The Redemption Arc: Mad Max Fury Road

I watched Fury Road Black and Chrome edition recently, after going to see the new Furiosa multiple times, and loving it.

Director George Miller said of his film that he thought Black and Chrome was the definitive edition of Fury Road, and his favorite edition, and I have to agree. I've seen the movie more times than I can count, but the first time I watched B&C I felt chills down my spine and the characters' emotional journey hit me in a way that I totally wasn't expecting.

When they escaped into the sand storm, when Angharad goes under the wheels, when Furiosa discovers that the "Green Place" has been corrupted by the nuclear-fallout induced rot gripping the planet, the affect was so powerful each time that I couldn't help but to pause the movie and let the emotional turbulence wash over me.

How is it that a black and white color grading could make the movie so much more powerful? Well, it's easy to imagine the reverse, a garish over-saturated color grading so bad that it made the movie uninteresting or unwatchable. I think that taking the color out reduces the cognitive load of a movie that is already so densely packed with symbolism and action that you can actually start to process the powerful story and the journeys of the characters in real, or closer to real time.

What I realized this time around, is that the basic structure of the story is a deeply archetypal and ancient story structure: facing a crisis of identity, of morals, of being stretched to the limit, the antagonist triggers a regression to the past, to childhood, the "Green Place". This is followed by the tragic realization that the world of the child, the coping mechanisms, the attitude to the world at the time of childhood, are no longer fruitful or in fact they are now rotten. Which then prompts a decision-- whether to remain in the rotten world of childhood, doomed, and dying from lack of new inputs, or to abandon everything and to attempt to be reborn in the unknown.

Furiosa correctly identifies that she cannot simply stay in the corrupted green place with her old tribe. She knows that the only path forward is renewal, and she decides to ride into the unknown, a brave choice, but one that seems doomed to an almost certain death riding into an impossible stretch of wasteland.

Max, the seemingly immortal "Wandering Jew" of the Australian wastelands, who has the appearance of a man in his forties, but somehow was police before the world fell apart more than forty years ago, steps in with his archaic wisdom, seeing a third option and a true opportunity for Furiosa's redemption.

He suggests that instead of abandoning the world as they know it, they seek to return directly to the center of Furiosa's pathos, to tear down the corrupted, bloated emperor, and free the land from his tyrannical, pathological, and cruel rule.

In psychological terms, this is the midlife crisis, when one has grown exhausted under the harsh conditions imposed on one's self to thrive in the world, and the inauthenticity required to interface with the collective constructs of society, and the only way forward is to either abandon everything, or to overthrow one's cruel reason and to renegotiate a contract with one's self and the world. The renegotiation is clearly the more heroic path, but it requires the most psychological depth and maturity as well.

The renegotiation is not without sacrifices. Old and new friends alike are lost as the path back to the center is tread. But if successful, a new font of creativity, a well of fresh water, can be released that can power the second half of life, as can be seen when the aqueducts are released at the end of the movie.