"Mad Max is Sidelined in His Own Movie," and Why Patently Wrong Ideas Never Die

if you really want to be a dick you can even fit Fury Road into a Disney "the handsome prince saves the princess" frame

Longtime readers know that I have written about this strange and wrong idea before, but with the release of Furiosa there’s been another spasm of the bizarre, objectively-incorrect idea that Mad Max is sidelined/unimportant/secondary in Fury Road. This is, I think, indisputably untrue in plot terms, and it’s even worse thematically, not buried or hidden thematic suggestions but the most basic and unmistakable themes of the movie. In a simple plot sense, I’ll keep this brief by making a bulleted list.

• Without Max’s intervention, Furiosa and the wives would surely have died

• Without Max’s intervention, there’s no addition of Nux to the gang, and with no Max and no Nux there’s nobody to fix the war rig within the flow of the plot as we know it

• Max dispatches with a small army’s worth of enemy grunts

• Max’s ability to drive the war rig makes Furiosa’s maneuver at the gate (where they meet the dirtbike gang) possible, without which they would have been quickly caught and killed by Immortan Joe and his warboys

• Two of the three major sub-villains in the movie are the People Eater and the Bullet Farmer; Max kills both

• Max saves the lives of Furiosa and the wives countless times

• He’s the one who stops the crew from driving off into the salt flats to slowly die, and he proposes the idea that works! If he doesn’t intervene they die a miserable death from thirst and exposure! He individually, specifically inspires the heroism that makes the conclusion possible, and which dramatizes the essential theme that we have no other world to go to and must save the one we have

• He literally gives his actual blood to Furiosa in the process of saving her life

At the very least, he shares the stage as an equal hero in the story, and he’s the protagonist regardless of the events of the movie because he’s the POV character. I just don’t see any factual basis for this attitude. It’s just… wrong, in plot terms.

As I said, though, the thematic misunderstanding is worse. The whole point of the movie is that feminist victory does not come from the replacement of men or the marginalization of men but from a rejection of dictatorship and an embrace of democracy, horizontal leadership, and communal values. Immortan Joe rules as a sole patriarchal autocrat, going to great lengths to appear to be virile and manly despite his physical weakness and age. His reign is cruel and arbitrary, as dictatorship always is. And the status of “his” wives demonstrates the sexual aggression inherent to that kind of leadership. His difficulty in producing a male heir who’s “perfect in every way” echoes a long lineage in historical mythology where a ruler’s reproductive struggles echo the failings of his rule. Against him is pitted not a single heroine - a replacement of male patriarchal dictatorship with female matriarchal dictatorship - but a collection of men and women who work together as an autonomous band that deliberates together to make decisions. The scene in the salt flats where Max convinces the rest to turn back and fight for the Green Place is so essential not only for plot reasons but because it dramatizes a form of democratic decision making through argument, negotiation, and mutual respect. If Furiosa gave an autocratic order “Back to the Green Place!” then, yes, that’s a female dictator. She didn’t. She engaged as part of an egalitarian collective based on equal right to speak. It’s as obvious and effective a political statement as I can ever remember in a big-budget blockbuster film.

“Furiosa replaces Max in Fury Road” is so deeply stupid not because it simply ignores the facts but because it does so in pursuit of flagrantly missing the (brilliant and essential) political message of an unusually thoughtful movie. So why is it so popular?

On the one hand, we have this whole vast discourse about this kind of question, right - why people believe things that aren’t true. The whole wearying conversation about misinformation and disinformation is among my very least branches of contemporary political argument, and not just because it’s dominated by BlueAnon. Core to the problem is that the idea of misinformation fundamentally begs the question; there’s always an antecedent set of questions about what actually is good and actually is true that you can’t just wave away. If you were to pick through all of those questions and try to hash them out before you figure out the nature of misinformation, you’d be setting yourself the task of getting to the bottom of every question of political controversy we have in the 21st century, and I think if you accomplished that you’d probably not be so concerned with misinformation anymore. And for the record, a core problem with the whole misinformation discourse lies in its tendency to convince people - like, say, the type of person who can’t believe Democrats can ever legitimately lose any election - that the essential political dilemma is misconduct, chicanery, dirty tricks. It’s not. The essential political dilemma is that many people have sincerely held beliefs that they express legitimately that are entirely wrong. Anyway - I don’t think misinformation is a good frame here. I think the problem here is that people are often wrong because they are impressionable and they’re impressionable because it’s scary to stand alone.

I’m aware that this next part will sound impossible conceited no matter how I put it, so here goes: I think ideas become memes because a lot of people are afraid to have their own ideas. I think people say this sort of thing because the internet has taught them that the only thing that matters in life is appearing clever and so they say stuff other people have already preapproved of as clever ideas.

Even dipping your toe into online life will make it clear that opinion remains the essential currency of the internet. We are bathed in opinion, here, all kinds of opinions about all kinds of things. And I think that if, like me, you’ve been a relentless and self-satisfied little opinionater your whole life, it’s easy to forget that this is an unnatural state for a lot of people. I was raised in a deeply political home, one where I was routinely challenged by adults to express and defend my point of view when I was quite young, and as is common with such things for a long time I didn’t realize that this wasn’t how everybody lived. I thought that’s just what childhood was, what being a person was. Turns out that’s not true for many or most people.

Of course, no commodity is less valuable online than opinion, thanks to the immense oversupply. But it remains the case that for a very large swath of the human population, probably the majority, constantly forming and expressing and fighting over opinions on contentious topics is an unusual and unpleasant activity. It’s not that many people out there just don’t naturally form opinions, on art and culture and politics, the way anyone does. But to think of those opinions as something to constantly bring into a state of contention with others, to argue all the time as a matter of day-to-day life, is intimidating even for many smart and principled people. It’s hard to recall now, but there was a very recent period in which most people had no greater opportunity to share their opinions than to say them out loud at work or a bar or during the fellowship service after church. The truly motivated might stand on the street with a bullhorn or start a paper newsletter or write letters to the editor. Most people never bothered. The cacophony of opinion we live in is very new.

And I think that a natural way to deal with the new set of social expectations is to grab onto an opinion that’s already been shared and accepted positively. It’s a pretty basic strategy, same as many other things in life - find what’s gone over well in the past and ape it. At the very least, you’ll be in good company if someone else disagrees with your opinion, and you can often simply Google a prewritten rebuttal. This is a very large chunk of what happens on Reddit, to pick a salient example. I’m aware that there’s all kinds of people on that network and some of them are very sharp. But it’s the case that a ton of what gets said on Reddit comes in these predigested, mimetic forms - hence “take my updoot, good sir!” and “this is freakin EPIC” and various bacon-and-doggo-related nonsense - and that certainly extends to opinions, which sometimes appear to be literally copy-and-pasted. There’s this whole other wing of this conversation that deserves to be given adequate space some other time, about how any argument that looks like an argument that’s already been socially rejected faces an uphill battle. (I personally live in the hell of otherwise-bright liberals who reject any claim that appears to be a complaint about kids these days, even when that claim is plainly correct.) For now it’s enough to say that when a bad idea becomes a meme, it can get to a point where whether it’s true or false has no bearing at all on how far it spreads. Every new person who shares it adds another layer to the argumentative armor of those who use it, in a way that has nothing to do with the idea being good or true. The more well-worn it becomes the more safety there is in deploying it.

Now, here’s where maybe I puncture the admittedly condescending nature of what I’ve just said: there’s every chance, in any given dispute, that the meme idea is the correct one. It’s possible (though difficult to actually pull out of the movie itself) that Max really is marginal in Fury Road. It’s possible that every one of my precious little bespoke political opinions is dumb and wrong. Their status of - originality isn’t quite the right word - their status of being homemade does not give them any greater access to the truth. But I do think that the tendency to argue with prefabricated parts leads to the perpetuation of silly ideas that should, at the very least, be treated with much more skepticism of their own, and also to resistance to evolving or adjusting ideas over time, in response to critical engagement. Because if you got an opinion off of the rack, it’s much more intimidating to make alterations. It’s like a college student trying to alter a paper he found online so that it actually matches the assignment sheet.

For a long while now I’ve identified this as an era of rampant emotional insecurity. If you asked me to name the kind of people who would seem to be most equipped to live in a state of healthy and unfussy self-confidence, it would be educated and middle-class-or-above urbanites who work in enviable careers in tech, media, nonprofits, academia, education, or government. Short of being a celebrity or a billionaire, those people would seem to be living the lives that our society is most willing to see as winning, or at least as not losing. Yet, as you are aware, the type of person I’ve described is often the type to fret about everything all the time, to be chemically dependent on both stimulants and anxiolytics, to go through therapists even faster than they go through romantic partners, to be afraid to check their email for fear of having to make a decision or tell someone no, to leave every social situation and immediately perform a ruthless postmortem in which every possible minor social misstep they may have made is studied for hours in self-loathing and regret. The collapse of meaning in a post-religious, post-family, post-sincerity world is implicated here. So is smart kid status culture and (especially) parents who insisted that their merely talented children were actually gifted. So is the internet. But whatever the causes, the limitless insecurity and endless self-reflexive neuroses that once made Woody Allen movies portraits of a very specific kind of person are now so common that I’m more surprised when I meet people who don’t suffer from them. And ready-to-wear arguments about movies that are simultaneously viral and just plain-facedly wrong are one minor consequence.

I have no idea if the person who sent the tweet at the top did so herself under the influence of meme ideas. Maybe, for her, it was a wholly novel insight that reflected on her own organic inability to assess plot or theme on even a basic level. But the tweet has more than 30,000 likes because it’s a simple, easily-digested idea about a popular movie that has already received the stamp of approval from something called The Internet. That makes it safe, easy to share at parties, just like “rising lifespans are just because of falling infant mortality” and “there’s more people alive now than have ever died” and other predigested little bon mots. People feel that they have to make incisive or witty observations about everything around them, in order to be liked, and fumbling around in the burlap sacks of their minds they find only those baubles that someone else crafted. So they throw them out there. And, over time, these things get repeated so often, so insistently, and by so many people who are wracked with a need for social approval so deep I can’t comprehend it, in spite of how wrong they are I’m tempted to say, well, who am I to blow against the wind?