‘Mad Max: Fury Road’, And The History Of Sexual Politics In Australian Road Movies

In Mad Max: Fury Road the mutinous Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) is looking for redemption.

As far as motivations go, it’s not the most original line. But that hardly matters, because throughout Fury Road Furiosa says it best with bloodshot eyes. This is one tired woman who’s just trying to get her vehicle across the desert, but the goddamn thing keeps getting ambushed and breaking down.

Much has been made of Fury Road’s feminist credentials. “We are not a thing”, declare Joe’s wives (the majority of whom are played by those most commodified of all bodies: professional models), paving the way for an extraordinary shot of a pregnant Rosie Huntington-Whitely clinging to the side of Furiosa’s petrol tanker like some kind of avenging Virgin Mary.

But less focus has been placed on the film’s parallel emphasis on an equally binding form of masculinity. Where the women are baby-making machines, Immortan Joe’s War Boys are super soldiers, hybrid bodies fixed with a range of organic and inorganic add-ons, who pursue glory on the battlefield in the misguided belief that self-sacrifice amounts to no less than total immortality in a chrome Valhalla.

Perhaps there is something in the self-contained world of the car that provides a microcosm of society at large, because the Mad Max films are among a number of Australian road movies that would seem to reflect broad-scale shifts in gender relations.

If Fury Road is a gauge of where we’re at on the gender front, then it’s also an opportunity to look back on where we’ve been.

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The Long Weekend (1978)

Directed by: Colin Eggleston

Starring: John Hargreaves and Briony Behets

Peter and Marcia don’t have to worry about shifting gender relations; the husband and wife are pretty consistent in maintaining a steady mutual dislike.

Having left Sydney for a weekend-long camping trip, they’ve chosen a pristine location to pitch their tent. But Peter and Marcia are as disdainful of the setting as they are of each other, and after one too many cigarette butts are carelessly disposed of, things start to get pretty weird. Although it’s never entirely clear if the perceived sinister element is the product of malevolent flora and fauna or simply a symptom of the paranoia that only a man and a woman sufficiently blind to everything but their own personal hell could possibly breed.

‘Their crime was against nature’, the tagline reads, and ‘nature found them guilty.’ It would be possible here to speculate on precisely how far the couple has perverted the natural order of things – especially where Marcia, Marcia, Marcia is concerned. But given that there’s something particularly odious about the pompous and self-satisfied Peter’s regularly expressed moral outrage, Long Weekend remains an ambiguous film.

At any rate, the subject of a husband and a wife hating each other to the point of the mutual destruction never gets old, and a remake of Long Weekend was released in 2006.

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The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert (1994)

Directed by: Stephan Elliott

Starring: Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce, Terence Stamp, Rebel Penfold-Russell

“I’m not Jane and god knows you’re not Tarzan!” an exasperated Marcia rails at Peter, in what is actually one of her more sympathetic moments during The Long Weekend. For the duration of the pair’s getaway, poor Peter has been wandering around in a bushman costume with a gun slung over his shoulder — neither of which has served any purpose other than to get him in trouble.

Dressing up is a more celebratory affair in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, where it proclaims a faith in the possibility to self-define, even if the definition arrived it is ultimately kind of confused.

When Sydney-based drag queen Anthony Belrose drags two fellow performers across the country with him to stage a show in Alice Springs, he is eventually forced to admit that the trio’s new client was once his wife. “So what are you?” a betrayed Adam AKA Felicia Jollygoodfellow demands. “I don’t know!” is Anthony’s reply – which should surely have been the anthem for a new millennium.

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Mad Max (1979)

Directed by: George Miller

Starring: Mel Gibson, Joanne Samuel

It’s frankly doubtful that Fury Road’s Immortan Joe has much in the way of sexual interest in even his so-called ‘favourite’ wife. He’s the kind of villain to have elevated the practice of self-love to the point of requiring no other gratification than a son and heir.

One of the defining features of the villains in the original Mad Max films (including Toecutter, also played by Hugh Keays-Byrne) is a kind of gender promiscuity that could be termed bisexuality, except that what it involves is less the expression of a sexual preference than a compulsion to rape and pillage.

What this says about Australian attitudes towards homosexuality in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s is probably a valid subject for further enquiry. But in Fury Road, predatory homosexuality is happily absent – even as the camp aesthetic remains.

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Wolf Creek (2005)

Directed by: Greg McLean

Starring: John Jarratt, Nathan Phillips, Cassandra Magrath

Where Mad Max clearly represents sex as a weapon, it’s a theme that Wolf Creek (and its sequel, which came out last year) takes to a new level.

After abducting two British backpackers and their Australian friend, Outback monster Mick proceeds to inflict all sort of physical and mental atrocities on his captives. He isn’t sophisticated, but he is effective. And while Mick is regularly thwarted in his attempts at sexual assault, it hardly diminishes his enjoyment of the routine.

The Wolf Creek movies have attracted a fair amount of controversy since their release, but there is a comic edge to these films that reveals a satire on the theme of the self-sufficient Australian male brought to a state of inarticulate fury by what is a deep-seated and misplaced sense of entitlement.

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Stone (1974)

Directed by: Sandy Harbutt

Starring: Ken Shorter, Rebecca Gilling, Bill Hunter, Helen Morse

While Mad Max paved the way for later Australian attempts at genre cinema, such as Wolf Creek, Miller’s debut was itself heavily influenced by the earlier Stone, which follows a Sydney detective’s initiation into an oddly benign bikie gang that doubles as a Satanic cult.

Stone’s man-eating magazine-editing girlfriend has possibly done a number on him, because the eponymous hero has a lot to learn (such as DV isn’t DV if there’s consent).

Stone is fascinating for the mixed messages that it aired at a time when the nation as a whole was at a crossroads. While the film appears to celebrate a youthful disregard for authority, the Gravediggers are oddly preoccupied with good manners – and when the full breadth of official ineptitude and corruption come to light, the gang is exposed as the true defender of the rule of law.

Which only goes to show that you can wear whatever you want while remaining a fine, upstanding member of society.

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Mad Max: Fury Road is out now.

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Alice McCredie-Dando is a freelance writer based in Sydney. She writes on cinema from her blog american night.