The inclusion of Eaton and Gale doesn’t serve to make the world of the film less white, just to appease critics.
MAD MAX FURY ROAD CAST FROM MAD MAX MOVIE
But the movie never mentions that these two women are Maori, making Jeanne the FanGirl’s reading feel like a reach. Gale has said she is a “small percentage” Maori. One much-shared Tumblr post by Jeanne the FanGirl, a Polynesian feminist, cites the Maori heritage of Eaton and another actor, Megan Gale - who plays The Valkyrie, a matriarchal tribe member - as evidence that the film tells a story “dismantling of colonial oppression where indigenous women play key roles in the fight and future of the world.” Gale is not even listed in the opening credits, but I guess we should take crumbs because food is so scarce in post-apocalyptic worlds. A number of white women who are very invested in Fury Road being feminist and progressive have championed its diversity on social media. The lazy insertion of one or two people of color as a way to attain “diversity” to satisfy progressive audiences is irritating, but apparently effective. She has also been criticized for a ppropriating the trauma faced by Congolese women for her own campaign.Īnother consultant on the film is notoriously insensitive about race: comic book illustrator Brendan McCarthy who has drawn criticism for his trope‑y portrayals of black characters in Spider-Man comics and his Facebook comments that seemed to minimize the death of Trayvon Martin. For example, she timed her V‑Day, a day of action to end violence against women, to coincide with The Global Day to Honor Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, without acknowledging the other campaign. Perhaps we shouldn’t so surprised at the whiteness of Fury Road, given the consultant that the director chose: Vagina Monologues creator Eve Ensler, who has been subject to many criticisms around her dealings with women of color.
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Kravitz and Eaton’s characters do survive the film, and having a person of color standing at the end makes Fury Road a rare unicorn within the post-apocalyptic genre. “Ethnically ambiguous” seems to be the only type of racialized woman who makes it to the end of the world. Many have claimed the film put women ahead - but which women? Certainly not women who are very visibly racialized through curves and features. The effect is the aesthetic of a Chanel runway, with one or two women of color for flavor. Neither held a lead role, and some audiences seem to have missed that Eaton was non-white, citing Kravitz as the only identifiable woman of color.īy contrast, Fury Road offers variety of white men, some tall, some thin, some not so thin, and a posse of beautiful cisgender white women who serve as “breeders” - sexual and reproductive slaves - for the cult leader of this corner of the post-apocalyptic world, Immortan Joe.
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Out of 15 characters listed in the opening credits, only two are visibly people of color: Toast the Knowing, played by Zoe Kravitz (who is biracial, Black and Ashkenazi Jew), and Cheedo the Fragile, played by Courtney Eaton (who, according to Australian tabloid The Sunday Times, “credits her father with her Caucasian looks,” but has Maori, Pacific Islander and Chinese lineage). Despite being set in Australia - historically an Aboriginal country - and filmed in Namibia, the world of Fury Road is eerily white. However, there’s another thing missing in Fury Road: people of color.
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The math does not add up.Īs Eileen Jones notes, when you actually look for the feminist plot elements in Fury Road, there’s not much there. Although most of our world is not white, the end of the world is always so.