In this sense, Furiosa’s own personal creation myth is a massive expansion on the recurring question underlining Mad Max: Fury Road: “who destroyed the world?” It is the question that Immortan Joe’s “breeders” scrawl on the wall of their gilded cage before fleeing his clutches alongside Imperator Furiosa in that movie. They also ask it point-blank and in extreme close-up to one of Joe’s War Boys before casting him off their War Rig refuge. While the question, which very well may have originally been posed by Furiosa to Joe’s “wives,” is never verbally answered, the implication is obvious. Men destroyed the world. Now in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Miller takes the time to show exactly how, and on a biblical scale.
The Green Place lost to Furiosa is ruled exclusively by women with their own customs, rituals, and beliefs. We’re never invited to fully know their religion, but it’s a common refrain for them to say “may the stars protect you.” It signifies some form of spirituality, but one devoid of the patriarchal connotations associated with most religions from antiquity to today, be it of a pantheon ruled by Zeus or of a single God whose self-appointed voices on earth often treat women as subordinate to men, usually using a story about Eve and an apple as one of many pretexts. At various points in history, women have been kept in conditions identical or worse to those of Immortan Joe’s breeders by men who claimed to be doing god’s work.
Meanwhile Furiosa’s odyssey into the Wasteland introduces her to good men, such as Praetorian Jack, and figures deserving of mercy, including Fury Road’s aforementioned and pitiable War Boy played by Nicholas Hoult. By and large though, the world Miller has modeled after our own history—be it pre-modern, medieval, or truly ancient—is just an extreme repeat of what came before.
We get a better idea of how this works in Furiosa. The ancient scribe and self-appointed historian who follows Dementus around is always whispering in his ear about this or that custom from the bygone days. It’s implied the old man’s dubious recitations of history likewise inform much of Dementus’ initial aesthetic. As a character who actor Chris Hemsworth described to me as “a circus sideshow,” Dementus is a veritable carnival barker or snake oil salesman. He’s the eternal conman who, as Hemsworth surmised, tells people that “I have the solution for the problems you’re suffering. Come this way.”
While we’d hesitate to say Furiosa is overtly criticizing any single religion, the movie is creating its own mythology about how those religious stories and texts are created, propagated, and finally exploited by men of power who are now in search for more of it. Dementus appropriates Christlike iconography, even as it’s unclear if this far into the post-apocalypse he even knows who Christ is. It’s simply a guidepost explained to him, likely by his captured historian, which becomes the basis to create his own self-aggrandizing myth. Surely the same happened to Immortan Joe, as he indoctrinated desperate youths into believing a grab-bag of tenets, be they from the ancient Romans with their praetorians and imperators, or the Vikings with promises of paradise in Valhalla.
“They’re variations on a theme,” Miller said. “Tyrannical figures, people oppressed, people sitting on top of dominance hierarchies where they control all the resources.” Stories of salvation offered by those who seek to make themselves king.
