Watching “Mad Max: Fury Road” feels a lot like observing contemporary feminist debates in particular and many of our debates about cultural politics in general. Their associations with narratives about masculine community and destruction, however, are productively misaligned with the presence and behaviour of the film’s much-discussed female hero.Īlyssa Rosenberg noted recently in the Washington Post: These pleasurable intertextual allusions enrich the text of the film by signifying a certain cultural universe in the film.
MAD MAX FURY ROAD ENDING SERIES
Nerds will be delighted by the uttering of “ smeg”, made famous by the TV series Red Dwarf and Miller also nods to Apocalypse Now as Wagnerian strains play over chopping engines and automatic gunfire. Miller speeds up short sections of action (a comic strip effect), reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996). Slit’s (Josh Helman) wonky, slashed smile is unmistakably close to Heath Ledger’s appearance as the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) (Ledger was slated early on to play Max). I believe, however, that it offers a number of poetic complications of the earlier films’ themes.įury Road collages iconography from films about patriarchal power structures and dysfunctional homo-social relationships. Ari Mattes suggests in his article, Frenzy on Fury Road: Mad Max faces a post-digital apocalypse, that, while each previous Mad Max film “revisits and critiques” the one before, Fury Road fails to offer a development of the Mad Max story.
It’s possible that Fury Road produces new, absurd and null signs. This is exciting aesthetically and narratively because it invites us to be active viewers and also complicates a film’s meanings – avoiding generic or single conclusions. In cinema, this might mean that what we are shown (visually) and what is said (verbally) are at odds or, at least, don’t conform to the conventional or conditioned meanings denoted by those images or words. The poetic “sign”, in this case, misaligns signifier and signified, and thus creates either a new sign, an absurd (or surreal) sign, or renders the sign as null. We expect a sign to have a certain discursive identification and function (as we certainly encounter normal experience more in terms of discursive prose than poetic language) poetic language radically realigns the sign. Poetic language, in this sense, reawakens our engagement with the world by diverting our expectations of the normative understanding of the sign. Scalia suggests that the “language” of cinema may be understood poetically, as an unsteady relationship “between image and (verbal) language”: It is perhaps the characters’ most intimate encounter in the film, told through the actors’ astute physical communication and the gradual pace of its editing. Miller shows us their symbiosis in profile, as Furiosa gently settles the gun onto Max’s shoulder and takes perfect aim. He loyally remains in place as she crouches behind him.
Max anticipates her with an expression both of resignation and trust. Its motley crew has three bullets with which to hold back one of the many people hell-bent on their destruction, the vengeful Bullet Farmer (Richard Carter).įuriosa attends to the vehicle and Max takes her gun.Īfter he misses twice, however, we see her climb down from the rig. In one memorable sequence, Furiosa’s rig is bogged in wet sand. Buried underneath the Nux Car is a turbo-charged ‘34 Chevrolet huffing nitrous oxide. Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) mounts an escape with Joe’s five wives, known simply as the Wives, and – through necessity – forms an alliance with Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy).Ĭue armoured trucks, hacked monster vehicles and motorbikes and a deadly, relentless chase through an area known as the Wasteland.
Survivors of the apocalypse are enslaved inside a desert fortress by a tyrant, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). It may, then, be of some value to consider scenes and sequences as roughly analogous to the poetic line or stanza.įor those who have yet to see it, the film begins some years after civilisation’s collapse. The pacing of a film, dictated usually by shot/reverse shot patterns, scene and/or sequence length, and camera movement, gives film an aesthetic whole that resembles the rhythmic and imagistic sense of poetry. Signify through an aesthetic more closely aligned with poetry (discovered meaning) than theory (made meaning).