milkers and eventually a War Boy or two end up with tokens passed down from mother to daughter, reclaimed from a fallen sister when it was time to return her body to the earth. Even Max accepts a pair of hand-knitted socks with a surprised grunt and a slight flush in his cheeks.
Furiosa is aware that she’s taken nothing. Even the blanket she’d wrapped around her shoulders that night on the edge of the salt was packed into Janey’s motorcycle bag the next morning.
I am one of the Vuvalini, of the Many Mothers. My initiate mother was Katie Concannon. I am the daughter of Mary JoBassa. My clan was Swaddle Dog.
How many times had she whispered it to herself, in the Vault or the War Boy bunks, reciting her lineage like an invocation? When had she stopped?
She had been Vuvalini, and then she had been Joe’s, and now…
When Janey takes the rifle strap out of a hidden pocket Furiosa recognizes it instantly, the cloth woven with a repeating pattern of leaves, faded and sun-bleached but still reliable and strong after all these years.
“It was Katie’s,” Janey says.
Furiosa swallows. “I remember.” She had learned to shoot with it over her shoulder, the weight of Katie’s ancient Winchester heavy in her ten-year-old hands.
“She would have loved to see you,” Janey says with a wistful smile, and she holds out the strap in the flickering light of the terrace campfire. And Furiosa cannot say that she is sure of that at all, not with thousands of days of Imperator blood on her hands. But she takes the piece of cloth and tucks it into a pocket.
I don’t think I’ll ever be over the blood donation scene in Fury Road. The way Furiosa’s dying, and she uses her last moments of consciousness to tell Max “get them home.” That she, ferocious warrior, imperator, stolen child, is, in her last moments of life, so loved, and so full of love and the selfless need to protect these women and get them home. The way Max’s hands are huge, rough and dirty – hands that have snapped necks and fired guns – but they are so gentle when he cradles her. The way he mutters “I’m so sorry, sorry” every time he has to hurt her to make it better. That he’s barely spoken all film but now he’s feverishly muttering to her, “there you go, okay” and stringing together as many syllables as he can muster because the silence is just unbearable. That his body has been abused and exploited and drained of blood without his consent so many times, but now at last he’s free, he has a choice and he chooses to giveher his blood. The way his name – his identity – was the last thing he could call his own, but as he holds her in his arms and waits for his blood to run into her and fill her with life again, as he finally fixes what’s broken, he goes, here, you can have it, Max. My name is Max. That’s my name. And it’s yours.
Because before he met her, he was a man reduced to a single instinct: survive. He was a muzzled animal, a raging feral, and treated as such. But then he got caught up in their escape and she gave him the tools to free himself. She asks him “what’s your name? What do I call you?” She treated him like a human being and in protecting and loving Furiosa and these abused women without asking for anything in return, he recovers his humanity, so of course, here, it’s yours, my name is Max, it’s the last thing I have and it belongs to you.
It’s an extraordinarily beautiful scene visually too, and I honestly think it might be the most profound declaration of love that’s ever occurred in an action film.
This is not “I’m too fucking macho to tell you”, it’s “I can’t handle identity right now or maybe ever”.
IIRC, Furiosa naming him “Fool” is the only time in the whole show that one character teases another. It’s not completely devoid of jokes – Toast makes a sex joke about a pistol, Dag tells her baby to stay put, it’s lost it’s novelty out here. We see affection and care between different characters, especially the five, but we don’t see any teasing in the forms of status games – no physical play, or insults, or reminders of past embarrassments, except this one.
And this is an incredibly high stakes moment. Why does Furiosa do it? She’s insulting Max when he’s already really damn on edge, and she’s about to give him control of the rig and make him responsible for their escape plan. At first glance it looks like a really stupid idea to take a poke at a guy who’s currently holding a gun on you.
The obvious reason is that teasing (when it’s not bullying) is an indicator of a close social bond. You only tease people you’re comfortable with. She’s giving Max an insulting nickname because when you act as though you’re comfortable, it helps you become comfortable. She’s trying hard to deescalate the situation and win him over, and this is one tool for doing so.
I think there’s a more subtle reason too, and it’s that Furiosa sees right through him. She already knows that Max was human once, and is afraid to be human again. Teasing isn’t unique to the human species, but it’s one of our higher order functions and it’s very, very relational. Furiosa isn’t just trying to fake a bond with Max that doesn’t exist yet, she’s trying to remind him of his humanity. He’s just denied his humanity and avoid relationship by refusing to give his name. She’s going to drag him back into humanity by the scruff of his neck if he has to, and by calling him a fool she’s pointing out that she sees his attempts to avoid attachment and that it’s, well, foolish. Not helpful for survival, either physically or emotionally, and she needs him, dammit.
The obvious Doylist explanation of the scene is that names are important in this show (such good meta about that today!), and naming Max ‘Fool’ is symbolic on a number of different levels. It’s one of a million pieces of heart-rending meaning that Miller and co. packed into this thing. But I think that explanation works on a Watsonian level as well. Furiosa doesn’t have time to think all of this through rationally, but she intuitively knows how to draw Max into the group and she does it with consummate skill. By calling him names.
I was talking to someone about Fury Road today and they said ‘I just hated how it had no plot. They just left and then turned around and went straight back, it was so stupid’ and I think my soul was in danger of leaving my body because really – that’s the whole point. That’s the great message of Mad Max Fury Road – they need to leave and go back because they need to understand that the Green Place doesn’t exist. Valhalla doesn’t exist. There’s no better place waiting, no Eden to escape to, nowhere for Furiosa and the wives to run to. This world, broken and damaged and war-torn as it is, is all they have, and if they want a Green Place then they have to make it themselves. They have to choose peace. They have to choose love for each other. They have to take the seeds from the older, violent generation and start again. They have to destroy the oppressive power structures holding them back, capitalism and the patriarchy that Immortan Joe represents.
The Green Place was around them all along, and it takes this long, cyclical journey to understand that, both for them and for the audience. The circular narrative structure is an absolute work of genius, and the fact that the entire plot can be boiled down to “they leave and come back” is an indication of how well this works as an action movie – that the plot is simple enough so everyone can understand what’s going on while explosions are going off and cars are racing past at 100mph – yet it’s still incredibly rich and wonderfully complex too.
And what a pertinent message to send out – the generations before us killed the world and now it’s up to us to fix what’s broken. There’s no Green Place but the one we make ourselves, which will be born out of fire and blood and rise from the ashes of the old world.
Steel Phoenix Studios 