This is one of the movies that I’d love to love without having to explain why, but I really wanted to feature it here in some way, so here’s a little tiny bit of why I love Mad Max: Fury Road — the gradual humanisation of Max.
Humanisation, at its most literal, means to make something human. Mad Max does this visually, and we don’t even realise when we start getting attached to or feeling empathy for his character.
When we first meet Max, he’s presented as a “monster”. He’s long-haired, bearded and barbaric, at least till after he gets captured by the warboys who cut his hair. At this point, he’s faceless and unknown, and we as an audience don’t see him as a character in the full sense of the word as of yet. He’s portrayed as desperate, motivated only by survival instinct, violent and rough and animalistic. We feel pity, maybe, or concern, but no real connection yet.
Next? He’s a “thing”, strapped to the front of Nux’s car as a “blood-bank” — a commodity and source of blood for the warboys. We see his face, but he has a muzzle on, and has absolutely no agency in this situation. At this point, that’s really all he is to us — we don’t know him at all.
It’s only at the 45minute mark that Max finally manages to get the muzzle off. When he does throw it aside, I at least was kind of surprised. I expected… something, I don’t know what, but not such a normal-looking guy. Turns out, he’s just a human.
Why is this significant? See, the visuals are effective in reflecting our understanding of the character at that point in time. How much of his face we see, and our visual impression of him, increases just as how much we know about the character increases. The result is that Max goes from monster to thing to human over the course of the movie, and how much we empathise and relate to him increases as this changes. This is something really simple that applies in lots of other movies — if we can’t see the character’s eyes or face, it makes him suspicious and probably villainous. But Mad Max exploits this not for antagonism, but for the introduction of a protagonist over the course of the movie, starting from suspicion and unfamiliarity and ending with empathy or even affection.