It’s an old storytelling adage: You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become Aaron Eckhart. (We’re paraphrasing.) Such are the thoughts apparently kicking around in the head of Mad Max creator George Miller, who thoughtfully fielded questions about the ultimate fate of Fury Road’s breakout badass Imperator Furiosa this week, and came to some not especially cheerful conclusions. (Not wholly surprising, given that Miller’s two most famous film franchises are built around two utterly terrifying ideas: Planetary apocalypse, and a pig being lost in a city.)
“I’ve often thought about it,” Miller responded when asked about Furiosa’s future in a recent interview with Josh Horowitz. “There are two ways to go, One is utopian, which is not an interesting story, really. I’ve somehow imagined that the first thing she would do in line with that, is go up and release the water.” (Coming to theaters in 2025: Okay Max: It’s Good Now!) But the other possibility is a whole lot darker—and more traditional:
Campbell said that the usual story is that today’s hero becomes tomorrow’s tyrant. The hero is the agent of change. They basically relinquish self-interest in order for some common good. He basically says … you love what you’ve built, or saved, too much. You become holdfast. You become the orthodoxy. You develop the dogma and basically then you have to protect it. That tends to be the rhythm of these things.
Of course, Miller acknowledges that Charlize Theron’s Furiosa has probably never read Joseph Campbell, and may very well be a whole hell of a lot smarter than him in any case. “I think she’s too smart to fall into that trap. She’s already seen it with the Immortan Joe,” the director noted. Ultimately, Miller says he’s “torn” between the two outcomes; maybe that explains why his interest in re-visiting the character is solely focused on that Furiosa prequel he’s been floating for years now, free as it would be from all this potentially depressing speculation about the character’s ultimate fate.
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I agree with everything he says here, but I want to add: if the only interesting story you have left to tell with a character is inverting them, maybe that character doesn’t have any worthwhile stories left.
I don’t think the revolutionary->tyrant thing is really a “inversion” — it’s just how things go in reality. Robespierre went from someone who fought against the Old Regime and ended up being somebody far worse that the despot he helped to depose. Same thing for Lenin and Mao.
It’s how things CAN go in reality, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near universal. Nearly every nation on earth has some kind of revolutionary in their founding mythology who is looked upon as a great improvement on the previous regime. Like Washington, for one. (Hell, even Lenin and Mao aren’t seen as the one-dimensional villains in their own societies that they are in the west.)
In (most) film, where characters are invented to serve a narrative purpose in a finite story, I think flipping their role to its opposite in the sequel counts as an inversion, even if you can draw a coherent line from A to B.
Myth and fiction is full of heroes who become corrupt and/or fall from grace. King David, Jason (of the Argonauts), Beowulf, Oedipus. It’s as ancient as heroic myth itself.
Right, I never disputed that. It just sits alongside a larger tradition of ones who don’t.
1)I’ll concede that there is a large tradition of,and a greater volume of stories about heroes triumphing and living happily ever after. Certainly more so than turning to tyrants. But I also believe, as far back as Gilgamesh, that depicting heroes’ flaws, mistakes and failures were deemed hugely important elements of myths and legends. I think that tradition is of equal significance.2) I would also agree, to some extent, with the way you are defining inversion as a narrative device. I difference, I think, is that I see the narrative of such stories as one long arc that’s split, rather than two, and that the fall of the hero is an inevitable consequence of what is set up in the rise. David defeats corrupted leader Saul only to become as corrupt as Saul. Michael Corleone succumbs to becoming a gangster who could kill his own brother. Rather than a reversal these ends are inevitable, a lesson that is integral to these stories.
The Gilgamesh story is interesting for when it arrives in the Sumerian/Akkadian mythic tradition. There’s a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that it comes at a time when social and political power was shifting from the ens — sort of a local cult priest, originally — to the lugals, which were more secular kings. It’s one of the earliest ones to clearly center a human protagonist; the older ones tended to emphasize the gods’ will, conflicts and actions. There’s a school of thought that suggests things like him losing the immortality plant to the snake represent a cultural shift to foregrounding mortal heroic kings over immortal deities.
This isn’t wholly on-topic, I know, but my point going into this was just that a dark turn for a protagonist isn’t inevitable, and we seem to be broadly on the same page there. But that’s not at all saying that a hero’s flaws don’t serve a variety of narrative and cultural purposes.
I’m not sure thinking of a character arc between sequels as one long piece is the most logical or useful way to think about them, especially in a case like this where it’s not even a sequel he’s even necessarily going to do, just the director spitballing about the life of a character after the movie ends. The Godfather, sure, that’s based on one book that was split up over at least two movies. But Fury Road was supposed to (and did) stand alone with maybe minimal knowledge of the preceding films and virtually no anticipation of a sequel required or evident. In a case like that, a sequel is, at most, some new expansionist stuff stapled onto the end of a story that was already completed in a satisfying way, and more often, just a whole new story about the same characters.
That doesn’t mean it can’t be good. The Mad Max movies aren’t exactly beloved for their intricate character development. I’m not necessarily against doing something radically different with the characters if a good idea arises.
All good points, it is a stretch to view a nonexistent Furiosa sequel as part of an arc. I’m extrapolating based both upon Miller’s musings as well as what he tends to do with major supporting characters (they become the new leaders of the community) and his protagonist (they-Max- end up outside the community), but its a big leap to suggest that this is the trajectory for Furiosa as she transitions from supporting to central player. That’s a fun exercise, but only that.
Disagree with Beowulf, he rules prosperously for 50 years then gets his heroic send-off and anoints a clear successor.
Lenin and Mao were pretty bad people though. And Washington was a slaveowner.
Washington was a slave owner before the revolution and he was a slave owner after the revolution. Power didn’t corrupt him into that, it was just a continuation of what was already set up or allowed by the British. Were Furiosa to follow his example it would be by essentially deciding to give freedom to the people she initially set out to free (Immortan Joe’s wives) while continuing the oppression against whatever other groups he was being tyrannical toward.
That’s not really the point.
Yeah. And he sanctioned or participated in the ethnic cleansing of a bunch of native tribes. With one or two very rare exceptions, historical myth-making tends not to valorize the leaders with low body counts.
LeninLittle side note because it is often forgotten: Lenin didn’t overthrow an Old Regime. They overthrew the Russian Republic, a democracy in the making. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Republic Russia may have been in the process of becoming Europe’s largest democracy … Lenin was a despot from start to finish.
You left out that Kerensky wanted to keep fighting World War I for another insanely bloody year at least and Lenin did not.
Thank you for noting this.
Oh Alexander Kerenski. The forgotten Russian.
I’m of the opinion that the only people who start revolutions are middle class social climbers, because they’re the only ones who have something to gain. The upper class already have the power and money, and the poor know they will be deprived and under the thumb no matter who is warming their butts on the throne. People start revolutions to become the new elite, it’s baked in.
History is replete with counter-examples though. To cite two of the most obvious, in China the Han and Ming dynasties were both started by men who were born peasants.
Hm, in my experience the desperate poor are all for revolution, but lack the tools to enact it. That’s why revolutionary leaders come from the bourgeois, because they have the resources to get shit done. There are revolutions that came from the working class though, the Romanian Revolution springs to mind.
Or in Marx’s estimation, Bourgeois revolution is just the usual end of feudalism, and that’s the last violent revolution we’ve had in most of the Western world. His prophesied proletariat revolution seems unlikely to follow, though.
Oliver Cromwell, too. Though he was likely always a prick.
But even that kind of depends on how you define “tyrant.” Like, Augustus was definitely a tyrant, but the empire wasn’t a miserable hellscape for most people.So I don’t think the choice is really between “evil tyrant” and “bright-eyed utopian philosopher king.”
Counterpoint: maybe Furiousa would have just embraced a whole different vibe
The tyranny of designer bags, Hello Kitty t-shirts, toy dogs and the general style of the eternal child-adult may be the worse tyranny of all.
From the movie Young Adult, not a paparazzi photo.
Imagine seeing her walk through a parking garage like that, then just casually climb up into the War Rig and drive away.
Oh HELLO, Kitty!
She’s faced down war boys, bullet farmers, and the worst of the worst, but this summer Furiosa has to face her most violent and formidable enemy yet (*record scratch*) – high school!
Immortan Floofykins.
Christopher Beckwith’s “Empires of the Silk Road” opens with a discussion of an ur-story of a hero rebelling against a tyrant, universal among the peoples of central Eurasia because every dynasty becomes a tyranny some new hero gets to rebel against. I had to return that book to the library before finishing it, but Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps” is a single short story containing the entire cycle.
I figured there was a decent chance that just letting the water run like that would cause it to run out faster and once she realized that, it’s back to strict rationing.
Psssh, you and your practical concerns!
Joe wasn’t “rationing”. Rationing usually means making sure everyone gets some, however little—not shooting your resources into a crowd like a T-shirt cannon at a sports game. It’d be a huge step up.
Thucydides and Hobbes agree that revolutions normally lead to chaos followed by the rise of the least reasonable and most violent leader overthrowing the rest. The nearly universal rule is: “The powerful take what they can and the weak yield what they must.”
Glad Max: Wild Water Kingdom. Furiosa goes up and releases the water, setting up a giant super-rad water park!
Yeah, I hadn’t thought about it, but it makes a lot of sense. For one, there was no way they were going to let the water flow that freely for long. I think it would be one of those “benevolent fascism” approach to things. Where she treats her subjects well, but they’re still HER subjects. They stay in line, get exiled, or killed. Still a pretty OK existence, seems like. By comparison. But it could only last all of one or two generations that way before someone less shaped by Furiosa’s past comes to power. It can’t last.
So Aunty Entity from Beyond Thunderdome? Not a full-blown monster like Toecutter, Humungus, and Immortan Joe, but still a ruthless leader.
So The AV Club just straight up has auto-playing video ads with sound that can’t be paused or muted now. What a shitshow this site has become.
On mobile it’s sticky, so their shitty autoplay videos also follow you down the page like a demented stalker.
Gotta get that ublock baby!
I see a trio of occurrences in one possible outcome:1. Somebody invents the stillsuit.2. A bunch of worms get mutated by the fallout and grow to enormous size.3. Turns out that chrome mouth spray is actually the Spice Melange…
Fury Road is George Miller’s adaptation of Dune, confirmed.
I think it’s pretty hard to imagine anyone in the Mad Max universe who gets any power not becoming a tyrant of some sort. The world is just to harsh and raw for any sort of peaceful co-existence types. It’s a killed or be killed world and the only way someone leads that is to be meanest and toughest person for the job. Furisosa wouldn’t be as bad as Joe but that was because Joe is almost a comically evil antagonist but there is no way she keeps her power workout being hard.
I always wished the Star Wars sequel trilogy had played with some version of this inversion idea. The old EU flirted with it a bit.
They hint ever so vaguely that the New Republic has turned into a nightmare of bureaucracy and appeasement, which isn’t quite an inversion, but it is a “here’s why revolutions fail” arc.But the sequel trilogy was never much interested in politics. Or telling an interesting story.
Its getting real exhausting reading articles with these ads.
I mean, if he’s torn then there’s an interesting story. A future where
she is shown to be very aware of the Immortan Joe trap, but
circumstances force her in that direction till it’s too easy for her to
make that choice? I dunno…
It’s kind of an interesting comparison to Max, who over several movies comes in to save the day, then just fucks off to who-knows-where
until the next sequel- this seems like it would be a possible
continuation for him if he had stuck around at the end of the Road
Warrior or Beyond Thunderdome, and maybe the reason he’s decided to keep moving on is to avoid the temptation to become that kind of leader.
Furiosa would have to have a character for her to “become” something. As it stands, she exists exclusively as a slight frown across Theron’s face.Love Fury Road, but it’s an action movie in search of a hero.
George Miller is dead.“I wonder if it’s the same Wolfgang Bayer.”
I don’t see why she couldn’t have ended up a merely solid and fair leader, sort of like Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead (the comics in particular). It wouldn’t be a utopia, the world’s still a wasteland. But why can’t she have learned the lessons of living under somebody like Immortan Joe. Why can’t she be smart enough to come up with something better? Nobody’s saying it’s going to be perfect or end up all rainbows and unicorns, but I think she could learn how to navigate being a ruler without falling into the two rather predictable outcomes George Miller’s predicting. And working through what that might actually look like, and what growing pains she might experience, would be more interesting to me than either a purely utopian or purely tyrannical outcome. And if she does end up on the tyrannical side of the spectrum, what does that mean in this universe given the nature of her character? For that matter, if she ends up a fair and effective ruler, what mistakes might she make? I’m thinking something akin to Daenerys and her path, only without the same unsatisfying ending. Or at least give some indicators or foreshadowing that works better than the last season of Game of Thrones.
But that might involve writing an actual story or plot.
Becomes
Furiosa becoming a tyrant, while realistic, would still be a cliche, though. If Miller were to make a sequel to Fury Road better she do something still in character but which the audience won’t expect. She could still be a good guy and the movie could be about something else.