Their right to be in these roles may be questioned (certainly Master didn’t much like Auntie Entity’s power grab) but it’s not because of their gender.īoth The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome, by the way, use myth and legend as a narrative device: both movies are in fact oral histories being told around campfires years later, with the narrators people who claimed to have met ‘The Mad Max’ himself - Feral Boy in The Road Warrior, and Savannah in Beyond Thunderdome. This is never called out as anything surprising or unusual. Auntie Entity runs Barter Town (or presumably will once she gets the riots back under control,) Savannah Nix leads the Tomorrow-morrow Land kids after they’ve settled in Sidney.
MAD MAX WASTELAND MOVIE
More so, and hold on to your hats for this, by the end of the movie everyone in charge is a woman. She is female, black, and anything but set dressing - she’s one of the main plot drivers.
Now don’t get me wrong: Beyond Thunderdome still has problems (it would fail the Bechdel Test, for example, as would the movies that came before it) but unlike previous movies, there’s not a single instance of rape and the women actually merit proper names (or in the case of Auntie Entity, proper nom de guerres.) Auntie Entity (played by Tina Turner) is fabulous and over-the-top, in much the same way that Lord Humongous was in the second film. That brings us to the third movie, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, where this whole ‘female agency’ thing sneaks into the movie so quietly most people didn’t even notice. That sounds suspiciously like ‘agency,’ doesn’t it? Her death has nothing to do with him, and it’s entirely her choice. Unlike Max, she goes on the final road trip knowing it’s a suicide mission, and she willingly (and heroically) sacrifices herself to save her community. She is never raped, threatened with rape, never used as a sexual plot device, never killed off to further Max’s story. Not only is she a major character, but she is in almost all ways indistinguishable from a male in the same role. Warrior Woman (yes, that is her official title credit) is played brilliantly by Virginia Hey, and she is a stand-out in many ways. In fact, very few women have proper names one of the larger female roles with a speaking part is actually titled “The Captain’s Girl.”Īnd yet…we can’t talk about this movie without talking about Warrior Woman.
There’s rape here too, and very few of the women have speaking roles. This is the movie that establishes so many of the tropes we associate with Mad Max: the complete collapse of government and society, the scarcity of resources, the roving bands of increasingly violent and tribal gangs who dress in the most outlandish S&M outfits (in fact, many of the gang members for this movie were famously played by members of the local gay bondage community, who brought their play costumes to the set.) Everything is dirty, distress, recycled.
MAD MAX WASTELAND SERIES
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is so iconic to the flavor of the series that I know a lot of people who mistakenly believe it IS the first movie. This isn’t what we think of when we think “ Mad Max.” Mad Max is a prequel that just happened to be shot first, a warm-up exercise for the movies that follow. I think it can be argued that the first Mad Max movie is a kind of cinematic prologue, an origin story, but not properly part of the main series at all. Where are the crazy outfits, the mad nomads in the desert? Mad Max isn’t a lone ronin wandering the wastes, he’s a highway patrol cop with a boss yelling at him to do his paperwork. My main impression of that first movie is how stunningly post-apocalyptic it was NOT. Most of the time, they don’t even have the dignity of proper names. At no point in this tale do women have even the tiniest bit of agency - they’re victims, period. I recall it as a low-budget revenge tale in a quasi-dystopian urban landscape (unlike later movies, government and law enforcement still existed, society had not collapsed.) Max Rockatansky as played by Mel Gibson has such a strong accent he is almost unintelligible, and women are largely absent except to be rescued, raped, or killed at various points in the story. It’s been many years since I watched the first Mad Max movie.
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