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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, and be sure to subscribe and ring that bell.
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