‘Who killed the world?

’ Religious paradox
in Mad Max: Fury Road
Bonnie McLean

George Miller’s Mad Max film series examines dystopian concerns vis-à-vis geographic
instability and the fragility of human societal relationships, ultimately connecting human
population crisis with the scarcity of natural resources and overall destruction of the planet.
In his latest film, Fury Road, Miller makes use of religious ideology and practice to highlight
ecological concerns and abuse of women. He contrasts patriarchal and matriarchal religious
power structures in order to interrogate the causes of the Earth’s destruction. From these
ideological contrasts, Miller introduces an ecological paradox that forms the film’s conflict.
Oppressive patriarchal practices enslave people through false promises of eternity, but can
offer no means to avoid a death brought about by earthly suffering. Conversely, matriarchal
religious practices ensure equality but offer no sustainable model of maintaining the Earth’s
resources. Ultimately, I argue that Miller employs this religious paradox to illustrate the
problems of earthly salvation in relation to religious ideology. Miller suggests that devout
worship, no matter how mindful or restorative, cannot rescue us from the ravaged Earth, nor
can it absolve us from the guilt of ruining the environment.

Keywords: Mad Max films, ecofeminism, Mad Max, privatisation

George Miller’s Mad Max film series examines a dystopian world as imagined
by combined destruction of the planet and society through warfare, resource
shortage and political instability. Through his vigilante character Max
Rockatansky, who battles lawless gangs and fascist warlords, Miller explores
the fear of extinction from the combined disasters of nuclear warfare and
reproductive crisis. In the latest instalment, Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller US
2015), Miller utilises religious ideology, practice and language to highlight
simultaneously ecological exploitation and abuse of women – behaviours
that culminate in the oppressive consumerist and religious rhetoric of the
film’s villain, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). Miller contrasts the rigid
power structure of Immortan Joe’s society with depictions of the women
who defy his rule and present an ecofeminist social model that promotes a
society of mutual dependence, gender equality and respect for the Earth.1 He

1. Mary Mellor defines ecofeminism as ‘a movement that sees a connection between the exploi-
tation and degradation of the natural world and the subordination and oppression of women’ (1).

Science Fiction Film and Television 10.3 (2017), 371–90 ISSN 1754-3770 (print)  1754-3789 (online)
© Liverpool University Press https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2017.25
372 Bonnie McLean

illustrates pregnancy and the woman’s body simultaneously as manifestations

of individual agency that decry abuses of power by Immortan Joe (echoing the
ecological exploitation undertaken by Joe throughout the film), who views the
female body as a product that will perpetuate his lineage.
Miller connects the male exploitation of the female body with human
exploitation of the Earth to suggest that these fates are linked by the ability (or
inability) to reproduce a system of power, which then yields a kind of exploi-
tation of natural resources and human lives. While the women’s reproductive
capacities are appropriated for a man’s self-appointed ideological purposes,
they also serve to spark a promise that the Earth may be made whole again. The
traditional Edenic ‘recovery’ narrative is disrupted by feminist agency, as noted
in the article ‘Re-casting Nature as Feminist Space in Mad Max: Fury Road’,
also featured in this issue. Through ecofeminist matriarchal religious practice,
Miller examines the masculine appropriation of reproductive power in order
to track the effects of oppression on vulnerable populations and on the Earth
itself. In this way, he unites ecological concerns surrounding the Earth with
gendered anxieties about women and childbirth to posit a theory of the Earth’s
destruction and suggest a blueprint for its restoration.
Yet Miller complicates this optimistic solution by adding aspects of religious
practice, linked to social customs and political affiliations. Through the conflicts
between the warlord and his wives, he constructs divergent religious practices
as a means of explaining ‘Who killed the world?’ – the question Immortan Joe’s
wives continually pose. The film’s plot sets up a patriarchal religious structure
in which Immortan Joe acts as religious leader, the Citadel becomes a place of
worship, and the War Boys enact rituals and recite incantations in order to win
Immortan Joe’s approval and hope to win a glorious death.2 Miller contrasts
this oppressive religious cult with a subtle yet equally resonant religion from a
matriarchal perspective. Practiced by the Vuvalini and Immortan Joe’s warrior,
Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), this communal faith finds converts in the
wives, who murmur Earth-centred liturgy and seek to become one with the
Earth. By decentring hierarchy and creating a religious practice focused on the

2. Known as ‘entering the gates of Valhalla’, this death echoes the kinds of war cries enacted by
various religions. It also reinforces the apocalyptic view of the world – that the best way to survive
a dystopian world is to bodily leave it altogether and save the work for a future generation, who
will also hope to escape it. As Rosemary Radford Ruether explains, ‘It is this kind of concept of a
transcendent, unrelational God, and the identification of themselves with this God, which allows
apocalypticists to imagine themselves to be safe from world destruction. Their own security and
escape from destruction is assured. Indeed world destruction is the means by which they can
escape’ (83–4).
 ‘Who killed the world?’ Religious paradox in Mad Max: Fury Road 373

Mad Max: Fury Road. Warner Home Video, 2015.

Earth and its inhabitants, this matriarchal religious practice exposes injustice
and inequality of our own present-day world. Yet the matriarchal religious
model offers no easy solutions with which to restore the Earth to a desired ideal
of balance and harmony.
From these ideological contrasts, Miller introduces a paradox that forms
the film’s central conflict. While oppressive patriarchal practices purport to
embody an imbalanced hierarchical power structure as a means of preserving
natural resources and the human species, such a means of salvation is only
available to an elite few, while abusing the trust of the poor and oppressed.
Conversely, those who practice matriarchal religions recognise an imbalance
in hierarchical power and seek to erase it by ensuring equality and a communal
society through care for the Earth as an extension of the self. Yet this
contrasting mode of salvation cannot undo the damage wrought by wars,
nuclear catastrophe and natural disaster, nor can it provide a blueprint that
would enable its citizens to create a more cooperative society or sustain Earth’s
remaining resources with which to feed and nurture the dwindling population.
Thus, what ensues is a crisis of faith: Miller suggests a need within people to
follow and implement some form of theology or secular ideology in order to
care for a dying Earth, yet no established practice can guarantee sustenance of
the Earth and its peoples.
I therefore argue in this paper that George Miller employs ideas of privati-
sation through a patriarchal religious context and ecofeminism within a
matriarchal religious framework to illustrate the problems of salvation through
human agency and religious devotion, particularly in terms of an apocalyptic
world and reconstruction of the Earth. By framing salvation – both of the self
374 Bonnie McLean

and of Earth – through childbirth and Earth cultivation, Miller suggests that
no such redemption is possible. Because human consumption and apocalyptic
disaster have produced this population crisis, bearing more children will only
heighten the tension between the people and their Earth. Death, therefore,
permeates both ideological constructions and highlights a problem neither can
solve, suggesting an inevitable end to the world, no matter how many children
are born, how many resources are hoarded, or how many people are freed from
oppression. Miller creates a seemingly happy ending that reveals an uncertain
future with no way to actually solve the world’s problems. Such an end, he
suggests, demonstrates the inability of that religious ideology to rescue us from
the ravaged Earth and absolve us from the guilt of ruining it.

Dystopian contexts in privatised and ecofeminist religious ideologies

In order to explain how contrasting religious ideals introduce such a paradox, we

must first understand their relationship to both privatisation and ecofeminism,
particularly when both practices are influenced within the context of the
dystopian society that Miller creates. Critics and authors utilise dystopia
to critique utopian modes of thought and world-conception.3 Yet they also
describe dystopia within the context of real-life situations. M. Keith Booker
describes it as an ‘“if this goes on” cautionary tale’, which Miller plays upon
in Fury Road through the gas shortage and human warfare taking place in the
society he shows his audience. Booker adds that the authors of such texts warn
us ‘of the dire consequences that might occur should certain trends already
underway in some contemporary real-world society, usually the author’s, be
allowed to continue’ (6–7). Thus, while dystopia is a descriptive genre, it also
transforms into a prescriptive genre when it features criticism of contemporary
society. In order for such criticism to occur, authors and artists transmute
current societal issues – whether warfare, shortage, oppression, or pandemic
and death – into unfamiliar geographical, social and political landscapes that
still feature similar social issues as their real-life counterparts.4

3. M. Keith Booker utilises Lyman Tower Sargent’s schemas to define dystopia as ‘a non-existent
society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author
intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that
reader lived’ (‘On Dystopia’ 6). Booker identifies a spectrum in which texts comment on social
decay or collapse and how they occur in speculative and dystopian texts.
4. Booker explains how ‘dystopian literature is specifically that literature which situates itself
in direct opposition to utopian thought, warning against the potential negative consequences of
 ‘Who killed the world?’ Religious paradox in Mad Max: Fury Road 375

From a religious perspective, dystopia taps into biblical narratives of

apocalypse, as outlined in the biblical book of Revelation. Adam C. Roberts
notes, ‘The same Christian Bible that has given us a narrative of beginnings
now provides us with an apocalyptic narrative of ending, and both of these,
it says, are actually the same thing: God’ (220). The bookending chapters on
creation and destruction point to a tenuous relationship between humans, the
Earth and God. The biblical book of Revelation particularly underlines the
impending apocalypse, God’s triumph over human frailty, and a restoration of
the Holy City to the ravaged Earth, signalling a return to the Edenic model that
had been thwarted by sin in the book of Genesis.5 Religion seeks to reconcile a
ruined planet with questions about an almighty God who is supposed to have
sovereignty over the Earth’s destiny and that of its inhabitants.6 Ultimately,
religion and dystopia form a violent relationship, in which the human both
dreads and hopes for an apocalypse that will cleanse the Earth of sin and
restore it to an Edenic moment of perfection.7
Within a dystopian context, then, neoliberal privatisation anchored in
religious practice serves to illustrate the effect that moral values have over
social practices and the lengths to which moral vacuity destroys society.
Practitioners of neoliberalism posit individual freedom and morality through
the acquisition of private property that feeds into social capital and produces

arrant utopianism. At the same time, dystopian literature generally also constitutes a critique
of existing social conditions or political systems, either through the critical examination of the
utopian premises upon which those conditions and systems are based or through the imaginative
extension of those conditions and systems into different contexts that more clearly reveal their flaws
and contradictions’ (Dystopian Literature 3).
5. The cyclical nature of religious apocalypse makes its way into literary texts, as well. In her 1993
novel Children of Men, P.D. James uses this cycle of destruction and renewal to explain the nature
of apocalypse and restoration through the metaphor of childbirth. In describing her midwifing role
to a woman who is pregnant after two decades of unexplained fertility, Miriam tells protagonist
Theo Faron, ‘I was there at the end. Now I shall be there at the beginning’ (149). James uses this very
language as an illustration of the close relationship between destruction and renewal present in the
Bible and religious practice.
6. Francesca Haig explains, ‘This ambivalence [in a present or absent God] is characteristic of
contemporary eschatological thought: on the one hand, the apocalypse was viewed by traditional
Jewish and Christian theology as God’s righteous judgment; on the other hand, post-Enlightenment
critiques of divine intervention have used the indiscriminate suffering of apocalyptic scenarios to
question the very existence of a just or omnipotent God’ (Haig 167). Therefore, dystopia exacerbates
anxieties over human existence and the sovereignty of a God who has seemingly chosen not to
intervene in human actions, particularly those that lead to death and destruction.
7. Ruether notes, ‘The apocalypticist, far from being concerned about the evidences of destruction,
is immensely cheered by them. Violence directed against others with whom they do not identify
is evidence of divine punishment, while violence against themselves is persecution of the
righteous’ (84).
376 Bonnie McLean

more capital. Prosperity is granted to individuals who buy into the system
of commodity production and privatise them to eclipse state regulation.8
Therefore, in order to receive status and wealth, the individual must already
possess a certain amount of capital and generate more profit within the private
sector.9 This social pressure to succeed is followed by a desire to subvert a
group-oriented sense of social values and mores, which would otherwise
sacrifice profit to the greater good of the collective society. In destroying the
moral social order, neoliberal privatisation creates a vacuum of power in which
individuals possessing capital seek to become entrepreneurs and amass power
through acquisition. They therefore become figures of social authority by
eclipsing the social power already set in place.
But religious and dystopian perspectives also reveal massive inequities in
this privatised society built by entrepreneurs’ self-motivated ambition or greed,
which leads to violence and social collapse. The entrepreneurs’ morals, based
on power through acquisition of capital and control of market forces, prove to
be inadequate in addressing social inequity and injustice towards the general
populace. Further, in a dystopian society, material goods and consumerist
systems of government exacerbate natural disasters by either depleting natural
resources or by emphasising the consumptive habits of the citizens who rely
on industry and technology to complete their everyday lives.10 Consequently,
over-reliance on material goods for personal and religious meaningful experience
disconnects individuals from the Earth that has been ravaged by human greed.
The entrepreneurial dependence on merchandise, goods and acquisition in place

8. E.S. Savas defines privatisation as ‘relying more on the private institutions of society and less on
government to satisfy people’s needs. It is the act of reducing the role of government or increasing
the role of other institutions of society in producing goods and services and in owning property’ (3).
This definition of privatisation maximises individual responsibility as a better and more virtuous
public than government-funded programmes or public assistance. While linked to neoliberalism,
privatisation sets in force ideological aspects of neoliberalism with direct fiscal consequences.
Furthermore, privatisation implies that these more desirable private institutions will service the
individual freely, dependent on the individual’s inability to pay for such goods and services.
9. David Harvey points out that while this system is marketed as providing better services to the
individual without government interference, it is a system that only works when the individual has
money to begin with: ‘But it is a system that works for the entrepreneurs, who by and large make
hefty profits, and for the affluent, but it penalizes almost everyone else to the point of somewhere
between 4 and 6 million foreclosures in the case of housing in the US’ (24).
10. As Sean Redmond notes, ‘The commercial aspect of this development [of science and
technology] is often narrativized as future capitalists forcing their products, services, and mandates
on a terrified, obedient, or compliant populace, held further in check by cold and calculating
scientists, the military machine, and tyrannical politicians in the pay and service of these (post)
industrial demigods’ (257–8). Thus, commercialism takes a dark turn into tyranny, and material
possessions destroy their consumers.
 ‘Who killed the world?’ Religious paradox in Mad Max: Fury Road 377

of actual intangible moral values cannot sustain a human population, since

habits of consumption can only provide humans with more of a product that
cannot weather a diminished existence in a destroyed world.
By contrast, ecofeminism seeks to reunite humans with the Earth and
restore social balance, particularly by subverting or destroying corrosive
social structures which entrepreneurs had implemented to stratify individuals
by their ability to generate and maintain capital. Derived from principles
of ecocriticism and feminism, ecofeminism interrogates hierarchical social
authority, particularly as it relates to gender and the management of the
Earth.11 As Greta Gaard explains, ‘Drawing on the insights of ecology,
feminism and socialism, ecofeminism’s basic premise is that the ideology
which authorizes oppressions such as those based on race, class, gender,
sexuality, physical abilities, and species is the same ideology which sanctions
the oppression of nature’ (1). Ecofeminism relies on a multitude of disciplines
in order to understand the complicated relationship between humans, the
Earth, social institutions and supernatural belief systems. Therefore, the
blending of theoretical approaches demonstrates the chasm between self,
Earth and society, further complicated by ambivalence towards a higher
power and religious practice. The ecological aspect of ecofeminism seeks to
rejuvenate the relationship between humans and a ravaged Earth, which fits
into a dystopian context.12 The feminist aspect of ecofeminism examines the
nature of gendered power in society and authority, particularly when that
power is patriarchal in nature.13
Just as dystopian texts reveal the damage wrought to the Earth by harmful
social practices, they also reveal inequities in gender that damage the social

11. Heather Eaton and Lois Ann Lorentzon define ecofeminism as ‘a variety of theoretical, practical,
and critical efforts to understand and resist the interrelated dominations of women and nature’ (1).
They add that ‘although ecofeminism explores a range of women/nature interconnections, three
claims seem central – the empirical, the conceptual (cultural/symbolic), and the epistemological’
(2). Ecofeminism relies on a multiplicity of disciplines and theories to explore deep connections
between gender and the earth, particularly in practices of preservation and power.
12. Greg Garrard declares that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a founding ecocritical text, ‘not
only begins with a decidedly poetic parable, but also relies on the literary genres of pastoral and
apocalypse, pre-existing ways of imagining the place of humans in nature that may be traced back
to such sources as Genesis and Revelation, the first and last books of the Bible’ (2). The religious
aspects of apocalypse are directly linked to the treatment of the Earth, particularly regarding
pollution and technological misuse.
13. Eaton and Lorentzen note, ‘If myriad voices, theoretical positions, praxis, and political leanings
characterize ecofeminism, then what makes ecological feminism feminist is the commitment to the
recognition and elimination of male-gender bias and the development of practices, policies, and
theories without this bias’ (3).
378 Bonnie McLean

ecology of equality.14 Women become especially vulnerable to abuse and

oppression when the damage to the Earth is revealed, because they are presumed
to have a closer connection to it. Vandana Shiva notes that consumerism and
privatisation, within the context of dystopia, separate women from nature and
suppress them within a patriarchal society:
The economic and political processes of colonial underdevelopment were clear manifes-
tations of modern Western patriarchy, and while large numbers of men as well as women
were impoverished by these processes, women tended to be the greater losers. The
privatization of land for revenue generation affected women more seriously eroding their
traditional land-use rights. (74)
Before entrepreneurs appropriated the land, women were considered to have
been ‘closer’ to the Earth than men by their mere proximity to it on a daily
basis, as well as their trust in nature to provide food, succour and income. Thus,
ecofeminists explain that privatisation of the land – especially in third-world
countries – is seen as a direct assault on women’s bodies, because women are
seen as being both more responsive and more nurturing of nature.15 Women
delegated to subordinate roles that make them subservient to men and not the
Earth thereby find themselves unable to effect the necessary social changes that
preserve their environment and society.16
Within a religious context, then, ecofeminism highlights the ways in which
spirituality, the Earth and humankind’s fate are impacted by dystopian disasters.
The impending or present apocalypse heightens the sense of vulnerability and
danger in which humans struggle with and against the Earth. Furthermore,
the apocalypse sharpens the societal divide by creating schisms between ethnic

14. Ivone Gebara declares, ‘Women and the ecosystem were there, present but unacknowledged, but
they were not regarded as constitutive elements in the process of making our knowing explicit. In
other words, what we called “knowing” was in fact an awareness limited to a particular perspective
on reality, itself determined by a specific group responsible for formulating this perspective’ (22).
The epistemological acknowledgment of gender as a metaphor for power seeks to understand how
the well-being of women is tied to the Earth.
15. As Mary Mellor explains, ‘The gender dimension of environmental issues rests on two linked
claims. The first is that women and men stand in a different relationship to their environment, that
the environment is a gendered issue. The second is that women and men respond differently to
environmental issues, in particular that women are more responsive to nature’ (12).
16. Gebara declares that ‘The notion of a free and autonomous person has been co-opted by the
ruling classes, by colonialism, and by neocolonialism, by the capitalist free market, by contem-
porary wars, by advanced technology, by ideologies, and by religions utilized in promoting rivalries
and eliminating poor peoples, especially blacks and native peoples, in order to uphold a power elite
as it takes advantage of all the good things of the earth’ (75–6). By explaining the process of privati-
sation and its effects on women in third-world or developing countries, Gebara demonstrates how
women’s fates intersect with that of the Earth.
 ‘Who killed the world?’ Religious paradox in Mad Max: Fury Road 379

groups, social classes, genders and the Earth’s inhabitants, human or animal.17
Ecofeminism therefore points to the problems inherent in divorcing the Earth
from its inhabitants, as well as the spiritual implications of a solely material
existence. These theoretical intersections indicate a holistic means of being, one
that transcends the material and encourages union with the Earth as beneficial
for both the body and the spirit, at an individual and societal level. With this
spiritual schema, the individual can assert agency over their body and demand
accountability from their society, thereby demonstrating an awareness of being
a responsible global citizen. Such a transformation yields a mindfulness that can
help preserve the Earth and its inhabitants.
But the theoretical and interdisciplinary modes of engagement with inequality
and power imbalance linked to cannot address the ongoing ecological disaster,
nor can they offer a respite to the very physical nature of death and suffering
that those oppressed within systems of abusive authority ultimately undergo.
Ecofeminism highlights the problems of gender inequity and damage wrought
to the Earth, but it attempts to head off the ‘if this goes on’ scenario that Booker
describes as typifying dystopian literature.18 Fury Road demonstrates that
unchecked environmental crisis leads to death and destruction that cannot be
undone even by the best theories and practices of equality and preservation.
Therefore, Miller’s contrast of ecofeminist principles demonstrates that no
matter how mindful the spiritual practice, even the best intentions cannot
undo the irreversible damage that kills the Earth and its inhabitants. Just as
death plagues those who privatise what is left of the Earth’s resources, it also
haunts those who seek to restore the Earth for a communal society.

Patriarchal religious systems in Fury Road

Miller thus connects dystopia to the effects of privatisation through examination

of patriarchal religious beliefs, in order to critique societal constructions of
gender. He constructs Fury Road’s villain, Immortan Joe, as an entrepreneur

17. Ruether explains that ‘The extermination of evil is therefore tribalized, identified with absolutized
enmity against other racial, ethnic, and religious groups. The impulse to apocalyptic [sic] thus
becomes genocidal, the extermination of those people who are seen as “Satan’s people”’ (83).
18. Ruether notes, ‘Rebuilding human society for a sustainable earth will require far more than
a plethora of technological “fixes” within the present paradigm of relations of domination. It will
demand a fundamental restructuring of all these relations from systems of domination/exploitation
to ones of biophilic mutuality’ (258). Again, these ‘fixes’ denote an ability to reverse ecological
disaster before irreversible damage has taken place, such as the destruction of food and water
supplies, or radioactive fallout that causes incurable diseases among the human species.
380 Bonnie McLean

to interrogate privatisation, as well as patriarchal religious authority. From

the setup of the film, we infer that Immortan Joe has attained his power in a
vacuum of authority and amidst the chaos that comes from nuclear disaster
and lack of natural resources. Miller introduces his viewers to Immortan Joe
through panning shots of the Citadel to illustrate it as a place of industry,
technology and plenty, a repository of fertile women, fertile crops and drinkable
water. The inhabitants of the Citadel consist of the War Boys, Immortan Joe,
his sons and his wives, while the masses outside are poor, dirty, maimed and
seemingly helpless without the Citadel for survival. Immortan Joe doles out
carefully prescribed doses of water, admonishing, ‘Do not, my friends, become
addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence’,
while the camera interpolates a medium shot of him speaking with close-ups of
individuals fighting over the water. Those who have the best access to water and
food belong to Joe’s inner circle – his eldest sons Corpus Colossus (Quentin
Kenihan) and Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones), his wives and the War Boys.19
No others are considered necessary or ‘useful’ enough to receive resources
or treatment that would save their lives, or make them more comfortable.
Miller’s tableau suggests that the warlord attained power by discovering and
marketing an essential natural resource, and then hoarded this resource while
distributing it exclusively to those in his favour.
Within this state of privilege and perpetual lack, patriarchal religion takes
its deepest hold. The starving citizens who dwell outside the Citadel treat
Immortan Joe with the reverence accorded to a deity: he conflates their physical
needs with his beneficence as their cult leader, so that basic resources like water
become sacred objects to be worshipped. In the prelude to a trade with the
neighbouring settlement of Gas Town, the people gather to pay homage and
receive a meagre amount of water. A panning shot of the bedraggled crowd
contrasts sharply with a long shot of the Citadel’s interior, showing green plants
and an immense waterfall. A long shot angled upward presents the citizens’
perspective of Immortan Joe – he appears powerful and remote, a deliberate
contrast to the previous shot, in which his War Boys placed plates of protective
plastic over his body to conceal tumours and lesions. His sense of a deliberately

19. We witness this privileged healthcare through the treatments that Immortan Joe, Rictus and the
War Boys receive, particularly with oxygen tanks and blood transfusions. The Organic Mechanic
(Angus Sampson), Immortan Joe’s medical officer, allots treatment to a dying Nux (Nicholas Hoult),
explaining, ‘I got a War Boy running on empty. Hook up that full-life’. Nux is able to receive this
care because of his proximity to and service for Immortan Joe. Furthermore, Max himself receives a
kind of care in that his O-negative blood (the sign of a universal donor) contains quantifiable value
to this ‘half-life’ society.
 ‘Who killed the world?’ Religious paradox in Mad Max: Fury Road 381

constructed patriarchal religion is further reinforced by the gestures his War

Boys make – adoring hand movements that signal worship, and silence to
respect his authority.20 Immortan Joe further cements his status as self-made
god by withdrawing the water and rebuking his subjects for their reliance
on a resource now re-branded as ‘Aqua Cola’.21 By hoarding resources and
allotting them to those who acknowledge and accept his authority, Immortan
Joe constructs a society in which virtue merits reward – but even then, social
stratification separates the devout by their relationship to the warlord.22
Just as Immortan Joe hoards resources, he also uses them as commodities
in trade and development of capital. His food and water become capital to
trade with other collectives that carry the resources that he may lack.23 His
social and religious authority stems from the management and distribution of
goods, showing how his self-centred quest for power affects the Citadel and its
inhabitants.24 Likewise, his commodification of humans justifies his leadership
and moral virtue in preserving and ‘protecting’ the human race from oblivion.
To perpetuate his monopoly on Aqua Cola and the Citadel, Immortan Joe
relies on a lineage to inherit his wealth and adopt his role as social authority.25
Young, strong, and fertile women become a necessity for Immortan Joe’s
successful social dominance, and he therefore acquires several women to serve

20. As War Boy Slit (Josh Helman) grabs a steering wheel before joining Immortan Joe’s war party,
he tents his hands together and murmurs, ‘By my deeds I honor him. V8’. This chant demonstrates
the hold Immortan Joe holds over his War Boys and illustrates their loyalty to their god who
provides for them, so long as they serve him without question or hesitation.
21. Here, Miller demonstrates the product placement and marketing of a natural resource.
22. Harvey notes that this struggle in class leads the privileged to prioritise their own interests
rather than save society from collapse. Drawing from Paul Volcker, who predicted a serious social
collapse, he explains that ‘this will mean rolling back some of the privileges and power that have
over the last thirty years been accumulating in the upper echelons of the capitalist class’ (153). The
privileged class’s inability to distribute wealth will mean further inequities of capital and class,
precipitating an increasingly marked imbalance in power.
23. Examples of this trade may include the ill-fated trip to Gas Town, in which Furiosa is to take
water and fresh produce to Gas Town in exchange for ‘guzzoline’.
24. Harvey theorises that in retaining his own comfort, a character like Immortan Joe ‘makes it all
too clear why those of wealth and power so avidly support certain concepts of rights and freedoms
while seeking to persuade us of their universality and goodness’ (38).
25. Yet the presence of tumours, missing appendages and general poor health along with whispers
of ‘viable humans’ being born, suggest that a nuclear crisis has occurred to trigger an infertility
pandemic in the world. Splendid Angharad’s (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) death triggers anxiety
because of the stillbirth it has induced. The Organic Mechanic, declares, ‘Another month. Could
have been your viable human!’ which leads to assumptions that the human population is suffering
a deficit. He further confirms this supposition by declaring that the dead child was a boy, ‘Your A-1
Alpha prime’, which is the same kind of clinical, animalistic language used to describe the wives as
‘prize breeders’.
382 Bonnie McLean

as his wives and producers of breast milk to maintain a human population and
sustain it with their milk.26
Through this commodification of human beings, the paradox in Immortan
Joe’s patriarchal religion emerges. While he develops a breeding program that
seeks to ensure his immortality on Earth, he inculcates apocalyptic religious
rhetoric that attempts to ease his War Boys’ exit from the Earth. Most of the
War Boys suffer from various ailments in what is called their ‘half-lives’, and
Immortan Joe exploits these illnesses to prepare them for an early death. He
promises absolution and eternal life to those who follow his bidding – and
absolute obedience means a glorious death fighting Immortan Joe’s wars. He
even develops a liturgy and a set of last rites in which to ‘welcome’ his War Boys
to the afterlife.27 The promise of a life eternal, free from starvation, pain and
misery, thus propels the War Boys into acts of terror, war and homicide. Within
his self-fashioned patriarchal religious scheme, Immortan Joe treats the Boys’
bodies as disposable property that serves a purpose and self-destructs. It is a
scheme that preserves viable human life and eliminates the sickly and dying
War Boys who have been affected by nuclear disaster. Yet Miller reminds us
that though Immortan Joe works to preserve his family, his actions and those
of his predecessors have precipitated the population crisis, natural disasters
and radioactive fallout in the first place.
Furthermore, his apocalyptic religious doctrines excuse him and his War
Boys of any irresponsibility or abuse of authority, because they treat the land
as both within their control and dying without cause.28 His use of religious
language deifies death and the afterlife, but it does not acknowledge the
damage wrought to the Earth, nor does it suggest a sustainable plan to restore
the environment.29 His use of religious language suggests a hierarchical

26. The film refers to the collective breast milk as ‘Mother’s Milk’. In one of the more visually
arresting scenes from the film, we see a close-up of one of the mother’s breasts, both attached to
elaborately worked metallic breast pumps that suction milk into large glass jugs above her. The
camera moves back to reveal a whole row of naked women hooked up to pumps, many holding dolls
under their breasts but bereft of the children who would have caused them to lactate. These toys
mark another sign of consumerism, as they simulate children to induce and maintain lactation:
another example of using capital to generate more capital.
27. Before a War Boy commits suicide and kills his enemy, he sprays his mouth with chrome from
a can and yells, ‘Witness me!’ to a response of ‘Witness!’ from his peers, who watch the death. Nux’s
own invocation begins, ‘I live, I die, I live again!’ Immortan Joe makes his own promise to faithful
War Boys ‘who will ride with me eternal on the highways of Valhalla’.
28. As Ruether explains, ‘The very nature of the life of the biosphere, rooted in mortality and renewal
through disintegration, is denied. Instead, life and death are absolutized as opposites’ (83).
29. Immortan Joe’s own language is apocalyptic, as he promises salvation to the people and the
War Boys: ‘I am your redeemer. It is by my hand you will rise from the ashes of this world!’
 ‘Who killed the world?’ Religious paradox in Mad Max: Fury Road 383

structure for faith and society, and his patriarchal beliefs ultimately oppress
both the land itself and its inhabitants. As Roberts declares, ‘Apocalypse, and
(of course) its discontents, speak to the anxiety that the whole world is about
to close down, and soon: the coming end, the collapse into the unspeakable’
(220). Immortan Joe’s language belies an anxiety that he and the War Boys will
become extinct, that his human empire will collapse from both the external
dystopian forces and his own cult that signals the War Boys’ death from their
own cancers and maladies. While asserting his authority, Immortan Joe holds
no sway over the inevitable death that awaits him. Thus, in his criticism of
entrepreneurial privatisation of resources and humans, Miller’s film condemns
the behaviours that privilege one set of humans over another, and he decries
the careless actions that have ‘killed the world’, showing that death awaits even
those who claim godlike authority.

Matriarchal religious systems in Fury Road

Fury Road’s introduction of the wives provides an opposing religious viewpoint

with the construction of a matriarchal, Earth-centred religious society that
serves to critique the wrongs committed by humans towards the Earth and
each other. Through this communal society, Miller indicts the patriarchial
consumer model. To first explore matriarchal religious practice, Miller
contrasts authority figures and their impact on their respective acolytes. While
Immortan Joe serves as a clear model of patriarchal power, his matriarchal
counterpoints do not construct a similarly power-oriented hierarchy. Instead,
the Vuvalini (Furiosa’s original family and the women to whom the wives look
up for spiritual guidance) form a core of beliefs that they inculcate in their
children and mentees (mostly women).30 This model of leadership connects
the believers to one another and invokes a more communal deity than the
powerful figure Immortan Joe constructs himself to be. Further, the women’s
shared authority allows converts and established worshippers a voice in their

His promise erases responsibility for destroying the world and instead promises redemption for
obedient humans only.
30. Furiosa, one of the Vuvalini who was captured and worked for Immortan Joe as an Imperator
(Latin for commander), references her matriarchal heritage to prove her identity to the Many
Mothers: ‘I am one of the Vuvalini. Of the Many Mothers! My Initiate Mother was K.T. Concannon!
I am the daughter of Mary Jabassa. My clan was Swaddle Dog!’ Furiosa’s lineage is thereby traced
through the women who raised and mentored her, signalling a different kind of family and society
than Immortan Joe’s War Boys.
384 Bonnie McLean

decision-making, as they sort out the best paths for their collective survival.31
Such a communal authority structure connects humans together in order to
survive as a species.
This community-oriented society restores social balance between oppressed
humans and creates a new sense of equality that frees the women to think of
the Earth beyond their own survival. Though the movie does not explicitly
demonstrate rape or other abusive practices, Miller conveys the effects – the
wives are kept locked in a vault, forced to wear chastity belts, and expected
to produce Immortan Joe’s sons.32 Their escape occurs off-screen, facilitated
by Furiosa on a trade expedition to Gas Town. Miller reveals their oppression
through close-up and medium shots of the empty vault – their prison – to
recreate a feeling of entrapment. Further, shots that track back reveal the wives’
protest of their imprisonment with phrases such as ‘Our babies will not be
warlords’, and ‘Who killed the world?’ etched in graffiti along the walls of their
chambers. Immortan Joe’s first wife, the elderly Miss Giddy (Jennifer Hagan),
rebukes Immortan Joe by pointing a shotgun at him and yelling, ‘You cannot
own a human being’, a statement that chastises his destruction of the wives’
agency. A medium shot shows the wives’ graffiti behind her head, which reads,
‘We are not things’. Their flight from the Citadel signals their assertion of
independence from Immortan Joe’s patriarchal schemes and a desire to return
to a communal society in which people are equals in their struggle to survive.
This ecofeminist religion, when seen within dystopian society, rebukes
humans for their carelessness towards the Earth and the abuse they bring
on disenfranchised people and ecosystems. Because of the population crisis,
women’s bodies become interlinked with the fate of the Earth. The wives’
pregnant bodies and the Vuvalinis’ hardened skin represent the spectrum
of human existence, from birth to aging, and it is only when the body is

31. Perhaps the best example emerges when Max (Tom Hardy), having first chosen to stay behind
while the Vuvalini and wives take motorcycles across the salt (perhaps indicating a dried-up ocean),
decides to suggest a new plan: return to the Citadel and overtake it. Relying on a previous conver-
sation with Furiosa, he indicates, ‘At least that way, you know we might be able to … together …
come across some kind of redemption’. As Furiosa silently but decisively clasps his hand while the
other women nod, the agreement signals a return to a consensus-oriented society.
32. In a Time magazine interview with Eliana Dockterman, Eve Ensler explains that her work as a
women’s advocate around the world helped her share with the actresses who played the wives the
effects of being trafficked or raped upon the female body and individual agency: ‘What would it
mean to have been a sex slave held for a long time in captivity? What would it feel like to carry a baby
of someone who had raped you? What would it mean to feel attached to your perpetrator despite the
abuse because it had gone on for so long?’ She adds that sexual violence reduces individual agency,
that ‘your body becomes a place that you dissociate from, a landscape of terror’.
 ‘Who killed the world?’ Religious paradox in Mad Max: Fury Road 385

reconnected to the Earth that the future can exist in any form.33 To enact this
change, the wives must band together with the remaining Vuvalini, overtake
the Citadel, and restructure Immortan Joe’s cult from a patriarchal to a
matriarchal society in which men and women hold equal stakes in preserving
their species and the Earth.34
However, the body is not the only form of life that must be reimagined. The
dying Earth, in the world beyond the Citadel, cannot sustain life, and even
the Green Place has been poisoned by humans’ technological advances and
warfare. The Many Mothers have been forced into a nomadic existence.35 The
Keeper of the Seeds (Melissa Jaffer) hoards seeds from all kinds of plants and
bequeaths them to The Dag (Abbey Lee) in her dying moments, signalling
a shift in responsibility to care for the Earth.36 Through this Earth-oriented
religious practice, the human race shows its faith in redemption through the
preservation of the planet, despite the empirical evidence that such salvation
may be too late for the Earth and its inhabitants.
Splendid Angharad, once Immortan Joe’s favourite wife, proves to be the
most fervent convert to this Earth-oriented religion, as she invokes a liturgy
that energises the other wives into committing to their desert escape. Chanting,
‘We’re going to the Green Place where there are many mothers’, Angharad urges
the other wives not to see the dying world around them, but to imagine the Green
Place in which Furiosa grew up and where the Vuvalini will nurture them and
the Earth.37 Angharad’s liturgical phrases invoke a sense of worship in which

33. As Jeffrey Allen Nall declares, ‘Put simply, the birth of new life is the fundamental act of human
creativity upon which all subsequent creative acts are contingent’ (37). This sense of creativity
is directly linked to the Earth’s ability to reproduce and regenerate after destruction. Thus,
childbearing stands as an extension of the Earth’s creative capacity for restoration.
34. In a conversation with Max about motivations for escape, Furiosa explains that the wives
are looking for hope in the Green Place. As Max asks her what she seeks, she simply replies,
‘Redemption’. Her own behaviour in Immortan Joe’s empire has led her to forsake her beliefs in
order for her to find a chance to escape with the women.
35. As Furiosa tries to understand how the Green Place disappeared, the other Mothers explain with
cries of ‘We had no water’, ‘The water was filth’, and ‘It was poisoned. It was sour’ echoing around as
the camera moves in for a close-up of Furiosa, while the soundtrack swells. This moment captures
Furiosa’s recognition and rage that the world she has known has been ruined by the machinations of
Immortan Joe and his fellow warlords.
36. In their conversation, The Keeper calls the seeds ‘heirlooms – the real things’. This language
signals the promise of life that can replenish the earth.
37. Angharad’s agency extends into her actions that save her fellow believers. Using her pregnant
body, she shields the wives’ bodies from bullets that would have killed them. Julianne Ross declares,
‘Splendid is valuable only in her value to Immortan Joe. That’s why it’s thrilling when she subverts
everything that has been used to oppress her – the lack of agency over her own body, the denial of
her reproductive freedom – in order to fight back’.
386 Bonnie McLean

Mad Max: Fury Road. Warner Home Video, 2015.

the women, the Earth and a higher power meet and merge.38 Furthermore, her
death inspires the other wives to commit to preserving the Earth and shielding
their children from Immortan Joe.39
Yet Miller does not invoke ecofeminism as the salvation of the Earth that
will erase the damage wrought by Immortan Joe and others like him. Instead,
he deliberately complicates the women’s religious mindset to challenge the
idealism behind all religious practices and question solutions for making
humans accountable for the Earth’s current state. Violence underpins the
actions in both matriarchal and patriarchal religious beliefs. The women’s
escape plan depends wholly on Furiosa and her position of power within
Immortan Joe’s patriarchal society. In her confession to Max (Tom Hardy) that
she seeks redemption, Furiosa admits that becoming an Imperator, with its
benefits of controlling and driving a War Rig, provides her with the best chance
of escape, but that she still feels a need to redeem herself for the unspoken and
unacknowledged actions that brought her into this position of power.
Furthermore, in order to overthrow Immortan Joe and take control of the
Citadel, the women must kill or disarm Joe and his War Boys. The peace and

38. As Ruether explains, ‘An ecological spirituality needs to be built on three premises: the transience
of selves, the living interdependency of all things, and the value of the personal in communion …
We are called to affirm the integrity of our personal center of being, in mutuality with the personal
centers of all other beings across species and, at the same time, accept the transience of these
personal selves’ (251). By seeking together to transform their society, the Vuvalini and the wives seek
to redefine themselves and become interdependent on each other and the Earth.
39. Ensler praises characters like Splendid Angharad as ‘women who are willing to give up enslaved
comfort for liberation and risk death to do it. It’s the rising feminine rebelling against the patriarchy’
(Dockterman).
 ‘Who killed the world?’ Religious paradox in Mad Max: Fury Road 387

Mad Max: Fury Road. Warner Home Video, 2015.

victory of the film’s closing scene are reinforced by the violence that establishes
this peace. The loss of many of the Mothers, Splendid Angharad, her unborn
son, countless War Boys and Nux reminds us of the decimation of Earth’s
population that will continue to happen with continued starvation, poverty
and political instability. Through these deaths, Miller points to the inevita-
bility the women cannot escape through their religious beliefs any more than
Immortan Joe could – nor will their ideology spare them from death, just as
Joe’s own religious ideology turned violently against him in the end.
Just as Miller criticises Immortan Joe’s patriarchal religious practice for its
inability to transcend a painful death brought on by suffering in a ravaged
Earth, he also suggests that death and destruction will similarly plague the
Vuvalini and their matriarchal faith. Because ecofeminism is dependent on
gender parity to restore balance, the death of both women and men leaves
the film’s supposedly happy ending in question.40 While Furiosa, the wives,
Max and Nux seek the Green Place, their roles are equal. Yet the return to the
Citadel is fraught with loss and uncertainty. The women’s return to the Citadel
has been facilitated by Nux’s sacrifice, anchored in the belief that while his
death on Immortan Joe’s behalf will bring him to the gates of Valhalla, his
sacrifice for the women will enable them to take over the Citadel.41 Nux’s death
therefore enables them to continue their work, just as Splendid Angharad’s

40. In establishing a call to action, Ruether declares, ‘We need to structure new forms of gender
parity’ (171). Doing so involves unmaking centuries of established human domestic behaviours to
ensure that men and women co-labour in family life, child-rearing and domestic work in equal
measure.
41. As Angie Han notes, ‘When [Nux] dies, he does so while fighting for a righteous cause, and he
388 Bonnie McLean

death brought resolve to the wives in fleeing the tenuous safety of Immortan
Joe’s oppression. Yet it is the male action that brings permanent change to the
Citadel world, one that criticises ideological flaws in the Vuvalini’s religion for
rendering such a sacrifice necessary.

Conclusion

In his exploration of death and violence as resolutions to dystopian problems and

stability within society, Fury Road questions both patriarchal and matriarchal
religious practice for their assertions that salvation is even possible. While
Immortan Joe’s religious practices rely upon death as a metaphor and incentive
to obtain the War Boys’ consent at being used as disposable weapons, death
eclipses his own agency as dictator. Furthermore, the violence that Joe enacts
upon others, while ostensibly preserving natural resources, only perpetuates
the fertility crisis, starvation and political disaster that he has attempted to
stave off. Thus, privatisation of a land already plagued by economic, political
and social crisis reinforces the problems of this dystopian society and leads its
citizens even closer to the brink of extinction.
Likewise, Fury Road critiques matriarchal religious practice to demonstrate
the impossibility of escaping death or restoring the Earth to a ‘previous’ state.
While the Vuvalini do not claim they can solve the problem of ‘who killed the
world’, they nevertheless posit a belief in a better world with the potential for
growing seeds and children apart from the toxic influences of warlords such as
Immortan Joe. The Seed Keeper plants her seeds in soil, regardless of whether or
not they can grow, and the women’s determination to remake the Citadel asserts
the belief that they can enact change for the better and develop a society of equals.
Yet Miller’s depiction of a ‘happy ending’ leaves this belief in uncertainty. While
the women do succeed in returning to the Citadel with Immortan Joe’s body in
hand, and while they win over the crowd who then dismember Immortan Joe’s
remains in the presence of his War Boys and remaining son, we are reminded
that several deaths have led to this outcome. Death, not ideological might,
enabled this shift in power, and if the people can dismember Immortan Joe, they
can overtake the diminished band of Vuvalini, as well.
Ultimately, Miller brings both patriarchal and matriarchal religious ideologies
under scrutiny with this conclusion as a means of questioning the role of

leaves behind people who will miss him. It’s a stark contrast from the dozens of anonymous War
Boy casualties’.
 ‘Who killed the world?’ Religious paradox in Mad Max: Fury Road 389

salvation in dystopian texts. Death forms the paradox in which privatisation

through patriarchal religious practice and communal living and attention to
Earth’s restoration cannot solve our current problems. Neither Immortan Joe
nor the Vuvalini can escape the past transgressions of individuals and societies
who have ruined the Earth, whether from technological advances that polluted
the environment, political coups and war, or nuclear crisis that poisoned all
living inhabitants. Their differing modes of salvation cannot absolve or rescue
humans from their guilt over ‘killing the world’.
Death thus forms the inescapable, inevitable component that cements the
film as a dystopian text and argues that the ‘if this goes on’ scenario has
already come to fruition. While the Vuvalini seek to avoid further damage
to the Earth as wrought by warlords such as Immortan Joe, Miller hints that
such reparations may come too late for the sick and dying survivors who have
been poisoned along with the world. In Fury Road, George Miller exposes the
human failure to right the wrongs they have committed. He posits in the end
that salvation, whether through a warlord or through the worship of the Earth,
still cannot prevent the inevitable death of the Earth itself.

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