(rock music)
Hey Wisecrack! Jared here. Few artists have
had as big an impact on our image of the apocalypse
as Australian director--and actual, fully
trained medical doctor--George Miller. Miller’s
vision of a leather-clad post-apocalyptic
wasteland has captured our collective imagination
since the release of Mad Max: The Road Warrior
in 1981. And while we mostly tend to think
of Mad Max as that franchise with more violent
car crashes than lines of dialogue, these
films hold our attention because they--and,
indeed, most of Miller’s work--explore big
questions around life, death, and power.
Who owns the body, and what is it for? Who
gets to decide who lives and who dies? And
how can we live full lives when death is all
around us? Today, we’re going to explore
George Miller’s answers to these questions
and more. So go get some spraypaint, flood
your car with gasoline, and witness us as
we dive straight into this Wisecrack Edition
on The Politics of Life and Death in Mad Max...
and Babe.
And spoilers ahead for grown men getting straight-up
horny over cars. And again, also babe.
First, a little scene-setting.
George Miller’s Mad Max universe opens in
a near-future Australia where ultra-violent
motorcycle gangs duke it out with ultra-violent
cops for control of the roads. Protagonist
Max Rockatansky’s family is murdered in
the first film, and the series follows him
as he wanders the “Wasteland” in the wake
of a nuclear apocalypse, struggling to survive
turf wars between rival groups while holding
onto some shred of his sanity.
To understand a lot of what Miller does in
these movies, we can turn to our old friend--and
War-Boy cosplayer--philosopher Michel Foucault.
Foucault spent much of his career crafting
and refining a concept he called “biopower”--in
a nutshell, the idea that power, in all its
forms, has increasingly come to bear on “life”
and biological function. Biopower, according
to Foucault, involves the “Calculated management
of life”, “the subjugation of bodies and
the control of populations” and “distributing
the living in the domain of value and utility”.
In short, modern power isn’t about just
the exercise of force, but building and managing
a population. This management plays a big
role in the politics of the wasteland. Mad
Max: Beyond Thunderdome, for instance, revolves
around the fight between Aunty Entity and
Master Blaster for control of Bartertown,
a settlement that literally runs on biological
activity--specifically the methane produced
from pig shit--and relies on prison labor
to process said feces.
And in Mad Max: Fury Road, Immortan Joe uses
the tried-and-true biopolitical technology
of chastity belts to control his “Wives’”
reproductive capacity, and hoard it for himself.
But the concept of biopower can only take
us so far in our analysis of Miller’s work.
To go deeper, we have to move past the politics
of life... and explore the politics of death.
In his 2003 essay “Necropolitics,” Cameroonian
philosopher and political theorist Achille
Mbembe formulated the idea of “necropower”
as an update to Foucault’s concept of “biopower.”
According to Mbembe, much of the world now
runs on political machinery that is designed
not to protect and control life, but to produce
death in vast quantities. As he explains it,
necropolitics involves “the generalized
instrumentalization of human existence.”
It brings about “the creation of death-worlds,
new and unique forms of social existence in
which [people take on] the status of living
dead”
Obviously, Mbembe isn’t writing some Walking
Dead fan fiction. Rather, he means that, in
a jurisdiction permeated by necropolitics--such
as a slave-powered plantation, or an area
subject to colonial rule--members of certain
groups are allowed to live as long as they
are useful, but denied status as fully sentient
human beings with their own rights and subjectivity.
These people are physically or psychologically
maimed to mark them as lesser-than. In this
way, they are kept in what Mbembe refers to
as a “state of injury.”
This state of injury is rampant in the world
of Mad Max. These movies love to explore the
weird and terrifying ways that near-future
Australians degrade each other into mere objects.
In The Road Warrior, a gang straps prisoners
to the fronts of their cars, to be used as
living hood ornaments.
Moreover, gang-boss Lord Humungus arguably
even puts his own fighters into a state of
injury by classifying them not as people,
but as animals:
And in Fury Road, people are reduced to all
kinds of weird objects meant to serve Immortan
Joe’s needs. Max is kidnapped and turned
into a “blood bag,”
Immortan Joe keeps a collection lactating
women hooked up to industrial pumping machines
to produce “Mother’s Milk,” And then,
of course, there are Immortan Joe’s “Wives.”
Or, as they’re known around the Citadel:
In Immortan Joe’s eyes, these women are
property--”instrumentalized,” in Mbembe’s
terms--to the point where he keeps them behind
a literal bank vault door, as if they were
a stash of gold bars or the last remaining
copy of Final Fantasy VII. He values their
lives only insofar as they can make his babies.
Against this necropolitical backdrop--where
a human life is presumed to be a resource,
rather than an end in itself--Mbembe claims
that people tend to use one of two basic strategies
to find meaning and make life bearable.
The first, and most obvious, is the “logic
of survival”--the approach to life that
finds satisfaction in being the last person
standing. Max embodies this logic throughout
the series, and explicitly voices it in the
opening shot of Fury Road:
More complex is the “logic of martyrdom,”
the way of thinking that drives suicide bombers,
kamikaze pilots, and so on to kill large numbers
of people by killing themselves. According
to Mbembe, when the logic of martyrdom is
in full swing: “The besieged body becomes
a piece of metal whose function is, through
sacrifice, to bring eternal life into being.”
This logic finds its fullest expression in
the Cult of the V8, the religion that encourages
the War Boys to win eternal life by dying
in service to Immortan Joe.
Nux, for instance, deals with his hellish
life and impending death by cancer through
fantasizing about the opportunity to die a
glorious death.
More than anything else, the dying Nux desires “eternity” in the form of “Valhalla.”
When he fails to kill Furiousa, he frames that failure as the loss of his one chance at eternal life:
And speaking of McFeasting…
So far, we’ve been discussing how George
Miller explores questions around life, death,
sovereignty, and so on through Mad Max.
But George Miller isn’t just a former medical
doctor who directed the Mad Max series. Throughout
his career, Miller has been involved in a
variety of genres, among them dark fantasy
(The Witches of Eastwick) medical drama (Lorenzo's
Oil), and children’s films, including--believe
it or not--Babe and Happy Feet.
Weirder still, throughout all of these movies,
biopolitics and necropolitics still loom large.
Not convinced? Allow us to re-introduce you
to what is arguably the most sexual of penguin-based
children’s movies. Some might say too sexual:
Happy Feet follows the adventures of Mumble,
a penguin born in the midst of a fish shortage
to a society organized around the act of singing.
When his father Memphis realizes that Mumble
wants to dance, rather than sing, he is deeply
alarmed.
Emperor Land fetishizes singing, and identifies
it as the only legitimate way to find a mate.
This behavior lines up neatly with Foucault’s
description of the so-called “science”
of sex that developed in conjunction with
biopower. For instance, he notes how the “Strange
pleasures” of individuals were long considered
harmful to all-important population health.
In contrast, Proper and normal sex, allegedly
ensured a physically vigorous population.
In other words, getting down in a non-traditional
way came to be seen as literally dangerous
to the health and safety of your neighbor,
your country, etc. It’s on these grounds
that the community elders attack Mumble’s
tap-dancing.
Per the Emperor penguins’ biopolitical logic,
the only safe and healthy way to channel sexual
energy is through singing. Anything else is
seen as a direct threat to the wellbeing of
the group.
Biopower plays a similar role in Miller’s
The Witches of Eastwick. The entire plot of
this dark comedy revolves around a sexual
relationship between the Devil and three women
who unknowingly summon him to their conservative
New England town. The townsfolk condemn their
behavior as not just immoral, but dangerous:
Like Immortan Joe, Jack Nicholson’s Devil
ultimately seeks to use the women in his life
as vessels for his offspring, a fact recognized
only by the hilariously unhinged, devout churchgoer
Felicia, who slowly loses her mind imagining
the sinful shtupping:
Moreover, many of Miller’s non-Mad-Max projects
also engage heavily with necropower, by exploring
questions around who lives and who dies, and
why.
Nominal kids’ movie Babe explores the “state
of injury” through the lens of life on a
farm. From the get-go, the actually-horrifying
film makes it clear that the farm animals’
lives depend on their ability to provide utility
to the Hoggets--or, as Mbembe might say, their
lives depend on how they can “instrumentalize”
themselves. If they can’t do that while
alive, well… there's always dinner to think
about.
Like the population of the Citadel, the animals
are grouped into a rough caste system, based
on the role they play on the farm. The exact
mechanics of this divide are spelled out by
Ferdinand, a duck who tries to steal the morning
crowing responsibilities in order to become
“indispensable” to the Hoggets. Animals
lower in the hierarchy are kept in a state
of injury, where they are reduced to the food
items they are destined to become.
The tragedy of the necropolitical arrangement
is that it gives the half-lives, pork chops,
and blood bags of the world only one way to
experience something approaching personhood:
to deal out death and violence themselves.
Now this point is subtler in Babe than in
Mad Max--the pig only gets as far as biting
a sheep on the leg--but we can dream, can’t
we?
Mbembe claims that, under necropolitics, a
person becomes a subject- that is, a fully
individuated human being--“in the struggle
and the work through which he or she confronts
death [and] upholding the work of death.”
In other words, the extent to which you are
allowed to be a unique person is determined
by how much killing you can do. If you are
a victim, you don’t matter.
Throughout the Mad Max franchise, the right
to define oneself is limited mainly to men--and
occasional woman--who have the power and the
will to subject others to violence and death.
Employing flamboyant costumes and monologues,
characters distinguish themselves from the
drab multitudes by killing effectively, and
with a particular sense of style. As Mbembe
points out, murder in a necropolitical environment
tends to become over-the-top, even perversely
playful--in the wasteland, it helps to be
a bit of a ham.
Toecutter and his gang--in particular, the
ill-fated “Night Rider”--demonstrate the
link between killing and personhood, using
violence and chaos as opportunities for ego-primping:
The speeches and codpieces get bigger in The
Road Warrior, with Humungus employing what
appears to be a full-time hype man:
And the trend continues through Fury Road,
with Nux feeling most like a person when attempting
a suicide run on the war rig:
Not to be outdone, the Bullet Farmer responds
to the loss of his eyes with a speedy personal
rebrand:
Strikingly, Max actually avoids defining himself
in terms of his violent deeds:
Max, in other words, has been so warped by
his time in the wasteland, and by the logic
of survival, that he doesn’t even want an
identity. To take a name, after all, is to
make a kind of stand--a liability for a person
who just wants to drive away from trouble,
as far and as fast as he can.
And yet for a guy who makes movies about sexual
assault, suicide bombings, and horny penguins,
George Miller injects his stories with a surprising
amount of hope. Caught up in cruel biopolitical
and necropolitical systems, his protagonists
ultimately find ways to transcend those systems,
and live in ways that leave the world better
than they found it. In other words, they find
the “redemption” that Max and Furiosa
are looking for, and in the process become
subjects without resorting to pointless killing.
Just before the world goes completely to shit,
a pre-wasteland Max expresses his fear of
losing himself--should he spend too much time on the road.
Which, of course, is exactly what happens.
Max loses his family, takes revenge on Toecutter’s
gang, and begins his descent to the condition
we find him in at the beginning of Fury Road:
Beginning with The Road Warrior, Miller challenges
us to imagine a way back for Max--that is,
a way for him to live again..
The way to “live again,” it turns out,
is to fight back against the logics of necropolitics,
namely survival and martyrdom: to take actions
that put one’s own life at risk, and have
some greater purpose beyond taking as many
possible people with you when you die.
Babe finds out how to live in a necropolitical
environment by learning to herd sheep with
kindness, rather than cruelty. After his one
attempt at being an asshole to the sheep fails
to get him any results, Babe commits to simply
asking them nicely to move.
With this radical new approach, Babe creates
for himself a form of subjectivity not bound
to the cycle of dominance which Fly describes
earlier in the film. He is neither a “pork
chop” nor a “wolf,” as the terrified
sheep call the violent dogs--he is the “sheep-pig.”
This dynamic of taking a riskier, less efficient
action for the benefit of friends--rather
than the destruction of enemies--is also the
key to redemption in Fury Road.
In his final moments, Nux transcends the normal
logic of martyrdom by turning his body into
a shield that saves his friends, rather than
a weapon to be used against his enemies. He
gives his life not out of hatred for the other,
but out of love for the first people in his
life who have recognized him as anything more
than a fanatical soldier.
As he crashes the rig, blocking the pass and
allowing the others time to escape, his new
friends become the first people to truly honor
his request to “witness” him. Driving
away, and gracing him with the same hand sign
the Vuvalini use to honor their dead, they
recognize him as the full person he could
never become as long as he worshipped Immortan
Joe.
Similarly, Max becomes a subject by transcending
the logic of survival. Rather than taking
the motorcycle offered to him and driving
far, far away, he concocts a wild plan to
drive straight back the way they came, through
Immortan Joe’s forces, to take the Citadel
for themselves. In other words, Max risks
his own life for the chance to create a better
life for the people he’s come to care about.
This allows him to become a subject outside
of the necropolitical framework--to reclaim
his name.
Now, none of these endings are quite that
simple. At the end of the day, Babe is still
an unpaid farm laborer who could be turned
into spare ribs the moment he stops being
useful. And Furiosa & co. find themselves
in control of a massive war machine: it’ll
take a lot of work to deprogram a Citadel
full of War Pups.
But at a minimum, Miller offers us hope that,
in a world too often polluted by coercion
and violence, we can find a way to be something
other than victims or perpetrators. As Max’s
one-time commanding officer puts it:
Babe, Max, Furiosa, and Nux all prove themselves
to be bigger than the labels put on them by
the necropolitical power structure. Babe is
a sheep-pig, not a pork chop. Furiosa is a
freedom fighter, not an Imperator. Nux is
a lover boy, not a War Boy. And Max is more
than a man reduced to a single instinct: he’s
a human. And, as hard as that can be sometimes,
so are we.
But what do you think, Wisecrack? Where can
you see biopower and necropower at work in
our world today? What are some of your favorite
stories that grapple with these or similar
themes? Let us know in the comments below,
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