Mad Max: Fury Road - Gender and Ability

For this multimodal post, I have chosen to analyze a clip from the 2015 action movie Mad Max: Fury Road. This film will always be one of my favorites, and I had trouble picking just one scene to write about. Critiques of gender, sexuality, and physical ability are present in nearly every scene, and I feel that the one linked below offers a good variety of cultural aspects to analyze. This scene takes place immediately after Max finds Furiosa and the rescued wives of a tyrant, Immortan Joe, in a desert. Max is at this time being used as a source of blood for the character Nux, whom he then tries to free himself from.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c39y2oTt7os

This scene means a lot to me for several reasons. First, it shows a group of women working together to beat a man in a fight. The man, Max, is chained. This fight mirrors the idea that men keep women in symbolic chains, except in this case, the roles are reversed. At the beginning of the scene, the women are being ordered by Max, but by the end they have used their combined strength to fight against him. They do not, however, succeed in winning the fight because Nux decides to help Max. It should be noted that Max and Nux only win the fight after using Furiosa's own weapon against her. This is an interesting dynamic, as it took using Furiosa's mechanical advantage against her. This also foreshadows how the final conflict of the movie ends, but I will not discuss that here in order to avoid spoilers.

The other thing that is so striking to me about this movie, and particularly this scene, is how physical ability is portrayed. Furiosa, the lead heroine is an amputee. She has a mechanical arm that she wears for most of the film, but in this scene, she is fighting Max without it, and she is very much is equal in doing so. I think it is very empowering to women and viewers with disabilities to show fighters like this on screen. It offers representation that is rare to find in most Hollywood blockbusters. This scene also includes a pregnant woman, the character Angharad. Usually in films, pregnant women take on roles as caring wives who are deeply in love with their husbands. They support them through thick and thin. Angharad is different though. She is running away from her husband in search of a better life. The fact that she is deep into her pregnancy actually makes her character stronger. A viewer can understand that she is both mentally and physically tough based on the fact that she chose to leave at such a vital time in her life. Not many pregnant women are given strong roles in film, and Angharad sets a high standard.

Mad Max: Fury Road is truly incredible, and I wish that I could delve even deeper into its analysis. Even in this scene alone there is so much more to interpret and discuss. The themes of gender and ability continue throughout the movie, and I would definitely recommend the film to someone who has yet to see it.