I haven’t seen the latest Mad Max yet, but David Grant explains that the villain of the piece, Immortan Joe, maintains a measure of civilization but is still the villain — to a modern audience, at least — because he is more free-handed with violence than with the benefits of civilization:
He engages in slavery; he attacks people who simply wander into his territory; he withholds water from the people below him; he restricts immigration up to his fortress. All these things are supposed to feel wrong to us modern, Western viewers. Instead, we’re supposed to sympathize with Furiosa and company’s dream of escaping Joe’s tyranny. When the gang returns to the Citadel with Joe’s corpse strapped to the front of their car, there is much rejoicing as the crowd tears Joe’s corpse, the women carry people up to the fortress along with them, and the women already up top release water for the people below.
What we do not see is that the food supply is still meager, the people overuse the water and eventually run out, and a rival warlord seizes Gastown and the Bullet Farm and lays siege to the Citadel, killing or enslaving everyone he gets his hands on. The women’s dream of a better life for themselves and their children proves illusory. Max, understandably, doesn’t stick around to watch all this unfold.
That’s not the point though:
Compare Max to another uncivilized hero near-and-dear to the hearts of many neoreactionaries: Conan the Cimmerian. Conan kills, rapes, and steals as the desire strikes him and prudence permits him; he has no respect for private property, law and order, or any authority beyond power. He has a barbaric code of honor that places great emphasis on personal ties and obligations, and while that code often makes him more admirable than his civilized antagonists, it is not sufficient to support a civilization.
Like Fury Road, the stories of Conan are straightforward action-adventures. We don’t read them for any kind of morality play but rather because we want to see a man facing adversity and triumphing through strength and cunning. When Conan strangles the tyrannical king of Aquilonia and seizes his throne, we are not supposed to take this as social commentary and definitely not supposed to go out and try our own hands at Hyborian rapine.
The value of Max and Conan, as well as heroes from James Bond to Luke Skywalker to Odysseus, is to exemplify various masculine virtues and to show us the great deeds that can be accomplished with them. Their stories inspire us to live out those same virtues; they teach us how to be men. This kind of instruction is badly needed these days.
Mad Max: Fury Road should be watched as an action-adventure film. There is no need for us to seek a deeper meaning to it. But if people want to see it as a morality play and to sing the praises of Furiosa, the strong, independent woman who still needs a man, we can explain how Joe was a benefactor to his people and that by destroying him, Furiosa has led them all to death and desolation. Normal people do not wish to live in the waste; they will recoil from these thoughts.