Folks, I have seen Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and it is excellent.
Don’t worry, I abhor spoilers at least as much as the next person, so I’ll keep my comments on the movie itself to a minimum. But its release gives me a great opportunity to write about the ways mobility studies overlaps with my other research subfield: gothic literature and pop culture.
The gothic has been a recognized mode of writing since the late eighteenth century, with authors like Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe. Early gothic tales tended to feature captivity, incest, passion, betrayal, and the return of long-lost characters. More than just the soap operas of their day, though, such stories were often profoundly moralizing, raising questions about power, corruption, and social order.
The images and tropes common in the gothic have changed somewhat over time. Monsters became a common feature in the gothic revival of late nineteenth-century Britain, and in the US, authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James popularized the psychological gothic and its depiction of the horrors that lurk within the human mind. Landmark gothic texts have explored topics as wide-ranging as social dystopia, consumerism, and the haunting effects of slavery. What remains the same is that the gothic uses individual characters’ struggles to give voice to the anxieties of a given time and culture (or subculture).
Several contemporary scholars describe the gothic as the literature of transgression. The stories themselves often transgress bounds of propriety, depicting shocking or horrifying events, but in doing so, they also challenge the supposed firmness of those boundaries and others: between past and present, between right and wrong, between human and monster. The gothic suggests these distinctions aren’t as clear as we might like to think, showing us just how many things don’t fit neatly into the categories we assign to them. Nothing in the gothic seems to want to stay where it’s put.
Imagine, then, how important mobility is to these stories. Mobility, that so often signifies agency and the possibility of becoming. One woman’s gothic captivity is every woman’s restriction, and when she breaks free, she restores hope to a whole community. Gothic mobilities (whether physical, social, or psychological) offer liberation to a host of oppressed groups.
The Mad Max franchise is built on the idea of a gothic mobility. In a world structured around scarcity, when humans are reduced to survival mode, physical mobility (specifically automobility) is the only real agency many of the characters have. The two most recent movies especially – Furiosa and 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road – dramatize the dehumanizing limitations of such a society: the impossibility of achievement, of home, and of love. In these films, whatever hope the characters muster is associated with mobility, with either moving up or getting out. These are the gothic extremes of capitalism and fossil fuel dependence.
As much as any contemporary gothic film, the Mad Max franchise characterizes oppressive, if familiar, societal structures as forms of entrapment. Understanding mobility’s role in both creating such extremes and fighting against them is crucial to understanding these films’ messages about the dangers that await us, and those that are already arising.
But, as I promised, no spoilers.
Photo by Rémi Jacquaint on Unsplash
