IN MAY OF THIS YEAR, George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the long-awaited prequel to 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, premiered to generally favorable reviews. It provides an origin story for the one-armed deuteragonist Furiosa, played in Fury Road by Charlize Theron and, in Furiosa, by Alyla Browne and Anya Taylor-Joy. Overall, it’s a pretty enjoyable film, if not quite as groundbreaking and genre-defining as its predecessor.
Miller’s five Mad Max films are masterpieces of a certain sort of repurposed-junk aesthetic. His vision of a future in ruins is one where humanity is grotesque but ingenious—building baroque vehicles and weapons adorned with anything and everything salvaged from the scrap heap of the age that came before. Roughly forty minutes in we get a glimpse of the interior of Gastown—a fortress built on the ruins of an old oil refinery. The unnamed Guardian of Gastown (Peter Stephens) clutches a pre-apocalypse artbook open to a page bearing an image of John William Waterhouse’s 1896 oil-on-canvas Hylas and the Nymphs. The camera pans out to reveal that the Guardian is painting a gigantic reproduction of it on a wall of the stronghold. There is very little in the Mad Max films (especially in Fury Road and Furiosa) that might be considered beautiful in the Burkean sense of delicacy and femininity. Thus, the seemingly benign painting of waifs stands out.
Waterhouse’s composition—with its lush greens and blues and human figures with unblemished, alabaster skin—is a fantasy of a prelapsarian world. Both Fury Road and Furiosa are set in arid, craggy deserts dominated by reds and oranges; they revolve around the loss of an Edenic “Green Place” and feature characters that are, almost without exception, wind-burnt, radiation-scorched, scarred, and riddled with postnuclear mutations.
Yet what looks like a scene of watery, mutual seduction in Waterhouse’s tableau is, in some sources, the prelude to abduction and drowning. In Greco-Roman myth, Hylas, the prince of the Dryopes, is orphaned when Herakles kills his father in battle. Afterward, Hylas becomes Herakles’s servant and lover, joining him on the Argo Navis, the seafaring vessel used by Jason and his Argonauts. On their journey, Hylas is abducted by naiads and Herakles is so heartbroken by his disappearance that the ship’s crew must leave him behind while he searches, fruitlessly, for his paramour. Hylas’s ultimate fate changes with the telling: The poets Gaius Valerius Flaccus (Roman) and Apollonius of Rhodes (Greek) each offer some version of Hylas falling in love with his captors (it wouldn’t be the first time), but the Greek Sicilian poet Theocritus, the oldest of the sources mentioned here, opines that he was held beneath the waters while the nymphs muffled his cries.
In other words, the Guardian of Gastown paints a scene that appears to embody escape but in fact represents another sort of environmental peril. Immortan Joe, the water-hoarding, monstrous symbol of patriarchy in both Fury Road and Furiosa, thunders from his citadel to his subjects: “Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you and you will resent its absence.” There is, of course, an irony to the Guardian inadvertently fetishizing another form of death in his Waterhouse homage.
Water is central to both films and can be, to some extent, a stand-in for the femininity that this world is missing: Both are scarce and hoarded by powerful men (as is the milk of nursing mothers that, like water, is exported as a luxury good from Immortan Joe’s citadel). The wet vulnerability of wombs that provide unblemished children is similarly precious—and policed. In 2018, the Manchester Art Gallery in England, where the Waterhouse has resided for over a century, put the painting into storage, in an action led by the performance artist Sonia Boyce and supported by its then curator of contemporary art, Clare Gannaway, along with other museum staff. In its place was a note asking viewers to challenge the “Victorian fantasy” in which the female body is “either a ‘passive decorative form’ or a ‘femme fatale.’” (Visitors were also invited to record their reactions to the deinstallation on Post-it notes.) The removal was meant to start a conversation, but the heated backlash to this artistic/curatorial gesture ended up being more about censorship. Whatever one’s feelings about the form or quality of Boyce’s work, it is engaged with Waterhouse’s potentially uncomfortable vision of femininity. The artist and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose aesthetic precepts he subscribed to, were products of a Victorian era attempting to square empirically observed realism with the affective emotionality of the Romantic poets, whose ideas still held immense sway. (It is easy to forget that in 1848, when the brotherhood was founded, an elderly William Wordsworth was England’s poet laureate.) The results are often dreamy re-creations of scenes from literature, mythology, and biblical history that draw from the sublimity of nature as well as from a roster of artists’ models, meticulously and accurately painted.
Furiosa is a revenge movie, far more invested in themes of environmental decay and how one is hardened by a life in the wastelands, i.e., a realm of vanishing resources and extreme human greed, much like the world all of us occupy today.
The effect of this particular stylistic choice is that the same, very specific women—the favorite models of the artists who depicted them—ended up embodying a wide array of Pre-Raphaelite subjects. Elizabeth Siddal, the wife of brotherhood cofounder Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is John Everett Millais’s Ophelia, William Holman Hunt’s Sylvia, and Rossetti’s Beatrice. By the time Waterhouse (who was twenty years younger than the founding members of the brotherhood and debuted Hylas and the Nymphs nearly fifty years after the group’s founding) was painting, Aestheticism—the art-for-art’s-sake movement championed by Aubrey Beardsley, Walter Pater, James McNeill Whistler, and Oscar Wilde—had come to the fore. The Aestheticists loved the end results of Pre-Raphaelite philosophy but rejected the notion, put forward by the Brotherhood’s most ardent critic-defender, John Ruskin, that good art reflected truth through moral fiber. Under Aestheticism, Waterhouse and his predecessors created a sort of amoral interchangeability; the same model could be the passive Lady of Shalott, iconoclastic Lilith, tragic Proserpine, or the manipulative Belle Dame Sans Merci—all rendered as similarly worthy and beautiful, agnostic to their legacies.
Boyce’s disgust, in 2018, at Waterhouse’s nymphs (described by Victorian art critic M. H. Spielmann as “sweet girl-fatalist[s]” and resonating with the then-novel term nymphomania) is informed by the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements at their height. It is not hard to find something unsettling, even hideous, in the brotherhood’s representation of women. Rossetti, in a fit of romantic grief, buried multiple unpublished poems with Siddal when she died of a laudanum overdose in 1862, but he had her corpse exhumed six years later to retrieve and publish those texts; a reverent worship of feminine beauty gets thrown aside all too easily in pursuit of male genius. But also consider that, whatever the meaning of any one Pre-Raphaelite painting, the group’s penchant for individual representations of their models lends their subjects a multidimensional richness. Joan of Arc, Daphne, and Ophelia are not interchangeable, but across the brotherhood’s collective portfolio, they are all represented by the visage of Siddal. Indeed, she contains multitudes.
Though Fury Road came out in 2015, a full two years before the #MeToo movement rose to widespread prominence, it is hard not to think of it as a part of the same cultural moment that Boyce’s installation occupies. Its plot, after all, revolves around the liberation of Immortan Joe’s prisoner-wives. His villainy is driven home by Miller’s Grand Guignol representations of violent, patriarchal rape culture (which, thankfully, never stoop to depicting sexual assault on-screen). While the movie’s environmental message is elegiac—there is no Green Place left to return to—its feminist one is triumphant: The world is better when women are free and the rotten face of patriarchy, in Immortan Joe’s case, is literally torn off. Furiosa’s feminist credentials are less clear. Being that this is a prequel, most of the title character’s time in the tale is spent in begrudging service to Immortan Joe and only ends with her escaping his citadel with his wives, thus kicking off the events of the earlier movie. The film’s primary antagonist, despite his over-the-top cruelty, is not a parody of patriarchy. Miller treats the protagonist with respect, but the work is, definitively, not a #MeToo film. It is a revenge movie, far more invested in themes of environmental decay and how one is hardened by a life in the wastelands, i.e., a realm of vanishing resources and extreme human greed, much like the world all of us occupy today.
In that shift away from those interests, Furiosa has almost no place for soft, Burkean beauty. Fury Road centers on the wives, the closest thing we have to Pre-Raphaelite waifs: young, beautiful women with perfect skin and delicate frames, clad in flowing, diaphanous, and revealing gowns, unsuited to the horrors of a dead world. These women begin the film as interchangeable set dressing, victims to be rescued. Furiosa is singularly focused on its heroine, who is neither interchangeable with the brides she later recovers nor soft, given her many scars, shaved head, and skeletal prosthetic arm. But that hardness is required to rescue the wives and let them be individuals. Without becoming disfigured and brutal like Furiosa herself, the wives are, with her assistance, given space to contain multitudes. By film’s end they are able, like Elizabeth Siddal, to remain unblemished, and embody every facet of mythic womanhood, be it destructive, seductive, ameliorative, or murderous. Miller’s world—with its ingrained grit, unrelenting sun, and water that is scarcer than bullets, gasoline, and rage—destroys that which is exquisite, seductive. The Guardian of Gastown, in painting his mural, is, unknowingly, restoring something lost to the Mad Max universe: the possibility that one could be both delicate and dangerous.
Tyler Dean holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Irvine, and is a professor of literature at a number of Southern California colleges. He is a regular contributor to Reactor magazine and teaches courses on vampires, Victorian novels, and the Gothic.
