Mad Max Cheats and Cheat Codes, PC. Web Media Network Limited, 1999 - 2020. This site is not affiliated in any way with Microsoft, Sony, Sega, Nintendo or any video game publishers. Max is ready to take on the Gastown races. The Big Chief, the V8 engine, and Hope are on the line. The objective for the first part of this mission is simple: defeat the reigning champion, Stank.
Mad Max Fury Road has gotten a lot of people talking. It is, in a word, awesome, not just for being an amazing movie, but also for being incredibly progressive. George Miller went as far as to bring on Eve Ensler, writer of The Vagina Monologues, to help him tackle the topic of sex slavery and other delicate subjects. It showcases masculine and feminine men and women being both strong and weak in many different situations, from the slow transformation of once “breeders” into combat ready soldiers, to the breakdown of Nux, when he realizes he may not be meant for Valhalla.
Everyone is going nuts about this movie, with it receiving at 99% on Rotten Tomatoes, something that is rarely ever heard of! Everyone, that is, except for a group of Men’s Rights Activists who say that this movie is a plot by the feminist illuminati to “vaginafy” a truly manly man’s vision of a post-apocalyptic future…. And Anita Sarkeesian.
Anita, of Feminist Frequency, took to twitter to explain why she thinks that Mad Max Fury Road isn’t feminist. Her discussion reads as follows:
I’m not one to shy away from expressing unpopular opinions. So here goes. I saw Fury Road. I get why people like it. But it isn’t feminist. On the surface, Mad Max is about resisting a cartoonish version of misogyny. But that resistance takes the form of more glorified violence.
Fury Road is different from many action films in that it lets some women participate as equal partners in a cinematic orgy of male violence. Feminism doesn't simply mean women getting to partake in typical badass 'guy stuff'. Feminism is about redefining our social value system. Sometimes violence may be necessary for liberation from oppression, but it's always tragic. Fury Road frames it as totally fun and awesome.
As a film Mad Max absolutely adores its gritty future. The camera caresses acts of violence in the same way it caresses the brides' bodies. 'We are not things” is a great line, but doesn’t work when the plot and ESPECIALLY the camera treats them like things from start to finish.
Mad Max's villains are caricatures of misogyny which makes overt misogynists angry but does not challenge more prevalent forms of sexism. Viewers get to feel good about hating cartoon misogyny without questioning themselves or examining how sexism actually works in our society.
It makes me profoundly sad that mainstream pop culture now interprets feminism to mean “women can drive fast and stoically kill people too!” We’re starved for representations of powerful women but we need to re-imagine concepts of power & move beyond the glorification of violence.
And now comes the part where I make everyone in the known universe hate me.
You see, I sided with Anita through the whole GamerGate scandal for a number of reasons. For one, her opposition were people who a) were claiming that a secret cabal of feminist game journalists were secretly conspiring to ruin the man’s world of video games, which is just insanity, and b) people who decided to attempt to stress their viewpoints through personal threats of violence and cyberterrorism. In short, I pretty much knew which side was the bad guys here.
But prior to GamerGate, I was one of Sarkeesian’s heavy critics. I thought her points were generally good, but I found the way she went about expressing them to sometimes be lacking. Her examples could have been better researched at times, and the ones she used sometimes felt like a stretch when there were so many easy to use good and obvious other examples that could have been used. But these were just nitpicks about a person who otherwise had a good point.
In short, I don’t always agree with Anita Sarkeesian, it’s just that mentioning it during the troubled times of GamerGate was a one way ticket to having someone use that as justification to make a bomb threat against her.
But I find myself, after hearing her take on Mad Max Fury Road, needing to respectfully disagree with her once more. Far be it from me to mansplain to a woman about what is and isn’t feminist, but in this situation it’s not really me who is doing the explaining, it’s Eve Ensler of The Vagina Monologues.
You see, feminism is all about equal rights, opportunity, and representation, and I personally don’t think there is anything more feminist than, quite frankly, deferring to a feminist about what is feminist! That’s exactly what George Miller did. Ensler had a hand in nearly every aspect of the movie, from character dialogue to camera direction. He gave every opportunity for a feminist point of view to be expressed.
I get that Sarkeesian thinks that, even so, the movie fails at being feminist, but I’m not sure I agree on her reasons. Once again, I think she has a point in that we, as a society, do need to rethink our core values. However, I think the fact that we need to do that doesn’t necessarily make this movie non-feminist.
First of all, Sarkeesian says that the camera caresses it’s women as things, and caresses the violence all the same. However, I would say the camera does that very little if at all. Much unlike many other action films, which use a dynamic camera to show you close ups of every single punch and every single piece of a woman’s body, George Miller keeps his camera pulled out most of the time. It allows you to see every bit of every scene, instead of artificially glorifying it with zooms and pans. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I enjoyed the movie so much. It went out of its way to show you the whole scene, rather than “caressing” any part of it.
Similarly, Sarkeesian says this is a cinematic orgy of male violence, but in terms of violence ratio to other movies, Fury Road's violence is actually quite low. Fist fights and gun fights are not long and drawn out, but rather short and to the point, emphasizing the permanence of violent acts.
Sarkeesian says that Mad Max adores its gritty future, but that is completely contrary to Miller’s original purpose. Mad Max, as a franchise, was an attempt to show where Miller thought current day Australian social and economic values would take us, if left unfettered. It is, in a way, satire, Horatian satire to be sure, but satire nonetheless. Then, as is now, the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max is meant to be an extreme version of the world we live in today, with even more resource scarcity and even more fanaticism. It sounds, to an extent, as if this satirization of our world cannot exist in the same space as feminism in Sarkeesian’s opinion, because it put the spotlight on those very violent acts.
In short, she says that the villains are caricatures of misogyny, but isn’t that what satire does? Make caricatures of important political and social issues so that we might more easily understand them?
Furthermore, I believe Sarkeesian is missing a very powerful tool that George Miller has employed here, the deadening of violence. You see, there is only one sort of violence in the movie that felt real, and that was violence against women. All the rest of the violence is this strange and wacky cartoonified version of violence (something Sarkeesian herself mentions). But that doesn’t make you look away from the violence against women, it makes you look straight at it.
You see, just like in Mortal Kombat, this extreme violence is almost a non-entity in the world of Mad Max. It becomes abstracted, brought away from the realm of human experience. It’s filled with double bass guitars that belch flame and gasoline-spitting races, things so far away from reality we can barely consider them.
But the violence against women in this movie is not cartoonish. The camera lingers on the death of important female characters in ways it simply doesn’t during random chase scenes. Each loss of life, each senseless act of violence against women in this post-apocalyptic wasteland is a punctuation on the movie, punching you in the gut and letting you know that there is a serious issue here, not just in this society but in our society. Heck, even in my viewing, I saw people walking away from the movie discussing how the events mirrored contemporary feminist issues. The fact that it started such a discussion is alone showing progress in the right direction. Hell, the very fact that so many articles, so many reviews, have talked about the movie through the lens of feminism shows that we are going in the right direction.
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Yes, we have to rethink our definitions of power, and yes feminist characters are more than women that can “drive fast and stoically kill people,” but there ARE characters like that in this movie. There are characters that cause real change via their compassion, not through bullets or force. There are characters that stood as icons that there was still something to believe in in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. The movie exalts traditionally feminine qualities as much as it exalts traditionally masculine qualities. It kind of feels like the only character that Sarkeesian is referencing is Imperator Furiosa, but there are far more characters than that, that play incredibly big roles in the plot.
In fact, I flat out disagree when Sarkeesian says the plot treats women like things from start to finish. The whole central point of Furiosa’s conflict is that she, and Max, and Nux, and for that matter everyone she knows and loves, are risking their lives so that women in this world would NOT be treated like objects, and in the end, they not only triumph over their adversaries, but rise to a position of power so that they can prevent such a thing from ever happening again. The movie explicitly goes out of its way to NOT portray women as objects, but capable, compassionate, varied characters each with their own skills and personalities.
In short, is this the “perfect” feminist movie? No. However, I don’t think that makes the movie non-feminist. Yes, the movie is violent, but it isn’t glorifying violence, it is satirizing it. It is framing a central conflict inside a world gone mad, a world that has no meaning, which is exactly what both Max and Furiosa are struggling with. Max has a hard time finding anything to care about in the wasteland other than survival, and Furiosa’s only way to find something that matters is to dedicate her life to the women she is trying to save, yet eventually these women come to save themselves, which in turn gives Furiosa a renewed sense of purpose, and gives Max the strength to go on. I think condemning this movie as non-feminist simply because there are women who are violent, in addition to the women who are not violent, is being short sighted, and I don’t think we are going to get any closer to a feminist utopia by saying movies like Mad Max simply shouldn’t exist.
But that’s what I feel Sarkeesian is saying, when she says that any movie which portrays a cartoonish idea of violence cannot be feminist. I’m sorry Anita, you don’t have my support on this one.
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| By Angelo M. D'Argenio Contributing Writer Date: May 26, 2015 |
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*The views expressed within this article are solely the opinion of the author and do not express the views held by Cheat Code Central.*
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