Imperator Furiosa

or, the frayed edges of humanity

I’ve been watching and rewatching Mad Max: Fury Road for completely normal reasons (I promise) and while I have something much larger to write about this, I want to take a moment to write about something very specific. So indulge me a bit as I touch on what amounts to maybe five seconds of screentime.

When the war parties from Gas Town and the Bullet Farm join Immortan Joe in his pursuit of Furiosa and his stolen wives, Furiosa drives the war rig into a canyon where she’s arranged for a trade with the gangs there.

Oil for passage and protection.

There are a thousand things I could discuss about Fury Road, but I want to linger on a very specific moment that happens here as she prepares to show herself to the gang of canyon bikers.

Furiosa wears grease, as do the other Imperators, but over the course of her attempted escape from Immortan Joe and her journey through the sandstorm, the grease comes off.

For those who have never seen Fury Road…um…go watch it. For those who need a reminder: she’s stolen Immortan Joe’s wives, fought a band of scavengers, an entire battalion of War Boys after Immortan Joe emptied the Citadel to get his property back, and she’s doing everything she can to keep these girls alive, to keep them safe.

Furiosa must be hard.

She has made of her heart a stone.

Everyone in this postapocalyptic desert must be hard. Everything hurts and it hurts all the time. But the further she gets from the Citadel, the more her softness rises to the surface. We see it first when Splendid emerges, revealing the first glimpse of a wife to the viewer.

And we see it when she asks Max his name.

Here, Max does not yet trust her. He’s still mad, driven insane by grief and the wasteland. And so he does not tell her. Refuses to connect to her as a person, for he is not yet human. He must be bathed in hope, first.

She turns away from him, accepting, and prepares for the next fight in this war for salvation, for freedom.

Here, at this moment, chased by three war parties, trying to work a deal to get past this final gang to make her way to the Green Place, she once again applies the grease to her face. A thick black smear over her eyes and all the way to her hairline.

Warpaint.

She puts on the mask of Furiosa.

And we see her give this minor look into the rearview mirror. It’s only a glimpse. A second.

But this moment carries weight.

And you, dear reader, dear viewer, are going to carry that weight.

Brief in its presence, momentous in its significance.

In a movie driven by action, by movement, with almost no dialogue, moments like this hold hundreds of words of dialogue within them. Whole scripts of movies could fill in the space between her putting on the grease, glimpsing at the mirror, and looking away. And maybe this scene wouldn’t work without Charlize Theron’s acting or George Miller’s direction or John Seale’s eye, but I was struck by all that her eyes communicated.

I am Furiosa but I am not his.

Immortan Joe has made her the Imperator. Has made her Furiosa.

But he does not own her.

We are not things, the wives repeat like a mantra, and we can feel it bellowing out of Furiosa here.

For Furiosa has lost everything. She was abducted from her matriarchal homeland flourishing with green and taken to the wastes, to the desert, where everything is oil and blood, overseen and constrained by a brutal and parasitic patriarchy. In this land of violence and masculinity, she has carved out a space. It cost her an arm, but she, at least, has not been made into one of Immortan Joe’s wives, forced to be raped repeatedly by him until she can birth him a son.

The fact that she is the only female Imperator is significant on its own and sets her apart. Yet she has also erased all femininity from her appearance. At first glance, you could see Furiosa as a man walking tall and proud, confident in her ability to inflict violence.

But here, for a brief moment, she is a woman.

And these wives are her girls. Her daughters.

We are not things.

You, Immortan Joe, do not own me.

I will escape.

I have escaped.

I have taken what is most precious to you and I will give them freedom.

Hope.

A green place.

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My novels:

• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.

• Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers

• Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.

• Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants

• Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.

• House of Ghosts - Standalone sequel to Libertatia; or, the Onion King