Learning to Drive with Furiosa

I first watched Fury Road while I was learning how to drive. Through a combination of luck and adolescent charm, I had passed my road test after several months of barely practicing. I was in junior year, rehearsing for a play, and my life was consumed by all the things that consume your life at 17. When the play was over, a burst of adrenaline fueled an impulsive post-show drive with the cast to the local multiplex to see the fourth film in a franchise I was not familiar with outside of a sick as hell trailer and the buzz of the film critics I was just beginning to read. 

The thrill of finishing the play was nothing compared to the feeling of watching Fury Road for the first time. After months of training our developing vocal cords to recite Shakespeare, we gave ourselves over to a symphony of kinetic action unlike anything I had seen outside the Buster Keaton movies I had watched in school. But Junkie XL rocked harder than anything that ever would’ve accompanied The General, and the political tempo of Fury Road beat with an urgency that felt thrillingly 2015. Bernie Sanders had just announced he was seeking nomination on the Democratic Party ticket (less than two weeks after Fury Road’s premiere! God’s plan?), and Donald Trump seemed about as likely to be president as Rictus Erectus. We were at the age where we understood there to be great evil in the world, yes, but watching Furiosa rip Immortan Joe’s face off confirmed the dearest hopes of our Obama-era childhoods: Together, we would vanquish it. 

Make America Erectus Again

Euphoria carried us out of the theater and into the mall parking lot, where nearly the whole cast piled into the backseat and trunk of my 2001 Volvo hatchback. We tore down the highway, probably blasting the Mountain Goats or something, until I quickly realized I was operating a vehicle I was desperately unfamiliar with and had to give all of these people rides home. My sense of direction was not good and my navigator was 15 and I am certain I made some left turns in front of oncoming traffic. Hudson Valley roads at night are dark and twisty and those headlights barely lit the road five feet in front of me and my years of experience as a passenger had taught me that at any moment a deer could leap out and murder suicide the front of the Volvo. I made it through the night with zero kills, and that felt like a victory tantamount to retaking The Citadel. I may not have been able to pilot a war rig, but I could drive my car, and that gave me a right to name it. I called it Furiosa. 

Two presidents later and Furiosa is long for the junkyard, but her namesake is back, this time played by that girl with the wide set eyes from The VVitch (2015! What a year). In the years between Charlize Theron and Anya Taylor-Joy, I have delighted in Fury Road’s predecessors as well as the greater filmography of its auteur, George Miller. It’s a wonderful set of films to explore because it’s so varied, stretching from Doof Warriors and Toecutters to talking pigs and dancing penguins to Lorenzo’s Oil, a family drama as horrifying as anything to emerge from the shifting wasteland of the Mad Max movies. 

There is no one kind of story or genre that is essential to George Miller, nor a consistent visual style. But Miller has a fantastic eye for finding cinematic tableaux, and his films are marked by striking images, each entry containing at least one sequence forever burned into my retinas. There’s a scene in Lorenzo’s Oil where Lorenzo knocks over a Christmas tree, signaling the acceleration of his terminal disease. Miller films it with horrifying grandeur; When watching it shortly after Fury Road, you’ll find it eerily similar to the destruction of the war rig, ornaments flying towards the lens like the Doof Warrior’s flaming guitar. Before I ever watched Fury Road, my first George Miller was Happy Feet, and I will never forget the scene of the animated Mumble coming into contact with his live action human captors. Realizing the world of cartoon penguins I had been contentedly watching existed side-by-side with the real life human problems of climate change and overfishing shook me to me 8-year-old core. Like a praetorian on the run, George Miller is always driving full speed into uncharted Wasteland, never getting too comfortable, his eyes hunting the horizon for new paths forward.  

AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There has never been a film like Fury Road. It is still to my mind George Miller’s best film. It is still to my mind one of the best films. For George Miller to retread old territory by making another dialogue-lite, non-stop chase may have lit up the old pleasure centers, but it would have been, in all likelihood, a lesser Fury Road. Fury Road paints in seconds, Furiosa paints in years. The blending of two actors as one character is as subtle as I’ve ever seen in a movie (that’s Anya Taylor-Jay and the excellent Alyla Browne as her younger self, though Anya does pull off an impressive Charlize vocal impression) with each scene representing another scar in the shaping of the hero I once chose as my car’s namesake. Unlike Max’s wandering road warrior or even the Furiosa of Fury Road, this incarnation of the character is fighting for revenge. That’s a different breed of primal storytelling than Fury Road, leaning more Lady Snowblood than Buster Keaton, more Sergio Leone than Tom Mix. It’s also an echo of 1979’s Mad Max. Before he became the mythic hero of the sequels, Max Rockatansky was just a man driven mad by the murder of his family sent on a rage-fueled killing spree.

Of course, the same could be said for Furiosa’s antagonist, Dementus. Rather than being marked by a skeletal nebulizer like Immortan Joe or a hockey mask like Lord Humungus, Dementus’ primary costume piece is a teddy bear, a vestige of a family whose death (real or imagined) he raves about whenever confronted with his own evil. He commits acts of horrible cruelty, particularly towards Furiosa, but he isn’t framed as inhuman in the vein of The People Eater or The Bullet Farmer, men so removed from their humanity that they barely look like people anymore. Dementus’ evil, by contrast, is presented as very human. We watch him plot, maybe even root for him, as he takes on the houses of power we so hated in Fury Road. He acts out of survival, out of swagger, and eventually out of despair. 

She’s Furiosa, she’s Furiosa…

Fury Road is a story told with black and chrome morality. There is no moment in Furiosa to rival the Imperator tearing Joe’s face off, and Miller leans into the discomfort of Furiosa being faced with an unsolvable problem. No amount of blood spilled will make right the evils of the past. If Fury Road is about bodies moving through space, Furiosa is about figures moving through time, how human impulses shape history and transform people into legends. Between breathaking action sequences and scintillating images, we watch the wheels of human brutality churn out new warlords as innocent people are crushed as equally by their fall as their rise.

In 2024, life feels more like the messy bloodbath of Furiosa than the triumphant victory of Fury Road. Maybe that’s politics, or maybe that’s because I’m 26 instead of 17. But if George Miller’s apocalypse feels realer every day, crackling like a sandstorm on the horizon, it’s high time I take the lessons of these movies to heart: I gotta learn how to drive stick. 

…and she’s Furiosa, too