Mad Max: Fury Road
Produced by Village Roadshow Pictures 
Written and directed by George Miller 
Distributed by Warner Brothers 

Ex Machina
Produced by Film 4 
Written and directed by Alex Garland 
Distributed by Universal Pictures 

We never know how feminism will show up at the movies.  We only know that it will.  Currently, it’s on display in George Miller’s rabid action film Mad Max: Fury Road and the quietly cerebral science-fiction allegory Ex Machina.  How it fits in either enterprise seems at first an unanswerable question until one considers the profit motive.  Feminism, like homosexualism, currently pays nearly inexhaustible dividends at the box office.

Mad Max is another in the series of postapocalyptic movies that began with Mel Gibson wandering about an Australian desert in 1979.  The current iteration, like the first, is populated by barbarous freaks crouched astride flame-throwing motorcycles or seated behind the wheels of steroidal muscle cars.  All of these vehicles roar constantly through the film’s running time as if they are obnoxiously protesting the gas shortage the storyline mentions so frequently, perhaps to display its environmental conscience.  You wouldn’t think feminism would flourish in such a setting, but Imperator Furiosa is on hand to prove you wrong.  She’s a truck driver played by the lovely Charlize Theron, with grease smeared across her brow.  Here, however, the grease doesn’t come from Christian Dior but from her truck’s engine block whenever she needs to calibrate a piston rod’s stroke timing.  To prove she’s no sissy, Furiosa stalks the movie sans her left forearm.  One gathers she lost it in an earlier encounter with the brutal men who have come to rule this future world.  They must be abysmally thoughtless to maim such a beauty.

I don’t know how the technical boys disappeared Miss Theron’s forearm, but its absence looks exceedingly real and is central to the film’s meaning.  No matter what horror men might inflict, they can’t keep a good woman down.  Even with one arm gone, Furiosa nearly beats the tar out of the itinerant warrior Max, played by the hefty Tom Hardy.  Of course, Max was having a bad day when this happened.  Nux (Nicholas Hoult), a loyal son of the rapacious King Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), had lashed our surly hero to the grill of his hot rod.  Having lost a good deal of his own blood battling Joe’s enemies along Fury Road, Nux had been siphoning plasma off poor Max so he could continue his fighting.  It’s not that Nux would mind bleeding to death if it came to that.  Hasn’t Joe told him time and again that dying in battle is merely a prelude to an afterlife populated with suitably nubile females who are all too unavailable in this world, where Dad keeps the babes all to himself?  As Joe puts it soothingly, “Die, and you will arrive at the gates of Valhalla, shiny and chrome!”  What manly man wouldn’t sign on for that?  Of course, Furiosa and five of Joe’s wives have a different idea.  They would rather escape Joe’s world altogether.  They’re not satisfied with the only two functions allowed them within his rockside environs: to give pleasure and to breed.  We get a glimpse of what this means when we enter Joe’s citadel, in which several fat women loll about with their breasts hooked up to milking machines, waiting for one of Joe’s warriors to sample their output.  Is this male chauvinism or what?

When the opportunity presents itself, Furiosa and the wives race into the outback.  Joe and his bare-chested War Boys—all his sons, we gather—give fiendish pursuit, hallooing like banshees as they shoot indiscriminately at the fleeing women.  You can’t blame them; they’re just doing their best to coax the cuties back to Joe’s den.  After all, Joe needs his women, especially the pregnant Splendid Angharad (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley).  She’s nine months on with his next War Boy heir.  But Splendid’s not coming easily.  Gravid with new life though she is, Splendid can shoot, fight, and clamber about on Furiosa’s speeding rig with the best of them, at least until the moment her water breaks.

This is the movie’s story, such as it is: a desert chase for fertility.  Some have marveled that the premise and plot should be so streamlined, so unencumbered.  Few have ascribed the shortage of narrative intricacy to Miller’s lack of invention.  Why, I can’t imagine.  Is Miller a sacrosanct figure?  Maybe his feminism has shielded him from criticism.  After all, he brought in Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, to help shape his screenplay.  I’d like to know why this insufferably childish excuse for entertainment has been honored with a 98-percent approval rating from critics on the Rotten Tomatoes website.  Perhaps I’m too old to understand.  Perhaps I’m an unreconstructed male-chauvinist pig.  In my defense, however, I’m bound to report that I’ve yet to beat up a one-armed woman, even one who’s clobbered me across the snout with a musket, as Furiosa does Max at one fraught moment.  Of course, I’m still walking Fury Road where, I suppose, anything can happen.

With Ex Machina British novelist and first-time director Alex Garland also assumes the feminist mantle.  This needs some explanation.  The film seems focused on artificial intelligence and the threat it might pose mankind—a timely subject, certainly, given our propensity for ever more capable gadgetry.  You know: drones, electronic snoopery, programmable espresso makers with built-in milk frothers.  (For the record, the redoubtable John Derbyshire at Taki’s Magazine recently told us AI is sauntering implacably our way.  These machinae unblessed by any deus other than human scientists might just throw us out with the trash while blandly chirping to one another in bits and bytes, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”)  But I don’t think AI is really what interests the film’s actual deus, Mr. Garland.  Nor feminism—not principally.  From what’s on the screen, I’d have to say he’s much more taken with femmes than with feminism or mechanism.  At a guess, I’d say he’s one of those clever men who reasons that taking up the feminist cause is the sine qua non for winning women’s affection.

Garland’s film features an unusually seductive robot named Ava, reminiscent of the mechanical vamp who caused so much trouble in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in 1927.  Ava is equipped with a face and form very much like the 26-year-old Swedish actress Alicia Vikander.  Of course, her physical appeal is somewhat clouded by her transparent arms and legs, inside of which her machine parts whir, click, and faintly glow.  And then there’s the melon head she’s been given.  It disconcertingly harbors glowing synapses that twinkle with what may or may not be—gasp—thoughts of her own.  Her shapely bosom, groin, and hips are covered with what looks like a mesh of medieval mail, the better to ward off unwanted hands and eyes.  Her maker, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), CEO of Bluebook, the world’s most popular search engine, raises an obvious question: Has his marvel attained independent consciousness?  For an answer, he recruits Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), one of his smarter programmers, to administer a variation of the Turing test.  Putting aside her mechanical nature, Caleb must decide whether Ava gives evidence of an independent will.  You’d think the answer is obvious the first time Ava flirts with him.  A being capable of guile can hardly be said to lack consciousness.  Didn’t Mary Shelley’s monster in Frankenstein prove this when he attempted to get round his maker?

It transpires that Nathan hasn’t been on a disinterested quest to create AI after all.  He’s equipped Ava with sexual parts capable of experiencing pleasure—or so he says.  Whether she experiences any such delight is an unsettled question.  What seems certain is that Nathan does.  The proof of this comes when Ava informs Caleb that Nathan can’t be trusted, a complaint common among human women—at least those who feel themselves, shall we say, objectified by men.  When we learn that Ava is the latest in a series of Nathan’s beautifully feminine robots, the film is clearly alluding to the price women pay for realizing their sexual power over men.  They gain knowledge at the expense of losing their trust in other women.  After all, if they can bamboozle males so easily, it stands to reason others of their sex can do the same, to their loss.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up the question of Ava’s pubic hair.  For most of the film, her groin is covered.  But I suspect Garland chose Vikander for his leading lady because she’s been displaying herself au naturale in a series of Swedish films.  As you would expect, Garland has contrived to display Miss Vikander’s body here also.  Doing so doesn’t challenge his plot overmuch.  When Ava tires of her robotic existence, she merely has to wrap herself in some sort of foam rubber designed to look like flesh.  Nothing to it.  Fritz Lang did something similar in Metropolis when he had his metallic automaton take on seeming flesh so she could use her sinuous charms to entice young capitalists to their doom.  Ava follows suit, but I’ll say no more.

By the way, Garland doesn’t share John Ruskin’s delicate sensibility.  As I mentioned in my review of Effie Gray last month, Ruskin seems to have been unable to abide the sight of his wife’s pubic hair.  Either Garland wanted to mock the fastidious Ruskin or, more simply, let nature’s own modesty cover the privates of his female robots.  (There are more than one.)  At the risk of provoking titters in his audience, he’s given his mechanical mannequins delicately groomed hair below their waists.  Or did he have something altogether different in mind?  Could he have been bent on providing basic titillation for our more enlightened age?  Whatever his purpose, it’s clear that his film is not primarily about artificial intelligence and the Turing test.  Nor can it be said that ideological feminism is his uppermost interest—not when he lets his camera linger so lecherously over Miss Vikander’s very human body.