{"id":64,"date":"2024-05-31T01:23:54","date_gmt":"2024-05-31T00:23:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/joshtest04.wordpress.com\/2024\/05\/31\/the-wasteland-furiosa\/"},"modified":"2025-05-05T20:21:41","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T19:21:41","slug":"the-wasteland-furiosa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/2024\/05\/31\/the-wasteland-furiosa\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wasteland (Furiosa)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Spoilers (thematic and otherwise) for Furiosa.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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That\u2019s Furiosa.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At the climax of the film that bears her name, Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) hunts down the man who killed her mother and set her life on the violent path through the wasteland that she has never managed to escape. Disarmed and defeated, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) is alternately nihilistic, manic, murderous. But he refuses to be despondent, to beg or sob or apologise. He won\u2019t legitimise Furiosa\u2019s revenge on her behalf. Defiant, he demands that she either kill him\u200a\u2014\u200aor join him. Dementus straddles the line between off-putting, unpleasant, charismatic and ridiculous in a manner that harkens back to Heath Ledger\u2019s Joker, but without that character\u2019s hyper-competence. Indeed, the empire of the Great Dementus rises and falls over the course of the movie largely without direct intervention from Furiosa, his incapacity as an administrator and inability to share power with his internal allies leaving him stripped down to a core handful of followers by the conclusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In their shared anger\u200a\u2014\u200aDementus proposes\u200a\u2014\u200aFuriosa and he have much in common. Veteran director George Miller does well to make these hoary old cliches seem fresh and novel, aided most by the abstract style of these final scenes of Furiosa and Dementus alone in the sprawling desert. Miller eschews the grand showdown in favour of a pared-back, stylised meditation on revenge, on free will, on evil. It\u2019s the rare \u201cwe\u2019re not so different, you and I\u201d that works, not for a trite nihilism about there being no difference between good things and bad things, but because it\u2019s the truth of the setting\u200a\u2014\u200aFuriosa takes place in a world where everyone has had something taken from them. Is the brutal Dementus not right to be angry? Is there not some aspect of his wilting invocations of elite privilege that rings true?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That\u2019s Dementus.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It is not hard to imagine the crisis-ruined world of Mad Max as the immediate future of our own. Climate change, war, political instability, any and all could be plausible steps on the way to turning our planet towards a desertified wasteland where there is little to do but scavenge in the ruins of our parents. Robbed blind by an ancestral class who are all too willing to mortgage the future of those who follow them, who privately mull over whether humanity has had such a good run that it might actually be better to keep not fixing the problems. After all, by the time the bomb drops, won\u2019t everyone who matters be dead already? Hopefully in the real world we can keep this from coming to pass; but if we fail, like Dementus and his roving clan, who will there be left for us to rage at in the dust and the dirt? What catharsis will there be to have?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is what allows Dementus to laugh in Furiosa\u2019s face. There\u2019s no revenge to be had in the wasteland, only to be lusted after. I saw someone online being mocked for making the point that Furiosa\u2019s mother and her compatriots are technically hoarding the green place, but it\u2019s an argument worth taking seriously. Who does the green place belong to? Women, mothers, pacifists? Who can say which of humanity deserve salvation? When Dementus comes to the Citadel for the first time, making his ineffective pitch to the assembled War Boys that they should rise up, he brings to mind Tubal-Cain in Aronofsky\u2019s Noah<\/em>: the great masses of humanity coming to stake their claim to another Ark and being turned away (Furiosa . The violence was already at the gates of the green place; the green place already had a border<\/em>. The green place had already become the Citadel, jealously hoarded with indiscriminate violence. What is the difference between Furiosa as a child tearing a man\u2019s throat out with the chain of a bike, and a War Boy trained to hurl himself from the citadel as a falling bomb? Is not the inevitable end of possessing the green place, becoming the Citadel, barbarians at the gate and no end to the violence justified?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Furiosa\u2019s mother is no stranger to the violence of the wasteland.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

We see Dementus torture Furiosa\u2019s mother. We see Dementus tear a man limb from limb between five motorcycles. But\u200a\u2014\u200awe see other tortures. We see other deaths. Dementus did not bring death to the wasteland. The wasteland is <\/em>death, only pending. They\u2019re all dead already. There\u2019s nothing to build, nothing worth having. The green place, Furiosa\u2019s river delta, is gone by the time of Fury Road<\/em>. She knows this really\u200a\u2014\u200aotherwise she would have gone back. Furiosa never mourns the loss of the star map she tattoos herself with; that part of her was already replaced with the wasteland even before the metaphor became literal. Given the chance, when Praetorian Jack arranges for her to travel alone in a car stocked with supplies, she stays with the War Rig. The only virtue the green place had was that Furiosa was from there. Once she found somewhere else to be from, she had no need of it any more. The defining trait of Gardens of Eden is that they become lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Furiosa (Miller, 2024)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Noah (Aronofsky, 2014)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Furiosa<\/em> expresses the wasteland to us slowly, going from the brief glimpses of the green place into bleak desert dunes devoid of any feature whatsoever. From there we pick up land features, then tents, then small structures and car trailers. We\u2019re some way in by the time we first reach any kind of permanent structure, the great rock towers of the Citadel. This helps circumscribe what we\u2019re also told in text titles: this is all there is. Aside from the three great fortresses (the Citadel, Gastown, the Bullet Farm) there is nothing else beside. As miserable as these locations are, anywhere else you might be is only habitable to those passing by on a vehicle. And if you\u2019re passing by on a vehicle, you\u2019re vulnerable to being raided by a bigger gang, and that gang by a bigger gang, until all meaningful life outside of the fortresses has rolled up into the bike gang of the great Dementus. Given this power to command and nothing left to expend it on, Dementus promptly uses it to seize Gastown. At which point everything is back to square one. The only free choices in this system are to die, or else to destroy one of the fortresses and implicitly doom everyone else to die with you in a sad parody of mutually assured destruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Furiosa comes alive behind the wheel of Immortan Joe\u2019s War Rig.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a world with no room for creation, only possession. We see Immortan Joe\u2019s brother, the unfortunate previous administrator of Gastown, duplicating an artwork onto a mural from an illustration in a book. But even this facsimile is destroyed and degraded. It\u2019s a world without culture, without community or family. There is no \u2018living well\u2019 to form the best revenge. The only expression is direct, personal and immediate\u200a\u2014\u200aturning to look God in the face and scream \u2018witness me\u2019. Throwing your enemy to the ground and having him beg you for life. It\u2019s a world staffed with people who have regressed into their own fantasies and are limited only by their ability to achieve them, as with the People Eater who is constantly stimulating himself, or the Octoboss who just wants to wear a cool mask and fly about. This is where Furiosa ends up at the climax of the film, demanding of a baffled Immortan Joe that her personal vendetta against Dementus is of paramount importance. But it doesn\u2019t matter that Joe is baffled. Furiosa is capable of realising this fantasy, and does. And if on returning she finds that being a cool badass with a robot arm is no longer fulfilling, then Furiosa will just have to find another fantasy to realise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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While Furiosa is the undisputed protagonist this time round, the film does not shy away from indulging the viewer in Dementus\u2019s freewheeling joy.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The dead wasteland sustains only the industries of death\u200a\u2014\u200aGastown, which turns death in the form of dead things into power. The Bullet Farm, which manufactures the instruments which cause death. And the Citadel, which produces the people destined to die. Beyond this triumvirate? Only sand and carrion birds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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If you enjoyed this article try my reviews of <\/em>Rebel Moon Part 1<\/strong><\/a> and <\/em>Rebel Moon Part 2<\/strong><\/a>. If you appreciate my writing, watch my video essay <\/em>Sixteen Attempts to Talk to You About Suicide Squad<\/strong><\/a>. Then watch my video essay <\/em>The Fanatic<\/strong><\/a>. Then back to <\/em>Suicide Squad<\/strong><\/a>. Then <\/em>The Fanatic<\/strong><\/a> <\/strong>again. If you\u2019re after more text, subscribe to my <\/em>Letterboxd<\/strong><\/a> <\/strong>reviews.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spoilers (thematic and otherwise) for Furiosa. At the climax of the film that bears her name, Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) hunts down the man who killed her mother and set her life on the violent path through the wasteland that she has never managed to escape. Disarmed and defeated, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) is alternately nihilistic, manic, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":1,"footnotes":""},"categories":[94,96],"tags":[76,81,82,83,19],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article","category-media-criticism","tag-furiosa","tag-furiosa-a-mad-max-saga","tag-mad-max","tag-movie-criticism","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions\/98"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}