Mad Max Fury Road:
What would Jesus do?
Author: Samuel Peterson
Date Published
2017-08-21 (ISO 8601)
72-08-21 (Post Bomb)
Author's Note: this is a little thing I wrote in 2015 right after I saw this movie. I had so much fun writing it, I decided to post it here for my first entry.
Mad Max: Fury Road is probably best understood by what’s on the surface. On that level, it appears to be not so much of a story, but rather a psychotropic drug which is administered visually, sending tall orders to the medulla and the adrenal glands and negotiating directly with the hippocampus. It leaves the viewer with a sense of fatigue and dumbfoundment, a sense that he knows he just saw something he’s likely not to forget, but exactly what he just saw is likely to be remain a mystery. I think the secret to the film’s capacity to have such a chemical effect on its viewers is that it may be the purest expression of the destructive impulse sometimes referred to as Thanatos. What its effect on civilization will be has yet to be determined, but based on the sales, a huge portion of the world’s population has been administered a large dose of something that perhaps should not have been approved by the FDA. If you’re one to hedge his bets, you’d best finish and stock up that bomb-shelter you’ve been working on, as the world may be getting even nuttier after consuming an unprecedented amount of a substance which I think should be called ”Distillate of Mayhem”
That’s what I think the film really is, so I’ll just save any description of the plot for the sections dealing with the subtext, since I think that’s where it belongs. Don’t worry, like all subtext, it’s vague, it doesn’t have to make complete sense, and nobody really believes it. The only thing I will say here about the film’s plot and execution is in my mind a substantial piece of praise; the movie completely shed that oh-so- annoying trend of American cinema in the ’00s of being preachy and/or whiny. This would have ruined the purity of the Mayhem. The only thing that’s made clear in the film’s beginning is that humanity has already fucked up and broken everything, no hand-wringing or tut-tutting necessary.
The Subtext: Jesus incites a coup in mount Olympus, which overthrows the Roman Catholic Church
If that seems crazy or deranged, I’d just chock it up to the brain damage that must necessarily result from consuming such a large dose of Mayhem in one sitting, but I must soldier on; What’s done is done. I think that anyone who’s seen the movie would forgive someone for trying to grasp at something (no matter how crazy) to explain the movie–it watches much like a night-mare. The beginning is so riddled with grotesqueries and nonsense that it leaves the mind in a peculiar state when the story turns to events and dialog that can be processed.
The story begins with the theft of wives from a particularly gruesome character known in the movie as ”The Immortal”. The audience is never fully introduced to this fellow. All we know is: he lives on a mountain called the citadel with his harem and his warriors who worship him in a sort of death-cult, at the base of the mountain lives a miserable rabble on whom the Immortal occasionally bestows water from his sky fortress, and he sends periodic scavenger parties on war rigs to do god-knows- what. When the Immortal learns that his harem is gone, he mobilizes his entire horde in pursuit.
During this first pursuit stuff gets broken and our hero, Mad Max, joins the abductors. I won’t belabor all the details here, but I think it’s important to note that Max is initially mounted on the crucifix-like prow of a war vehicle with a blood line to a zealot particularly bent on reaching paradise; I might also add that Max appeared to have a ridiculous, nay, miraculous amount of blood. Incidentally, the zealot also joins the fugitives, and eventually forswears the death-cult thanks to the power of feminine love and compassion.
After a short respite, the chase resumes. By now the Immortal’s party is joined by two others headed by other warlords. Now I don’t remember the details here (perhaps it wasn’t fully elaborated) but I think the other warlords were the Immortal’s brothers. At the very least, they appeared to have a common cause. I’ll just go out on a limb and say the one called the Man-Eater was Hades, and the other by deduction was Poseidon, but I’ll justify that later. Anyways, the ladies run from their pursuers, more stuff gets broken, and the fugitives eventually find the band of matriarchs they were fleeing to only to find that the paradise in which they sought refuge is no more.
The band of harem women and matriarchs now decide to find salvation elsewhere by riding off into the great unknown. Their plan is to just ride off into the wastes with provisions for a half-year ride in the hopes of finding something. Now, half a year of motorized travel will easily get you across any continent, so it seems metaphysically significant that Max is able to convince the women that there will be no salvation found in flight, and that the only hope of redemption is to go back to the citadel and to try to fix what’s broken. So they turn back, people die, and even more stuff is broken in a spectacular orgasm of Mayhem in a mountain pass, complete with one final chord played by a flame-throwing electric guitar. Also, the band manages to kill the Immortal and his warlord compatriots, and Max saves the ringleader of the woman-heist with nothing less than his own blood. Finally, the surviving women and Max reach the citadel with the Immortal’s corpse, the women ascend the mountain and Max remains behind.
So much for the plot. What does this have to do with Jesus? I think to best answer that, I’ll need to submit to you broad, over-generalized, and brief summary of indo- european theology and civilization.
A male takeover that leads to mayhem
Roughly speaking, before the domestication of the horse the gods presiding over neolithic civilizations in Eurasia were female. At some point people in the Eurasian steppe learned to domesticate the horse. Not only did they learn to fight from the saddle, they also hooked the horses up to chariot ”war-rigs”. With these tools they managed to make all kinds of Mayhem. They also happened to have male deities. As the conquests of these marauders went on, an extensive theological influence was made. Many of the lands overrun by these peoples had a masculine shift in their gods, so that for the most part, men controlled the power of the heavens, and the feminine province of fertility of both land and body were diminished in importance. Indeed, in the case of Greek civilization, this takeover is evident in the numerous myths involving Zeus raping this deity or that, which, when taken together, depict an outrageous wholesale molestation of a family of fertility cults.
Time passed, war-rigs were improved, and a particularly influential theocracy called the Roman Empire was undergoing a face lift. Since the reign of Augustus, the emperor of the Roman Imperium was also the chief priest, the Pontifex Maximus, which is an office that exists today under the name of the papacy of the Roman Catholic Church. In the pre christian era, the pantheon of the roman empire had three principle deities, all of which were male. There was Jupiter, ruler of the heavens; Neptune, ruler of the seas and earth; and there was Pluto, ruler of the underworld. The gods of this trinity were also brothers who had taken their thrones from a prior set of beings known as Titans. Some of the details to this arrangement were about to change when Constantine the great won the imperial seat in a series of civil wars from 312 to 324 AD.
While fighting in civil wars, Constantine adopted a heretofore persecuted religion called Christianity that sprung from the empire’s eastern province of Palestine. At the time of the religion’s founding, Palestine was principally inhabited by a semitic people (non indo-european) called the Jews. The Jews had their own mountain god (also masculine, but certainly not related in any obvious way to Jupiter, Zeus, Wotan, or any of that ilk), and this god alone was worshiped by the Jews (the ”good” ones, anyway), furthermore, The Jews didn’t view their god as belonging to anyone else but them – He was their god, and they her his people. From this religion, a heretical cult branched off that believed this mountain god produced a son, Jesus of Nazareth, who was sacrificed in order to redeem all of mankind, only to be resurrected three days later and taken to the kingdom of heaven, after which, Jesus Christ’s apostles became possessed by a ”holy spirit” that lead them to act according to the Hebrew god’s will.
An important sacrament in Christianity is the Eucharist, which is a metaphorical act of cannibalism instantiated by the eating of bread and drinking of wine which take the lace of the body and blood of Jesus. I put that here since I think it’s significant that it is Max’s blood which at first fuels one of the Immortal’s warriors, and later is used to save the principle heroine of the movie. Ironically, although the teachings of Jesus was one of ascetic pacifism, the cult became so popular amongst the soldiers in Constantine’s army, that the religion was adopted as a means of motivating a killing machine bent on obtaining the supreme office of the most potent nation in Europe. Indeed, Constantine adopted Christianity as the religion of his legions before the decisive battle against his enemy Maxentius, putting crosses on the shields of his soldiers... essentially mounting Jesus on his war rig and fueling his soldiers’ spirits with the blood of the savior.
Perhaps one of the appeals to Christianity to the soldier class was that the religion was focused on paradise in the afterlife, which may seem like an appealing promise to people whose business is death. One could forgive an alien spectator of Christianity for making the conclusion that it is a death-cult since the harshest penalties to the unfaithful and the highest blessings to the faithful lie in the respective realms following this life. Even today, a principle rationale for the fervor of some missionaries is that the pagans must be given the message of Christ so that they may escape eternal damnation following their death.
Anyways, despite the adoption of a theology that was originally much different from the old Roman pantheon, it turned out that not much substance of the old religion was changed. Minor deities were demoted to saints, the old trinity were given new names and slightly different forms (the father, Ruler of heaven; Son, redeemer of earth; holy ghost, custodian to the afterlife), holidays were only partially changed (what the hell does a bunny have to do with the resurrection of Jesus? Answer: Nothing whatsoever!), the calender and therefore the cosmic rhythm remained solar, and so on. Another way to show how thin of a semitic veneer Christianity is on the old pagan theology, look no further to the common artistic depictions of god the father; according to Judaic law, attempting to make a likeness of God is strictly forbidden, but in Christianity god looks almost exactly like Jupiter. You know, old dude in the sky with long flowing white hair. In fact, the Immortal looks like a grotesque imitation of that.
So here we are now. Our war rigs are pretty impressive now. Our nature is also still pretty flawed, and if we decide to create Mayhem with the same determination as we showed in the last century, we could very well end up breaking everything.
What does this have to do with Fury Road?
The prior section was a brief and somewhat over-generalized summary of a view- point that lead to the following impressions I had about the events of Mad Max: Fury Road.
The Immortal is Zeus, and the other warlords are Hades and Poseidon (presumably the man-eater is Hades, but that’s a minor point). He lives in sky fortress, he’s apparently the only source of rain for the damned at the base of the mountain, and he has a harem which he undoubtedly obtained through theft. He also runs a death cult, so I will also presume that he is a metaphor of the Roman Catholic Church.
Mad Max is Jesus. He’s been abducted by Zeus’s death cult to function as a blood bag since he’s a universal donor. The fact that he’s a blood bag is significant since the rite of the Eucharist is fundamental to Christianity. He’s also a universal donor, which is similar to the notion that Jesus broadened to estate of the Jewish god to all people. He is kidnapped by the Immortal’s war-band and hooked up to a war-rig (in a position much like that of a crucifix) to fuel a zealot’s single-minded purpose of reaching paradise, which I liken to Constantine painting the cross on the shields of his legionaries. Now Mad Max is no pacifist in this film, but Jesus was prone to ire when it came to defamation of his father, and my guess is that he’d be none to happy to see his religion co-opted by a pagan religion that is one of the wealthiest organizations in the world.
The women are the deities of old, some of them have been raped and inducted into the Immortal’s harem, the others banished to the wastes. When they finally escape from the grasp of the grotesque Immortal, we reach the pivotal moment in the film– the moment when Jesus convinces them that there is no salvation in flight. Only in reclaiming the Citadel, or mount Olympus, can they fix the mayhem that men have wrought. It is significant that it is the women who are pining for the ”green place” and carry seed for crops, since the female gods were principally beings with powers over fertility.
Finally, when all was said and done, Olympus was been dethroned, and the people manning the citadel voluntarily hoisted up the women. Max, however, stays behind. He’s done his job. Heaven now belongs to woman.
What do I really think about all this?
I feel I owe an apology to any reader who’s made it to this point. The above narrative is merely a desperate attempt to make sense of the ridiculous spectacle that is Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me if it is to be interpreted as a story. However, I really don’t think that was the intent, as I said in the first section of this review. Mad Max is really a psychotropic substance. Distillate of Mayhem.
Before I close this article, a clarification needs to be made. One might suppose after reading this that I’m some sort of wishy washy mystic who worships Gaea, or practices some other sort of watered down new-age paganism. This is not so. Although men do have a fabulous talent of breaking stuff, the female dominated theologies were full of nasty realities as well, particularly that of human sacrifice. The female ruled world also has it’s dystopia, that of an Orwellian leviathan that devours its young. Maybe Hollywood will make another baffling piece of work that confuses the rational mind so much it runs to that scenario to make sense of things. We’ll see.