A Feminist Review by Elliott Marie
I’ve heard a
lot of talk about how Mad Max: Fury Road was such a great
feminist movie, and I agree with the great, but not so much the Feminist.
However, I have to live up to my Feminist Theory professor and appreciate the
good things while critiquing the bad. For starters it was a good try, and
merely stating you are trying to create a feminist movie is a good move, but
they didn’t completely pull their weight. There are about 5 female
characters other than Furiosa in the whole movie. I get that the whole movie
has a very small number of people in it, but my problem with this was that all
5 of these women were basically Victoria Secret models with a little dirt on
their face.
Oh wait, one
of them is…
You can
imagine the insecurity of the girls without model body types were feeling
watching this movie. Also, these other female characters could hardly pull
their own weight. Because they have a female warrior as bad-ass as
Furiosa I don’t see why it would have been inconceivable to have a group of
female warriors escaping to go to the green land instead of breeders.
This idea of Furiosa’s to run away to this land fails and she decides
they are just going to ride into the desert and hope for the best, which would
have most likely gotten them killed. Luckily Max is there to stop them from that
foolishness and saves the day, telling them to go back and kill the evil
motherfucker who is causing all of their problems. Also, most of the girls in
the movie just fucking die. Most of the breeder women die, most of the
old badass women die and even Furiosa almost dies. But thank goodness Max comes
in again and saves the day. Also can there be one action movie that doesn’t
have a stupid and unnecessary love connection…
Now ending on the
good things, because they definitely are there. Having a woman who does not
have a stereotypically able body and is not conventionally beautiful as one of
the main, kick ass warrior characters was something yet to be done in mainstream
movies. It is common for
men and women with disabilities to be deemed “unable” and this movie is a
testament to how false that idea is. I’m sure there were plenty of girls with
disabilities who were watching this movie and finally felt like they could
relate to the badass hero, and that to me is an incredible accomplishment.
The characters of the breeder women could have
also shed some light on the problem of sexualizing women and how women and
birth-giver are so synonymous. I am also sooo ecstatic that the director of the
movie collaborated with Eve Ensler (author of the Vagina Monologues and
researcher of violence and mutilation against women) in order to correctly
portray women in slavery. She worked with the actresses to help them better
represent women who had been traumatized; that is such an amazing aspect of
this film. Another thing that I loved about this movie was that it was
absolutely beautiful. The colors and the scenery were exquisite for
working with a desert of orange on more orange.
All the things that I would like to see changed
are not just in this film; they are in most all mainstream movies. The
main reason I chose to call this movie out for it was because I was excited and
also slightly let down by the failure to be completely feminist. However, I
really enjoyed this movie and I am happier about all they were able to
accomplish than I am disappointed in the things that they weren’t. There
will always be room for improvement, but this was one badass, wild movie unlike
anything I had ever seen before.
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