Where Must We Go, We Who Wander?
Searching for Eden in Walkabout (1971) and Furiosa (2024)
The Land of Lost Content
What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those?
—A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad
“In Australia, when an Aborigine man-child reaches sixteen, he is sent out into the land. For months he must live from it. Sleep on it. Eat of its fruit and flesh. Stay alive. Even if it means killing his fellow creatures. The Aborigines call it the WALKABOUT.” So begins Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 film Walkabout, which is set in the unforgiving landscape of the Australian outback. However, for an Aborigine man-child, Roeg substitutes an English woman-child, played by Jenny Agutter. She is given the additional challenge of keeping alive her 7-year-old brother, played by Luc Roeg. Girl and White Boy, as they appear in the credits (none of the characters are named), end up in this perilous situation when their father, under the pretense of taking them on a picnic, drives them to the outback, takes out a gun, and starts shooting at them, before setting the car on fire and putting an end to his troubles by putting a gun to his head. The girl is resourceful enough to pull her brother to safety behind the cover of a large rock: she will need this resourcefulness in the days and weeks to come, for her troubles are only just beginning.
A girl wrenched from the comforts of home, safety, and civilization, the violence of gunfire and cars set to fire, a sudden scramble for survival, where the only thing one has to rely on are one’s own wits: these ingredients are also present in Furiosa (2024), the fifth installment in George Miller’s Mad Max franchise. Like Walkabout, the Mad Max films are set in Australia, but unlike Walkabout, they are set in a future post-apocalyptic version—“the wasteland”—the result of widespread societal breakdown in the aftermath of oil shortages, war, and human damage to the environment. 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road had introduced us to Imperator Furiosa, in that movie (played by Charlize Theron) a hardened commander in the army of Immortan Joe, a warlord who had taken control over one of the only sources of fresh water left; she drives the War Rig that brings water and produce to Gastown in exchange for “guzzoline.” Her real mission, however, is to aid the escape of Immortan Joe’s five “wives,” i.e. sex slaves, and bring them to the home she distantly recalls from childhood: the Green Place of Many Mothers.
Furiosa begins in this Green Place, this Eden that will be lost to the girl forever. Like Eve, the young Furiosa (Alyla Browne, who grows up into Anya Taylor-Joy) is cast out after reaching for forbidden fruit: she plucks a peach and shortly after is kidnapped by raiders, who take her to the leader of their biker gang, Dementus. Furiosa’s mother, Mary Jabassa, follows in hot pursuit and manages to rescue her daughter; Furiosa, too, does all she can to defy her captors. But for both mother and daughter, it is a losing game—Mary is captured; Furiosa lingers, unable to leave her mother behind, and in the end is forced by Dementus to watch the crucifixion that ends her mother’s life.
In both Fury Road and Furiosa, Miller associates this lost Eden with women and the feminine. After all, we refer to nature as “Mother Nature”—that the Green Place of Many Mothers is one of the only places that sustains, harbors, and nurtures life is no coincidence. In Furiosa, before Mary is captured, she gives her daughter a peach pit, a seed Furiosa carries on as a legacy of her lost childhood. In Fury Road, one of the Vuvalini—now desert-dwellers after the destruction of the Green Place—carries a bag full of seeds from their old crops: “trees, flowers, fruit.” Before she dies, she gives this bag to one of the wives, The Dag, passing on the torch and planting the seed for a more fruitful future.
This association between women and life-giving, life-sustaining nature makes itself clear in the way women are linked especially to water. The first time Max and the audience catch a glimpse of the five wives in Fury Road, they are washing with water from a hose attached to the War Rig, clad in wispy white, a picture of startling health and beauty and guilelessness. The water spills luxuriantly across the screen, a welcome sight for our thirsty eyes after nothing but dry, dry desert for miles and miles, and we can feel with Max just how parched he is. In Furiosa, too, when we first see the wives (not the five wives of Fury Road), their living space contains a shallow pool of water, through which a woman or two wades, clad in white, suffused by light.
Water and women: both are Immortan Joe’s most valuable resources, and he controls both with an iron fist. Control water, control women, and you control life. Joe keeps the water in some underground store, then pumps it up for the wretched thousands waving their pitchers below and shuts it off at a whim. He keeps his “breeders” locked up in a vault and chastity belts, and those who are unsuccessful in producing a viable male heir he keeps as “milkers,” pumping out gallons of mother’s milk to feed to his army and provide another commodity for trade.
This is a perversion of nature’s purity and a betrayal of its abundance. Purity and abundance made Eden what it was, as Roeg shows us in Walkabout’s most beautiful scene. Having trudged through the desert, disoriented from wandering endlessly under the pitiless sun (one cannot help think of “A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water” from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land), the girl and boy come across a small water source and a fruit tree. Here, an Aboriginal boy about the same age as the girl (David Gulpilil) discovers them and offers much-needed help. The three travel onwards as a group, for the Aboriginal boy is on his own walkabout, and they become a sort of family: mother, father, and child. For the white girl and boy, this new life is paradise regained, free, unconstrained, pure. It reaches the zenith of its beauty when they discover an oasis, and the girl takes a swim. Divested of her schoolgirl uniform and her schoolgirl mores, she floats languidly in the water, weaving in and out among the leaves and the light and the ripples, delving into her own reflection, turning on her back to soak in the sun. Like Eve before the Fall, she is unashamed of nakedness, and for this brief moment, she is no longer a schoolgirl but a water nymph.
Nymphs before the Fall: this is what startles us in Furiosa when we arrive at Gastown. Dementus is trying to take it over from its current ruler, whom we expect to be as fearsome and brutish as the villains we’ve already met. But this is not to be borne out: the old man sits with a paintbrush in hand, looking over an old book that contains a color print of John William Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs (1896). Filling the wall behind him—and the cinema screen before us—is a faithful reproduction of the painting, exact in its colors and techniques, shocking in its prelapsarian beauty. It depicts Hylas, a Greek youth, crouching among the reeds before seven nearly identical women. They swim in a pond of lily pads and water lilies, their skin inhumanly luminous, blossoms threaded through their long locks. Its pastoral profusion, its tender colors, its grace, its sensitivity is totally at odds with the relentless dust, blood, gore, and machinery of the wasteland. Into this duo of nature and women, the Waterhouse painting has brought a third partner: art.
For it is not only nature that we have lost, according to Miller, but also art, history, literature, the culture that is the flowering of human accomplishment at its best. Strangely enough, the wives’ vault is filled with books and contains a grand piano; architecturally, too, it is vastly different than anything else we see, with a chandelier and a large, multi-paned window that lets in a flood of sunlight. They are watched over by Miss Giddy, one of the few history men and women, who have the Old World’s knowledge inked across the parchment of their skin.
Powerful men have always wanted women who are—or at least have the appearance of being—more than “mere” sex objects, from the geisha of Japan to the tawaifs of India to the cortigiane oneste of Venice. These women were educated such that they could carry on intelligent, learned conversation, and trained in the arts of poetry, music, and dance. Perhaps Joe was aiming for something similar. Perhaps he believed these young, attractive women in their oasis of art and beauty would provide respite from the cruel world outside. Perhaps he felt that if they only kept to gentle, pretty things, they would never be able to defy him or escape. But nymphs are dangerous creatures.
Nymph, Departed
The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
— T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Walkabout could almost be an ur-prequel to the Mad Max franchise, depicting the seeds of societal collapse, the push of the first domino. The film is bookended by montages of modern industrial life: cars going up and down a street, the hustle and bustle of a city crowd, the gleaming windows of large buildings, schoolchildren in a classroom, kangaroo meat in a butcher’s shop, hulking structures of ugly cement. School is monotonous and robotic: all the schoolgirls, Agutter’s character included, chant the same sounds together, practicing elocution, eyes glazed over. The boy and the girl both wear uniforms, though the girl spruces hers up with a touch of individuality by adding a pink scarf on her way home.
Their futures are foreshadowed by the figures of the mother and father: the father sits in his uniform, suit, tie and briefcase, alone under the shadow of an enormous concrete and glass building, gazing up at it like an animal in a cage. The mother is a housewife, and her days are spent in the kitchen, where she listens to the radio while preparing food: halves of cantaloupe and watermelon sit on the countertop, divorced from the environments from which they have come. The apartment overlooks the ocean, but the girl and the boy swim in the apartment’s pool, colored an intense blue so artificial it hurts the eyes—chlorinated, neatly rectangular, the opposite of the oasis in which the girl later luxuriates. Over it all looms the sound of a didgeridoo, ominous, foreign.
Juxtaposed with the surrounding nature and the way of life the Aboriginal boy teaches to the white girl and boy, this civilization seems so strange, so false, so imposed upon the landscape and utterly at odds with it. There is violence in the natural world, and Roeg shows us plenty of it, but it is the violence necessary for survival, not the casual violence of sport or the meaningless violence of war. When the Aboriginal boy hunts, he kills only for the food they need to eat, using a spear he himself has fashioned. When the colonizers hunt, they use guns and shoot not to eat but for the red thrill of it, to flex their power over the land, to assert man’s dominance over life. The Aboriginal boy is pained to see this, and the rock art he draws at one point in the film, depicting humans and animals, conveys a relationship of harmony and mutuality, of sacredness and interconnection, that the Western world has lost.
Another drastic departure from Western civilization is the easy intimacy the three children arrive at with one another, despite vast differences in language and culture. In contrast to the white children’s biological family, where the parents don’t talk to one another and appear alienated from their children, even moments of silence between the white girl, white boy, and Aboriginal boy are infused with warmth, and laughter and happiness make up a universal language all can share in. There is a thread of sexual tension between the Aboriginal boy and the white girl, but it has the innocence of a high school crush, especially when compared to the way, among a team of geological researchers in the outback, the men leer at a female coworker, peering under the table for a glimpse of where garter belt meets stocking.
Eventually, the white girl and boy find their way back to civilization. They wait for their rescue in the scrap heap of an abandoned mining town, a Mad Max-esque hodgepodge of detritus and rusted metal, spilling out the waste of industry into a landscape quietly forced to accommodate it. Then we speed forward to a grown-up version of Agutter’s character. She now occupies exactly the same role her mother did at the beginning of the film: in what seems to be the same apartment building, she slices meat on a cutting board. A shot of the Aboriginal boy hacking at a kill flashes briefly on screen like a distant memory. Once he provided for her; now another man does, in quite a different way, driving home from the office in his suit and tie. He comes up behind her in the kitchen and embraces her. As he describes his promotion at work, spelling out his corporate ladder-climbing dreams, her eyes glaze over. The screen fades into a memory (or is it a dream?) of her brief, happy time in the outback. She, the brother, and the Aboriginal boy splash naked in the oasis, the sun beaming down on their skin, smiles gleaming on their faces, as a voiceover begins to recite from A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad: “Into my heart an air that kills….”
The girl has abandoned Eden, but Eden will not abandon her. Somehow we can go back, Walkabout yearns, somehow we can recover Housman’s “land of lost content” and “blue remembered hills,” somehow we can take off Western civilization’s discontents as easily as our garments, stepping into the pristine azure-blue of beauty, purity, wholesomeness, harmony with nature, if only we were brave enough to shake off the chains of convention and release the bonds we hold over ourselves.
But for Miller, Eden is lost, and it is lost forever. The nymphs have departed, the springs, streams, and rivers have dried up, polluted or abandoned, and there will be no more splashing about. You cannot go back to it, for it does not exist. In fact, it never really did. Nymphs, after all, are only a myth.
Is That Just the Wind, or Is That a Furious Vexation?
Vengeance is mine; I will repay.
— Romans 12:19
If the girl in Walkabout capitulates, Furiosa does not. She refuses to believe that Eden is lost, and then she sets about destroying those who have killed it. Everyone likes a good revenge story, especially when it’s served on the platter of a character as well-motivated, as justified in her eye-for-an-eye quest as Furiosa is, and in Furiosa the prime target of her ire is Dementus, the murderer of her mother and, later, her lover Praetorian Jack.
Dementus begins the film in two accoutrements that are all that remains of his innocence: a white cape and, strapped to it, his dead daughter’s teddy bear. Despite keeping the young Furiosa muzzled and chained up, he exhibits a fatherly solicitude towards her, as if he sees in her the daughter he has lost, and he gives her the teddy bear as a sort of comfort item. After contact with Immortan Joe’s society, however, his white cape becomes bathed red in blood, and any last embers of innocence turn to ash when, after capturing Gastown, he hands the young girl over to Immortan Joe to be imprisoned as a future “wife.”
In 2018, the Manchester Art Gallery, which houses Hylas and the Nymphs, removed the painting from public display, as well as postcards of it from their gift shop. As their reason, they cited “recent movements against the objectification and exploitation of women.”1 A cursory glance at the painting seems to uphold this: you see a clothed man, alone, situated above a very harem of naked, beautiful women. But who is it, really, who has the power here? If those who removed the painting had done their research, they would have known it is certainly not Hylas. As Theocritus tells the story, leaving the Argonauts and his companion Heracles to fetch water, Hylas spots a beautiful spring, where the nymphs—“the dread Goddesses of the country-folk”—are having a dance. He places his pitcher in the water, the nymphs latch onto his arm, and he sinks down, “as when a falling star will sink headlong in the main.”2 Heracles calls out and calls out for him, deserting the Argonauts, but Hylas is never to be seen again.
Furiosa embodies this latent threat that lurks in nature. “For sheer white robes,” the Furies say in Aeschylus’s Oresteia, “we have no right or portion.”3 Furiosa, too, has no use for the sheer white robes of the wives: ingeniously, she uses Immortan Joe’s son’s attempt to sexually assault her as an opportunity to escape, disguises herself as a boy, and climbs the ranks in Immortan Joe’s army, proving herself in a stunning sequence on the War Rig that rivals anything in Fury Road. In the long shadow of Christian ethics, we are taught to forgive rather than to seek retribution, to turn a blind eye—or at least an eye of mercy, pity, love—rather than to gouge out an eye for an eye. Literature echoes this in the genre of the revenge tragedy; from his earliest of such plays, Titus Andronicus, to his greatest, Hamlet, Shakespeare makes it clear that quests for revenge only ever end in bloodbaths: violence begets violence, and its appetite increases the more it is fed.
But Furiosa is not a tragedy, it is a myth, a legend, an installment in a post-apocalyptic epic; most of all, it is a coming-of-age, and the wronged nymph grows up to be nothing less than a chthonic Fury, a wasteland Lady Justice. In Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government, painted on a wall of the council hall of Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico, where the republic’s nine magistrates met, Lady Justice looks sternly on, warning the (male) leaders to act virtuously. She is represented twice, most prominently on the far left side, where she balances the scales held by Wisdom, looking up at her; at her feet sits Harmony. In later representations—statues of Lady Justice are ubiquitous outside of prominent courts of law—a sword would be added, along with a blindfold.
For scales, Furiosa substitutes the peach seed given to her by her mother; for a sword, a gun; for a blindfold, the robotic arm she constructs to replace the one she herself has separated from her own body in escaping Dementus. Lady Justice’s scales and the sword make sense, but why the blindfold? The common explanation is that justice must be impartial, unbiased, dispassionate. “Law is intellect without appetite,” says Aristotle—or, in Legally Blonde’s translation, “The law is reason free from passion.”4 For the Greeks, reason was a male virtue, nature tempered and subdued, elevated above feminine passion, nature let loose and run riot. Indeed, a man may get angry, scheme and plot the ruin of another, enact violence, do the most iniquitous things, the most unprincipled things, the most degenerate things, but he will never know the inside of rage like a woman. This, as a woman, I can assure you. What Aristotle misses is that the Furies are old gods, and as nature is prior to reason, divine justice stands prior to the law, and justice is forged in the flame of passion. There can be no justice without the heat of righteous anger, the moral passion of wanting things to be right, of seeing cruel things happen and feeling indignant, riled up, incited to correct it.
Could the blindfold’s raison d’être be that Justitia had simply grown tired of bearing witness to an endless parade of man’s horrors? Could she not have become weary of the world’s injustices, of its cruelty, of its ever-flowing streams of red blood? Seeing it, she would grow desensitized to it, and where would morality be then? Or is it that the blindfold is for us, that we must not see the terrible eyes of Lady Justice—can it be that at a single glance, you would be burned instantly, a glance more awful than that of Medusa, a glance that judges and punishes in one and the same instant? Indeed, who is to say that her eyes, all-seeing in judgement, are not unlike the panopticon of Bentham, a gaze that constructs out of wrath a circular prison from which none can escape?
In Fury Road, when a War Boy is about to do something totally kamikrazee and self-immolate in a blaze of glory, he shouts, “WITNESS ME!!!” Obviously, this is an injunction not just to those around him but to us, the audience. Witnessing is an important motif in Furiosa, too. When Dementus has Furiosa’s mother crucified, he holds the child’s head in place, prying her crying eyes open to watch, and does not allow her the clemency of looking away from this scene of unspeakable cruelty. The image etches into her retina and memory like a woodcut, its channels inked with blood. Later, when Dementus has his underlings fight to the death in order to gain the privilege of joining him, he tells the girl, “You don’t have to watch if you don’t want to. You might want to close your eyes.” She does not reply. She refuses to be blindfolded. Her gaze is steadfast and does not waver.
When she returns to Dementus, ready at last to pay him in kind for the evils he has done her, she is more subdued than the War Boys. “Remember me?” she asks, words she will echo as a statement, an order, when she kills Immortan Joe in Fury Road. While Dementus is on the ground, Furiosa reveals her face, looking down at him from above. Her gaze is like the burning sun in a landscape inhospitable to the shade of trees. He tells her that hope is futile, that only hate will bring her happiness, that there’s no shame in hate, “one of the great forces of nature.” But this only serves to add more fuel to the fury, for Furiosa is not driven by hate, she is driven by love. “My childhood, my mother, I want them back.”
Dementus, it turns out, does not remember, but that matters little. When Furiosa rides off to seek vengeance, the history man says, “That is the darkest of angels. The fifth rider of the apocalypse.” She is the female “Angelus Novus” described by Walter Benjamin, the angel of history whose “face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”5
Furiosa’s “single catastrophe” is her abduction and the murder of her mother. She faces this past constantly, it is always in her eye and in her mind, it haunts her dreams, it animates every action she takes. To “make whole what has been smashed” is the telos she holds to unrelentingly, to awaken the mother who sleeps year after year and will never wake, to stay, somehow, in the dream that is the Green Place, that land of lost content. Yet the older Furiosa grows, the more “the pile of debris before [her] grows skyward,” and the more the past recedes, the more the winds blow her towards the future, making that past ever more inaccessible, distant, and intangible.
The storm called “progress” that pushes her further and further away from what she loves, from her green ideal, from beauty, purity, abundance, is the storm of industrial capitalism run amok that caused the apocalypse. It is this belief in endless technological improvement without regard for the environment, this need to conquer and subjugate without regard for other lives and other ways of being, this draining of nature’s resources without regard for renewal, restoration, regeneration, and its consequences resurrect in Furiosa’s revenge. Lady Justice is Mother Nature with her muzzle off. Not gentle nature in her pastoral, fostering aspect (though Furiosa has plenty of tenderness for those worthy of it—after all, the Furies are also called the Eumenides, or Kindly Ones), but the raging nature of torrential rains, seas that wreck ships, tornadoes that rip the roofs from houses, sandstorms that tear cars to scrap metal, “a furious vexation.”
In Fury Road, we see that Immortan Joe has imparted a philosophy to his War Boys that makes them ready to “die historic on the Fury Road” and into “the gates of Valhalla… ride eternal.” During the final confrontation between Dementus and Furiosa, Dementus says to her, “The only question is, do you have it in you to make it epic?” The film’s narrator goes on to tell us that the film’s events may not have happened exactly as depicted—the details are fuzzy, there are any number of possibilities for how it really could have gone, the story has been told and retold so many times that nobody knows for sure. Furiosa is yet another wasteland legend, a hero in search of whatever kind of kleos the world still has to offer, a post-apocalyptic Achilles who echoes the Iliad’s first word, mēnis, “rage,” across a vast emptiness. Fittingly, then, the justice we see her deliver is justice at its most poetic, which is to say, at its most epic: instead of killing Dementus, she uses his living body as the organic matter that feeds the peach tree planted from her mother’s seed.
“You can never balance the scales of suffering,” Dementus tells Furiosa. Maybe not, but you can balance the scales of justice, inasmuch as it is possible for a human being to do so. The peach tree sprouts as a symbol of hope against all odds, as the Green Place restored as much as it is able to be restored. Balance: at the beginning of the film, Furiosa plucks a peach and is abducted; at the end of the film, Furiosa plucks a peach and gives it to the abducted. Dementus killed her mother; now he keeps her mother’s legacy alive. Having forced Furiosa to bear witness to the demise of her mother, he must now bear constant witness to his own demise. Having once wanted to find this place of abundance—to conquer it, to capture its resources for himself—like Tantalus he must now to the end of his life sit under an abundance—the beauty of green foliage, the savor of ripening fruit—that will always remain just out of reach.
This is not the human punishment of laws or criminal courts. It is the sort of punishment a Greek god would mete out, an Ovidian metamorphosis: Athena turning the woman who challenged her at weaving, Arachne, into a spider, for example. Dementus’s fate echoes Max’s in Fury Road: first forced to become a “blood bag” for Nux, one of Immortan Joe’s War Boys, at the end of the film he voluntarily gives his blood to Furiosa to keep her alive. By killing Dementus, Furiosa would have made him a wasteland waste product, yet another body tossed away, discarded, left to dissolve into desert dust; by transforming him into a blood bag for the seed of a new life, she restores nature to its rightful cyclicality, where everything that has reached the end of its first life, its initial purpose, finds new purpose, second life, as a cog in the engine of regrowth. Nature—a force beyond our petty reckoning, our selfish desires, our short-sightedness, our greed—will always take back what is rightfully hers, and nature’s ultimate law is that destruction feeds creation. Matter cannot be made or unmade. Methods for evil can become methods for good, bad things can become beautiful things.
Better Selves
Where must we go… we who wander this Wasteland in search of our better selves?
— The First History Man (Mad Max: Fury Road)
Whence will renewal come to us—to us who have defiled and emptied the whole earthly globe?
From the past alone, if we love it.
— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Walkabout is a profoundly cynical film. There is a hinting at joy, hope, meaning, transcendence, the possibility of family, and then it vanishes. Why does it vanish? Because the girl cannot escape the narrow prison of herself, because she cannot “only connect,” as E.M. Forster puts it, because she cannot “live in fragments no longer.”6 The tagline on the film’s poster reads, “The Aborigine and the girl 30,000 years apart… together,” but by the end of the film there is no “together,” there is no bridging of “30,000 years,” there is only “apart” and its ellipsis that goes on forever like an endless trudge through the wasteland.
Upon meeting the Aboriginal boy, the little brother starts to adopt more of his ways. He uses gesture to bridge the language barrier, he learns a few words in the older boy’s language, he starts to wear Aboriginal markings on his body. In contrast, the girl never really leaves her conventions and her upbringing. When they ask the Aboriginal boy for water, she continually insists upon the English word “water,” as if English is a universal language anybody should be born knowing: “Water. Drink. We want water to drink. You must understand! Anyone can understand that. We want to drink. I can’t make it any simpler. Water.”
This is an interesting parallel to the scene in Fury Road where Max comes upon Furiosa and the five wives and uses his gun to point to the water hose, uttering that one word in a rough growl, “Water.” Of course, they all speak the same language, but for Max, who could almost be a silent film star here, so few words does he utter over the course of the film, it’s gesture that matters. So, too, do gestures bridge the uncommunicable between unlikely characters, and between character and audience: the tenderness with which Capable literally reaches out to the War Boy Nux, comforting him; the way Max silently hands the gun over to Furiosa to fire the last bullet, conceding that she’s the better shot, establishing himself as her ally.
Walkabout is a film bookended by two suicides, both due to failures of connection. The second is the Aboriginal boy’s, unexpected because the suicide of the father at the beginning of the film has taught us that suicide is a product of modern Western civilization’s lack of meaning, its alienation, its separation of humans from what is “natural.” The white girl does not adopt the Aboriginal boy’s way of life; rather, it is as if she brings with her an imposition of her own society’s discontents onto him, spreading its sickness. To express his affection for her in the only way he knows how, he initiates a courtship ritual, dancing day and night. Frightened, unable to understand, unwilling to face the unfamiliar, she hides inside an abandoned farmhouse they have found. He is like any other teenager with feelings too big for his small amount of life experience to be able to handle. A girl not liking him back: a catastrophe. The next morning, he is hanging in a tree, his body teeming with ants, dead.
Indeed, for any human being, to lose love or the hope of its possibility is a catastrophe. Both Dementus and Max are hardened because they’ve lost their families. Yet, Miller shows us, to give in to cynicism is a choice. Dementus sinks ever deeper into his moral darkness, actively making choices out of selfishness, greed, and lust for power, but Max, over the course of Fury Road, traverses the long highway from self-centered pragmatism to selfless purpose. When someone reaches out to us, we can choose to extend a hand back, warm flesh gripping warm flesh. In a cruel world, we can choose to be the one single source of kindness that emanates light. “My mother and father were soldiers. Even as the world fell, they yearned to be warriors for a virtuous cause,” Praetorian Jack tells Furiosa. To be virtuous in a fallen world requires strength, zeal, vigor, the militarism of not giving up the fight.
Is vengeance a “virtuous cause?” The last chapter of Furiosa is titled “Beyond Vengeance,” and at the very end of the film, we see Furiosa taking the peach from the tree planted from her mother’s seed, fertilized by Dementus (returned, in a strange, surrogate way, to the father role he lost when his daughter died), and giving it to the five wives, leading them under the cover of night to the War Rig. Driving it the next day, she will not deliver mother’s milk, produce, and water but justice and the world to a new order. She does so not through vengeance but through expanding beyond herself, widening the circle of her care and concern, utilizing her power, position and resources to help those who need it.
"Where must we go… we who wander this Wasteland in search of our better selves?” Fury Road asks us at the end. Furiosa finally makes the journey to the Green Place, but when they arrive, it is an uninhabitable swamp where nothing grows and crows caw ominously overhead. Eden is lost, and all that remains is a small straggle of Vuvalini. Max stays behind to make his own way when the rest of the group, led by Furiosa, decides to journey further in search of habitation, but he has a change of heart. Catching up, he tells them that the only real hope they have is to return to the Citadel: terrible as it is, it’s the only place with any certainty known to foster life.
If there is anything like Eden, it must exist within ourselves. It is not a place, it is an ideal for being, living, acting in a fallen world. What does it matter that the arm, on which the star chart leading to it is drawn, has been cut off? A star chart may be erased, torn apart, ripped to shreds, and yet the stars themselves never diminish in brightness, ineradicable from the skies by human evil. Hold fast to the North Star within your own heart, and you will never be lost. In Fury Road, Furiosa explains that she is looking for “some kind of redemption.” Redemption, for both Furiosa and Max, comes in the form of taking on a mission that is larger than themselves. It comes from empathy, union, connection.
Our better selves are the people we love, and the people we love lead us to better lives. Furiosa’s survival skills, her ability to fight and drive and fend for herself, are the products of lessons of love, taught to her by her mother and Praetorian Jack. In Fury Road, she moves beyond using those skills in the service of her own private mission of revenge to use them for aiding the wives and, eventually, the wretched thousands at the Citadel’s base, overthrowing Joe, who, it turns out, is not so “Immortan” after all.
In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil speaks of “justice, ‘that fugitive from the camp of conquerors’”: Furiosa is that fugitive, and her overthrow of “the camp of conquerers” points to a new kind of leadership dependent not on conquest but on cooperation and coexistence. For Weil, “social order can be nothing but an equilibrium of forces,” and “what the ambitious man entirely forgets is the notion of relationship”—relationship, of course, being rooted in equilibrium. Furiosa, the model of the good leader, does not use those around her as resources, means to her own end, but rather brings their disparate skillsets together for a common end that benefits all. Of the wives, only Toast the Knowing is able to load a gun, but Angharad acts as a source of strength for the other wives, Capable turns Nux into the ally who cinches their mission’s success, The Dag’s spirituality, intuition, and instinct hew them to their path, and she becomes the de facto new Keeper of the Seeds, and Cheedo the Fragile uses her timidity to their advantage during a crucial moment of battle. Traditionally masculine survival skills—fighting, driving, hunting for resources—must be mated to traditionally feminine skills—cooperation, intuition, empathy—which, it turns out, are equally necessary for survival.
In contrast to the testosterone-pumping, gasoline-guzzling, guns-blazing machismo of both Dementus’s biker gang and Immortan Joe’s Citadel, the Vuvalini who inhabit the Green Place enjoy a matriarchal society in which women are foregrounded and men largely absent. Perhaps one or two are kept around for reproduction and other odd jobs; being fierce, competent road warriors themselves, adept with machines, weaponry, and combat, the women seem to do well enough without them.
Yet in spite of the fierceness they rely on in order to survive and protect themselves, the Vuvalini embody values of collaboration, harmony, compassion, and growth. Dementus has his people fight amongst each other to the death in order to prove themselves, and the Immortan runs a deeply hierarchical society in which he and his family sit at the top, but among the Vuvalini power is shared more laterally, and the women are tied to one another by bonds of care and kinship. Among all the bloodshed and the battery, the signature gesture of affection they use with one another, along with the gesture they make when one of their own dies, stand out for their sheer tenderness.
The dissolution of their society, as well as the dissolution of Immortan Joe’s, and Furiosa’s rise to power, point toward the synthesis that is necessary for future human flourishing. The nymphs have departed, and they return to corrupted civilization to correct it, like the figures in Lorenzetti’s Good Government, allegorical representations of the virtues that hold society, at its most ideal—its greenest, purest, most abundant—together: in addition to Justice, there are Peace, Fortitude, Prudence, Magnanimity, and Temperance, as well as Wisdom and Concord, Faith, Hope, and Charity. The “happy highways” of Housman’s land of lost content are gone, but the Fury Road remains. We embark upon it not to die historic but to drive toward our better selves.
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Theocritus, Idylls, translated by J. M. Edmonds. https://www.theoi.com/Text/TheocritusIdylls3.html
Aeschylus, The Eumenides, translated by Richmond Lattimore, from The Complete Greek Tragedies.
Aristotle, Politics. https://iep.utm.edu/aristotle-politics/
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History.
E. M. Forster, Howards End.
Beautiful - « Our better selves are the people we love, and the people we love lead us to better lives. »
As always, another great piece and reflections. I like your sentence - After all, we refer to nature as “Mother Nature”—that the Green Place of Many Mothers is one of the only places that sustains, harbors, and nurtures life is no coincidence. I don't think anyone else could have weaved through these complex ideas as you have done so nicely here. I liked the references you cited from Aristotle to BBC news. You gave me lots to think about. Very nice work!!!