This is Stuff You Like, you can call me Ursa, and We Are Not Things.
Now much digital ink has been spilled on pretty much every aspect of Fury Road, so in the
interests of (hopefully) not saying all the same things again, we’re going to talk about
approaches to objectification, Legally Blonde, and Lily Allen.
Stick with me.
First, the plot of Mad Max: Fury Road goeth thusly: [explosion]
No, but really: the world kind of ended, and a bunch of people are involved in cult kind
of relationship with Immortan Joe, mostly because he has the water, which is kind of
necessary for life.
One of his, ahem, faithful lieutenants (clearly the man has not read the Evil Overlord List)
is Imperator Furiosa, who is driving the War Rig to Gas Town and the Bullet Farm to get...well,
she’s going to Gas Town and the Bullet Farm, she isn’t going for puppies and rainbows.
But! In fact, this is all a ruse, and Joe’s...er...Wives...begged her to help them escape from him, which she
is duly doing. This goes down very well.
Side note: kudos for not needing to show us the horrifying realities of sex slavery and
leaving us to fill in the gaps.
Comic, you say? Noooo, there are no comics, why would you need to expand on that? That
would be unnecessary.
Anyway, the movie is Joe chasing down his wives to get them back, then the Wives meeting
the Vuvalini and, after a suggestion from Max, yes, he is in the film, deciding that
the best thing to do is to stage a coup, and then running back the other way in order to
do so. They kill Joe, they take over the Citadel, woo I hope you’re good at water rationing
and diplomacy and military tactics, kids, because you basically just signed up to be
a government in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Side note I would totally watch a TV series where they explored that.
Anyway. Fury Road is a freaking great film. And one which takes its theme very seriously.
Even though Max, the Wives, and especially Splendid’s unborn child are all seen as
THINGS by Joe and the Warboys: MY PROPERTY
The movie gives us no excuse to objectify the Wives, who have agency, distinct personalities,
and their own conflicts and roles and things to do in the story.
Objectification, by the by, is treating someone like an object, a thing rather than a person.
Fury Road is an explicit ESCAPE from objectification, because we are not things, we want bodily
autonomy, and our babies will not be warlords, they are not your property.
And it goes very Hero’s Journey, Final Stage with this. I make my own choices, and often
that means getting the same outcome but for my own reasons.
Nux gets a whole redemption arc where the original outcome remains the same (he dies
historic on the Fury Road) but the context is transformed (he does it to protect the
people he cares about, rather than as a grab for glory and immortality)
‘Witness me’
Max is forced to give blood to Nux at the start of the film, but by the end chooses
to give blood to Furiosa because she is his friend. Same outcome. Context is transformed.
The Wives end up BACK at the Citadel, right where they started, but now they are there
as people, as conquerors, even, rather than as possessions.
And so on.
But in addition to this classic hero’s journey ‘we’re back at the starting point but
now I am different because I am choosing it’ thing among the heroines and heroes, we also
have the villains.
Who don’t get that arc, but get not to be things regardless.
Who get moments of humanisation. ‘I had a baby brother!’
The villains of the piece are terrible people who do unspeakably awful things.
But as bombastic and over the top as the movie gets, even they get to be people.
Nobody is an object, but equally nobody is a cipher. Though you could probably argue
cannon fodder one way or the other.
Being cannon fodder is also objectification, albeit of a non-sexual sort, and the fact
that it can be argued either way is testament to the fact that there is no grand arbiter
of What Is Acceptable and What Is Just Not Cricket in terms of portrayal of people.
To go back to the topic of sexual objectification: I love Legally Blonde, but while I personally
enjoy its subversion of expectations we would normally have of the blonde fashionista who
wants her boyfriend back, not everyone sees it as the love letter to self-determination
that I do. And that’s fine.
But Legally Blonde, like Fury Road, is a film about self-determination. It just has a different
approach, taking what could be a very tired and cliched female-competition plot and subverting
it by making Elle a rounded character who ultimately decides that befriending the competitor
and ditching the jerky ex-boyfriend is the way to go.
And who has many ladyfriends to boot.
It takes our expectation of the capabilities and motivations of a conventionally attractive
fashion major and punts them over the hedge.
In the same way, Fury Road kicks the expectation of helpless women needing to be rescued in
the teeth. Not just because their rescuer is a woman, or because the people they enlist
for help are women, but also because the Wives help with their own escape, even though they
have basically no idea what they’re doing.
I am RIGHT HERE for kicking expectations in the teeth in the service of making a point
about personhood. Also for sisters doing it for themselves,
so to speak.
Subversion of expected tropes is, admittedly, the least complicated way to make a point
about this stuff.
Just...have people be people, and don’t undermine your message by letting the camera
treat them as objects either.
This is why there’s maybe one ten-second sequence of soft-focus Wives in the whole
film, and even then the focus is as much on the water as it is impossibly incongruous
women with all their own teeth in a post-apocalyptic landscape.
Because if you decide to USE cliched tropes to make a point, you’re into the realms
of parody and satire, and those are much, MUCH harder to land.
I’ve never been able to get behind most examples of ironic objectification, including,
say, Zombie Strippers, because it’s...maybe too subtle for me?
It just feels like trying to have your cake and eat it too.
We’re being ironically sexy, look at these stupid sheep-men drooling over the women who
are about to kill and eat them, ha ha!
But since ironic sexism tends to contain all of the T&A shots that would be there if they
The example I’ve seen which comes closest to working for me is the Lily Allen video
were playing it straight? Eh, again, having your cake and eating it.
for Hard Out Here, which is a very earwormy song about breaking the glass ceiling, double
standards, and objectification. No, really.
But I’m still quite not on board. Clearly the video’s meant to be a joke;
incisive commentary on the state of modern music and its standards for female performers.
There’s a 45 second sequence at the start where a dude in a suit criticises Allen’s
appearance while a surgeon sucks fat out of her,
How does someone let themselves get like this? ‘I had two babies!’
And then she sings about breaking the glass ceiling and double standards and how she won’t
be confined to the kitchen...
And then she’s ON A KITCHEN SET, I see what you did there.
But most of the video is closeups of boobs and butts and thighs and...well, body parts
as opposed to whole people, basically. Not to mention product placement.
I mean, I get that she is mocking all of these things, but she’s still getting paid to
do the product placement, even if it’s meant to be a self-mocking joke. And the dancers
who are wiggling their butts are still having cameras zoom in on their butts, in spite of
the fact that there’s a specific line which claims
Don’t need to shake my arse for you Cos I’ve got a brain
It’s very much a case of I see what you are trying to do here, and it almost works
for me... But only almost, because it still feels like
all the other women in the video can be objectified but you better not objectify HER, you jerk.
Further reinforced by the fact that she’s the only one who gets to wear clothes. Well,
OK, leggings and a leotard, but she gets to have her skin covered at least.
(There’s a whole other digression we could go into about how skin on show is read as
vulnerable, whereas if you’re covered up you’re perceived as more powerful, but...back
to the point).
Like I said, there’s no grand arbiter of what works as commentary on objectification
and what doesn’t. Bits of it work for me, but the video as a
whole doesn’t. Which just reinforces how hard (out here for
a bitch) it is to make a video that really can boast ‘ironic objectification’.
And this is one of the things that works so well with Fury Road.
There is a naked woman in Fury Road; there are beautiful women in wafty clothes; there
are women chained up and breastfeeding. But they are framed in a way that makes you think
of them as people. They aren’t objectified even ironically.
I don’t feel like the nudity is superfluous: that woman is hidden by her hair and the camerawork,
those women are consistently treated like people;
those women are practically naked but what you feel is horror for their situation, rather
than like they’re there to give you something boob-related to look at.
Plus they release the water at the end, so even they get some agency.
WE ARE NOT THINGS being such a big part of the movie’s message, it is nice how they
don’t undermine that with cheap sexualisation and interchangeable characters with no personality.
In case I haven’t made it clear, I love this movie. It’s a joy and the gift that
keeps on giving. Every time I watch it I see something new and subtle and cool that they
did. It is a visual banquet, a beautiful piece of cinema, and it achieves this, and achieves
it generally without treating its characters as meat. Though, like I said, cannon fodder
can probably be argued either way.
And it’s so darn optimistic with its character arcs and redemption themes and hope, it just
makes me feel better about the world.
That’s about our lot for now, so: Patreon is here, links to Twitter and Tumblr are in
the description, and above all: may you ride immortal, shiny and chrome. See
you next time.