George Miller’s smartest move in Furiosa is to completely diss Immortan Joe

George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga complements and amplifies the impact of his 2015 blockbuster Mad Max: Fury Road in many ways, but there’s just one that I can’t stop thinking about: how little the new film has to say about Immortan Joe, the iconic arch-villain from the original film.

Certainly, Joe’s lack of interaction with Anya Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa could simply be due to the fact that Hugh Keays-Byrne, the actor who first brought Immortan Joe to the screen, died in 2020. Lachy Hulme takes on the role of Furiosabut perhaps George Miller reduced it out of respect for Keays-Byrne, with whom he worked for many years.

But I’m sceptical. Joe’s consistent secondary status in Furiosa’s origin story fits with the overall themes of Furiosa Too Good to Be a Coincidence : Immortan Joe, the demon from Imperator Furiosa’s final battle, wasn’t her nemesis at all. In fact, he wasn’t her something.

This is in stark contrast Furiewegwhere their beef appears deeply personal. Max Rockatansky wanders into someone else’s story Furieweg, as his stories usually go. This time it’s Furiosa (Charlize Theron) and Immortan Joe.

While Furieweg only subtly hints that Furiosa was once one of Joe’s captured harem of wives and incubators – the white sheaths of Furiosa’s top are reminiscent of the Wives’ impractical shifts – Theron confirmed that bit of her backstory during job interviews. So Furiosa really seems to have personal reasons for hating Joe. And his response to her betrayal is presented as a towering, mushroom-cloud rage out of proportion to her ability to resist him.

Not to diminish the Five Women’s agency in their own escape, but Joe views them as property stolen from him, not as allies who betrayed him. However, he considers Furiosa a traitor worthy of his personal wrath. And in the end, she’s the one who gets the credit for finally taking him down, which underlines her place on the same story level as him. Furieweg‘s main villain.

That’s why it’s so wild Furiosa says, quietly and unrelentingly throughout its running time, that Joe isn’t actually even a main character in her story. Of course he buys her, but then he forgets she even existed. He took nothing from her that had not already been taken, taught her nothing that she had not already learned from someone else, gave her nothing that she had not already accepted for herself. When they share scenes and even dialogue, there is no interpersonal anger or affection in either direction. Despite the intensity of their characters, Hulme and Taylor-Joy maintain a neutral distance from emotions.

It turns out, inside Furiosa, that Furiosa’s life was actually framed by the completely different, utterly pathetic figure of Dementus, the Wasteland warlord who tortured her mother to death, sold Furiosa into slavery, murdered her best friend and cost her her right arm. And just as emphatically Furiosa says Furiosa moved past revenge for years before she ever stood up to Joe.

What you saw in it Furieweg, Furiosa says, was the furthest from personal to Furiosa. Immortan Joe was never The Guy. He was ordinary the man standing in the way. And the “man” part is perhaps the most important.

The conversation that immediately surrounded Furieweg was about Immortan Joe as a Wasteland illustration of the death cult of capitalism and toxic masculinity. His highly recognizable philosophy reduces all non-elites to things – women to wives (sex slaves, forcibly impregnated) or mothers (enslaved to produce breast milk for food), and men to war boys (emphasis on guys), interchangeable cannon fodder addicted to the lie that they can only find meaning in violence against the True Leader.

This was all emphasized by the disempowering nature of Furiosa’s rebellion. After all, in the language of a country and western song, she injured him in the most devastating way a man can be injured, by his wife (Wives), his money (water), his car ( the War Rig). , and maybe even his dog (Nicholas Hoult’s hapless character Nux, if we want to stretch the metaphor a bit).

Immortan Joe is an exciting villain, and Furiosa doesn’t exactly skimp on him! A scene that contrasts Dementus’s shaky appeal to the self-interest of the masses with the unwavering faith created by Joe’s death cult propaganda is one of the film’s most chilling. But there is an eternal risk in presenting such an operatic villain who also represents such a broad theme. If you’re not careful, you risk making them look ambitious if you make them powerful and capable enough to claim villain status. You can easily turn around it making them seem cool.

That’s why it’s so damn smart Furiosa to put this final nail in the coffin of Joe’s emasculation by establishing that Furieweg‘s sense of personal beef was squarely on Joe are fear, and are vulnerability, not Furiosa’s. He’s not even important to the woman who dismantles him.

In a cliché reversal for the cinematic eras, Immortan Joe was, before Furiosa, just Tuesday.