Diverging from its predecessor's lean energy, Furiosa is a new history of junk. It is a junk-history of the sixth extinction. Watching it is frustrating, because a junk-history is necessarily contradictory and incomplete. Scene-by-scene, detail-by-detail, it has the confidence of a Tolkien, but its 'impression of depth' is wrested from deep history and given over to a peculiar depth of junkyard-life. Every sign of life in Furiosa is understood to be a total mystery, a mistake, an erratic, vagabond thing that, owing to the fact that it is, can only be unintelligible. All life, even ugly life, is exalted as something where there should be nothing. The epic historical voice of the film is attuned both to this mutant reality, and to the fiction of time as a container. The interweaving of these modes is not seamless. Furiosa's is history brought back to the style of Herodotus — all gossip and hearsay and world events as gossip and hearsay. The historian tells of what will one day be known as the 40-Day War. It appears, live before us, but it's also out of sight, because neither we, nor he, nor Furiosa is at the centre of history. We just live and die in its junkyard.
Furiosa is set in the future and infatuated with origins. It stages an abortive Genesis narrative where Noah fails to plant the seed given by God, and so the flood never comes. What's left is the junkyard Earth without the promise of renewal, and not stalled time but junkyard time. In junkyard time, the freak-future is welded to its ancient origins. You can see this in its fascination with combustion. Furiosa salivates and claps when things explode, its every movement seems propelled by the same dirty combustion engines that animate its cars and bikes and pumpjacks and mechanical arms. Its entities burn fuel, waving flamethrowers at the empty road. Fury Road also lives for combustion, but its fireworks are spectacular, its movement smooth. Furiosa stops and starts and fails. Its combustion seems to thwart momentum, to bring us always back to the beginning. Origins again: when Dementus arrives at the Citadel, Immortan Joe dazzles him with a display of fire.
In the beginning Prometheus stole from the metalworker Hephaestus' forge, and so domesticated fire - language, machinery, artifice - became the human lifeblood. The industrial revolution saw the advent of the thermodynamic machine, writes Bernard Stiegler, "which showed the human world to be fundamentally characterized by change and disruption [perturbation] (...) and the instability of equilibrium in which all this consists, at the core of physics itself." Thus the Anthropocene replicates our human origin but at a planetary scale, beginning at "the moment when the question of the cosmos is itself grasped as that of combustion, in both astrophysics and thermodynamics." History Man tells the story of Furiosa. His skin and robes are decorated entirely in words. He appears himself in the story he's telling, whispering in Dementus' ear the workings of an engine as though it's an ancient fable. All is ancient and new, myth and inorganic waste, in the junkyard of history.
As I salivated and clapped at the explosions, the ramshackle effects and telling of the film, and the gratuitous burning of fossil fuels on screen, I wondered why it was going to such efforts to render pointless material waste. I later wondered why that joy seemed so instinctive. A recent paper by Benjamin Nicoll suggests we derive a death-driven enjoyment from our failure to avert disaster. Certainly Furiosa's junkyard aesthetics attend to both the masochism of our contemporary moment, the entropic form of combustion, and the sense of a future disaster that at once seems to have already eventuated and to forever be imminent — the flood that never arrives. Carolyn L. Kane writes that in an era of innovation we are surrounded by human failure, and that "playing with trash" is a prerequisite of living in 'the failure age'. Instead of spectacular future technologies or contemporary 'invisible' ones, Furiosa's are all heaving, physical junk. And instead of ruined signs of the forgotten past, they remain wastefully alive, coughing and spluttering as we do to the rhythms of the combustion engine, failing even to die.
Written 4 Jun 2024