squeegee started this discussion 11 years ago#42,598
so i read that thread or whatever from last week and thought it was kinda funny but i actually watched mad max yesterday and then i watched it again tonight... it... it actually IS. i could explain some of it, but i'm going to have to watch it a third time and take some notes first. i might do that, but i might not. someone wille ventually like publish a paper somewhere about this because it's actually pretty blatantly obvious and like right on the nose stuff. So maybe it won't really get that treatment because it's kind of low hanging fruit. But it's certainly there! like at first i dismissed it, but then it just kept happening all through the movie. everything about it from the dialog to the symbolism it's feminist propaganda. militant feminist propaganda at that! it blamed men for all the troubles of the world, reduced Max to a no-named "everyman" who represents a man who relinquishes control and let's women literally speak for him. he is merely muscle to be exploited for that strength, but his "life-blood" is required to sustain the species, but he's merely a "blood bag." and at the end women are literally lifted up and hailed as life-givers and saviors while max is given no recognition except that only after giving of himself fully and freely to sustain women is he allowed to be identified by name.
it's actually kind of nuts because the symbolism goes really deep too, and even the dialog is steeped with allusions. it's like some big allegorical thing that's going to require a lot of looking at before it can really be given a proper interpretation, and it'll of course have to be compared to Frank Miller's other work, but it kinda seems like at some point Frank Miller thought, "boy-o-boy, men have really screwed the pooch, we should just put women in charge," and decided to turn a "man's action movie" into a feminist piece. because really it seems to be coming from, like, some old school of thinking that one gender should be dominant over the other. you know? like the 80s, old star trek and shit, they'd come across a planet of women leaders with subservient men or whatever because the writers weren't actually forward thinking enough or progressive enough at that time to conceive of real equality. like a one gender must dominate mentality, one or the other, but equality can't happen.
it just seems like such a backwards kind of message to me. but it's definitely there, and if you don't believe it when you see it you will towards the end and they reach their destination and you see who they were searching for and realize who they were escaping from the whole time.
so check it out, it's like... a really weird juxtaposition
hamfist !t5TYQ9eJPs joined in and replied with this 11 years ago, 8 minutes later[^][v]#565,239
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squeegee (OP) replied with this 11 years ago, 9 minutes later, 18 minutes after the original post[^][v]#565,244
@previous (hamfist !t5TYQ9eJPs)
well, not so much, in the movie it had a lot more to do with men consuming and bartering "mother's milk" which was taken by force from women held as property. In the original Mad Max movies the themes were more about Fuel and scarcity and survival rather then... well, all these new themes brought in with the Furiosa (female lead character). Max pretty much was a supporting character who didn't really impact the outcome of events in any real way other than at one time he just points out one obvious fact that everyone was overlooking, but it was the women who made the logical leap and convinced the group where salvation lies, and how to get there. also, you might notice upon a second viewing, but pretty much every time their progress is impeded it's when Max has assumed any kind of leadership role. It's only when he relinquishes everything to Furiosa that they make progress again. this happens over and over