Furiosa: A Cautionary Tale

I'll be the first to confess that my initial reaction to Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was: "Mediocre." Mediocre. Because it fell short of the near insurmountable standard that its predecessor, Mad Max: Fury Road, had set not only for me but also the film and storytelling industries as a whole.

Even now, like many others, I see Furiosa as an inferior movie. But just because it's an inferior movie does not mean it's an inferior story. On the contrary, the storytelling of Furiosa is far superior to that of Fury Road and, I'd argue, even elevates the science fiction/fantasy genre as a whole.

"As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?" are the first words of the movie, uttered by the History Man, the keeper of the annals of a modern world that was destroyed and replaced by the post-apocalyptic world of the Mad Max series. Furiosa turns out to be one long, action-packed answer to this question, which is relevant not only to the characters contained within that world but also to all of us in the real world outside. Though we do not live in a post-apocalyptic setting, we all still live in a world that proves time and again that it will force us to face cruelties at one point or another. And as the movie will show us, it's how we brave those cruelties that will change histories both small and large.

There are so many things that make this story a great work of art, from its exploration of how extreme circumstances bring out the dormant strengths of even the most disadvantaged individuals to its portrayal of how women must survive in a male-dominated world that preys upon them from a young age and into adulthood. But one of the biggest reasons I like Furiosa so much is probably because it asks and answers this question of "As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?" in such an epic way. My favorite way in which it addresses this question is the relationship between Furiosa and Dementus.

Dementus is the murderer of Furiosa's mother, Furiosa's captor, her vengeful fixation, and, to a certain extent, her only (though very messed up) father figure. If the History Man were to ask Dementus, "As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?" I'm sure Dementus would answer, "With more cruelty."

Right from the start, Dementus proves himself to be cruel and sadistic. He orders the graphic torture of Furiosa's mother in the name of finding "the place of abundance" for him and his men. He clearly isn't using torture only as a tool for information or survival, though. He clearly uses it for entertainment too. When Furiosa runs forth to try and save her mother, Dementus seizes her and literally savors her tears, commenting that tears of sadness are more "zesty" than those of joy. He loves the pain of others and with a smile, forces young Furiosa to watch her mother's excruciating death.

Interestingly, though, a better and more humane side of him coexists with this sadistic side. After killing Furiosa's mother, he imprisons Furiosa. When he catches her watching an imminent dismemberment of a living man, which he uses as a means to weed out the weak from the strong for new members of his motorcycle gang as well as a means for his own entertainment, he encourages her to look away. When she refuses, he gives her his personal teddy bear, which he never lets out of his sight and keeps chained to his torso at all times. As he gives it to her, he reveals that the bear had once belonged to his own "little ones." Until their parting, he allows her to carry his precious bear, the only vestige of a family he once clearly cherished, from time to time.

His genuine care for Furiosa is never clearer, though, than during his first confrontation with Immortan Joe and the other leaders of the Citadel. As the War Boys throw down their thunder spears and unleash mayhem on Dementus and his gang, body snatchers catch Furiosa and attempt to drag her down into their cave, most likely to kill and dismember her to add to their stash of rotting limbs. Dementus sees this, and instead of continuing his escape from the fire raining down on him, he risks his life to rescue Furiosa. He doesn't bother helping the History Man, his other great asset who was also in danger. He doesn't care about any of his other soldiers or even his generals. He goes back only for Furiosa, even at great risk to himself. It is the one time he genuinely saves her, and the one time she accompanies him willingly. Even when he races to safety, he places her in the safety of the chariot's front and not, say, the back or even strapped to his back as a shield.

Despite these moments, though, it's never straightforward with Dementus. As much as there are clear instances of him caring for Furiosa, his softer side constantly mixes with his evil side, creating a gray, manipulative man who inevitably uses what good he's capable of for evil. He sees her as a surrogate daughter in need of saving but also harvests her blood for the human blood sausages he loves so much. He sometimes tries to shield her from violence but also gives her full view of all the wasteland's cruelties and his liking for it, all the while justifying his actions by saying he's making her stronger and "doing this for her." He also gives her seemingly fatherly advice from time to time like, "When things go bonkers, we have to adapt," which she does seem to take to heart, for she does become increasingly resourceful. He gives her one of his precious puppies while keeping her muzzled and caged just like one of his dogs. When the Immortan Joe takes notice of her, he brags that she's physically perfect, unlike his deformed sons, and when the Immortan demands that he hand her over as part of their trade for peace, Dementus flat-out refuses. Even when the History Man points out that she could be used as a crucial marriage alliance, he still refuses to hand her over to what's obviously a bunch of sexual predators. But he also refuses on the grounds that "she's mine," as if she's his most precious asset rather than a precious human daughter. Indeed, when it becomes clear that he must either give up Furiosa or lose a lucrative deal and go to war, he ultimately abandons her.

Why does he show her both kindness and cruelty? Well, part of the reason is that, obviously, he's an evil lunatic. But on a deeper level, his actions toward Furiosa betray an inner war. I believe Dementus's humanity, though a small, weak sapling, still lived within him. The teddy bear he cherishes symbolizes his inability to let go of the memories of his loved ones and of a better, quieter past. Indeed, as the movie progresses and he loses more and more of his sanity and humanity, the teddy bear, as a metaphor, also becomes dirtier and more worn. He can't let go of the past even in his perpetual downward spiral, though, and a part of him still wants what was taken from him, maybe even still hopes for it, which is why he keeps the teddy bear chained to himself throughout the years. This inability to let go is what makes him gravitate toward Furiosa, who must seem like one of his daughters risen from the grave. She brings out a better side of him, a softer side, even if in tiny doses.

But he's too far gone by the time he meets Furiosa to become a good man. He's already answered the History Man's question long ago, and he chooses to answer cruelty with more cruelty so that even if a softer side still lives within him, he chooses to crush that side in favor of evil. Even at his best, he finds it impossible to divorce completely his better side from darker ulterior motives. For example, even in his more paternal moments, he's always trying to shape her into another form of him. He even names her "Little D." He dresses her in a white cloak that's a smaller version of the cloak he wears. Even giving her a puppy and his own cherished teddy bear all force her to become a living echo of himself. It's never, ever just softness or just warmth or just love and humanity with Dementus. There is always an angle.

Though Furiosa consciously rejects him as the twisted father figure he's trying to make himself to be, she subconsciously grows that seed of hatred he's planted within her using all his violence, cruelty, and sadism. Though he's failed to create a devout follower in her, unknown to her, he's gone deeper. He has successfully transformed her into himself by feeding and stoking her grief. He, of all people, understands that it was grief that fueled his rage and, in turn, fed an insatiable desire to make the world taste that very grief and rage that he was forced to eat. Perhaps in avenging himself on the world through his cruelties he'll finally fill the wide, gaping hole that the destruction of his loved ones left behind. He succeeds in ensnaring her mind and making her hateful just like him. She slowly but surely, throughout the rest of the movie, starts to transform into a Little Dementus. Not because she openly worships him or calls him father. But because she becomes just as hateful and hungry for vengeance, "retribution," and "justice."

Even after she's sold to the Citadel, Dementus haunts her waking thoughts and transforms her dreams into nightmares long into adulthood. His reminder that "It's just you and me, Little D" is a constant refrain in her mind. Even when she goes back to Bullet Farm to rescue Jack, she loses her focus on Jack as she tries to assassinate Dementus. When she finally does capture Dementus at the end of the movie, she's stolen his cloak, which, once white, is now sullied by red and black to symbolize his blood lust and the darkness of his hopelessness. She's literally donned his cloak and become Little D. She's also disarmed him in every way possible so that he doesn't stand a chance against her, her guns, and her car, allowing her to toy with him like a cat playing with a mouse.

She tries to force him to feel what she felt that fateful day he killed her mother. She drops water onto his face not only to taunt his thirst but also to try and replicate the tears she shed and which he savored. She takes away his precious bear. The camera angle even suggests that cutting away the bear from his navel is metaphorical for her castrating him. In short, she goes above and beyond to torture him, to try and make him feel a little bit of the inner anguish she's held on to for all these years.

And all for what?

Well, she reveals the answer, her true motive, when she screams, "Give them back!"

She wants her mother back, her childhood back, her innocence. She keeps pistol-whipping Dementus, trying to beat it out of him, but throughout his own torturing, he confronts her with the harsh truth. "You idiot," he tells her. "You can never balance the scales of their suffering! ... What you want, dear, are my cries of anguish. Anguish without end. And if I could give you that, I would ... But you are never going to get anything close to what you want."

He's already lived her journey, and he knows where it ends. He sees within her the same hatred he's held on to for so long. He wants her to transfer her hatred for him onto the world and everyone and everything within it, just like he did. He wants her to exact vengeance on others - guilty or innocent, it doesn't matter - for taking what was theirs and to delude herself into thinking that that is good. And he wants her to do it in even greater fashion than he has.

"You are me," he tells her. "Already dead. To feel alive, we seek sensation, any sensation to wash away the cranky, black sorrow. And it leaves us for a moment, but then it comes back, and we have to do it all again. And we need more, and each time we need more until too much is never enough. We are the already dead, Little D. You and me. The question is, do you have it in you to make it epic?"

In his loneliness, his grief, his rage, his hatred, his utter casting aside of hope, he tries to bring her down to his level. He knows that she wants to bring back what she's lost, just as he yearns for the family and past that was stolen from him. He even tried to recreate what was taken by making her his surrogate daughter for a while. He knows that she has it in her to become evil and twisted just like him because she has that grief and hatred like him, but even more so. In joining him and succeeding him, she'll prove that he's right about the world. The answer to braving the world's cruelties is to kill all softness and to heap upon it even more cruelties. That is the price that all must pay to survive in the wasteland. That is the only way to live in a cruel world.

But this is when Furiosa proves herself to be different. She drops the teddy bear in a moment that symbolizes her acceptance of the truth. Dementus is right. She can't bring them back. She's already started torturing her enemy to try and "wash away the cranky, black sorrow." She's getting high off of it, but his torture and death will never calm the wild hatred and grief running rampant within her. Vengeance won't quench her thirst, won't dry her tears. Violence will only breed a need for more violence, more "entertainment." And once he's dead, she'll always need more because there is no way to bring them back.

But in accepting that Dementus is right, she sees that she has become like him too. And she doesn't want to become him. She doesn't want him or any of the other cruelties of this world to have that victory over her. She does have what it takes to make it epic. But not in the way that Dementus means. She'll make it epic but not by taking her cruelty further. She'll prove herself above such all-consuming hate and insanity by proving that softness - love, care, humanity - can still survive in the harsh wasteland, even if it is in a hardened, survivalist form.

So, she drops the teddy bear. She accepts that she can't bring them back, and she lets go of her hateful need for vengeance. That's not to say she doesn't get her vengeance. She does. But she gains victory and "makes it epic" in a totally different way, a way that isn't simply driven by hate and violence and the greed for more.

The open-ended ending of the movie says it all. The mythological ending the History Man provides shows that Furiosa has kept Dementus alive and planted in his navel the peach seed she carried away from home. She's taken his manhood and reduced him to a living corpse. From the tree that grows from him, she takes a ripe peach and offers it to the Immortan's "brides," his sex slaves, other women who have been preyed upon and subjugated by evil men. And, of course, in Fury Road, we see her free not only the brides but also Nux and Max himself before freeing the whole Citadel from the Immortan's cruel reign.

I believe the mythological ending is a metaphor for how she came to terms with herself. Her vengeance isn't simply in killing Dementus but turning away from him. Her victory is in refusing to let the world's cruelties turn her into something as cruel and monstrous as them. She keeps the memory of him alive, but not as fertilizer for hatred and hopelessness, but as a living warning of what she can become. Instead of becoming fuel for vengeance and madness, he becomes a perpetual reason not to seek destruction. He becomes her reason to save and grow what's good.

The last words of the movie are Furiosa's and her answer to the History Man's question. "This is our first fruit," she tells the brides as she brings them the peach. "But it's not for you and me. Each of us in our own way will vanish from this Earth. And then, perhaps, some uncorrupted life will rise to adorn it."

"As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?"

I think Furiosa would answer, "With hope."

Now, a bit of an aside. This question and both Dementus's and Furiosa's answers hit a very personal chord with me.

When I was young, my father left me and my mother for another woman he'd been having a secret affair with. The whole messy divorce that followed ripped apart my world. My mother, like Furiosa's, was a strong and resourceful woman who loved me fiercely and sacrificed so much to try and give me a better life. And like Furiosa, I had to watch my mother go through and hell and back because of it, or rather, because of my dad and his sinful choices. My dad went down his own spiral from then on too, and, though not as extreme as Dementus's spiral, it felt just as black. And all the chaos his black choices unleashed on my life made me cry at first. But only at first. Because I discovered quickly that the world won't slow down just because I need a break. If I don't keep running to keep up with the spinning of this cruel world, it'll chew me up and spit me back out with nothing spared.

And the only thing that helped me to stop crying was anger.

Don't get sad; get mad. Because anger is a stimulant that sharpens the senses and fuels you with its red-hot touch to keep going, and not just to keep going, but to keep going faster, stronger, better, farther, farther than anyone else.

I not only survived the chaos but thrived because of my anger. I got flawless grades, went to a prestigious university, got near flawless grades there, then worked my way up the food chain in the professional world all by pulling myself up by my bootstraps. I was hungry for most of my twenties. Like, literally. I was unable to eat three good meals in peace half the time. I lived with rats and mold. I was professionally bullied in one of my first jobs, and at that same job, I was preyed upon and sexually harassed by a male superior twice my age. I had to quit even though I had nowhere else to go. I walked straight into an abusive relationship afterward. He was physically and emotionally abusive. And that's only some of my past.

To me, the world often seems like one giant wasteland full of men who want to prey on me and women who will backstab me. There is no place to call home. Home is just a distant memory, a childhood shattered, a mirage that can never be sought again. And I survived so much of my wanderings in this wasteland by feeling angry. Angry at my father for putting me in this damn, black pit. Angry at the relatives and friends who failed to help my mother and me. Wrathful toward all the men who dared touch me, use me, abuse me. Enraged at the world. Hateful of myself.

Much of it calmed after I became a Christian in college, but old habits do, indeed, die hard. I learned forgiveness through Christ, which began my healing process, but that tried and trusted weapon, my favorite tool, anger, is always there, asking me to take it and wreak havoc.

Because Dementus and Furiosa are right. Violence, anger, hatred, vengeance. All of it just breeds more of it. It'll give you a short-term solution and a fleeting satisfaction, but the more you use it, the deeper you dig your own grave and the more you'll need it like a drug. Even now, it's hard to keep my anger muzzled and under control. I'm pretty sure the fights I have with Albert look different than a lot of other couples' fights. I break things, hit and punch and bite and scratch, throw things, and it spirals so that I want more, and I want to go into some crazy Fight Club mentality, and I "[feel] like destroying something beautiful."

Somewhere along the way of surviving, of using my anger as a way to self-medicate and numb the pain and sorrow ... somewhere along that journey, I began to lose sight of myself. I began losing the better parts of me, the softer parts of me. I killed those parts of me because I thought they were useless, and ever since I became a Christian and learned the truth - that love and forgiveness and peace are real and good - it's been a long and hard journey to revive that which I once cast aside as useless.

It still can be so, so hard to reign in my anger so that I don't hurt the innocent loved ones around me, from my husband to my family members to my friends to even my beloved dogs, who see me as their entire little world. When I can't take my own thoughts, when the memories of the past come to haunt me, when the world feels too heavy to bear, when life feels more than just unfair but wrong and unjust and everything in between, there's a part of me that's like Dementus. In those moments, I want to watch the world burn because I have no hope of growing. "With more cruelty." That's the answer that I, to my shame, still come up with in my darkest moments. It's a very real struggle that I have and such a big part of my life that it even ended up becoming a central theme of my upcoming books, which I've been working on for the past nine or so years. My anger and the troubles its caused can really be that all-consuming. There is a lot of grief in sorrow in me still, and the only way I can often deal with it all is to translate it into something that's red instead of that cold, cold black, something that fuels action instead of imprisoning me within entropy, something that makes me feel control, that makes me feel like I have the power to build things. And to tear it down.

But as a Christian, as someone with hope now, as someone who understands that every tear will be wiped away in heaven and that through Jesus, my sins are washed clean ... through him I have redemption. Whenever I remind myself of the truth of the Gospel, I, too, am able to let go of that teddy bear again and again. I, too, am able to answer, "With hope." And each time I answer myself like that, I'm able to move forward in a healthy, non-destructive way, even if it's just one step. I'm able to look past myself and care for something greater. I'm able to treasure peace and love and softness the way that I should, the way that will cause positive ripples that will heal and help those around me instead of grinding them into the dust from which I came.

It is a constant battle between the Dementus and Furiosa within me.

Furiosa isn't just entertainment. Like fables, it is a cautionary tale. Yes, the wasteland isn't real. Furiosa, Dementus aren't real. A crazy, steam-punk, post-apocalyptic desert society in the middle of Australia isn't real. But the emotional, psychological, and spiritual journeys are. Don't make their mistakes. Learn from their stories. I'm living proof that their mistakes and lessons can ring true in our own real world.

So ask yourself. Not if, but when the world falls around you, how will you brave its cruelties?