Warning: Full spoilers follow for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
In 1988, three years after the release of George Miller’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, writer Alan Moore and artist Brian Bolland created one the defining superhero stories of our time. The Killing Joke attempted to explain the unexplainable, offering a possible glimpse into the mind of the Joker as a man who believes in the transformative power of one bad day. Between The Killing Joke and the death of Jason Todd’s Robin, 1988 would cement Joker and Batman as mirror versions of superhero trauma for decades to come.
Similarly, the tension between madness and violence has never been far from the stories of the Mad Max franchise. But it is Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the first of the films to not explore the legend of Max Rockatansky, that gives Miller’s famous antihero his own mirror image. While the stories of Moore and Miller may be equally obsessed with the impact of a life torn apart, for Miller, madness is not the end. Dementus and Max offer parallel perspectives on why loss is just the beginning of each character’s journey – not its end.
Painting Chris Hemsworth as the Joker of the Mad Max universe is more than just franchise bingo. Both characters are positioned as second-tier tyrants whose madness has evolved almost into a form of hypersanity. Dementus possesses both a keen sense of history and tactics that allows him to come inches away from control over all three of the Wasteland’s fortresses. What could have been a cliche – a babbling, craven depiction of a Wasteland warlord – becomes something richer and more complex in the hands of Chris Hemsworth. The performance is a swirl of humor and hatred in equal measure, and in a franchise where characters often sit skin-deep, there is much to mine in his broken brain.
This also makes him the perfect foil for Max Rockastansky. Tom Hardy’s performance may loom large over Miller’s current vision of the universe, but expand your watchlist to all four of the Mad Max movies and you will find a character not too dissimilar from what Hemsworth has created onscreen. Mel Gibson’s Max can be thoughtful and expressive, but there is an indifference to those around him that teeters somewhere between a defense mechanism and outright cruelty. Given their shared backstories – the “one bad day” that cost them their families – it is not hard to understand why both men choose violence as their preferred language.
In fact, the relationship these two characters have with death is almost symbiotic. In Beyond Thunderdome, Max tells his post-apocalyptic lost boys that he is “the guy who keeps Mr. Dead in his pocket.” In Fury Road – now in the harsh rumble of Hardy’s accent – Max introduces himself in voiceover, explaining to whoever is listening that he is the one who runs “from both the living and the dead.” And when staring retribution square in the face, even Dementus trades fear for fatalism. “We are the already dead, Little D,” he explains to Anya Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa – and not without a touch of empathy in his voice.
But if both Max and Dementus have embraced death, what separates the two characters is who they are willing to bring with them into the darkness. Given how often Max finds himself at the center of Wasteland prophecy, it’s fair to wonder if Dementus is what Max would become if he started buying into his own hype. Max has his chances; in each of the three films before Furiosa, Max is invited to rebuild, only to disappear into the horizon as others take on the task of creating a new society. Even in the first film – long before he loses his wife and child – Max rejects any attempts by his commanding officer to wear the mantle of civilization’s hero. “Any longer out on that road and I’m one of them,” he explains. “A terminal crazy.”
Meanwhile, the Wasteland might have broken Dementus, but he is accompanied in his travels by his own powerful savior mythos. For all his bluster, Dementus is no coward; he does not fear death and is frequently willing to lead his men from the front of the charge. We also see him act with something close to kindness towards young Furiosa, encouraging her to look away from his clan’s “dance with Darwin” and risking his own life to save her from Immortan Joe’s War Boys during his siege of the Citadel. If valor and performative class consciousness were our only criteria, we might even consider Dementus a Wasteland hero on the rise.
Therein lies the difference between Dementus and Max. Both men may be damned, but whereas Dementus wants others to join him in his pain, Max works to spare others from feeling it. Max knows that his humanity is a lost cause, and that, like radiation, long-term exposure to him frequently results in death. He also knows that his presence would only poison the lives of those around him, encouraging them – directly or otherwise – to adopt the same heartlessness he has been reduced to. Perhaps no community in George Miller’s films could survive without Max as their savior, but Max himself sure seems to think that no community would endure with him as their leader.
So we watch as two broken men in knee braces shuffle across the Wasteland, each trapped in death’s cold embrace and seeking a reason to continue on. The power of pairing Fury Road and Furiosa is in seeing how these two characters both changed and were changed by Furiosa in turn. Dementus nearly dragged her into the depths of hatred, but if the History Man’s story is to be believed, even her final act of revenge speaks to the flicker of hope she keeps alive in her heart. Meanwhile, Max offers her a path to redemption, showing that even the dead still have something positive to offer the living.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that George Miller, the man who famously tried to bring the Justice League to the big screen, understands the powerful duality of heroes and villains. But those who would suggest Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga suffers from a lack of Max Rockastansky need to take a closer look at the work Miller and Hemsworth have done with Dementus. Even 45 years after the release of the first film, Max Rockatansky remains as inscrutable as ever – but leave it to Miller to use his richest villain to help us understand the chaos of Max’s mind.
