so here’s something about fury road i don’t get, in hindsight
(yeah i’m in mad max mode tonight and for the unforeseeable future, sorry)
but…why is joe and the rest of the war party kind of just sitting around doing nothing by the time the war rig comes back their way? they were at least a day, maybe two, behind the group and they were just…sitting there.
lots of them were on lookout, sure, but joe had no way of knowing they’d come back around. was he waiting for the bullet farmer to come back with the wives? did he wonder what was taking him so long? what would he have done if they made good on the plan to go across the salts?
My wife brought up the same question after our first viewing. I like what people have suggested about Joe being in mourning for Angharad and her child. The film makes a point of showing that. The comment about waiting for the Bullet Farmer to return makes sense, too, if you assume that Joe has not already learned their fate. It could also be that having lost the trail of the war rig, he’s stopped at their last known location near the exit from the canyon while he sends out scouting parties to try to find them.
There’s also this: he’s sunk a lot of cost into the attempt to recover the wives. We know the People Eater has already been complaining about their losses. It could be a point of pride for Joe at this point not to return without something to show for it. And not just pride, but the practical need to maintain power. As a dictator, he relies on the War Boys in particular, and his subjects in general, believing he possesses godlike abilities. To return with nothing after being so thoroughly defeated by Furiosa would be a blow to his authority. I think that could be a factor in his hanging around for the couple of days he’s apparently been doing that: he doesn’t know what to do next, but he knows that returning to the Citadel empty-handed would be bad.
This entry was posted by jbc on Sunday, June 7th, 2015 at 6:51 am and is filed under Tumblr.
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