Fury Road Research Articles

Mad Max and Disability: Australian Gothic, Colonial, and Corporeal (Dis)possession

The Australian landscape has a long Gothic history, as Gerry Turcotte writes: “long before the fact of Australia was ever confirmed by explorers and cartographers it had already been imagined as a grotesque space, a land peopled by monsters” (10). This grotesque space is brought into focus through the films, the graphic novel, and the videogame of the Mad Max franchise and transposed onto this landscape are survivors and remnants of society, many of whom are coded as disabled. These characters are set against the omnipresent Australian landscape, an unwelcoming land that opposes their very existence, yet whose presence compliments it. This paper will focus on the literary understanding of disability to explore the preponderance of physical differences in the Mad Max franchise. It will focus primarily on the latest releases, dealing with the Fury Road portion of the series, where living with physical impairment is a banal reality. This paper will ask whether the Gothic landscape of the Australian Outback in Mad Max codes the characters as disabled, or whether it is the able bodied characters that are outside the norm, as well as considering the positive (or negative) implications of representations of disability in the franchise.

WOMEN-LED FILMS: DIFFERENT FEMALE REPRESENTATIONS IN POPULAR CINEMAS.

This is a comparative study to look into cinematic feminism between English-speaking blockbuster and non-blockbuster films that screening from 2012 to 2015. This study will choose films that led by female character(s) and to explore, compare, and justify the feminism qualities that reflected through the female characters and storylines. In this study, six female-led films are selected: The Hunger Games, Mad Max: The Fury Road, Cinderella, Gone Girl, Brooklyn, and Carol. This study assumes that modern high budget productions are portraying feminism conventionally through unrealistic characters and masculine domination stories; while the non-blockbuster productions are portraying feminism progressively through reflective characters and self-determination stories. Blockbuster films? actresses are commonly created as recognisable female superheroes with strong masculine traits but living in a men-ruled world, or princesses that living in fairy tales. The cinematic feminism is superficial and ambiguous in blockbuster commercial films. Hence, non-blockbuster films? actresses are characterised with conservative and realistic images but given more chances to deal with alternatives, decisions, and progressions throughout the development of the story. Non-blockbuster films? characters and stories are less emphasizing on masculine feminism but more focusing on subtle yet significant feminism expressions. To achieve the objectives and hypotheses, this paper uses two methods ? quantitative method with a designed coding sheet in content analysis; and a qualitative method with film reviews for textual analysis. These two methods are expected to test out and evaluate the cinematic feminism through on-screen characters? gender representations and the storyline?s interpretations in selected films.

Incompleteness and punishment in the female body: mad max; fury road

Incompleteness and punishment in the female body: mad max; fury road

Blind Warriors, Supercrips, and Techno‐Marvels: Challenging Depictions of Disability in Star Wars

Blind Warriors, Supercrips, and Techno-Marvels : Challenging Depictions of Disability in Star Wars

‘So shiny, so chrome’: images and ideology of humans, machines, and the Earth in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road

Mad Max: Fury Road has been critiqued for its feminist, masculine, biblical, and environmental themes, but these critiques fail to engage with the connection between humans, machines, and the Earth in Fury Road. Nuclear technology may have produced the apocalyptic wasteland in which the film is set, but machines and industrial technology remain coupled to humanity to the point of symbiosis. Through the images of Fury Road, director George Miller reveals an ideology of ecomobility that demands an assemblage of human and machine. To exist in the wild and desolate spaces of the Earth is to become one with machines. Further, despite the distraction of subjective violence, the film is a critique of the ideological fantasy of modernity’s regime of automobility and its connection to capitalism.

‘Hope is a mistake, if you can’t fix what’s broken you go insane’: a reading of gender, (s)heroism and redemption in Mad Max: Fury Road

ABSTRACTAfter a hiatus of 30 years since the first three films, the fourth Mad Max film was released in 2015, called Fury Road. It features the familiar eponymous character of Max, but this time alongside a female character, Imperator Furiosa. The gender dynamics of the fourth film are vastly different from those of the first three films and elicited much praise as well as criticism. It provides a new perspective through which to view the early films and the dystopian post-apocalyptic future world presented in the films. Fury Road introduces a corrective to the earlier films in terms of their reductive depictions of the relations between men and women, while avoiding an equally reductive representation of gendered shame and blame. The message is clearly about collaboration and cooperation as essential for the redemption of a world in which gendered inequities and abuses of power remain deeply disconcerting obstacles. This article considers some of the most salient aspects related to the depiction of women in Fury Road and of the relationship between the two main characters, Max and Furiosa.

Climate Trauma, or the Affects of the Catastrophe to Come

AbstractThe climate catastrophe to come is traumatically affecting, whether in its micro and macro manifestations, in the threat it poses to existing ways of life, in its upending of entrenched understandings of the workings of the world, or in the injury it is doing to particular lives and wider ecologies. It works on ecologies and bodies alike as a kind of wounding, one not simply or solely to the everyday stuff of biological life but to the very constitution of experience and expression. Critiquing and extending writing on climate, trauma, and aesthetic experience by E. Ann Kaplan (2016), Timothy Morton (2013), and others, this article argues that these affects of climate catastrophe are traumatically affecting without necessarily being traumatizing: they are jarring, rupturing, disjunctive experiences of future crisis in the now. This article traces these affects of apocalypse as they circulate traumatically in three texts: George Miller’s film Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Marina Zurkow’s animation Slurb (2009), and Briohny Doyle’s novel The Island Will Sink (2016). Climate catastrophe, that most threatening yet elusive of hyperobjects, marks and emerges irresistibly from within these works, not simply as theme, setting, or symbol but as the form of their affectivity. This intensity presses into the present from the future, shaping how the catastrophe to come is felt today and exposing crucial tensions between aesthetic expression and lived experience.

“In search of our better selves”: Totem Transfer Narratives and Indigenous Futurities

Much contemporary science fiction urges us to focus on eco-activism and sustainable futures in order to prevent environmental catastrophe. From a critical Indigenous and anticolonial perspective, however, the question becomes “for whom are these futures sustainable”? Set in a nondescript desert dystopia, George Miller's film Mad Max: Fury Road 2015 alludes to the westerns of yesteryear and the Australian “outback”—spaces coded as menacing in their resistance to being tamed by settler-colonial interests. This article charts how Miller's film, while preoccupied with issues pertaining to global warming and ecological collapse, replicates and reifies settler replacement narratives, or what Canadian literature scholar Margery Fee has referred to as “totem transfer” narratives (1987). In these narratives, ultimately the “natives” transfer their knowledges and then disappear from view, helping white settlers remedy the self-created ills that currently threaten their worlds and enabling them to inherit the land. In the second half, I also consider how Indigenous futurist texts offer decolonizing potentials that refute the replacement narratives that persist in settler-colonial contexts. In particular, I examine how Indigenous cultural production emphasizes the importance of the intergenerational transfer of Indigenous knowledges and refuses the hermeneutic of reconciliation that seeks to discipline Indigenous futures in the service of a settler-colonial present.

Moving

Identifying hope and redemption with moving and vitality, the dystopian film Mad Max: Fury Road surprisingly inspires us to develop the implications of moving as the core of religion. For animate organisms life is synonymous with self-moving. Philosophy and biology connect moving with not only vitality, but also with experience, perception and conception. Hope and redemption are qualia of human living. Enduring academic standards tend to halt the moving richness of religions. Taking as radically as possible the primacy of self-moving, an alternative is presented that prefers kinesiology to autopsy. Seven propositions are developed, directed especially to the emerging generation of religion scholars.

‘We Are Not Things’: Infertility, Reproduction, and Rhetoric of Control in Avengers: Age of Ultron and Mad Max: Fury Road

Pregnancy occupies an uncertain position in Hollywood cinema, and discussions of infertility are notably absent. Indeed, two blockbusters (Avengers: Age of Ultron and Mad Max: Fury Road) invested in the politics and rhetoric of reproduction met with disparate critical and popular opinion. This article will examine the potential reasons for this, whilst establishing ideological parity between the films.

Re-casting nature as feminist space in Mad Max: Fury Road

This article shows how Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) transforms nature into a space of feminist possibility. In particular, I show how the film disrupts a dominant narrative within Western environmentalism, what Carolyn Merchant calls the Edenic recovery narrative. The traditional Edenic recovery narrative reproduces the dyadic relationship between woman/nature as passive (object) and man as active agent (subject). Yet, in disrupting the traditional Edenic recovery narrative, Fury Road allows for a representation of female nature that breaks from its traditionally accorded passive status. In the film, female nature gains agency not traditionally accorded to it. In this way, the film draws connections between women and nature, not in the service of capitalist patriarchy, but rather, as Alaimo writes, to re-cast nature as feminist space.

‘ Who killed the world?’ Religious paradox in Mad Max: Fury Road

George Miller’s Mad Max film series examines dystopian concerns vis-à-vis geographic instability and the fragility of human societal relationships, ultimately connecting human population crisis with the scarcity of natural resources and overall destruction of the planet. In his latest film, Fury Road, Miller makes use of religious ideology and practice to highlight ecological concerns and abuse of women. He contrasts patriarchal and matriarchal religious power structures in order to interrogate the causes of the Earth’s destruction. From these ideological contrasts, Miller introduces an ecological paradox that forms the film’s conflict. Oppressive patriarchal practices enslave people through false promises of eternity, but can offer no means to avoid a death brought about by earthly suffering. Conversely, matriarchal religious practices ensure equality but offer no sustainable model of maintaining the Earth’s resources. Ultimately, I argue that Miller employs this religious paradox to illustrate the problems of earthly salvation in relation to religious ideology. Miller suggests that devout worship, no matter how mindful or restorative, cannot rescue us from the ravaged Earth, nor can it absolve us from the guilt of ruining the environment.

Driving toward disability rhetorics: narrative, crip theory, and eco-ability in Mad Max: Fury Road

ABSTRACT We argue that the film Mad Max: Fury Road challenges stigmas associated with disability by conceptualizing a world that embraces the differences between disabled and abled bodies. Drawing on crip theory and eco-ability scholarship, we examine how Mad Max: Fury Road’s narrative criticizes normative and ableist understandings about the body by imagining a world that constructs accessible and valued spaces for the disabled. Dolmage [Dolmage, J. (2013). Disability Rhetoric. New York: Syracuse University Press] argues that scholars need to situate rhetoric on the experiences of disabled bodies to generate new meanings about disability. Mad Max: Fury Road generates such meanings by challenging normative and stigmatizing conceptions of disability through positive and nuanced representations of disabled bodies.

Myślenie utopijne w "Mad Max: Na drodze gniewu"

Myślenie utopijne w "Mad Max: Na drodze gniewu"

Myślenie utopijne w "Mad Max: Na drodze gniewu"

This article attempts to describe a sociological view of the post-apocalyptic world in Mad Max: Fury Road and characteristics of utopian thinking related to Furiosa’s rebellion. It reveals that in the post-apocalyptic worlds, social Darwinism grows into fundamental worldview, which is reflected in a feudal society of the Citadel. Afterwards, a feminist topic connected with Furiosa’s rebellion is analyzed. Subsequently, the article characterizes Maciej Czeremski’s and Jakub Sadowski’s structural understanding of the two terms – a utopia and a myth. Furiosa’s psychological motivation is interpreted by using them. They also facilitate to formulate a semantic relation between utopian thinking and an ideology, which is defined according to a psychoanalytic method. Afterwards, a Ernst Bloch’s phrase – a utopian impulse is used to analyze Max’s behavior. It ascertains that through relationship between Furiosa and Max a modernization project of the Citadel becomes feasible. A purpose of the article is to show that fictional post-apocalyptic worlds can be analyzed in a sociological perspective and be a part of socially engaged cinema.

Mad Max: travelling the fury road to learn economics

The use of film to teach economics is widely established. We extend this literature by analysing the critically acclaimed Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). The apocalyptic setting focuses on core economic concepts such as scarcity, resource use, productivity, specialisation, gains from trade, economic organisation, growth, and income inequality. We also suggest an out-of-class assignment that is suitable in both face-to-face and online instruction.

Mad Max: travelling the fury road to learn economics

Mad Max: travelling the fury road to learn economics

Living, Again: Population and Paradox in Recent Cinema

The last several decades have witnessed a drastic increase in ecological writing, but also a substantial lack in regards to the discussion of human population control. This article argues that the deficiency has been reproduced within several recent examples of eco-cinema, Snowpiercer and Mad Max: Fury Road. Despite strong conservationist themes and narratives encouraging social revolution, the films encounter similar theoretical difficulties, and enact similar resulting absences, within their representational fields. As a consequence, the environmental topics are filtered through an anthropocentric lens that generates a set of paradoxes regarding human consumption, sacrifice and the visualisation of future sustainable states.

Animal Activism and Environmentalism in an Age of Extinction

Animal Activism and Environmentalism in an Age of Extinction John Kinder (bio) Going to the Dogs: Greyhound Racing, Animal Activism, and American Popular Culture. By Gwyneth Anne Thayer. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2013. The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-in Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation. By Adam Rome. New York, NY: Hill and Wang. 2013. Total Liberation: The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement. By David Naguib Pellow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2014. On June 19, 2015, a team of biologists, including Paul R. Ehrlich, author of the 1960s bestseller The Population Bomb (1968), published a brief study in [End Page 17] Science Advances on the future of life on the planet. Their forecast was dire: the world is in the midst of a sixth mass extinction, a cataclysmic biotic collapse on par with the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Since 1900, more than 450 vertebrate species have disappeared, an extinction toll that will continue to increase over the next few centuries. “If the currently elevated extinction pace is allowed to continue,” they warn darkly, “humans will soon (in as little as three human lifetimes) be deprived of many biodiversity benefits” (read: the basic ecological conditions necessary to sustain life as we know it). And it is not like we can simply wait for things to improve: “On human time scales, this loss would be effectively permanent because in the aftermath of past mass extinctions, the living world took hundreds of thousands of years to rediversify.”1 As if that were not enough, the report’s authors blame human activity for the looming crisis. In their reckoning, global society has exploited the Earth’s living systems to the breaking point—and everyone, every thing, will pay the price. Ehrlich and company are the latest in a long line of commentators to raise the specter of anthropogenic (human-induced) extinction. As journalist Sarah Kaplan points out, a 1998 poll of four-hundred scientists taken by the American Museum of Natural History found that “70 percent believe the Earth is in the midst of one of its fastest mass extinctions, one that threatens the existence of humans as well as the millions of species we rely on.”2 Since that time, warnings of global catastrophe have only gotten louder. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014), writer Elizabeth Kolbert predicts the current extinction event will “continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have—or have not—inherited the earth.”3 Recently, world leaders have also begun to raise alarms about the implications of environmental destruction. At the 2015 graduation of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, Barack Obama called climate change a “serious threat to global security.”4 And just one day before the release of the Science Advances report, to the outrage of climate-change deniers and Earth exploiters worldwide, Pope Francis issued a more than one-hundred page encyclical condemning human destruction of the world’s ecosystems.5 Meanwhile, twenty-first century popular culture churns out apocalyptic visions of mass extinction and environmental collapse. Looking toward the future, films like John Hillcoat’s The Road (2009), David Michôd’s The Rover (2014), and Frank Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) paint a grim picture of a biosphere on the brink of destruction. And yet, when confronted with the most important topic of our time—possibly of all time—the field of American Studies has largely responded with silence.6 In a recent article in American Quarterly, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson observes, “American studies, the academic discipline arguably most dedicated to progressive political engagement, social justice, and activism, has for the most part ignored climate change and the still-accelerating consumption of fossil fuels despite our awareness of the catastrophic environmental and human consequences.”7 Much the same can be said about American Studies’ engagement [End Page 18] with human-animal studies (HAS), an interdisciplinary field dedicated to understanding the complex relationships between human and nonhuman animals. Over the last two decades, HAS...

Female action hero vs male dominance: The female representation in Mad Max: Fury Road

Female action hero vs male dominance: The female representation in Mad Max: Fury Road