it’s the five year anniversay of Fury Road and I got nowhere else to be, so let’s talk about blood.
Action movies involve physical conflict as their central mode of story telling. Fists are flying, guns get shot, swords are clashing, all with the purpose to overpower an adversary. In these contexts, blood is a very common image. Blood is drawn when the hero is in trouble, when the tables are turning and the action gets serious.
Blood is taken, never given. Blood means pain, danger, and a loss of power that is zealously fought for.
So far so obvious.
This common way of interpretation is also very flat and boring, and blood as a symbol is arguably much more complex for about half of the population. People who are menstruating deal with blood on the regular. They are intimately familiar with its sight, its smell and its touch. For them, blood is nothing that is taken with violence. It is a common bodily function, and even if it is an annoyance, more often than not, the sight of it can be a great relief for anyone who doesn’t want a pregnancy.
Blood is given, not taken. Blood means a great deal more than just injury or threat or weakness, it means fertility, the power of life itself, it may symbolize adulthood and all its freedoms and responsibilities.
Which are all interpreations we usually don’t see in action movies. As a genre, action movies are focused on cis men and their struggles (for power, for love, for revenge, what have you).
Then comes along Max, who is mad, and whose blood is taken by the Immortan Joe’s war boys, which makes him even madder. A lot of things happen, but by the end of the movie, he uses his blood to throw a literal lifeline to save the heroine of the movie. He gives his blood to save Furiosa, who was taken as a girl to produce an heir for the Immortan, and upon failing that, became his Imperator in battle. Her relationship to blood is endlessly complex, I could write an entire essay on that. But here I want to draw attention to Max, a cis male action hero, who flips the script and uses his body in a way action heros never do. He uses his blood to heal, to literally give life to somebody else.
Critics have claimed Max was a “weak” action hero in Fury Road. I think what they meant was that he didn’t adhere to the violent dealings with blood masculine actions heros usually stick to. And to me that is a good thing.
This entry was posted by jbc on Wednesday, May 13th, 2020 at 6:28 am and is filed under Tumblr.
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