Rev Left Radio - Marxist Film Analysis: Mad Max

Episode Date: May 4, 2018

The Film Vanguard reunites to analyze the Mad Max anthology   Outro Song: Hostage Crisis w/ Chris Hannah of Propagandhi | Sole & DJ Pain1 Support the Show: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio Follow us on FB at "Revolutionary Left Radio" Intro Music by The String-Bo String Duo. You can listen and support their music here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/track/red-black This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, and the Omaha GDC. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org

My life fades. The vision dims. All that remains are memories. I remember a time of chaos. Ruin dreams. This wasted land. But most of all, I remember the road warrior. The man we called Max.

Max. To understand who he was, you have to go back to another time, when the world was powered by the black fuel, and the deserts sprouted great cities of pipe and steel. Gone now, swept away. For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. Without fuel, they were nothing. They'd built a house of straw. A thundering machine sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and taught. But nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. The cities exploded.

A whirlwind of looting. A firestorm of fear. Fear. Men began to feed on men. On the roads it was a white-line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage, would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in the smell strong of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed. Men like Max, the warrior Max.

In the roar of an injun he lost everything. And became a shell of a man, a burnt-out, desolate man. A man, haunted by the demons in his past. A man who wandered out, out into the wasteland and it was here in this blighted place that he learned to live again. Left radio now oppose the system any way you know how Unite the left against the capitalist lies

and liberate the proletary as mine Fight for all the working class Hard for equality Fight against the right free to fascist ideology Tune it in and turn it up loud Revolutionary Left Radio Starts now Hello everyone

Welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio I'm your host Anne Comrade Brett O'Shea and today we have the film Vanguard back on the show from our Texas Chainsaw Massacre episode to talk about Mad Max We have to edit that out Okay before we begin

I just want to give an update on our Patreon When we first started Patreon We had no idea what we were doing We were doing on a per creation model Which means if you donated one dollar It would be $1 per episode we put out and we've been putting out a lot of episodes lately. People have been confused by this.

They've dropped off the Patreon, not knowing what to do. Now, we've officially switched over to per month like most other podcasts. So if you just want to donate $1 per month, $5 per month, it gives you consistency. No matter if we put out four episodes or 10, you'll pay the same exact amount. So I just want to make everybody aware of that. And also, because we have patrons that don't really get anything for being a patron other than maybe some shows early, we're going to do a new thing in the name of education where patrons who donate even $1,000,

to the show. We'll have access to our Patreon page where every month I'll put up a post asking for questions. Anybody can ask any question they want and I will spend that month researching the answers to those questions, ones that I might not know myself and get back to you and it'll be released solely to patrons to give you a little something back for giving to the show and supporting us for so long. So with that announcement out of the way, we are going to talk about all four Mad Max films. We're covering a lot of territory today. It's obviously going to be an analysis through the prism of Marxist film analysis, as usual. We have back on Seth, Taylor, and Phil from previous episodes.

I think between all three of you, you've been on multiple episodes. Most of you are on the first one, the Maoist episode, our first Cuba episode, etc. Hi, I'm Phil. I love films, and I'm very excited to talk about Mad Max. My name's Taylor. I have done nothing but watch Mad Max and work for the last two days. this point, I have nothing on but leather, fish nets, and a codpiece. I am stoked and ready for this episode. Witness me. Yeah, I'm Seth, just an angry malist. So, let's get into it.

We have a lot of ground to cover. Now, the first thing I want to do is kind of do initial thoughts in the film. Maybe mention your favorites. Say anything you want to say about the actual filming itself, background to the film. I know most people out there are somewhat even if only indirectly aware of Mad Max aesthetics and the Mad Max sort of cultural impact it's had. So I'll go ahead and start and say that my favorites out of all four were two, the Road Warrior, and number four, Fury Road. The first one was amazing, but I think it was like sort of weirdly incoherent plot wise and they had some weird plot holes, but aesthetically it was amazing. And the first episode was filmed on a on a very small budget all those stunts you see in the films all the times you see

people flying through the air we're really people flying through the air at one point um a guy crashes and the motorcycle comes in and hits him in the back of the head and that was all real the guy obviously was was okay um so that's some of the the background to the film but yeah my two favorites were road warrior and fury road i would say fury road because i think it's it's in general the most well put together of the whole series but it's kind of achieving so i'll say Thunderjome, the third film would be my favorite. That's bold. It's a very, it's a genuinely strange movie.

A genuinely strange movie. And I like that, that strangest is not just a sort of surface level cobbling together of like people wearing football pads and assless chaps and stuff. It's like, it's genuinely strange. It's like totally uneven in tone. It's all over the place. It's like a family friendly movie, too. It's like about, the only PG-rated one, I think.

Yeah, it's like... This is from an era where PG was a wasteland. Right. So, yeah, it's kind of like a huge, huge left turn into like... From like a pretty, like a couple of very gritty, like the first two very gritty. And then the third is like a... It feels like watching a family-friendly genre movie, like a family-friendly sci-fire fantasy movie. The third one, you know, I have spent so much time watching a lot of other movies that weren't Thunderdome.

I guess I should properly say beyond Thunderdome. Dome, the appropriate title. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome being the complete title. That took me back to, again, after having watched and learned a lot more about movies, I got a really weird vibe from the third one. It was like the third never-ending story where the rock creatures are writing rock motorcycles and singing parodies of rock songs and also The Lost Boys. And I really got turned around and,

Yeah, I don't want to say anything too disparaging about it because it belongs to a legendary franchise and a franchise that I genuinely enjoy. And I just can't really tell people, despite how much I might put that down as kind of the red-headed stepchild of the group, you know, I can never tell anyone with a straight face, don't watch it because it is fabulous. And so saying that it's my least favorite is not saying that it's a bad movie. I agree with Phil. It's a genuinely weird movie. But Mad Max is this really important piece of film history. Going back to Chase's, chase scenes have always been a part of movie culture because it's always been a good part of storytelling.

You're going to be hard pressed to find a good story that doesn't involve some sort of chase, some sort of pursuit. Now, the car chase happened first in mid-1960s with this movie called Bullet, 1968. it was like a 20 minute car chase scene a prolonged car chase was featured on film it was the historical one it was the one that set that invented that created the genre in a sense it kicked off the genre and since we've had these incredible car movies from bullet to mad max to drive in the 21st century that's infurious uh I'm tempted to say speed but I'm going to pull back on that I you know that's in the furious for sure I mean it's influenced by it has to be yes absolutely And I, uh, in particular, you know, really love the, um, the first Mad Max because people sleep on it so much. I just, I love it so much. Uh, I think it has between, um, one and four, the, uh, one through four, I should say, a one and four, I think have the most substantial culture. Um,

number one has this just absolutely bizarre, uh, culture in it where you get a depiction of a society on a precipice, you know, the cops are all running around in leather and the house of justice is totally empty and barren and lawyers are around but they don't do much other than get pushed around by the cops and leather and uh you know you get this great you know revenge scene this really kind of new wave uh vision of cops you know and and bad guys that as we know as leftists the cops are the bad guys but sometimes it's fun to you know see this um this trope turned on its head and played around with, and you get movies like Mad Max. And, you know, the jump into number two was a jump into a definite post-apocalyptic aesthetic that I really enjoy. But really the

zany antics of Mill Gibson running around gripping and being gripped by, you know, cops and weather, just really sent a shiver up my spine. And also, I cannot get enough of the saxophone. Mill Gibson's wife in this movie playing sarinating a saxophone. Mel Gibson laying half naked in a bed while his wife is also half naked playing a saxophone is incredible. And I just, you know...

Also all the Australian accents. The Australian accents! Australians are objectively the most funny-sounding people. Australia! Australia! It's like you can have the most attractive Australian person in the world. Like, somebody who just like looks like a straight-up like I don't know George Clooney type

or like Mel Gibson like Mel Gibson is incredibly handsome especially in the third one Zaddy but you you expect them to sound like George Clooney but they sound like Donald Duck

I think probably my favorites were the first and the second honestly I think Fury Road is awesome but it's in like kind of an entirely different category like stylistic and the early the first two ones really appeal to me aesthetically and thematically and

Fury Road like while an incredible movie I think I don't know it's just in an entirely different category than the first two and it's the things about the first two that even though they're very imperfect films those things that you don't get in Fury Road really like have like that quirky appeal to me. So it's like I guess if I was being like an objective, like attempting to be an objective film critic, like yeah, Fury Road is probably the most, it's definitely the most like well done as far as like making a film goes. But just for like my like personal aesthetic and like cultural preferences, the first two have like a very big charm to me. It's like that really new wavy. Oh absolutely. I fucking love.

No, I gave you that. I think Fury Road is probably the best. It's the slickest looking Mad Max there is, but one and two actually look handmade. They look so well composed, and they look like they had people's hands on them. And this kind of passion that you're only, early only get from Autours when the word Autour meant something, it shines bright in those movies. About number two and about Fury Road. I think I see like Fear Red as being a fairly straightforward remake of Road Warrior. I mean, all the important elements are reproduced. They're shuffled around a little bit,

but it's like the same stuff happens in both. Maybe a different order and different characters, but like, I see it as a fairly straightforward remake of Road Warrior, and I'll double back around later when we talk about some of the issues, but that's why I would, you know, I think, and I think it is a great remake, and I think

it adds a lot of interesting stuff to it, but like, I kind of seen them as the same movie. Yeah, and insofar, they do parallel each other in some ways. In the universe of Mad Max, it's a continual timeline and things deteriorate and things get worse as the movies go on. So it's not an actual remake in the universe. It's a continuation of the story. But I absolutely hear what you're saying. And in the original, some of the interesting things were because they were operating on such a low budget, they had

to use like real members of bike gangs in Australia. And since they had very little money, they paid a lot of these people mostly in beer. And I think it's also worth noting before we move on that we have to take a moment to shit on Mel Gibson I mean as a human being he's an anti-Semite he's a piece of shit and I think that that I'm not sure of the background why he wasn't included in Fury Road but I mean I'm sure

it has to play a role right why George Miller didn't pick up Mel Gibson for the for the Fury Road one I don't think he could have done it anymore anyway I just don't know if you have worked in that role well it doesn't fit in the timeline Fury Road didn't happen that long after Thunderdome in Universe I

they picked a younger actor Yeah, Tom Hardy. Tom Hardy. Yeah, but at the same time, I want to believe that the people behind the movie are as disgusted as Mel Gibson as we are. And he can eat shit and die. Right, for sure. For the record. And in the first one, he was only 21 years old, kind of interesting, one of his really first, maybe his first breakout film.

I don't know. Actually, yeah. Yeah, no, they found him in film school. And they put him in this movie. And one of the funny things is because the first one had Australian accents when it was imported to the U.S. for a U.S. audience, they thought that, the US audience wouldn't be able to keep up with the Australian accent. So they actually dubbed over American English dubbing over an Australian film, which I never watched that film, thank God, because, I mean, people say it's fucking trash.

I just watched the original Australian version, but it's just funny they had to do that. Because American audience went in and they're like, is this a comedy? Why are they making joke voices? What's going on? Click it in the guts, Barry. She's the last of the V8. Shut the gate on this one, Max. It's the duck's guts.

Yeah, she's the last of the V8. She sucks Nitro. Face 4-Head with overhead cans. 600 horse pounds through the wheel. With the blow up there. She's meanness, but the music and the bitch is born to love. He's in a cova, man.

He loves it. before we move on to capitalism and some of that I do want to touch on aesthetics real quick maybe I'm off here it's obviously not steampunk but I would maybe classify it as goth punk how would you guys think about the aesthetics here how would you label it and maybe go into some of the costumes that were used especially in the earlier ones which I think are of a particular interest I don't know if I have anything really insightful to say about the costumes in Mad Max other than that they're badass and they look really dope and the uh costumes uh has the costumes have generated their own culture you know

it there is a there's uh cosplay and then there's uh steampunk and then there's this and i can for the life of me cannot remember um what the group associated with this genre of cosplay is i think they're called the badlanders or something but they're really creative really cool people and that is part of the, I think, the stylistic genius of Mad Max is that the costumes, the vision, the absolute, just a vision of something that people had been talking about since the dawn of time, the apocalypse, is, since time began, people have been talking about time ending. But only in Mad Max did they do it in cod pieces and leather fish nets. You know, assless chaps, assless chats. Oh, the Mohawks, the Mohawks, baby. You know, I think, I mean, there's more to be said about that

later on, but, like, as far as aesthetic, I think the second one, like, the second one was where you made that, like, hard turn into that territory, where you, where you saw a little bit of the leather in the first one, but in the second one, on both sides, they really push on the envelope in terms of costume, and it's all very DIY. Like, in the, in Philly Road, like, the costumes are more, uh, they're, they're more consistent in a way, and they're more crafted, whereas in the second one, it's like they're literally just wearing like football shoulder pads

and like turtlenecks and stuff. It's an interesting look. I think I'd just say apocalyptic and I think he may have been like kind of when you see apocalyptic stuff nowadays like the apocalyptic aesthetic builds heavily off of what he did with that second movie.

And I almost think, I don't know if it was originally intended all the use of leather. I think it almost might have came about originally as just a function of their low budget. Only Mel Gibson actually wore real leather. The rest was like fake leather. So it might have just been that,

and then it kind of caught on and to continue that universe and Road Warrior, they continued with it. But either way, it's just so unique, so fascinating. Love it. Once you watch these films, the aesthetic will stay with you for your entire life. And I think that, I mean,

you really have this pinnacle of punk fashion in the 80s. It's a relic of the 80s, and I think that's a really fun idea about what have time stopped in 1989, you know, like, what would the world look like if that's where Western culture got interrupted and then never, and then the ideology switched or the economic base collapsed and culture imploded, what would happen? You know, so in that sense, Mad Max almost becomes

this time capsule, you know, this movie of a time detached from time itself. I think there's something to be said about that. I haven't thought much about it because I've been too busy watching the movies going nae-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na. And to think much more about it than that. But I really just enjoy that sort of almost interruption in film aesthetics that George Miller, you know, created himself and his talented costuming crew.

Absolutely. Well, this is the film vanguard. And so, you know, there's been a million film analyses of, especially Fury Road. But we're obviously going to drill down on this from a Marxist political perspective, and so the main themes we're going to hit today are going to be political in nature, and I think the best way to start that off is the talk about capitalism, is the talk about the commodification of the post-apocalyptic world,

about Bartertown, etc. So to get into this, I would just like to start off by saying that you mentioned Taylor in your last little segue about the destruction of the economic base, and this poses an interesting sort of way to look at this film, because the economic base of what we can assume is 20th century capitalism is destroyed, but the capitalist logic and the capitalist social relations live on. So even in, you know, in a barter town and in Fury Road, there is this hierarchy of power and wealth, and those sorts of relations continue, and we'll get more into like the class division of society, but surely it's a class society all the way through. And I think it's an interesting way to start this. It's just this long debate in Marxist history.

Well, it's, I don't know if it's still a debate anymore, because I think more people are kind of getting a hold of this idea, but, you know, there was this crude, vulgar Marxism that once argued that just, you know, changing the base of something would automatically change the superstructure. And I think, you know, Mao came along and really introduced this idea of a cultural revolution and introduced this idea that the superstructure lags behind the changes in the economic base. So in an apocalyptic context, you have the total destruction of the base, but the superstructure, the culture, the social relations, those continue on. And, you know, Mow's solution to this was a cultural revolution alongside an economic one.

That doesn't happen in this film. The culture is very much still driven by capitalist logic. So let's go ahead and use that as a jumping off point. What do you guys have to say about capitalism, about base superstructure analysis, about cultural revolution, anything? I've got a lot to say about that, actually. I just not too long ago read this book of lectures compiled by this guy named Stuart Hall, who founded the Institute for Cultural Studies in Binghamton in England. He has been referred to as the W.E.B. Du Bois of England, you know, Jamaican, I believe

Jamaican born, English raised. And he, in this lecture series, just called Cultural Studies 1983, does a great job of introducing the concepts of culture and economics, the relationship between the two and then takes to task at the time the mainstream Althusarian line of thought that culture is a direct function of the economic base and even if you if you fiddle around with the base you'll fiddle around with the culture but ultimately if you feel around the culture you will not you know fiddle around with the base you know I mean in so many words that's a really crude way of putting it but what Stuart Hall says is that that that's that's It's a really crude way, it's a really abstract way of putting it.

That's the thesis of the lectures, is that in Marx's literature itself, you see this variety of levels of abstraction. And whenever you talk about class, when you talk about economic base, when you talk about culture, depending on the book you read, you can walk away with a different idea about what Marx means by that. I mean, for example, in capital, you have two classes. But in the 18th Broomer, you've got the landowners, you've got the aristocracy, you've got the big bourgeois. You've got the little bourgeois. You've got the peasant class. You have the

agricultural peasant class. You have the urban peasant class. You have the proletariat class. There are like eight classes in the 18th premier. You have all of these different competing cultures. And from that, Stuart Hall says, it really just depends on the kind of comb that you run through the hair. Is it going to be a fine-tooth comb or is it going to be, you know, I guess I'm not so fine-tooth comb. I don't know how it comes work. I'm a film scholar. But the point is that each kind of analysis serves a different end, you know, depending on what you want to talk about and for the sake of expediency. So when you do cultural studies and you talk about base superstructure, I think depending on what you're talking about, it is really irresponsible to

use that big, you know, crude method of just base, just superstructure. So that's then I have an ongoing debate about the merits of pop art in the 21st century. And part of it is, part of it is, I think pop art is crude and bourgeois, but at the same time, pop art represents this playing around, this idea, this playing around with culture. It reproduces culture, but at the same time,

it kind of, it questions it, it tests the limits. You know, we have art that, uh, represents the bourgeois society and bourgeois values and reinforces the bourgeois base, the bourgeois economic base, I guess the economic base endorsed by the bourgeois Z.

But it also is incrementally, uh, exploring the limits of the ideology. surrounding it. And so insofar as it's not, it doesn't subvert it, it doesn't abolish it, doesn't recreate it, it points out contradictions and flaws that other people will identify and exploit and use to deconstruct the economic base in the culture. And so I'm not sure that all of this is in Mad Max, but I think you, you know, when you look at Mad Max and you look at the the thought experiment of the economic base,

imploding and what happens, you get these vignettes of what happens. And I think that George Millett is a really very kind of slick job of saying there's no one uniform reaction to this. You know, these tribes sort of fracture and splinter off and culture develops in these weird and interesting ways. And the vestiges of the bourgeois society that remain after the economic base implodes are these bits and pieces of culture being led consciously and unconsciously in different ways to their ultimate conclusions and it's not being worked at universally it's being worked on in particular

over the course of a variety of new classes that have formed around the new economic basis their interests and their preceding cultures I'll let Phil go next because I just want to tell Taylor how wrongy is about Pop-Arden for the sake of not on, for the sake of staying on topic and not diverting 30 minutes in I'll give Phil the chance to... I'm saying I'm telling you

it's not a hard jump from soup cans to leather oh my god Phil maybe building off a little bit of where you're going there the sort of social reality portrayed in the film I think you could go one of two ways

with it on one hand is sort of this the central character of Mad Max you know as being like this cop you know and so much so much media is devoted to to looking at cops and like

the road warrior and you know him and his car on the road and stuff it's very much about individualism and stuff like that. But I also think that so much of his, so much of these movies are like melancholy. There's like there's a melancholic nostalgia for the social institutions of the past. A sort of endless search for community.

And so one thing that you see, Man Back's always doing is like he goes to a new place and he's like, you know, I'm not going to stick around and help, you know, I just need a gasoline and I need to hit the road again. And they're like, no, please, you know, say, help us. And he's like, and he sees a really cute kid and he's like, oh, I just got to do it for my dead wife or whatever. And everywhere you see people with the need and the longing and the, and making attempts to form these communities and form and rebuild societies, rebuild social institutions. And I think you see more and more of that as a series for gases,

and certainly more of that in Beyond Thunderdome, for example, than in Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome. You kind of see almost like an end game where they sort of begin to repopulate the cities. So, yeah, I think you could look at it as the film sort of representing at one level, the individual in a capitalist liberal society where they are, where they are totally isolated as individuals, and they are just one dude in a car, just driving out in the wasteland, you know.

But that, within that, there's always the impulse to find community and rebuild these social groups. And one thing I really like about the communities that George Miller writes into the Mad Max movies is that these communities are the focus of the movie. The camera's on Max, but the audience is with the community.

Mad Max really doesn't have a lot of, I mean, he doesn't have a lot of character. Yeah, yeah, for sure. He just kind of comes into town. And this is just, I know this is just good storytelling, but it's also relevant from an ideological point of view that Max really accelerates the contradictions and the conflict that are there

and brings them to a natural conclusion. And then he's a crisis actor. He's not a crisis, eh? He's an accelerationist is what he is. So, but no, yeah, he comes into town and, you know, brings these, these festering contradictions to an explosion. And what happens is not total destruction. Total destruction was before the acceleration happened. Oh, my God.

I'm not, disclaimer, I am not trying to endorse accelerationist philosophy. But what I am saying is that when Max comes to town, and so when the audience's attention is brought to the problems that these communities are facing, it's not the, It's not Mad Max that we care about. It's the people who are experiencing the problems who need the problems to, I mean, come to their attention, and i.e., the audience's attention and something, you know, materially done about them to resolve them. And so, you know, insofar as Mad Max is this rugged individual roaming the, roaming the wasteland, we have kind of the, you know, our own, we're confronted by our own consciousness, or not

consciousness, our own conscience, our own conscience, being brought to task and being made to pay witness to the material reality around us. To borrow a page from Peter Singer's book, you know, the American is being made to care about the, you know, the Brazilian, you know, child in the slum or the, you know, the worker in the factory miles and miles away and being made to do something real about it. And that's an interesting point, too, is that, you know, Mad Max's character throughout the film. He is sort of super one-dimensional. He's almost, he's almost just a vacuous sort of character. And like the people that really shine are like the villains, the people that that he encounters along the way. In every film, the people that stand out to me

is not Mad Max, but it's like the villains, it's humongous, it's furiosa. Those people stand out. And so I think that's an interesting thing. And I don't, I don't know if that was written into it or that was just Mel Gibson's weird acting or whatever it was, but that certainly comes through. And you reminded me of a quote from Carl Marx, who, you know, said that, quote, it is not the consciousness of people that determine their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. And when we're looking at the morality of people, when we're looking at how people behave in this post-apocalyptic hellscape, you really do see that that basic idea from Marx is absolutely true. Is, you know, human beings in one situation, put them

in a, in a comfy suburban setting in 2018. And that exact person, you know, that person, will act totally different than they act in a post-apocalyptic, you know, hellscape or under-socialism or whatever the different contexts may be. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the, like, the weird cultural quirks that you see represented in these, like, attempts at community, like, even, like, the Thunderdome. Like, I mean, that's just, like, a sort of Neanderthal, like, backwards sort of thing. But, like, I mean, I think, I think that, well, there's a difference between, like, a mass societal transformation like a revolutionary context and then like one in which like society like completely like crumbles to fucking pieces and so I think like you know when the drug is just like

really pulled under you like that I mean because you're you're talking about like two very different like motive forces so like in a revolutionary context you know it's it's people make it's large numbers relatively making a change and directing society or a attempting to direct society along this like path that follows a certain vision whereas like in in this setting with the ecological thing and nuclear war I mean it's really probably you know it's the result of people and power doing bad things but it's more of a circumstance where the rug is just like suddenly ripped out from everybody and like you know you your fundamental faith and like the way of things worked previously is really shaken when you combine that with like resource security

and stuff, yeah, you're more likely to see people take on this, like, tribalistic element and start using substitutions for certain institutions that are far more draconian and seem a bit absurd. I think on the note of Max and, like, his role, in the first one, you know, he's a cop and he has his interceptor, and he's very much an individual engaging, like, individual retribution and against, you know, these dogs and stuff. But as the series progresses, you really see that role of the road warrior diminishing. Like, in the second one, he starts out as this lone wolf and, like, going around and doing badass stuff.

But then he loses control of his interceptor and becomes just a driver, a glorified chauffeur. You know, he's no longer a road warrior. He's a trucker. He gets tired to get a truck and, like, deliver some good. And it's like, you know, and even more drastically inferior, because in the very first scene, like, his interceptor just completely blows up. And he's, like, completely helpless. He has no real control over the plot whatsoever. And his only job, his only function is just to drive the truck.

It's all the same to you. I'll drive that, tanker. The offer is closed. Too late for deals. No deals. I want to drive the truck. Why? Quite a big change of heart.

Believe me, I haven't got a choice. And how do you think you'd do it? I mean, look at you. You couldn't even drive a wheelchair. You should look at yourself, Max. You're a mess. Come on, cut the crap. I'm the best chance you've got.

Right, let's get moving. And that's even further pushed in Beyond Thunderdome, because of all the things to put into a franchise focused on, you know, these roadsters and these muscle cars and like the road warrior aspect of it and all these crashes and stunts, the thing they decided to make their centerpiece is a train chase. A train chase. Very strange, yeah. Where he's not even a driver at that point. He's just an engineer. He doesn't have to, like, steer. He just, the train just goes, and he is on the train. And so it's a, like I was saying, it's a

strange movie, and that's one of the things that's strange about it, to put a train chase in a movie where it's just cars chasing a train. And the train, I don't, it's like an infinite track and the change just keeps going. It's like, and I think we can definitely look at this as like a symbol of history or the symbol of the dialectic, you know? It just keep going. It's not a matter of having some badass action hero,

like steer it around and swerve around and like evade things or like going a different direction or something. It's going where it's going and it's going to keep going. All you have to do is shoot the bad guys from the car from the engine. Yeah, and I think as the film goes on,

the roads actually go away and you know the second one there's like there's the roads are not no longer maintained and then the third one we have this weird train thing and then at the end you're just driving over empty desolate land i think that's interesting um the also i wanted to talk about the the way different people react in these circumstances so you have some people that try to maintain morality and some people that just quote unquote go over to the dark side and just rape steal pillage whatever they do to get by but like on the in the road warrior you have the commune of people they start refining their own oil and they're just trying they're trying to maintain some semblance of social cohesion and moral responsibility to others

and they're being, you know, attacked from all sides. And then in the Thunderdome, I think there's a weird carryover of television culture and the spectacle of sporting events because when they're in the Thunderdome, it is a spectacle. People climb up all over the sides and they watch it as if they're watching TV and they like almost like they're, they could be eating popcorn and watching a sporting event. So all that's really interesting. I do want to focus now on Thunderdome, because Thunderdome specifically had Bartertown. And Bartertown is an interesting sort of focal point for a capitalist critique and for a class society critique.

Now, one of the writers and the crow producers of the movie, he made this quote about his description of insight into how the movie portrays the world in Thunderdome and how it's a reflection of our own world. And he says, quote, Bartertown is really our world today, a world which is vital, lively, funny, grim, totally relying on commerce and trade. There are bars and pigs and technology of a sort and industrial complexes and singles bars and girls

are on the make and guys fighting and all those things. It's people trying to live their lives the best way they can. There's very little concern for what might be termed quote unquote spiritual values. Of course, it's a heightened version of our world. Crack in the earth, the tribe of children in the oasis, is a place which appears from the outside

to be idyllic when we first arrive there, and it's mystical in a way. You might guess that it has a rich spiritual life, but it's real undercurrent as superstition, fracture, knowledge, and ignorance. It looks wonderful, and all your dreams as a kid of growing up without adults. But what I think you realize is that no world can flourish in that way. Cracking the earth can never flourish. It's too fractured. It has no knowledge. It can't make the connections between things. Everything got all mixed up. So as wonderful as it might be, it is in its own way, as barren as bartertown.

And that's sort of a reflection of different aspects of Western society, he goes on to say. but I do want to drill down on bartertown and the class society that it basically is. You literally have the, what is anti-entity? Is she the mayor, the ruler, the, I mean, whatever, the governor of the town. And she explicitly says, I'm trying to rebuild civilization. And she's perched atop in this, like, nest almost above the city. And as you go down to the ground, you get just like the regular people going to bars and watching fights in the Thunderdome. Then you go to the underworld.

and it's like the lump in proletary like prison labor down there and there's factory farming down there the the town is run off pig shit the methane released by pig shit is what they harvest it's so goofy like it is i love and i love that you know that the town is literally powered by pig shit it's absolutely a class society as you go down so do you guys want to talk about about that especially as it focuses on barter town and thunder dome yeah i mean i think that's uh you know that's sort a very literalized image of class of a class society and where there is a literal underclass that is that that's it they live under the city and uh but they do everything to power it they they run it and you know you could go that far along with his as you like and and having so master

having master like who's originally like set up as a villain master blaster set up as a villain having him eventually become having him like sort of flexing his power against his sort of upper class like mayor mayoral figure by essentially striking like he ultimately the key to the vid their their victory and and mad max's deliverance and deliverance of the children and all that is through a uprising from the underclass up through the tunnels and stuff and it's if you wanted to look at it that way it's a very clear like class classed a plot line there

I can't believe it I didn't realize that the plot of Beyond Thunderdome is the mayor hires a cop to break a strike yeah yeah holy cow

well then the dirty unionists have to bust in protesters at the end of the film to ultimately by bringing in all the kids it's you know just the wickedness of liberal unions

it's funny though because yeah you do the working class the underworld flexes its muscles through Master shutting everything down. And there's that where, you know, Mark's quotes, like, class struggle is a locomotive of history. And literally the train breaks out from the underclass

and goes out, chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga, there's no way George Miller knew that, right? I don't know if he could consciously put that together, but, God, damn it works so well. And that's the thing about, like, making an odd movie like that, maybe making a genuinely strange movie, there's no telling why he did any of those things. But when you make a movie that is genuinely weird,

it, by its very nature, it is going to reveal truths about our, you know, our society, and it is going to, if you make something that's genuinely subversive, genuinely strange, it is going to push things in that direction. I think the train, you know, he may not have been thinking, oh, yes, the train is the engine of history, it's a forging ahead. And, and, and what I forgot to mention before is that, like, when they reach the end of the train, they all get in the plane and they fly, like, so they're completely liberated from, like, the earth itself. So it's, like, You know, it's wild stuff. It's fantastic stuff. But just, yeah, just driving out of there on a train, the locomotive history, it's all there. Moving on to Fury Road, because there's plenty of capitalist logic there, literally people become commodities.

Mad Max is used as a blood bag to fuel, what was his name, Nux, hooks him up with a chain and a bloodline and infuses him so he can continue on. you know, there's pretty brutal scenes of women being milked by machines for their breast milk, which I think the story implied that they trade that milk with other tribes as a form of just trade or something like that. Yeah, there's a whole comic series that takes place between Beyond Thunderdome and Fury Road that kind of goes into that. Part of it is the rise of a Morton Joe, and the warlords in Fury Road all got put into power by Immorten Joe, who conquered this reservoir um and i could go into the whole detail about who a morton joe is too but i feel like we might get into that later right now though uh the morton joe's control over this enormous amount of territory and um absolutely human uh human human bodies are currency

the product of human bodies are currency um they mine lead for bullets that's that's currency um the water itself, yeah, everything's been reduced to currency in Morton Joe's universe and people included. Yeah, and women specifically face a sort of brutal traumatizing attack. Yeah, you have the, you have them being milked like cows for their, for their breast milk, and then you have his little, his little haram of five wives, which he basically uses as breeding machines to continue his, his bloodline, and I think we'll get into that later, but it's the total commodification of everything. And even in Bartertown, when Mad Max first appears, there's talk about exchanging time of your life for certain things. Just like, yeah, bodies are commodified,

time is commodified, life is commodified. It's just a, like, almost anarcho-capitalist of everything is for sale sort of situation. It doesn't touch on like how children are used in that situation, but you can only imagine what the more grotesque aspects of that society are. What are you trading? I'm looking for someone. You got nothing to trade or not? I'm gonna team to camels. People come here to trade. Make a little profit, do a little business.

Got nothing to trade, you've got no business in Barton Town. Now we're on the inside, that's all. Next. I got skills, I can trade then. Sorry, the brothels fall. One hour. Do you find him, what then? I'll ask him to return what's mine.

Oh, and of course he'll be desperate to clear his conscience. You will be. You that good? Mm-hmm. Perhaps you've got something to trade after all. Keep talking? 24 hours of your life. In return, you'll get back what was stolen.

I don't want to reach too far, but you could take an analysis of the automobile and gasoline itself as the stand-in for something really interesting about the role of the commodity and the product, the idea of the product in capitalist ideology. You know, the vehicles you'd use in this case as a stand-in for ideology, and the gasoline would be the objects of ideology. you know the vehicles are the vehicles and they get you around either they are the the the focal point of your interactions you know the the measure of your of your of your status and power in this universe and your um your your um your projection into it your footprint in the hypothetical theoretical universe but and gasoline gasoline gasoline is the object of the ideology it's this ideological fixture this this this this the this thing that drives it this idealized product, product. And no matter how faulty your ideology is, no matter how incoherent or contradictory it may be, you know, you don't need to have conversations about it. You don't need to engage in a discourse about your ideology if you can preoccupy your mind and the minds of others on the object of ideology, you know, this, this fantasy that supports and sustains the ideology. And that isn't necessarily relevant to the function of the plot and the commodity you know the the way that

the universe commodifies people commodifies is really weird and absurd um things and makes up like time you know your time of your life has become an item of currency but um it is sort of a macro abstract analysis of what is going on in the universe is that you know in these tribes when the economic base collapses in culture gets thrown upside down, you know, the focal point is always this object of ideology. And, you know, becoming, you know, the goal, ideally, I think, as people begin to rebuild in this universe,

is overcoming that fetishization of a thing, you know, so as to divert attention away from your worldview and your universe, which is, in this sense, very capitalist. I think that's the crucial turn that he makes in Road Warrior is because, like I was mentioned before we started taping. But the first one, you know, as valuable as it is for like it's sort of cinematic, the direction it takes. It is basically a movie about a cop who is just sort of on our revenge mission against these sort of thugs, these social deviants who are just sort of played up as, you know, weirdos. So he definitely could have gone in a different direction that it did.

And I think the crucial turn in Road Warrior is that he begins to think about the gas crisis and he begins to think about gasoline and once he does that, he gives himself the opportunity to talk about so much more to think and talk about how people relate to the gasoline as a commodity. But also, even when you do that, you begin to reflect all sorts of realities about our world, like conflicts over oil that were going on at the time. that caused a gas price, the gas crisis and that are obviously ongoing. So by making that turn and beginning to focus in Road Warrior on this sort of this

war of a gasoline and then building up this apocalyptic future, he's definitely, he began to give himself the opportunities that we've been talking about to really, you know, show some truths about society in a much, much better way than just a vigilante cop on a revenge mission. You were talking earlier, Taylor, about time. and it's made explicitly you can sell your life and time of your life for this thing but in reality

what do we do already in wage labor I mean we sell our labor but we also sell our time on this planet and we're never compensated for that and so that kind of makes that reality stark and bare and it's also worth sort of digging into the fact that you mentioned Phil the oil crisis

Australia went through an oil crisis in 73 and I think US went and had a 70s oil crisis as well now the first movie Mad Max was sort of a lead-up So the nuclear apocalypse hadn't happened yet. But because of the resource scarcity, I think the implication, and I had never read the comic,

so maybe this was fleshed out in more detail there, but the implication is that in the first Mad Max, things are getting bad, resource wars are starting to pop off, oil becomes a more precious commodity, and then the implication is after Mad Max won, an actual resource war occurs, and that ends in nuclear apocalypse. And after that, there's still the, there's a repeating of that problem. So literally the world is destroyed by resource wars over oil. But then they replicate that exact sort of conflict and on a microcosmic scale all throughout the rest of the film.

But as things deteriorate and fury road, the oil becomes maybe a secondary commodity or maybe they find ways to refine it. And water itself becomes the primary thing that people sort of, you know, care about and try to try to make, you know, take along with them and everything else. So it's really rooted in a real-life oil crisis, and I think as neoliberal late capitalism continues, as economic catastrophe continues, resource wars are going to happen. And, you know, hopefully it doesn't end a nuclear apocalypse, but God damn, it's still a live option, you know, either a nuclear apocalypse or environmental catastrophe or whatever it may be. So it's scary, and this future is not necessarily total fantasy. Like, it could happen.

It's not total fantasy. well Phil said time and again the sentiment that I agree with it's that capitalism ends one of it I'd add a I'd had a third way one of two ways you know um but um either it ends with an environmental collapse I'd say nuclear war um or full communism you know those are really the only three options on the table or fascism well fascism is almost like yeah which would which would inevitably lead to economic ecological catastrophe, which is not equipped to, yeah, that's just the worst. It's not a solution to capitalism. We could either have like normal, normal shitty capitalism until the environment spits us out, or we could have even shittier fascism until the environment spits us out, or we can come to terms with our relationship to the planet at each other and centrally plan our economies to facilitate sustainable and enjoyable human life.

absolutely okay now let's transition Phil's been talking about this a lot but I think we can drill down on it a little bit more is the notion of Mad Max as this rugged individual I think that you can view Mad Max as almost a neo-Western in that it has that lone ranger trope instead of a horse it's it's cars it even has it even has a train battle or like a train is being you know hunted down and attacked as opposed to Native Americans on horses like most Westerns it's you know these these weirdos and souped-up cars attacking a train. But it's very much a reflection of America's mythologized frontier spirit, which I don't know, Australia probably has some sort of parallel to that.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. That's important for Australia is that they share a lot of stuff with America in terms of culture. You know, obviously English colony, you know, Australia a little different than that, but they have a frontier, they have an indigenous population, and they have of the tradition of westerns and Western narrative? I struggle with this because so many of these movies prop up what I would think is a bourgeois individualism. It's almost like the hero is this libertarian archetype of self-reliance and this continual rejection of joining any community. He wants to be on his own. But every time he's on his own, I mean, he's eating lizards, he's eating dog food. He's getting fucking brutalized by bandits.

I mean, he's never successfully doing things by himself. Only when he teams up in a communal situation does anything good ever fucking happen but he's still all throughout the entire series and even at the end the end of Fury Road after they go back to the Citadel and liberate it he's walking away through the masses looking back up you know

and basically the implication is he's leaving that too and he's going back on his own well Brett yes Taylor do you not see that the rugged individualist is literally called mad max so you're saying there's a critique in there

social madness that's what it liberalism brings on. And it's a type of madness that, you know, like you're saying, no matter how many times he has his experience, or how many times we tell us his experience, he, as an individual, is constitutionally unable to be a part of a community. And so I think, like, kind of what I was alluding to before is that this is sort of a, we can look at this as sort of how liberalism works on an individual.

it makes them anti-social. And I think the idea that Mad Max is somebody who has survived the nuclear apocalypse, like he was around before this changing event. He is different than the characters around him, but maybe not, you know, he's not different than like the villains, but he's different a lot of times from the people he's helping, particularly the children and Beyond Thunderdown, where he sort of comes in. see him as a figure from the past and imbue him with all these sort of mythological strength.

But he, you know, understands the reality that kind of because he did survive, he is kind of incapable of being a part of these communities. Do you think that is the trauma of losing his family plays a role in that attitude? Yeah, but yeah. I mean, and maybe that's more, I would, I guess for me, it's more meaningful to look at that as more like metaphor if we're trying to pinpoint him and his how liberal is working

how individualism is working but I think particularly like unless so in Fury Road I feel like if any of the films besides the first like sort of valorize the idea of individual it would be Fury Road actually but like in Road Warrior you know he tries to leave and he's like

I'm not driving I would try to do an Australian accent but I'm not confident enough I'm not driving Okay, now I have a lot more confidence. He's like, I'm not driving the rig or whatever. And he goes out in his V8 and he just gets the shit kicked out of him. And he's like, he's, you know, totally incapacitated.

And he has to come back. And then he's like, the only way for him to leave is with them and as the driver. And, you know, he can still, you know, barely, he's barely capable at that point. much worse condition when he starts to drive the truck than he is in fear of yeah i think one interesting aspect of individualism that is a big part of this film series like the role of cars like vehicles in our society and how you know also what personal attachment we assigned to them as well as the necessity of having them like you look back on like the history of the automobile deal the only reason it became what it is is because like GM like quite literally went around

and started buying all the street card companies through like various shell corporations and then like deliberately dismantled them so that people had to start buying vehicles and then you know from that you get a culture that I would say like I kind of said earlier like I think this culture is subsiding a bit but up until pretty recently and it's still is a thing where you're like you know people really base their identities around cars like it's it's it's just one of those i mean primary status symbols and like the fact that like uh you know capitalism managed to brew a society in which they're absolutely vital but then it's also oh so you need this thing but then it's not only just that it works and gets you from point A to point B, but is that like, what does that

style of car say about, say about you? How does it reflect on what you do in your personal life? There's, like, this real, like, attachment to it. And I think, like I said, I think that's starting to subside now, you know, we, more and more of us just, like, don't care about that shit. But, um, but yeah, like in, um, and in the Mad Max movies, like, for in the first one, for example, like, one of the first really, like, violent scenes, you know, contrary to a lot of other violent movies where it'd be, you know, more like body-based violence. So, you know, the 90% of the scene was directed on the damage that you're inflicting to the car. And, you know, that's the, like,

get you in the gut, oh, like, how do they, how could they do that to that car? Because you do, like, you know, people, like, I think, and, well, certainly the characters in the film attach, like, this very deep attachment to it that starts as a product of necessity but then does turn into like this weird like federalization of culture and you you know now you have you have car culture in America and it's weird and I think that's like I don't get car culture it's fucking weird but like I think it is reflected in a variety of ways through Mad Max you know it's not like because half the via most of the vehicles in the films like I mean on the one hand they're like utilitarian to a

degree you know just being like as big and badass and as possible so you can like kill shit but like on the other you know they're just like gaudy like it's like this weird like sort of projecting of you know you're not only trying to like the functional purpose of being able to fit like five dudes with shotguns on and you're struck bed but it's like you know you also you got to have flames coming out of the fucking thing there's got like skulls like literal guitar that's the most excessive that car could never that car with the guitar on it is just an impossible physical machine that could never drive. Yeah, it's like bourgeois decadence

taken to like the just the absolute extreme. And I do find it interesting that like, you know, all the villains in the series, all of them default to this very like peacocky sort of thing. Like, you know, everything that they do has to like look just

ridiculous. Even like the one guy's walking around with nipple clamps on constantly. Like, hell yeah. It's just, yeah. What would, here's a brand tickler for y'all. What would Mad Max look like if in a society

that valued public transportation and strong infrastructure spending. No, really, though. What would it look like? Fist fights in the subway? I don't know. I don't know.

Mad Max 2. Too, Boyer. But yeah, the idea that the personal automobile, all of its corporate history, all of its purposely consciously, corporate history is really interesting.

And then it does rise up. It's bourgeois decadence, and it reflects bourgeois individual. you know after um fucking why is it the lighted this out but the blanking on the guy's name um green the guy that made the fucking climate change movie algor al gore fucking christ my god yes al gore i mean you know he didn't there's a reason he didn't win the presidents you're the most forgettable people i've ever seen i'll go on his movie about climate change with the big reaction on the right in this country was not was to was to go so hard the other way like woman to go out and if you remember this in early

I'm going to buy a fucking Hummer, right? I'm gonna, and then you saw these bumper stickers on these big ass trucks started coming out where it's like, do you remember those paved the planet fucking bumper stickers? People would always have paved the planet, like just fucking destroy it. And then we have this more recent phenomena

of fucking rolling coal. So you have these big ass trucks, these assholes driving them, and they purposefully outfit their vehicle so that when they step on the gas at a red light, fucking toxic clouds of fucking black smoke come out. And that's just them expressing their individualism in a society saying, hey, maybe we should

fucking not be ridiculous with the way we expend energy? Yeah, I think I would add to that too, like, because like, coming from a town of a thousand, you see, like, just the most absurd shit like that all the time. And I think

it, you know, when we're having these, like, conversations, it is important that, while it is certainly and, like, fundamentally reactionary, you know, that reaction is also, like, a product of a society that doesn't give you a whole lot of options as far as feeling like you're a part of something bigger like that you have like even just like

crafting like an identity and like so like those like assholes like yeah they're like assholes of the the trucks and stuff the chivalon stickers what the chive on stickers yeah yeah but it's like um you know it is like this it's like it's kind of sad like it's this sad attempt to like build an identity around like this really reactionary thing and reactionary subculture but it's an attempt nonetheless and it's like you know if they didn't live in a world where there's not particularly like I think it's why you see this stuff in rural town so much is because they have been like stripped of their identity to such a degree they only relate to vague aesthetic and like this like weird cultural values that end up like being demonstrated that

aren't like bad cultural values fundamentally but end up manifesting themselves in like very reactionary ways when you don't have a lot of options when you're not like like what do you you're in the same town for forever or in like mad max you know you're you're stuck in the middle of like a literal fucking wasteland it's like how do you how do you express your individuality because yeah and that's the other thing i think when talking about individualism also like like individuality isn't inherently a bad thing either you know but the common misconception comes like you know we want everybody to be the fucking same but like the idea that you know capitalism prevents you from

actually being the best individual that you can be and then you get these weird cultural manifestations of that that try to like push back against it even though it's not like a conscious thing well like it is kind of about individualism like people who like the trucks and stuff but there's also even within that sort of a desire for like a social And, like, you'll see that when baby bar with, like, bike clubs, like, the assholes that were in the intersection with me the other day. Can you explain the, like, do you have any insights into, like, bike culture? Because that's, like, one thing. Well, I don't, okay.

Well, I don't get, I don't get, I don't get the, I don't think that would have a lot of insights for this discussion as well, seeing as, like, Mad Max. All the villains are basically just, like, you know, bike gang. I don't, I don't get the sport bike culture in the city. I don't get that either. Because, like, I, well, I'll get to that. Because, like, they congregate, like, every night at a specific gas station at, like, 70, at, like, 76th and Dodge. And they just hang out there. God knows, like, what they're doing.

They don't do anything. They just hang out at night in a gas station parking lot. And then they drive on the roads. And it's like, what do you guys think? Like, what are you doing out there? Like, there's clearly that desire for, like, the social group. And it gets expressed. this weird like way i personally do not understand the like like chopper shit like i grew up watching

american chopper all the time with my dad but i don't get the like well american choppers they're not real they're not real bikers well yeah what okay whatever like but like you know the as opposed to the shit that you're talking about where it's like dudes on like street bikes like i'm talking like the hog the like Harley daz and culture i don't understand well that stuff is cool the street bike stuff that's weird but the the the hogs the leather the bandanas the ponytails all that is like super cool in my opinion i grew up i lived for a little while close to surges where you know they had that big rally uh and that had a huge impact on my life in political ideology why do you think people are like driven to that like i mean because

it's a recurring theme you know it's not even like it's not like it's not even like an overarching like bikers of america it's like you always like almost every locality there's some sort of biker subculture and it's like one of the few things that i would say like like regenerates itself like repeatedly like across geographical locations and consistently at every like every like a town of 250 there's going to be three fucking dudes with harley davisans and they're going to go out and ride those motherfuckers you know every wednesday what is that like what is that well if you ask any of them they'll describe it exactly like woodstock it's like it's the same like hippie shit but it's like with bikes it's like it's uh the line for community a sense of freedom

Like, if you say, oh, how is Sturters last year? They'll be like, you know, I don't know what exactly they'll say. But like, you know, it's just kind of that thing. It's like it's about social. It's about it's about sort of the mythologizing of like the road and like the American West. And like, yeah, I was going to say it reflects a certain like frontier spirit of being out on the open road. And it's a desperate search for community. A bike gang is a is a community in a society that, you know, destroys communities whenever it can.

I like that makes sense. that we're talking about hogs and that there were hogs in the third mad max i like that i like i do like the hogs hogs were great also let's think about what bikers were like when the bike was invented imagine that these dandies on their bikes bling ring you know the one wheels big getting in the other they're driving around looking at each other angrily throwing banana peels mad maxwell mad maxwell boulevard warriors Here is a milk bottle perched on a wall. Here is a kitten.

And here is a fall. Here is a razor-ed splinter of glass, lying in wait for whatever may pass. Here come the workers in hurrying ranks to build us our battleships, bombers and tanks. They're off to the factory, shipyard and shop. But Bill is unlucky. He's brought to a stop. His tire has been gashed and can't be repaired, whilst rubber is short and can hardly be spared. A long way to go and he's bound to be late, the battleships, bombers and tanks have to wait. They're urgently needed, but Bill isn't here. It isn't his fault, but the lesson is clear.

Take care of your milk bottles. Don't let them fall and don't put them out on the top of the wall. If you see broken glass where bicyclists ride, don't leave it, but kick it away to the side. Don't hinder the war effort. Keep the road clear for work. and services all in top gear you're saving our rubber in country and town and you're helping our fighting men one more note on bikes and this is completely unrelated

as well but like I just wanted to say I think probably the coolest stunts and Fury Road were the parts when like the bikes were like jumping over the rocks onto like the truck and she was having to like dodge him that stuff out that was so cool bikes were tight pretty fucking badass

now before we move on I do want to touch really quick on this idea that Seth mentioned earlier about this stereotype of communism as just favoring the collective over the individual. And I think that the real communist insight here is that the best, the individuals flourish best when they're in a context of a healthy community. And communities are best when they have healthy individuals inside of them. So the communist sort of approach to this is not to err too far on the individual side or the collective side, but to bring a sort of synthesis of the two and create a better society and better people generally based on an

alteration of conditions. Okay, now I want to move on to something that I pulled out of Fury Road. Now, I haven't read every single analysis of the film ever, but I read a lot, and nobody even touched on this at all. Can you call yourself a Mad Max fan? I did as much as I could. My entire week was just Mad Max in my head. But I really think that there's an interesting analysis of, or maybe expression of fascism Fury Road. I'm going to lay out some basic points and bounce us off to you guys and see what you guys think. One is the war boys, right? Not only are they white men, and this film is dominated by white people generally. There's not a lot of people of color in any of the films. But they're

they actually paint their white bodies more white. So they're extremely painted white. This whiteness is this facade over them. Their heads are all shaved, right? They sort of give off a neo-Nazi skinhead look. They indulge in a, they actually indulge in a collectivity, not an individualism, but it's a fascistic collectivity premised on violence and machismo. This notion of witness me is looking at the crowd of your collective and saying, look what I'm doing for the cause. And it's always brutal violence. It's, I'm going above and beyond. You know, I'm sacrificing myself for the cause. And fascism is a collectivist ideology, just totally opposite from a communist approach. And there is explicitly North mythology, the concept of Valhalla. Nux is always talking about

I live, I die, and I live again. I live, I live, I die, I live again. He's always talking about going to the gates of Valhalla. In Norse mythology, Valhalla is ruled over by Odin, and half of those who die in combat go through the gates of Valhalla. And Norse mythology was made plenty use of in literal Nazi Germany, and even to this day in the U.S. with neo-Nazi alt-right movements, there is this segment of them that are obsessed with that mythology. Immorten, if I get on the rig, there's a way inside. What is your name? It's nooks.

A pike her in the spine. Keep her breathing for you. No. Put up on a blood skull. Stop the rig. Return my treasure to sue me. and I myself will carry you

to the gates of Valhalla I'm highlighted You will ride eternal shiny and crone Address Upting the Lord Additionally, obsession with bloodline Immorten Joe

It's not quite clear Why he cares so much about His progeny, his children But he's obsessed with him reproducing a line and getting a male air. And that obsession with bloodline and purity is something that runs through all fascist movements. And then finally, I think of Morton Joe as a sort of ubermensch, a strong man figure that literally stands over the people he subjugates, not unlike Hitler or Mussolini giving speeches. And at one scene, the crowd even has to use

binoculars to see him because he's so much over them. The women are subjugated to second-class citizen. They're used as basically breeding farms. And even today, when you look at like Identity Europa posters, it's like keep the white family white. And it's this holding up of women, not in a feminist way, but in a way that white women are the vehicles through which we reproduce our Aryan race. And I think you see hints of that in this film. So what do you guys think about that? Have you heard anything about that? I've got a couple things. And one is just lore from the universe in the comic series between Thunderdome and Fury Road, we get insight into how Immorten Joe became Immorten Joe. And part of it was that

he was a military leader that took charge of a bunch of people post-apocalypse and seized the reservoir. And I mean, at the end of the day, that's as complex as the story gets. But, you know, when you see it played out, you see that as the, I know we keep going over and over and over this, but as that economic base gets, you know, blown up, the dude defaults on this military ideology. And I think that, you know, the focus that George Miller brings to these character traits in a Morton Joe are the focus that he's bringing to the aspects, the reliance of liberalism on this militaristic fascism. The fascism of a Morton Joe is the fascism of the military. that exists already, and is, you know, it exists in the U.S. and abroad and is exported in abundance. And but then also when you talk about like, you know, what's the, what kind of value are we talking about this fascism and what's the context that we're discussing the fascism of a Morton Joe in?

I wonder if George Miller, if his aestheticization of that, you know, and the prestige around that didn't do. more damage than good by bringing people's attention to it in this really kind of sexy road warrior-esque way I'm not saying that anything about it is in fact romantic but if you

if someone were to walk in that already thinks about women as second class citizens that has no regard for the class or racial struggles of others in season Morton Joe kicking ass you know and then Mad Max a white guy winning as well

you know, does that reinforce the fascist, you know, the fascism of a Morton Joe? Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, perhaps, but it's not necessarily Mad Max really who triumphs ultimately. It is, I mean, it's Furiosa who rips his face off. Hell yes. And like, it's a Nux who is, it begins as this sort of ideal, you know, fascist subject. If we're going with your critique there.

It sort of begins as this warboy who is, like, totally into the ideology, totally, you know, all the warboys are obviously, like, under sort of material difficulties, obviously, most of them. I'm not sure. What's the function of half-life, but it's like some sort of, like, they're dying or whatever? Yeah, they're radiated, and so they have shorter lives. Yeah, and so in that desperation, like, they turn to, you know, this authority figure, they turn to the promise of, you know, glory through violence and all this stuff and it's all very like masculine and stuff but then knucks you know you know redeems himself in a way by sacrificing himself and and that's ultimately what defeats it so it's not so like i can see what you're saying but maybe you know it has

there's also this other side to it where you know the victory you know it's it's maybe oh well i wouldn't you know i wouldn't characterize the war boys necessarily as sexy they're visually appealing and and interesting, but, like, they're all, like, covered in, like, tumors and stuff. And so it's not like something, like, I think it'd be, I think someone to be hard-pressed to go and be like, I want to be like, that guy, I want to have radiation. I want to get cancer. It's the depiction of the power fantasy that I think people can find a sort of a sexual energy in.

And, I mean, and then just an emotional energy. And I'm not saying that it's one thing or the other. But when you depict a fascist society, you have to be careful because you want to make a movie that's artistic and stylish but you need to take care to not make fascism artistic or stylish because that was what happened in the 1930s in Germany

I mean it's what's attempting to happen today the already has very bad art you know and very very bad culture actually but you know it's alternative and if that's your criteria if your bar is so low it's like I want to be alternative and still hate women

you know like you know and black people um then that'll do it that'll cut the mustard um so all i'm saying is that you just really have to be careful when you you know depict fascism i think there is a fascism evident in mad max fury road um and i think it's the um the the military the militarism that liberalism relies on you know to maintain order and what it ultimately will fall back on if not you know put if not you know pushed back uh and rebuked in and of itself um but when you give shape and form to that you also give in shape and form to the imagination of the fascists in the real world and as lenin said you know fascism is capitalism and decay well capitalism has totally decayed and what you get is is sort of this fascism that replicates much of its logic yeah well uh this is a little bit of a left turn

or a right turn whichever the case may be but uh i think as far as the character of knucks goes you can really see this role this character as being sort of a spiritual sequel to the uh to the role nicholas holt played in the seminal uh british youth culture series skins which is about sort of you know these uh disaffected youths you know who are sort of cut loose in the modern world and and turn to you know various dany social expressions to cope with that uh and i think nicholas holt's character in the end like gets hit by like a double decker boss or something and goes into a coma, he's like, oh, blimey, I have to go down to the chemist and get

another, get some more Viagra to snort, and then he gets, like, just decked by a double decker bus and goes into a coma. So, I don't know where I was going with that, but I would like one of our listeners to mash up, you know, a scene from scans with a scene from a madmax 3-year-road. Maybe, like, him saying, witness me before he gets hit by him. And, Nicholas, if you're listening. remember communism will win. I think going to why people are attracted to fascism and stuff, I think, you know, in a world that seems, you know, pretty empty

and for which there's not much of a roadmap. Like, I mean, obviously London and wherever the hell they are and skins isn't, like, quite on the same level as, like, the wasteland that is Mad Max, but if they're, like, thinking of, like, youth and, like, like, general feeling of feeling like really alienated, really, like, not knowing, and being unsure of the future much in the same way to a more extreme that you would be very unsure of the future

in like a post-apocalyptic wasteland, you have like kind of two ways to go, right? Either like the skins are out where you're just gonna like, you know, snort everything you possibly can and just like, you know, tap out as often as you can to like get away from it all and, you know, numb yourself or attempt to draw into like this larger

something that gives you meaning. And for somebody like Nux, as opposed to snorting Viagra, in this iteration of this actor's awesome career, he decides to join a sort of social movement that gives him not only, you know, gives him a purpose and a sense of meaning on this earth, but the promise that he'll attain something more later. So I think, like, particularly for youthful, like, for young people,

those kind of are representative, like, two very popular options to go like either just like tap out or like fully in just immerse yourself in like a particular culture that where like the meaning is like largely already pre-created for you either way like they're both like you know easy lazy options because like you either numb out or like you know join something you don't have to like go or like change anything rather just like join and have yourself be defined by like what a larger group is already doing and like that's what knucks attempts to do and uh this is totally going to be a changing topic but i just realized how disparagingly we talked about australian accents at the start of this conversation and i just wanted to say that there was just

recently a tremendous episode with someone from australia and uh that person uh is very insightful i really actually i genuinely enjoyed that episode amy's awesome amy's awesome i have great friends I actually have a couple really good friends in Australia right now that are from Australia and I have no problems with people from Australia I just want other than maybe Mel Gibson the likes of whom I definitely have a problem with

I just couldn't let this conversation in without making a formal apology as the years turned in my head I'm not some sort of proto-anti-Australian fascist I don't want that I don't want that I don't want that message out there so like on the fascism thing then like i wish i wish we knew more about like what like the people in that society were doing prior there's obviously like i think a lot of their behaviors probably predicated on like a previous class stand that either no longer exists or in some way

was carried on through like this major shift in society because my initial thought was like draw it's like I like to think about the lumpin a lot and so my initial thought was like you know like the hordes of like the literally white dudes you know the emblematic of a lot of like lumpen tendencies towards militarism towards anarchism but then they're probably not lumpen so then like that's kind of what I've been thinking about like like what is like I guess what is what's like Morton Joe's base like you know what I mean like of what strata of society I guess did he'd get his mass base for it. I think Taylor says in the back story in the comic books, he's a military general. Yeah, he's a military leader. I can't recall it exactly. But yeah,

this dude is a total bootlicker. Like, you know, through and through. This is a guy that's like, arm of the police. Fuck them. Fuck poor people. You know, like this is like, Morton Joe was that guy. And then he sprung on, you know, he sprung on the impulse. You know, when the, when the, when the, when the, when the, when the shoe dropped and, you know, he sat up like, oh, I can now be a social leader. Great. You know, he sprung on and took advantage of it. And the timeline's kind of wonky. I can't tell if the war boys were born before or after the nuclear holocaust.

I wouldn't think so. Before or after? I wouldn't think they were born before. Okay. It's like that gap between one and two really throws me off sometimes. Because other than that, the universe is super tight, which is why I love that. Tired than the leather pants that Sergeant Fifi wore in that next one. Just tight, tight pants.

the beautiful pants that he wore is a great metaphor for a symbol for the plot of this movie the lore of the universe that we're in which I just love. It's just great craftsmanship. We have two more main topics I definitely want to hit before we wrap up. One we're going to get to is

feminism but I do want to talk about I want to talk about technology and the political revolution that takes place and kind of tie those two things together So in Fury Road especially, there is like almost a machinist cult. In the beginning, they're all holding up steering wheels. It's very based around sort of industrial machinery.

And I was reading a review and they made a really interesting point and they say, you know, machines inherently deteriorate. And their main opposition was the mothers, right? And one of the mothers had a bag where she was trying to plant new seeds. And that was the green place of many mothers. So in juxtaposition to this hyper-industrialized. barren machinist masculine sort of energy from one side, you have this more natural-oriented plant growth. You know, plants don't deteriorate. They become cycles of growth and regrowth. And that is a sustainable future. A society premised on machines and technology is doomed because

machines themselves like cars deteriorate over time. And that's sort of a reflection of the fact that that society is not sustainable, that a Morton Joe rules over. And it eventually, I mean, comes down at the end of Fury Road. Do you guys have anything to say about technology, about machines, and about the way they're portrayed in this film? I remember, like, as I was watching, I was, like, making, like, shitty and-prem jokes to myself. But, like, yeah, I don't know. To actually, like, sit down and I'd have to think about that one. I just think that that's an interesting observation.

And I don't know. I think it's kind of funny. I don't know. It's a long-running narrative. in Western culture that the, you know, the things that people make are masculine and then the things that are, you know, substantial and non-made. I just think it's interesting that that, that trope reappears here. The gendered trope made its way into this.

I had never really thought about the function of decay and decline in terms of function and non-function. Yeah, one thing that I thought about, maybe this is sort of not tethered completely to the story, but thinking about machines, thinking about technology, nuclear war was the thing that ultimately brought civilization low in this film. And it made me think of this sort of late capitalist liberal fantasy that suggests that, yeah, we're in a bad spot, and a lot of that is caused by capitalist logic, you know, prismed through technology, but that technology will ultimately save us, and it'll allow the natural world to continue to go on. And when I was a liberal,

I believe this. I sort of like had this weird phase where I thought that like maybe in my lifetime technology can overcome even death, you know? Maybe we can be uploaded our consciousness goes into the thing. But really like when I think about climate change,

I'm like, well, scientists will definitely figure it out. Maybe we can go and we can create something that takes pollution out of the air or whatever. Right, you fool. The market will figure it out. Yeah, but that's exactly right. That's the delusion. And you're so embedded inside of this logic, this capitalist logic, that you can't see

outside of it. And so the very thing that causes the problem in the first place, Instead of rejecting the ideology, you just, you hold on to it tighter thinking it's going to eventually come back around and solve the problems that itself has created. And that's something that I think is at play here somewhere. Yeah, so I guess if you want to keep going on how you think that manifests itself in the film. Yeah, I just, I think it manifests itself in just this sort of loose opposition between a society premised on it, like sort of industrial machinery and technology. technology in contradistinction to a rising society that is liberatory and is focusing on sort of a sustainable relationship with the earth, trying to regrow the earth so that

you can have a new relationship to it and not repeat the horrible outcomes that have already created this situation in the first place. Like I say, it's not really firmly tethered to the story. It's just a little seeds there, pardon the pun, that you can kind of pull out and work with on that front. But I think it's just an important thing to say to people listening. like technology is like it's not going to save us the market's not going to save us only coherent organized political action is going to stop an environmental catastrophe or an imperialism that gets out of control

and ends a nuclear disaster and we can't rely on the logic of the system that's creating the problem to solve it i think it's interesting how none of the technical like pretty much all the technological like i don't want to say advances but like um made in the film like there's all All of them throughout the series, none of their, like, attempts to bring back more technology or whatever is use in any other way other than for vehicles or weapons, really. I think maybe that's largely just because, like, what's laying around and maybe they haven't figured things out to where they can really, like, are you building other technology? But, like, it is interesting that any sort of, I mean, anything that doesn't look like the, like, you know, like Barter Town, you know, basically just looks like the one city on Star Wars. wars. Yeah, a hive of villainy and scum.

Yeah. They don't really put a lot of effort into like putting all this metal and shit that they were using for massive vehicles to any other purpose. It's interesting talking about the future because nowadays our cultural conception of the future is pretty much something that ad executives created to sell computers. it's about, it's solely in terms of technological advancement and technological advancement in quotes because we've begun to look at technology as something that advances and something that necessarily is a part of future in the way we think of time.

When we think, when people have arguments of whether something is ethical or something, it's always in terms of, oh, well, are you on the side of the future or not? And by on the side of the future, they mean, are you going along with the ad campaigns for Apple and IBM. So, like, it's interesting when the vast majority of apocalyptic and dystopic future, futuristic fiction will have that element where it's like technology has advanced or like we will have like massive computer systems that are controlling everything with sending robots back in time or we have robots who can achieve human consciousness and like, oh, that's a problem or whatever.

And so it'll always have this layer of technology element. And then there's sort of the inverted idea of that, which is sort of like a reactionary steampunk thing where it's like, oh, everybody wears top hats now. And it's like, we just like all of our clothing has made out gears for some reason. But Mad Max is like, you know, maybe a little different in the sense that it's all like technology

that we use now. And we live in essentially the same ways and produce in essentially the same ways as we do now. maybe in some ways more metaphorical than others like the pig ship but like mad max is like this really great affirmation of dadaism you know like there's just like everything that we have can be put to use aesthetically you know and uh i just that just brought you know thinking about the future just brought that you know to my attention as you know the future of art the future of aesthetics the future of taste you know and the role of you know cultural fixtures uh and

the role of, you know, people, you know, doing that, you know, despite not having any economic basis, you know, how are you going to build a culture, you know, when you're worried about getting water and food and such? And, you know, almost, you know, creating a media event that, you know, puts, you know, someone in that headspace, I think can really draw some sort of appreciative attention to, you know, the stuff that we just kind of have around. Yeah, I will say just to wrap put this section really quick. You both talked about inverting a sort of liberalism. He talked about a futurism.

It occurred to me that the inverse of the liberal delusion that technology in the market will save us is this sort of Elon Musk futurism where fuck the world, we're just going to leave it. When we fuck it up, we'll just take technology and we'll go out

into fucking Mars or whatever and terraform it and make a new earth. And that's the same fucking sort of logic. And it's just as dangerous. and weirdly just as reactionary because it's like, fuck the world. Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. I think the ideology of space is also

conspicuously and thankfully absent from this. There's no, there's another, again, the sort of, there's another sort of cultural delusion that we can somehow escape capitalism by going to the moon or going to Mars. There's, it's, we're on Earth, we're stuck here. Our society, our technological advancement is not enough to save us.

us. And so one way or another, we're going to have to deal with the consequences of what we do now. So I like that. Not to tack anything further onto this, but there is a thinker that I'm very fond of that has a lot to say, it had a lot to say at the end of his life about technology. And he made observations that, you know, the dangerous aspect of, one of the most dangerous aspects of industrialization is that it evolves industry to the point where industry begins to decide people rather than people deciding industry and one of the functions that he saw of that

is this was the Holocaust. It was this this absolute brusque reduction of personhood to numbers and finding out an efficient way to put numbers to work an efficient way to dispose of numbers that couldn't work. And then at the end of the day

an efficient way of resolving a problem that the question of efficiency started, the question of efficiency being a function of industry. So when we talk about Mad Max and, you know, industry collapsing and collapsing the environment, you know, we get into this dangerous. And then, you know, tying into fascism, too, we get this dangerous, these dangerous, really dangerous discussions of industry and its consequences unbridled by human control, central planning, communism. Right, right, right. All right. Now, let's transition into feminism and just the role that women have played throughout the entire series.

There's a big debate that occurred after Fury Road was elise of whether or not it was a feminist. movie and I don't know if we want to comment on that broad trend, but we can get into some of some of the feminist issues here. But before we do, I want to make a caveat up front is that when I picked this series, when we sort of agreed on Mad Max series, I had never watched a single episode or a single movie of Mad Max. I didn't know what the themes would be. I just basically knew it was a dystopian film about a post-apocalyptic future. I was like, oh, we can mind that for politics. But when I came to watch Fury Road, which was literally today, I realized, oh shit, plays a huge role in this discussion and we don't have a woman on this, you know,

discussion. And so that was just sort of a product of, of me not necessarily seeing where this whole trajectory would go because I hadn't watched any of the films. So I do want to, you know, make that caveat up front. We're going to be bringing in our comrade from our organization for future episodes where we talk about film and she'll give an interesting feminist perspective on a lot of this stuff. But in the meantime for this episode, if any if any women out there do want to respond and add their two cents to this segment that we're going to talk about right here, please do on social media and I'll absolutely, you know, amplify those inputs. And I just apologize for not, you know, seeing this whole thing playing out

clearly and having four guys talking about this. But because it's such a crucial part of the film, it's absolutely worth talking about it. So let's go ahead and talk about how women are portrayed in the film and how really they're portrayed progressively better as the series goes on. And in the very beginning of the films, women are either the victims of horrific sexual assault or they're just wives or side pieces that motivate male figures. And as the film goes on, and in Thunderdome, you have Tina Turner's character, anti-entity, come and play a major role for the first time in the series, I think. And then in this Fury Road, you absolutely have this huge feminist energy in the film itself. So what are your broad thoughts on this? Is it?

there feminist elements here? What does he get wrong on the feminist front? Anybody can take this from here? I think that's one of the benefits of looking at Fury Road as a remake of Road Warrior is that that's one, in a few ways, it seems like he does take it and, like, improve it. And one of those aspects is, I think the role of women within the plot and the action and where I was very, I was shocked, you know, at the sort of the very graphic. and violent rape scene at the beginning of Road Warrior 2, which really only served to illustrate whatever point about, you know,

the sort of savagery and lawlessness of these roaming, you know, bands with thugs. Whereas in Fury Road, not only are the, are the villains, the villains have a more complex and nuanced and interesting social order and, and social reality, but also the, well, he's kind of dealing with similar themes and how, like, women are sort of commodified. And there is violence against women in it. Uh, it's definitely also more nuanced and interesting. And while I'm not sure whether we need to be too concerned about whether

we want to say, like, is he a feminist or not? Like, he's made something which is definitely much more interesting, much more, uh, much less in my opinion. exploitative, you know, than his previous work, which is, I mean, which is good. It shows his own development, I think, and it kind of reflects a broader cultural development on that front, as we've sort of gotten slowly but surely better on some of these issues. Yeah, I would just quickly say that Furiosa and Fury Road is a really, the most well-rounded character, and, you know, one of the problems when men try to make female characters and films is that they just put masculine qualities into a woman and says, oh, it's a strong

female character. But it's really just regurgitating masculine tropes through the feminine lens. And this one, I think Furiosa has what would be stereotypically seen as both masculine and feminine traits. Like she, she, you know, deeply caring. She's liberating women from a patriarchal order, which is basically making them into sex slaves. She, she has this background where she wants to return these women to, it doesn't really talk about it, but, you know, the green place of many mothers, it seems like a sort of matriarchal order in this hellhole of patriarchal all around them. And the oasis, the greenery, the imagery there is, I think, sort of a parallel to the refreshing nature of having a certain segment of the world that isn't totally

falling back into this horrific fucking patriarchal horror show. But I think she's the most well-rounded character. She's way more well-rounded than Mad Max, and she sort of portrays both those things. And so I think in the character of Furiosa, you can say that that is a truly feminist character in that it doesn't fall prey to stereotypes on other side, but actually shows the full, well-rounded humanity that people can be and not be put in these gendered boxes. Absolutely. I absolutely abhor the treatment of women in the first one and two movies. And then even in the third movie, it's just kind of, you get that like, oh, there's a woman

here, you know, but we're going to slap these like, you know, very well could have been a Morton Joe or Humongous in her role. you know, and Tina Turner's role. So, but then to see Furiosa, you know, rise out of the Mad Max lore is just absolutely, you know, not only a stunning performance by Charlie Theron, but an absolutely stunning character in the context of the story. And, you know, thinking about that arc, you know, and going to the land of many of others, you know, I really, I don't know if I've got the credentials to say one way or the other, whether or not it was, you know, the, the, the gendering the, the, the, machine world that you know mad max occurs in and then the green world that has become the fantasy

um basically this this and in this fantasy that existed before the nuclear apocalypse in the um in the universe and then after um i just don't know if i've got the credentials to say whether or not that's subversive or not in the context of the movie and i don't know what do you guys what do you all think about uh about that is that is that gendering of world of of world aspects the mechanic versus the natural, you know, in this context, something subversive, or is it sustaining, you know, preexisting, preexisting thoughts about gender? Yeah. Like almost the trope of like Mother Earth, you know, that like the womb is, is like this natural environment from which things spring and can grow, and that tying it to that, tying women to reproduction.

It might play into that, yeah, that older stereotype. Even when it's trying to be subversive, it might fall back on an old trope that is not necessarily subversive. Yeah, I mean, I I don't think it's, you know, it's less interesting to think about, you know, whether or not we're being presented with, you know, a pure feminist vision or just, or just thinking about, you know, thinking about, relatively, what does this say? And I think it's saying something that's definitely much more interesting and much better, you know, than the other ones. And I think it's much more so than just the individual character of, I'm sorry, blank on her name. Furiosa? Furiosa. Much more also than that because, like you were saying, maybe there is an element of her as

a strong female character of, you know, oh, you know, she's a woman, but she's a badass, you know, and she, you know, drives a truck and all this stuff, you know, that could be coded masculinely. But I think, you know, that is really played with in a great way with her, you know, interacting with the other women. And there's a lot of, you know, it's not just. one strong woman helping the man achieve something it's like the whole community of women you know standing up for each other helping each other uh and sort of and and the women the uh the women that

she's rescuing they are definitely very like very like femininely coated yes particularly at the beginning with like these are very long like these flowing dresses and like uh just very pure white dresses you know it's very like it could be very much like they're very much like cargo at the beginning and it's like they are to be protected and all this stuff but you know they do like uh engage directly in the action and like they are helping you know furiosa protecting her uh furious he's helping them the other group of women that they counter you know they all they're they all help each other and there's a The real sense of solidarity between them.

Exactly. And that's so much more powerful than, you know, just a strong female character. Yeah. You know, the solidarity between women and, you know, I think, you know, regardless of whether or not the director is a feminist or whether we can say it's a feminist movie, I think the presence of that element is really strong, powerful, you know, I think it's great. Yeah. There was an interview I read where, and I'm sorry, again, I'm blanking on the name of the director again. George Miller? George Miller, like, gave an interview where he was like, oh, yeah, I'm a feminist or whatever.

And, you know, you can't help it being around so many great women. It's like, okay, whatever. But he did say in the interview, like, his wife was very involved in the production. She actually was the editor. Oh, yeah. So, you know, whether or not we want to think of George Miller, you know, this, you know, this guy who's made pretty chauvinistic work in the past, you know, whether we want to think of him as a feminist or not, you know, movies are made by humongous groups of people, including the talented actresses who play the roles of the women and the

women who edited the film. So there's certainly a lot of women who worked on the film, and regardless of who we want to give the credit for for that, I think they've created something that has a lot of great things to say about that. Yeah, and you said something that's really important. You said there was a solidarity amongst the women when they meet the other the mothers and then the younger women they all just immediately have this genuine solidarity now when you look at the side of the people they're fighting when they say like witness me and they die um you know the other men will either comment like they'll say like mediocre right and they never even stopped to like care about the fact that even in a

collectivist fascistic context that one of their brothers dies it's just whatever it's just fodder for the war but when when the women lose somebody there's genuine emotionality and an attachment and like We actually care. Every person that we lose matters to every person in the collective solidarity group. And so there's a mismatch between like a false collectivity, like a machismo-based show-offiness that masquerades as solidarity and collectivity and a more real genuine collective solidarity amongst the women as they fight. It's me.

Perhaps it is Gibasa's child. This is our Furiosa. How long has it been? 7,000 days, plus the ones I don't remember. Furiosa? What happened to your mother? She died. On the third day.

third day. From where did you come? The West, Citadel, beyond the mountains. The men. Who are they? They're reliable. They helped us get here. Where did you find such creatures?

So soft. This one has all their teeth. Ha ha ha ha. I can't wait for them to see it. See? Say what? Home. The green place.

But if you came from the West, you passed it. The crows. That creepy place with all the crows. The soil. We had to get out. We had no water. The water was filth. It was poisoned.

It was sour. And then the crows came. We couldn't grow anything. Where are the others? What are they said? The many mothers. We're the only ones left. Now, I would say that some of the critiques that I've read and that I think are worth mentioning is the women, they are conventionally attractive women, the five wives, I mean.

They are mostly white. There's one woman of color. I think she's very light-skinned. They're drab in, they're draped in white clothing and scantily clad at that. And so there is a sort of, I think, maybe a male gaze that comes through when you're looking at those women. They are conventionally attractive compared to, you know, the more, what would be considered conventionally overweight women in the beginning, they're sort of just being

milked for their breast milk. But they're not giving any lines. They're not giving any agency. And they're sort of secluded. And so it's like the women that come to the fore are. conventionally attractive ones and ones that fall outside of that Western conception of beauty seem to play a backseat. So even though it's striving to be feminist in some sense, it also fails to be fully feminist in other senses. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think a part of that

is just is show business. Like, yeah, it's like, that's the misogyny in Hollywood, really. Sure, absolutely. Yeah, but I, you know, I think we can definitely, it's sort of like a fundamentally like progressive purpose in the context of the franchise. Yeah, I think we can definitely see a progressive element in that. It's particularly progressive when we compare it to his previous work. And I did, kind of on that, though, I did want to mention maybe an area where he's less progressive in is that it's sort of the homophobia, which kind of pervades his, this series. I mean, most obvious in the first two, particularly the second, but like the association

of villains and evil with gender and sex deviation is absolutely. not unique to Miller at all. You know, it's a very common genre trope. But Miller, in the first two especially, really goes out of his way, seemingly, to make those connections and most explicitly in the second, where, you know, you have sort of the main, not the main villain, but the main sort of... Was the secondary villain? Yeah, who sort of is the sort of thorn their side for most of it is like this completely

over-the-top, you know, uh, caricature of, of, like, of, like, uh, of like someone who is sexually devian in some way and gender deviant in some way. He's the one that wears assless chaps. Yeah, the assless chaps. And then, you know, as if that weren't enough, you know, he does, like, give him, like, this sort of, like, twink boyfriend that rides on the back of his motorcycle and then, you know, he just sort of loses this shit when he dies, you know. And so it's like, that stuff is pretty uncomfortable and age is poorly, but what was, what's probably most disappointing is that although we don't really see that in beyond thunderdome you do kind of see a return of it as like you kind of mentioned the guy walking around with like the

nipple clamps and stuff you know uh you know he's like a very like fat guy with a business suit with nipples exposed and nipple clamped and it's like you know that's obviously images that were supposed to associate with sexual deviancy and you know and that's supposed to be equivalent on some low with, you know, evil or corruption. And so that's disappointed to see, and you would have hoped, you know, that remaking Road Warrior, he would have left, you know, some of that behind. Small but I think important depiction in Fury Road that we got was the depiction of an older woman.

Old age really makes its way into movies. I remember actually reading this book called The Fountain of Age by Betty Frieden, you know, wrote the feminine mystique, you know, and disclaimer, you know, Betty Frieden's a absolutely white, hashtag white feminist, you know. And if you want to get a comprehensive view about second-way feminism, read Betty Frieden, but also read Angela Davis and read about the experience of women of color in our communities. But in The Fountain of Age, Betty Frieden, you know, the first chapter is just about media visibility of old age. And it was obscene. It was like out of like a hundred and some odd

images in one issue of vanity fair, there is like one image of an older person and it was a male president, you know? And so old old age is not represented in media almost at all. And then when it is, it's usually a male in a position of power that reinforces. It also reinforces disappointing dreams in masculinity that by the time you're gray and long of tooth, you ought to have six figures in the bank and a pension and, you know, a retirement plan. But when women in particular, you know, they kind of disappear after their reproductive function in a society, you know, can no longer be performed due to natural processes. They absolutely disappear. And so from media and media visibility and they are depicted as witches hags or crones and other really malignant you know

maligning terms and having the having the mothers be like older matriarchs you know actually having been shown to be wizened to be assertive to have authority and to wield it um is i think really an empowering an empowering fixture not only for women but for aging people and as a as a as a class of people that often does get overlooked. So shout out to George Miller for actually including, you know, older people and, you know, and then older people that are women, moreover, and women, you know, being, you know, genuinely powerful people. Yeah.

Let's wrap it up with this, because at the end of Fury Road, which is the end of four series, there is what could be seen as a liberatory event. And moreover, before the event, when they go back and liberate the Citadel, there is, a moment where both Max and Furiosa almost want to fall into escapeism, right? So like Max has to convince Furiosa to go back and liberate the Citadel instead of running across the salt plains and some, you know, escapeist fantasy like on the other side of the salt plains will be something better, running away from the responsibility of facing the fact that, you know, you liberated five people, but there's still a bunch of people back

there that are in horrific conditions. And then Max has to, you know, ultimately give up his hyper-individualism, his urge to go his own way and join in this fight to turn around, go back and ultimately liberate the city. So how do you think about this liberatory event? Can it be seen through a

revolutionary socialist or communist lens? Is it an egalitarian liberation from a fascist military dictatorship? How do you guys think about that final event and the ending of the four shows movies? I think it's interesting because it is a

you know, in that way it is different than the others because in the others, at least the second and third one, there is sort of an escape. And the second one, they do sort of escape to this other, or they appear to escape to this other better area, the group of people in Castown. And the third one, you know, I kind of already mentioned, they take the train ride, then they go to the plane, they fly, you know, they fly sort of above everything and a way into the city where they repopulate it. And so, in both of those, there is a sort of an escape, but In Fury Road, they stop and turn back and go back, which is, I think, pretty unique in terms of the progression of the series.

So that's definitely interesting. I'm not sure exactly what to make of it. But the idea that this is all there is, you know, we're not going to find, you know, a utopia on the other side of the desert. You know, we have to, you know, build here. We have to save the people here. it'd be as if, you know, Mad Max and the people, instead of flying away to the city, they went back to Barter Town and overthrew Auntie and established, you know, a more egalitarian society. So it's interesting.

I'm not sure exactly what to make of it in terms of ideology, but it is interesting. Yeah. And I think, like, you know, even the idea of, like, what they call it, the green place or whatever, you know it essentially it's like the option you're getting the differences of like going off and starting a commune sort of thing somewhere or like you know actually doing the much longer and more difficult process of changing the society that you're a part of and thinking you know about the broad masses of people and not like you even your 10 hippie friends And I think, so I'm glad that, like, they made that, like, let's go back thing, because I think that, uh, I mean, I could talk forever about how much I hated communes, but like, you know, I think, uh, yeah, it's a, that was a positive change. And, um, I think it is easy to get in that mindset of just, you know, let's go start something outside of this system when, and, and it's not a great, I should say, that's not, like,

a great parallel just because clearly in the movie there's not a totalitizing economic system of any point of any kind as like you know like I guess in the example that I gave of a like a commune you're still forced to engage with the economy that you're pretending that you're breaking away from whereas in this I guess it's a bit different because there isn't a coherent economy that really has like cultural hegemony over the entire yeah and uh and so i agree with you're saying that and i agree that it's interesting in that way and potentially progress in that way and potentially an ideologically rich direction to go in but also i i kind of like it less than the

than the other ones particularly beyond thunderdom because beyond thunder you get a sense of a much more massive sense of scale you get the sense of australia you know a post-abod Plyclaptic Australia that can be traversed that has different ecological zones at different places you could go to and like you get a sense of a much more like a much more global at least continental thing whereas inferior road it's it's it's the most of all the movies it's the most self-contained and that in the smallest in terms of geographical area you don't get any indication of what goes on outside this area that they are or even any indication that there exists anything else beyond that.

So there's that limitation that I don't really like. But I, but there is also that sort of, from the political standpoint, it's potentially, it's potentially progressive. Well, yeah, I would argue going, the notion that it's hyper-localized and there's a whole world happening around it, I would argue that the response to that would be because it's generating water, because on top of these broad cliffs,

there is a little bit of life growing back, that it's a base of power, a base of resources that if you take it over and liberate it, then you can then work off that base to go out and address the broader world. But I would say, zooming, taking that final liberatory event and applying it to our own time, what it made me think about is, you know, in some sense, although in a much less drastic sense, we are faced with this question right now. You know, and there's a big urge in a lot of people to fall into a sort of escapeism and idealism, a utopianism about the future. You know, whether it's an escaping in your own personal lives and looking away from the horror show that is late capitalism, whether it is

this urge by even leftists to push the horizon of communist revolution beyond your lifetime, well, it's not going to happen in my lifetime, but maybe the next lifetime or maybe my kids' kids' lifetime. You know, those are all manifestations of being defeated by this system and having no ability to address it in a real meaningful way. Time is running out. You know, the environment, our global environment is on fire and this is not a sustainable world and we do not have three more centuries to work through our issues. You know, and that reminds me of the communist necessity, of this necessity that we have to act now. We have to bring revolution now and we have to organize it now. And what that requires is high levels of organization,

of clear political strategy, a coherent demand. and a robust political program and a vehicle that you can actually operate through we have to resist the urge to look away we have to resist the urge to drive across the salt mines in search of some utopia this is the world that we live in right now the clock is fucking ticking

time is running out and we have to act it's not a future generation's problem it's ours and I think if you can kind of extract that message from that final event I think you might be on to something and you might be able to apply it to where we're at right now hell yeah or else Mel Gibson's going to have to come save our ass and who wants that

Nobody. Two days ago, I saw a vehicle that had hauled that tanker. Do you want to get out of here? You talk to me. Thank you all so much for listening. We'd love to hear your feedback, and there will be more Film Vanguard episodes in the future. Have a good night.

We'll edit that out, too. And so began the journey north to safety. to our place in the sun. Among us we found a new leader, the man who came from the sky, the gyro captain. And just as Papa Gallo had planned, we travelled far beyond the reach of men and machines.

The juice, the precious juice, was hidden in the vehicles. As for me, I grew to manhood. In the fullness of time I became the leader, the chief of the great Northern tribe. all them drive. And the road warrior, that was the last we ever saw of him. He lives now, only in my memories. Pit against my fellow man, we call it a way of life.

Tired generations bankrupt. Mama's point, cursing these heavens on earth. Trust me, you don't want my job. Trust me, you don't want the fire in my gut to consume everything you've learned to love. It's a mirage. The desert is a place when mirage is crystallized. And even crystals get revenge. We burn down the Whole Foods.

We burn down our life. We send robot supervillains with Oz. with eyes to wipe out of the platoon. The chickens don't come home to roost. They're already here. Whoa, it's us. We're not living in the faraway land. Welcome to the gray area.

We if your neighborhood resource officer doesn't kill you or your second job doesn't kill you. I refuse to be a hostage in your crisis. Do you say it's us versus them. I say fuck you all. We've been enlisted to wipe each other out. They won't be happy till the sky is. is black. Every forest cleared. Every ocean a tomb. This is how it's always been. We've been enlisted to wipe each other out. They won't be happy till the sky is black. Every forest cleared. Every ocean a tomb.

This is how it's always been a war with Eurasia. Always in some wheat begging bread from a savior. Time and time again. Ugliness is winning They keep talking heaven and they're bringing us with them Kill ten thousand of them They kill 2,000 of us It's business is usual in God we trust And our neighbors not for saying some banker sons of preachers Some came here to a skiff war

United in the famine From one place with no food To another place where there's nowhere to drink Where to the same people go and raise kids Not here where the factories close factories close all we produce is death welcome to the purgatory not quite a worker not fully a slave wide open jail and all your heroes are cops from today's Andrew jackson to tomorrow's trumps nobody really rents nobody really owns they wanted a global village but what's a

village to a drone we've been enlisted to wipe each other out they won't be happy till the sky is black, every forest cleared, every ocean a tomb. This is how it's always been. We've been enlisted to wipe each other out. They won't be happy till the sky is black. Every forest cleared, every ocean a tomb. This is how it's always been. It's our new reality, isn't it?

I mean, we're facing historic crisis from exploitative and destructive economic systems. economic systems, corrupt governments and civilization as we know it. We're all causing disasters with many faces, economic, ecological and war. We will never vote or buy our way out through political systems or corporations. Our time is now to find other paths, to rely on each other instead of them. Our futures are open to resist, rebel, create, and build our dreams on the ashes of theirs. Oh!