Opening remarks from tonight’s 35mm screening of Mad Max: Fury Road at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto.
My name is Matt Brown, I’m a white Canadian settler speaking to you tonight from the treaty lands and territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, and the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee. I’m here to talk about a film that was made by a white Australian settler, on location in the African nation of Namibia. It is a film which features no Namibian actors in majority roles; its only major character of colour is played by Zoe Kravitz*, who is of mixed heritage and is photographed here to be white-passing. The only major African actor in the cast is Charlize Theron, a white South African. The film contains no canonically queer or transgender characters. (Happy Trans Day of Visibility, by the way.) It’s a film that’s been hailed as a feminist masterpiece and although the film’s feminist icon, Furiosa, is both disabled and is given agency without having that agency come from suffering onscreen violence, the same cannot be said for the other women in the film. My point in raising all of this is simply to say, that representation, like acknowledgment, is not the work. Representation and acknowledgment exist on a continuum and while awareness of that continuum is a good first step it is not, nor ever can it be, any more than the first step.
*I mistakenly omitted Courtney Eaton here, who is of mixed English, Māori, Chinese, and Cook Island Māori descent.
So before we begin I would like to thank everyone who gave me eyes, ears, and time in the writing of my book, The Cinema of Survival, particularly those who pointed out my shortcomings, biases, and straw man arguments. Foremost I’d like to thank my two most important collaborators, my editor Nives Hajdin and my designer Annie Milova. Nives gave me a lot of time and labour on how to discuss many of the throughlines in the film that deal with traumatized women, and with madness; and Annie took a look at a film that is, above all, a gorgeous piece of visual art, and decided that the book should be, as much as possible, equally gorgeous. They both made this thing about a billion times better than it was when it was just a bunch of essays sitting on my computer and I thank them.
So! Congratulations to all of you; you have, thus far, survived the apocalypse. How have things been going? Are you enjoying it? Is it working out the way you imagined when you were watching The Walking Dead or playing Horizon Zero Dawn? The apocalypse became personal for all of us in the last couple of years, and then we got the real kick in the pants, which is that we SUCK at it. We suck at it. For a society that has done more than its fair share, at least in the action or fantasy space, of imagining the end of the world… well, to return to The Walking Dead, it turns out we’re not the human survivors; we’re the zombies.
Why are we so obsessed with apocalypse fiction? The end of the world is not something we need to conjure for our own amusement; it’s something where all we need to do is wait long enough, and it will get here. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk; I am usually more fun than this. But I gotta tell you, the older I get the more eerily credible George Miller’s setup for the apocalypse in Mad Max becomes. We run out of oil; and the world becomes a war zone. We run out of water; and then the planet cooks. It might not end up looking the way we expect it to look from the Mad Max films. For example, anyone who’s read Emily St. John Mandel’s book, Station Eleven, has been let in on the worst Mad Max-impacting secret about the apocalypse, which is that refined gasoline is useless after three years, so all you Road Warriors in the making, I hate to break it to you, are going to have to get really good at riding bicycles. Skateboard gangs, everywhere! A pack of feral sprinters!
What will you do when the gas runs out? When the water in Toronto is as dangerous for you to drink as the water is right now, in many of our Indigenous communities? Are you going to make it? I am not going to make it. I’ll just own that right now. My best case scenario is that I end up like Tom Hanks at the end of Cloud Atlas, a scar-faced old man sitting around a campfire telling kids stories of the way things used to be. That’s why I own so many Star Wars action figures. I’m not going to make up the stories, I’m just going to copy stories that George Lucas made up, and pass those myths on to the next generation so that myth can return to what it was before pop culture gobbled it all up: an externalization of the inner battles we all, as human beings, struggle with as we’re growing up — and, if we are to become heroic, have to learn to overcome.
Mad Max: Fury Road occupies a relatively rare spot in my relationship with movies, which is that it is a movie where, when I first saw it, the first thing I did after it was over was buy a ticket to the next show. And I just kept going. I was going through some pretty terrible shit in my own life and struggling with mental health issues on top of that, and I just… went to see Mad Max: Fury Road, over and over again, whenever I felt crappy or like I needed to lose myself in something bigger and louder than me for a little while. That’s a function of the myth too, and therefore a function of popular culture, although I think the folks that whine about Marvel or Star Wars tend to overlook that part; for better or worse, myths work because we project ourselves into their heroes and then co-experience the catharsis that the hero experiences at the end of the story. Which is a Joseph Campbell way to say, we can work our ya-ya’s out by identifying with, and then experiencing, these heroic journeys. I don’t know if that’s what happened to me in the summer of 2015 but I certainly do know that I came out of that experience with enough viewings of Fury Road under my belt that I suddenly had a lot of different and not entirely related things to say about it.
So I wrote a book. Of essays. Think pieces, I think you’d call ‘em. It’s this book, not this book. That book came out last week. I’m sure it’s great, I haven’t read it. I’m sorry if you’re here because of that book! I did not write that book! If you brought that book, I will absolutely sign that book. But no. I wrote this book, and I tried to work out some of the ways Fury Road works as well as it does, beyond the obvious, which is that yes, it is obviously a phenomenal action-adventure movie, laden with practical stunts and unobtrusive CGI, and it tees up not just the iconic figure of Furiosa, but, I think, also a more interesting and complicated Max than we had in the other three films — and not just because of what we’ve all subsequently learned about the other guy.
But it’s also a story of a War Boy who becomes a Peace Boy; and it’s a film produced in 3-D for a 2-D medium that nonetheless works within what I call four-dimensional blocking; and it’s the film that generated the “that’s bait” meme. Which is very useful when you’re on the internet because pretty much everything on the internet is bait. And it’s about people whose bodies are at one point enslaved and commoditized who subsequently take that control back, and make their own choices about what to do with it. My point being, there is a lot here beyond the vroom vroom pow pow, as one of my friends and I used to call it.
Most importantly, to me anyway, this film is about the last and arguably most important beat of the hero’s journey: the bit where the hero, having undergone their trials and overcome their demons, returns with those learnings to their community, to make their community a better place. I say this only because for hundreds of thousands of years, a natural and (I think) mutually understood balance has existed between the needs of any given individual and the bedrock reality that without the community around them, no individual on this planet can survive. And in the past, let’s say, one hundred years but certainly in the past five, in Western culture at least, the latter understanding has all but evaporated for many, many, many members of this society — who think that what they want simply matters more than whether what they want will directly or indirectly lead to the harm of their community.
And Mad Max as originally conceived is by any yardstick an individual. He is an icon of rugged, masculine individualism. He’s a lone gunslinger, as a western archetype. A ronin, as an eastern archetype. And he’s alone at the start of this film, and it nearly gets him killed. It’s the first thing that happens in the movie. It certainly gets him enslaved, tattooed, chained up, and used as an ambulatory blood bag for the soldiers of a war he did not start and wants nothing to do with. Through luck and happenstance he finds himself in a group, with Furiosa and the women she is shepherding to safety, and he wants nothing to do with them either. He wants to go his own way.
But there comes a point in the middle of the film where Max, Furiosa, and the Wives have all been locked up in the War Rig for a few scenes, fighting like children, and then they get attacked by a gang of bikers in a canyon. It’s my favourite scene in the film. Without even a word spoken, they immediately begin to work together as a unit to defend the group and escape their peril. Mad Max, in the previous films, was the reluctant hero on the outside of a group of people who needed his help. Here, he is very uncomfortably stuck in the middle of them and what he learns over the course of this myth is how to be a reliable part of that group, to the other people within it. Remember that word: reliable. It’s the only compliment Furiosa ever gives him. It’s something I’ve thought about, nearly every day, since the first time I saw this film. So all of us – all of you – by all means, engage in self-care and know yourselves and do what you have to do to preserve your peace in this apocalypse. But never forget that you owe something to every single person around you, at the same time. Be that road warrior. Be reliable. Thank you.