Since I know there’s probably a fair amount of you out there who haven’t seen the first three Mad Max movies, I’m here to tell you a li’l secret about them:
All the people complaining about how Max “isn’t the main character” in Fury Road are big ol’ Fake Fanboys cause Max’s primary character trait in literally every movie is “I hate this, why is it happening, please leave me alone to brood in the desert in peace”.
He’s much more the central focus of the plot in the first movie but in Road Warrior and Thunder Dome he basically just gets kidnapped or beat up by wankers in weird bondage outfits and spends the rest of the movie trying to leave as soon as possible while other people are like “please solve our absurd post-apocalyptic problems”. There is not one single point where Max actively seeks out being a hero until it is forced upon him. He ACTIVELY TELLS PEOPLE WHO ASK HIM FOR HELP to take a hike.
Mad Max himself would like nothing better than to never, ever, ever be the main character.
He would also like for people to stop stealing his fucking car.
Nobody wants to escape his own movies more than Max Rockatansky.
He understands better than his own fanboys that his life sucks and you don’t want to be like him, to be Max is humiliating and painful. Every time he gets dragged into a conflict, he ends up worse than he started. Max seems to realize no good can come of this, and is weirdly genre-savvy because he’s always trying to make a getaway at the first signs of encroaching Plot. I find this darkly comical and endearing – at no point does he snap off witty quips and save the day and get the girl. Ever. He’s perpetually a weird desert loser with terrible luck. It’s great.
What makes Max a badass is the ability to survive to the end of any movie he’s unfortunate enough to find himself in.
This relates to a theory I have, which is that the archetypal Western Male Hero is James Bond, to the degree that people (Mainly straight white men) start to see every Western Male Hero as James Bond.
Which is to say an aggressively masculine, quip-spitting, hyper violent womanizer. The ultimate Male Power Fantasy. A new supermodel love interest (or two) every film, a gun in his hand, and no consequences for his actions.
Consider:
Captain Kirk: Painted as a headstrong idiot who spends all his time banging green skinned alien queens. In reality, a pretty firmly Feminist character.
Han Solo: Pictured as a suave too-cool-for-school scoundrel. Actually kind of a mess with a ship that’s falling apart. He constantly has people after him, not because he’s some sort of superscoundrel that makes powerful enemies, but because he makes deals with dangerous people, and then fails to live up to his end of the bargain. From what I recall, it’s not even that he double-crosses them or anything, he just screws up.
Mad Max: To quote that one hilariously stupid review that helped make the movie so popular, “In the post-apocalyptic future, it’s going to be MEN LIKE MAX THAT ARE IN CHARGE!” Max just wants to drive his car around the desert and be sad. He doesn’t want any of this.
It’s like, the Male Power Fantasy (as exemplified by James Bond) is so strong that we feel a need to cast everybody we can in that same mold.
Seriously this
Max is not ‘in charge’ of anything Max is a broken shell of a human being who has lost everyone he ever loved and suffers from severe post traumatic stress disorder and his life is a non-stop struggle just to live through another day in the nightmarish hellworld that he is trapped in, he is literally never ‘in charge’ the movies are about him being dragged against his will into whatever bizarre and horrific thing is happening in this Nightmare World this week and doing his best to survive and, sometimes, to just help out the actual heroes of the film because something about them reminds him of the person he used to be instead of the wreckage of a human being he has become
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