Mad Max: Fury Road is less radical than its B-movie influences

Who would have thought that “women in prison” films, one of the most despised exploitation movie subgenres, would become so influential? And yet, stealthily, the films have permeated popular culture in recent years. Orange is the New Black has garnered widespread acclaim for both its storytelling and its diverse cast; the Australian series Wentworth set new standards for brutality on the small screen. And now, Mad Max: Fury Road is winning accolades from virtually everyone for its high-octane vision of feminist heroism and patriarchy upended.

Fury Road hasn’t generally been thought of as a WIP film. But much of it has been lifted directly from that genre. The whole movie is organised around a prison escape. Furiosa (Charlize Theron) is freeing a group of women from sex slavery at the hands of the evil patriarch Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). The fact that those freed prisoners all look like supermodels dressed in lingerie is a standard WIP trope. So is their growing battle-hardened resourcefulness and, for that matter, their commitment to feminist revolution. The end of the film is foreshadowed directly in Jonathan Demme’s cult WIP classic Caged Heat.

Mad Max alters the WIP tropes too. Furiosa is uber-competent, in an action movie style which owes more to Ripley or Sarah Connor than WIP films. The sequence where Angharad (Rosie Huntington-Wiley) shields the moving War Rig with her pregnant body, since she knows Joe won’t shoot at her, has no real precedent in WIP films that I’m aware of. Pregnancy as empowerment is not a major concern of the genre.

But while Fury Road has moments that are more thematically daring than its exploitation roots, in other ways it’s far less bold. As Nashwa Khan notes at In These Times, of the (admirably) many women on screen, only two are people of colour: Toast (Zoë Kravitz) and Cheedo (Courtney Eaton). This stands in stark contrast to most exploitation WIP films, which typically include a number of black women. Pam Grier was a major character in Jack Hill’s The Big Bird Cage and The Big Doll House, while Ella Reid and Juanita Brown both have important roles in Caged Heat.

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The diversity on Orange is the New Black is not an innovation. WIP films since the 1970s have detailed how patriarchy and prison target women of colour. Fury Road, on the other hand, reserves its main roles for white women. As a result, it ends up appropriating black experiences of exploitation. Like The Handmaid’s Tale, it’s a dystopia that imagines white women in the future suffering from the oppression visited on women of colour.

Unlike Fury Road, WIP exploitation films are notable for their refusal to treat the women prisoners as good or pure. In The Big Doll House, Collier (Judy Brown) seems at first to be a weak innocent, but we soon find out that she killed her husband after finding him sleeping with the houseboy. Yet we’re supposed to sympathise with her anyway, and with Maggie (Juanita Brown) in Caged Heat even though she’s enthusiastically criminal. Prison is wrong and oppressive in these films, even when it is used against people who aren’t law-abiding.

WIP films also traditionally include numerous evil female wardens and bad guys. In Fury Road, the women are blameless, opening the way for the male saviour familiar from action films and westerns. Max, haunted by the image of his daughter, is the Han Solo cowboy. Exiled from society by madness, grief and his general need to ramble, he is redeemed by mother’s milk (in which he literally bathes at one point).

Similarly, Nux (Nicholas Hoult), one of Joe’s warboys, is transformed by his love for Capable (Riley Keough). True to the gendered script, amidst many sacrifices and acts of bravery, Nux is the one character who deliberately dies to save the others, especially Capable. Women can be heroic and can save each other, but the white man is still the one who sacrifices himself for the white woman, straightening out WIP’s queerer dynamics.

Men in WIP films are sometimes villains, love interests, jokes or sympathetic characters, but they’re virtually never heroes. In Caged Heat, for example, it’s white woman Belle Tyson (Roberta Collins) who gallantly risks everything for her black lover, Pandora (Ella Reid).

None of this is to say that Fury Road is a bad film, or an unfeminist film. On the contrary, its presentation of gender roles and of women’s community is remarkable for a big-budget multiplex spectacular. Still, it’s worth considering that many of the moments in the film that seem to be innovations are actually borrowed from 40-year-old exploitation films, whose representation of women of colour and eschewal of male heroics is still, apparently, too radical for the mainstream. Fury Road is both an example of how adventurous big budget cinema can be, and a reminder that even the least popular B-movies of past eras have an influence on what’s out there now.