Mad Max: Beyond Patriarchy — On Fury Road’s (2015) Visual Rhetoric and Apocalyptic Social Rebirth
If you haven’t seen Mad Max: Fury Road (2015; dir. George Miller) yet, I highly recommend it. Unexpectedly, it turned out to be a film I didn’t know I wanted. There are a lot of things worth discussing here, but in particular, I want to explore two elements of the film that I think make it a significant work of cinema. Visual Rhetoric and Mad Max (in Brief) In my review of The City of Lost Children (1995), I argued that Mad Max : Fury Road is primarily interested in storytelling as visual versus a story funneled to us through narrative proper. The point I want to make about the visual qualities of Mad Max — an idea that also applies to The City of Lost Children, albeit mobilized for different purposes — is that there is so little in this film that is told to us as a narrative (i.e., in exposition, dialogue, or in literal narration) that it compels us to focus not on the narrative (the plot), but on the conveyance of meaning within its visual landscape, both in the straight symbolic sense and in the characters-doing-things sense.
