“If you can’t fix what’s broken…”
I was originally going to type up a review of Mad Max: Fury Road, but lots of people have already said the main stuff, and said it better than I could. However, one line from the movie kept stirring in the back of my mind; I felt that I should understand it, but didn’t.
“If you can’t fix what’s broken, you’ll go insane.”
Max has almost no real dialogue in the film, so if he’s given a full line, I’m gonna assume that that line is important.
What does he mean by “insane”? Well, frankly, he means his own condition. Max knows he is insane (it’s in the opening lines of the movie, as well as the name Mad Max.) He understand this about himself, but knowing it doesn’t help him escape his ghosts.
Max is trying to tell Furiosa that she shouldn’t make the choices he made. He couldn’t fix the brokenness in his own life, and he went insane. He spends his life driving around alone in the wasteland, just trying to survive. That’s how Furiosa will end up if she and the Wives and the Vuvalini go into the salts.
Escaping Immortan Joe won’t fix anything. He’ll still brutalize the people who rely on him for water. He’ll still have his Milking Mothers and Warboys and he’ll find new women to enslave. It’s not enough for the women to get away; they have to fix what’s broken. Their society is broken, and the only way to escape madness is to go back and fix it.
This is why Nux’s story arc is so important. Nux is the proof that change can happen, that even those who have dedicated their lives to destruction and objectification can make new choices and find humanity.
Escape is not enough. Survival is not enough. You have to fix what’s broken. The only way out is redemption, and redemption isn’t found in isolation. Either we all fix what’s broken together, or we all go insane.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1FrzCRU.
Tags: fury road, text post, thank you for helping me better understand that line, it also provides a good insight I think into the math that doesn't work, in the line about how if furiosa drives east for X days, she's going to find nothing but salt, because in reality she'd be able to circle the world, twice, by one fan's conservative estimate, in that time, but max's line could be intended not to be taken literally, but symbolically, because he knows what it means, to carry your own personal Wasteland with you, however far you go.
