I enjoyed watching Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) two nights ago. Although it may merely seem like a high-octane car chase, the type that appeals to a certain kind of car-and-gun-and-violence-addicted adolescent male, it is actually about the triumph of an ecofeminist, life-centred culture over a masculinist, technophile, death-centred culture. The central images of machine, desert, men, violence and death are contrasted with those of water, life, women, caring and fertility. One of the older free women carries a bag containing seeds of all kinds and a seedling growing out of an animal skull. Ironically, however, at the literal turning point of the film, it is not a woman but the man Mad Max's idea not to seek an illusory utopia beyond the horizon, across the endless salt pan (a dried up sea?), which will most likely end in death, but to return to the citadel of death and reform it from within, after ending the patriarchal dictatorship. This message is reinforced by the details of the Gothic designs of the cars, costumes, body art (mutilation) and decor, as well as the Valhalla myth the patriarch propagates in order to gain unthinking loyalty from his warriors. As a political myth relevant to current concerns, like the film Elysium (2013), it criticises the excessive concentration of wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the vast majority of an impoverished population.
|
Archives
November 2017
AuthorI'm Alan (an anagram for "animal"), an ethical vegetarian. Our colour vision can be traced back to our distant relatives, the fruit-eating, tree-dwelling monkeys, who benefited from colour vision when looking for (ripe) fruit.
Categories |