Modern Myth-Making: Furiosa
Reflecting on the creation and experience of ‘The Darkest of Angels’
*Contains spoilers for Mad Max: Fury Road and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga*
1. The Birthing of a Myth
Technically speaking, George Miller’s Fury Road from 2015 reintroduced some to the world of Mad Max. For the majority of others, including myself, Fury Road was our first introduction to such a world.
When I see Fury Road referenced these days, I see it praised for the exceptional action sequences and set pieces, the comedic or “camp” nature of the character’s names and viking + metal aesthetic, and the character of Furiosa. In fact, if you were to search “Mad Max Fury Road” on any social media platform, the first photos you are bound to see are that of Tom Hardy as Max being mounted on the front a pursuit car, then, not too far behind, follows a still of Charlize Theron’s iconic scream as Furiosa. More coming on that scream later.
What is so fascinating about the Fury Road is that George Miller has said in numerous interviews that he had written every character and their backstory before he wrote the plot. This means that Furiosa’s story, along with all of other characters, are already alive, breathing, and embedded in the DNA of Fury Road. The events, places, and people referenced in the film do have a central and concrete purpose in their place in the world of Mad Max. These are not cheap throwaway references or easter eggs, like those our culture has become accustomed from franchises like Star Wars, Marvel, and Harry Potter. Rather, each object and character that we see on screen has a rooted and intentional purpose in the world and story we are witnessing. Miller’s level intentionality in his storytelling is so strong that it trickles down to the way that he directs actors performances. The stars whom have worked with Miller have all described him as being “excruciatingly detailed” and “intentional”. He is a committed storyteller, not someone who is interested to creating new references to sell as toys (like Star Wars’ marketing strategy) or drop references that could be turned into another soul-devoid project later on (Marvel’s strategy in the last several years).
The way that this meticulous writing process impacts character-driven storytelling is curious to me. Let us reflect on Star Wars once more, considering how this is a franchise who’s prequels were written retroactively. Darth Vader was conceived of and written before the character of Anakin Skywalker. The character of “Anakin” is obviously referenced in the Original Trilogy, sure, but the actual roots or ‘building blocks’ of that character are not crafted until many years later.
Irregardless of the nuances within this, all of the characters in the Mad Max universe are not written this way. Everyone already has a backstory — they just haven’t been told yet. The functionality that results is that Fury Road creates a skeletal framework for the myth of each of it’s individual characters. To illustrate further, consider Fury Road through language of generic archetypes. The events of Fury Road take place over a three day period, telling the story of a revolution or “armageddon”. It is the story of a world, in this case a society, that is destroyed and given the chance to arise anew: healthier, equitable, and more just. The narrative is fairly straightforward, and we have all seen this archetype before. We already know this story, we are familiar with the movements of villains like Immortan Joe, and we know that good will defeat evil in the end.
While the symbolic and archetypal language is familiar, Miller adds just a hint of newness, sprinkling in a sense of unfamiliarity. We are not given a detailed introduction into what the world of Mad Max is. We are provided with a short summary of the nuclear war that created “the wasteland”, but we are not given an explanation of how this civilization has come to be.
How did Immortan Joe gain power? What is the religion that he seems to rule by? What are the intricacies of the belief system of this religion? Who is Max? Why is he alone, and how is he able to survive alone in a wasteland with so many violent factions trying to preserve themselves? Who is this mysterious Furiosa? Why is she heading home? What is this home?
Fury Road is not interested in answering any of these questions. It only cares about telling the revolution/armageddon. At best, Fury Road hints at some answers, while others are not addressed at all. The significance of this is that it creates a buffer of understanding between the audience and the fictional world that they are placed in. This world, how it functions and is inhabited, is vaguely familiar to us, yet we are shown repeatedly that we do not know it.
Miller is candid about not wanting to tell story through dialogue. If he were, we may have gotten an introduction to the world of Mad Max in the same way that we were introduced to the world of Dune: full of exposition giving literal descriptions of how the world works. This method of story telling destroys that buffer of understanding between audience and the ficitonal world. We now know how everything works, leaving little room imagine, less material to “chew” on when we leave the experience.
Instead, Miller prefers to use the strength of the medium to tell his stories: moving pictures. In other words, we are informed about Miller’s fictional world through the character’s interactions with and within it, behaviors and gestures that don’t provide the clearest of picture of what’s happening. The result is that buffer of understanding remains intact. There is more for us to wonder and dream about, beyond this story of revolution, when we leave the experience.
When you add a prequel to this kind of story, the formula of storytelling leads to something very different from other prequels. As many positive reviews have praised Furiosa for, the two films have a reciprocal relationship: Furiosa is enriches Fury Road, and Fury Road enriches Furiosa. Each film gives the viewer questions to ponder, some that may be answered in the other, while other questions remain unanswered and wondered about. I, for one, cannot name another sequel that can say that they have a reciprocal relationship in this way with their prequels.
2. Mad Myths
Before we dive into the myth-building of Furiosa, it would be responsible of us to investigate: What is a myth? The “official” definition of a myth is a story, possibly supernatural or divine in nature, that explains social or natural pheonema. All cultures throughout human history have had their own myths to explain the workings of the earth or human behavior.
When we think of stories like these, we may first think about ancient tales from fallen societies that tell of heroic journeys or personified tales of how our world works. Consider Greek myths like that of Zeus, Poseidon, Sisyphus, or Medusa. We, as humans, cannot possibly understand the worlds that these characters exist in. There is a veil of mysticism and magic that covers these stories, causing them to elude our comprehension, beckoning awe and wonder.
In our modern culture, it seems that we hardly consider the stories we tell to be “mythic” in nature anymore. Our stories, or at least those made for adult audiences, instead feel much more “grounded”. The scope narrower in focus, choosing to stick to human’s experience in the world as we know it and the various relationships we may find ourselves in. These stories are every bit as emotional and entertaining, but the way that we consume these stories is one based in a literalness. We experience the story as it as told to us, and, in some cases, the story is explained to us through dialogue and expostion as we experience it. The result is that we leave the experience with nothing to chew on, nothing to dream or wonder. “That was good, pretty entertaining,” we may say, as we return to our regular routines.
Is this a product of our faculty of reason and rationality, the same faculty that is the catalyst for our major developments in science and technology? We now have scientific descriptions of how just about everything in the world external of us works, and the field of psychology is similarly describing in scientific terms what the brain is, how it functions, how it produces consciousness, emotions, and the like. What is the use of wondering about mythology and mysticism anymore, stories that make us consider spirituality or the cosmic, if everything in our modern life can easily be explained away by reason and science?
Despite the scientific explanations that we seek and continuously create, we never stop making mystical myths. They are not stories reserved for ancient civilizations, but a creation by the meaning-making human being, no matter the year or era, no matter how much science is able to describe the world and our experience of it in the most literal of terms. Characters are conceived, their stories told, and those tales resonate in a myriad of ways with the audience who witnesses them. This is the true function of myths: a story that creates that buffer of understanding, using it to turn the viewer inward to introspect, inviting us to ask which parts of ourselves are being touched by the narrative and to be changed by it.
3. The Inevitability of Subjectivity
I rewatched Fury Road with my mom a week or so before writing this. In her first viewing, she made the astute observation that Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron in 2015, always looks as if she is on the verge of tears. I had never noticed this detail before, and she is right. Furiosa’s eyes in Fury Road frequently have this glaze over them, moist with a rage and grief that we viewers are made aware of, but Fury Road never grants us full understanding of how those emotions have come to be.
I responded to my mom’s observation with an affirmative nod. Having seen Furiosa, I had understood the roots of that rage and grief.
The mystique yet emotional heaviness that exists within the Furiosa character made me wonder how each of the actresses who play her were able to tap into that psychology. What was their experience of this character like? Did it resonate deeply with them, just as deeply as it had for viewers that love Furiosa?
What I discovered is that both Charlize and Anya Taylor-Joy both had significant input in how the character was portrayed on screen. Remember Charlize’s scream, depicted in the photo above? That scream was not George Miller’s idea — it was Charlize’s. In an interview, she recounts:
So [the scream] was never in the storyboard. The scene was always supposed to end on her realization that the Green Place was gone, and the camera would start spinning around her while she was just in utter shock. I said to George, “I feel like we need to have a moment where she’s completely lost, completely vulnerable. We’ve seen this woman be so capable and driven, so we need to have a moment where she’s none of those things.” I felt very strongly that we had to take her to her rock bottom. Imagine the disappointment of doing all this to get to a place that doesn’t exist anymore, to have spent all this time thinking this thing would fix everything for you and then it doesn’t fix anything? It’s a character at the cusp of, “I think I’m done,” and that was an important moment to me because then the stakes of her turning around and going back feel so much higher.
Similarly, Anya’s interviews about her time as Furiosa tell how she was also impacted by taking on the character, and how she also advocated for her character’s expression of rage. She speaks of a scream in Furiosa that she had to fight for for “three months”, and George Miller finally gave her that moment.
These moments are worthy of highlighting because they show how the myth-building happens. Myths are a co-created phenomenon, given meaning by various creators and the audience who observes them. In Furiosa’s case, both Charlize and Anya were active contributors in the telling of this character’s story, the emotions that the character is feeling, and how those emotions are expressed. As mentioned earlier, Charlize’s scream is one of the most remembered moments of Fury Road. Without she and Anya’s insistence that the character have these moments of expression, we would be left with a story about a presumably female-identified character being told through the gaze of a man. How differently this character would be thought of and remembered if these moments had not been fought for…
Returning to Anya for a moment, she speaks candidly in a recent interview with the New York Times about how psychologically difficult it was to become Furiosa. This article is unfortunately behind NYT’s paywall, but I will emphasize the important sentiments. Anya speaks of the emotions and trauma that she was forced to act in, through, and out of, and how embodying this subjectivity brought some of her own experiences to the forefront of her psyche. In one part of the interview, she speaks on how the only version of the movie that she has seen herself was a black-and-white cut, prior to any of the special effects being added in.
Anya states: “I’m curious, once I watch it, if I’ll ever be able to watch it again. Two minutes in and I’m sobbing. I adored a person that I could not protect. There were forces greater than me.” She continues to speak on how she carries Furiosa with her, carrying on lessons that the character taught her. “I think being able to advocate for myself more. Some of the protection and love I felt towards her, I’ve carried into my actual life.”
The dialectic power of mythology, and storytelling overall, is revealed in Anya’s words here. She was an active participant in bringing the character to life, bringing her own experiences to fill empty frame of the idea: “Furiosa”. She then witnessed that character in the same flesh and blood that she contributed, informing her own life and experiences beyond Furiosa’s story. Although experiencing this dialectic power in different ways and likely to different degrees, the audience does all the same as Anya. We are always projecting our own experiences and beliefs to stories and myths, then leaving the myth with a new understanding of ourselves once we see those projections played out in a narrative that is not our own.
4. The Darkest of Angels
Nine years after the initial introduction to the character of Furiosa comes her time to take center stage. George Miller’s trademark storytelling through cinematic action is still present like in Fury Road, but, while Fury Road’s spectacle lies in the size, scale, and pace of it’s action, it’s prequel’s spectacle lies in the emotional intimacy and mythical nature of it’s story as we experience 18 formative years alongside our protagonist. In other words, where 2015’s Fury Road is a high octane character-driven-epic tracking 3 days of events, Furiosa is the witnessing of the birth and development of a character who we, as the audience, are already familiar with and (most likely) already have an affinity for.
Furiosa’s intention to explore the psychology of one of the saga’s more iconic characters is evident in it’s slower pace, deliberately building up tension throughout until the final climax. And, like any story that is truly committed to explore the phenomenology of vengeance, that climax is not grand and sensational, but narrowly focused: intimate, personal, emotionally raw, impure, almost diabolical.
It is this film, Furiosa, that has caused me to fall in love with Miller. Amidst all of the action sets, loud music, and colorful shots is a subtlety that is left for the viewer to discover, to make meaning of and relate to, for themselves. In fact, the composer for Furiosa, Tom Holkenborg has confirmed that all of the music that is in the film is meant to convey Furiosa’s internal state. If she is present in a scene, we are given music to convey how we are to feel based on her feeling. This is the making of a true character study.
The exploration of how Furiosa creates it’s mythical buffer of understanding can be exemplified by Furiosa’s celestial tattoo on her left forearm. We are told that the tattoo is a map to her birthplace, while also being a symbol of guidance and commitment to the promise she made to her late mother to return home. However, there is a third layer of meaning to this tattoo, as it has a mystical nature that the audience is not given an explanation for. The stars are referenced as being spiritual, even religous, to the The Many Mothers or Vuvalini culture (the name of the culture that Furiosa is from). The spiritual significance of the stars is never expanded on further, providing a magical buffer between the audience and the Garden of Eden-like origins that Furiosa has been stolen from.
Now, anyone who has seen Fury Road or knows about the character of Furiosa at all, knows that she eventually has a prosthetic left arm. With this foresight and careful observation, the viewer can easily infer that she is going to lose the arm that holds this mystical tattoo. The grief is spelled out for the viewer before the event even happens. Similar prequels has encountered this dilemma, and history seems to tell us that this will likely not pay off. In fact, it may even single handedly describe while Furiosa struggled in the box office. For me, the question that arises for prequels is: If the viewer already has the “effect” of what is to happen without knowing the “cause” of that effect, what emotional “affect” is there for the viewer? How can we be expected to feel any emotion for something that we already expect to happen, even if we don’t know how it happens?
However, Furiosa ends up creatively playing with this common trope.
Furiosa has her tattooed arm significantly damaged during a chase with Dementus, but she does not lose her arm here. Not yet. She is then caught by Dementus immediately after having this arm damaged, and he orders her to be hung from this arm in a form of deliberate torture. After a brief time-skip sequence, it is discovered that Furiosa has escaped, amputating her own arm — the same arm that carried the tattoo of the celestial map that could lead her back home. This act of self-mutilation is shocking and subversive, the score revving to a crescendo as the camera lingers on the severed arm. And so the chase begins again, Dementus on the hunt for his prisoner who continues to be on the run.
Curiously, Furiosa is not even given a moment to process or grieve the loss of neither her arm, nor her tattoo. The film makes no acknowledgment of the significance of Furiosa severing her own arm, or the loss of a sacred symbol and map that contains so much meaning for her.
Why?
Furiosa maintains its commitment to the phenomenology of vengeance, therein providing the embedded answer. In her hatred and vengeance, Furiosa amputates her own arm to escape, thereby revealing the core of the emotional phenomenon of vengeance: it is destructive and corrosive in nature, ignorant to anything worth preservation. It desires to annihilate the subject at which it is aimed at. Anything and everything that falls outside of that narrow periphery can be sacrificed for this cause, and done so without hesitation.
But again, the film doesn’t gesture at this at all. We are shown the tattoo multiple times throughout the movie up until this point, but it is never acknowledged that the tattoo was damaged then amputated, and the weight of that loss is for Furiosa. The arm is literally left there in a single shot, hanging in the dust of the wasteland, for you to witness, grieve, and make meaning of yourself.
5. A Language for the Ineffable
This post is long enough, and you have been reading my puny words for too long. I am going to close by centering George Miller himself, the passionate auteur who admits to being inspired by the works of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell’s that speak of the importance of myths and the collective unconscious. George has an undeniable passion and gift for storytelling, and the masses owe it to him to continue to show his creations love through interactivity.
