‘So shiny, so chrome’: images and ideology of humans, machines, and the Earth in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road

Abstract

Mad Max: Fury Road has been critiqued for its feminist, masculine, biblical, and environmental themes, but these critiques fail to engage with the connection between humans, machines, and the Earth in Fury Road. Nuclear technology may have produced the apocalyptic wasteland in which the film is set, but machines and industrial technology remain coupled to humanity to the point of symbiosis. Through the images of Fury Road, director George Miller reveals an ideology of ecomobility that demands an assemblage of human and machine. To exist in the wild and desolate spaces of the Earth is to become one with machines. Further, despite the distraction of subjective violence, the film is a critique of the ideological fantasy of modernity's regime of automobility and its connection to capitalism.

Apocalypse yesterday: Posthumanism and comics in the Anthropocene

“…Combining Sci-Fi’s cross-genre ‘patterning of possible worlds and possible times’ (Haraway, 2016: 31) with the posthuman qualities of the comics form, we therefore continue our empirical analyses with a reading of Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller et al., 2015) – not the film, but the subsequent comic, which positions itself as a ‘prelude’ to the film’s events. The 2015 blockbuster has been widely celebrated for its critiques of water scarcity – by NASA’s chief water expert Jay Famiglietti, no less (Onal, 2015); for its opposition to ‘normative understandings of the body by making characters with disability central to its narrative’ (Fletcher and Primack, 2017: 345); and for its critique of automobility, ecomobility and the commodification of natural resources (Pesse, 2019). For our concerns, it is worth highlighting that the narrative world of the film, Mad Max: Fury Road , is able to tell two stories – which often do not sit comfortably with one another – at the same time: on the one hand, its postapocalyptic scenario offers a collective story of (post)human solidarity in the face of the threat of the Anthropocene; and on the other, it critiques the endemic inequalities and uneven life chances that the Anthropocene throws up.…”