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A semi-psychoanalytic reading of Mad Max: Fury Road

Jung’s theory hasn’t crossed my radar in a long time, but a recent film made it suddenly relevant. The film Mad Max: Fury Road seems to be an eruption of suppressed anxieties about society’s mass fascination with homosexuality. The final cut is likely at odds with the progressive beliefs of its creative team, at least as individuals. I can’t imagine Charlize Theron ever publicly disagreeing with the Human Rights Campaign or with Mary Bonauto. Bonauto is the attorney who eagerly told the Supreme Court that same-sex parenting, including arrangements concocted through surrogacy, is beyond reproach.

The dystopian images of Fury Road depart significantly from the Mad Max films of the 1970s and 1980s. Fury Road presents us with a world where motherhood is commodified to suit an elite class of males who wish to share their property and life ambitions only with other men. Women are hooked up to machines that pump milk from their breasts and held inside dismal barracks, gestating heirs for warlords who show no sexual interest in women. The men of this warrior ruling class derive all their ecstasy from the company of muscular young males eager to labor and soldier for each other and for their male patrons.