Mad Max: MLK Blvd

“I’m just here for the gasoline.”
-Mad Max
By Mumia Ali: It’s been observed that the movies that generate the most buzz are usually the ones that tend to be the more successful of the lot, and this year’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” is no exception. It’s been three decades since a Mad Max film has hit the silver screen, and this time around the titular character, played by Tom Hardy, shares significant screen time with “Imperator Furiosa”, portrayed by native South African blonde bombshell Charlize Theron. The “Imperator” strikes me as an older, post-apocalyptic Tank Girl type – you know what I mean, gals who can kick copious amounts of male butt this way and that. Just like the guys.
This was the main point Return of Kings contributor and Youtube personality Aaron Clarey, aka Captain Capitalism, makes in his recent column on the matter; he argues that the Mad Max franchise, which was originally about a lone law man trying to uphold what little law is left in a barren dystopic wasteland, has now fallen prey to the PC police, too – and urges all red-blooded, right thinking men everywhere, to boycott the movie.

Clarey’s article, struck a very tender nerve in the Cathedral Media – it quickly gained traction and was soon being bemoaned by feminists left, right and center, as yet another example of the banality (and, of course, misogyny) of the Men’s Rights Crowd, even though Mr. Clarey doesn’t identify as an MRA and in fact, like ROK’s proprietor RooshV himself, has had some choice words for the androcentric activists. Nevertheless, Clarey has put himself squarely into the crosshairs of the Social Justice Warriors, who seem to be out for blood.
What else is new?

I honestly don’t see what the big deal was about Clarey’s remarks; I mean, is it really that big a state secret that Hollywood has been about “messaging” of varying stripes, like, forever? To me, “Furiosa” has antecedents in the Sci-Fi genre going back to at least 1979’s Ellen Ripley in “Alien”, and both Sir Ridley Scott and James Cameron went on record in stating they specifically wanted to feature a “kickass” lady leading the franchise, as a direct statement on the feminism of the era. Cameron also directed The Terminator, which made Linda Hamilton’s shrinking violet of a character in the first film, into a ripped one-chick army in the sequel, Terminator: Judgment Day. Since then, “powerful females” have featured prominently in one form or another , in just about every Terminator sequel since. Even more to the point, the last Mad Max film, “Beyond Thunderdome”, had the Mel Gibson-version Max playing opposite the Amazonian leader of Bartertown, the shrewdly intelligent and gutsy Aunty Entity, portrayed by the immortal Tina Turner.
So, this notion that Clarey shines a spotlight on, that Hollywood has been a dissimentator of feminist ideas, if not agendas, is by no means anything new.
Nor is “messaging” by Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment machine in any way limited to White Girls Kicking Butt – as a Black man, I deeply appreciated the messaging of such films as “To Sir, With Love”, “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?” and “In The Heat Of The Night”, all starring Sir Sidney Poitier, showing that African Americans could be graceful under pressure and in the face of often unremitting and dehumanizing bigotry and hatred.
Nevertheless, critics of the messaging machine that is PC-addled Hollywood have made a legitimate point, too: that there can be seriously unintended consequences by fiddling around with the boundaries of where reality ends and fantasy begins, and vice-versa.
It may be an old saw at this point, but the simple truth of it is that I done lost count as to how many younger brothers honestly think they’re going to be the next Tony Montana or Nino Brown – the point that both of these men were tragic figures is utterly lost on this crowd, who look up to both as characters to emulate and lionize, not to pity and avoid.
So too, have I seen quite a few ladies, in my neck of the American woods, who honestly think they have a bit of Sarah Connor, Ellen Ripley or Imperator Furiosa in them.
And that’s when reality comes crashing in.
The problem I have with this current tempest in a teapot isn’t that Clarey doesn’t have a point – he obviously does – but with what I’ve been observing for quite some time about these kinds of “discussions” in the larger (read: whiter) culture: no disrespect to my white readers, but honestly, from my vantage point here in Black America, it feels like a lot of the issues that are argued about along sexual politics lines among white folks feels very arid and academic, abstract in a way that seems remote to me. Take, for example, this very discussion about Mad Max – a film about how society’s institutions and orderly functions have utterly collapsed, and how one guy is trying to hold what little society there is left together. Add to that the notion that there are women who think they can hold their own against maurading bandits of the most blood-thirsty types, and to my mind, the film should have been called “Mad Max: MLK Blvd”, because that is the reality of modern-day, inner city/urban Black America.
Indeed, word on the wires is that acclaimed director Spike Lee is working on a film to be called “Chiraq” – which is what black Chicagoan’s call their hometown, inferring that it has become a war zone (with more dead than all the US military casualties in Afghanistan – think on that for a moment). Lee’s most recent effort was the recounting of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, where the world caught a glimpse of societal order breaking down and total anarchy reigning in New Orleans.
Whether it be due to acts of God or gradual societal decay, the point is that modern-day Black America definitely has a dystopian feel to it – Baltimore, the setting of the fictional series “The Wire” can be included here as well. Mad Max could feel at home in any of these settings – the only difference being, that the cast, in the main, would be Black.
And in these enviroments – as we saw recently with Baltimore Baby Mama of The Year, Ms. Toya Graham – there really IS a meme out there among Black women that holds that they can be just as kick-butt as any Black man. Spend a bit of time watching YouTube (I highly recommend in particular, Tommy Sotomayor’s “Beastie Channel” and Colin Flaherty’s “White Girl Bleed A Lot” channel) along with any random sampling of World Star Hip Hop to see the mind-numbing evidence for yourself: feral girls, women and even elderly birds, tearing into each other and the occasional guy with abandon. I say “occasional” because for the most part, when a Black woman steps to a Black man, the results are almost always bone-crushingly brutal for the Sista in question – as the infamous uppercut-throwing bus driver incident out in Cleveland, OH, clearly showed.
I have always argued that modern-day Black America, which is a de facto and increasingly becoming a de jure Matriarchy – as Baltimore demonstrates – is indeed the culmination of half a century’s worth of “messaging” on the part of white feminists and their allies in the academia, media and yes, entertainment industries, along with law makers and the like. All of the major goals that white feminists have fought for, can be seen in extremis in Black America today – and it is not at all pretty. Every weekday at 3pm, is like experiencing Dawn of the Planet of the Park Apes all over again, as the feral spawn of Baby Mamas like Toya Graham, are unleashed onto what is left of civil Black society (read: when public schools let out) and all Hell breaks loose in Black American streets. Hordes of such kids are right in the middle of the streets, fighting up a storm – almost always girls – to the point where it takes a combined effort by school and city cops, NTAs and teachers, to reign the anarchy in.
Which usually fails.
And that brings us round robin as to why I do what I do – because I think it is important for the world to see, the realities of A Woman’s Nation on the ground. And that would mean, Black America. All of the lofty ideals, take a pernicious turn there, with scores of its denizens paying a powerful price. As I’ve said before, and it bears repeating now, ANYWHERE you see Baby Mamaism, which is the daughter of White Feminism, reigning in a society, there too shall you find pestilence, anarchy, dysfunction, violence, filth and Big Man Breeding (the current Mad Max film centers on the five-lady harem of Immortan Joe, the major villian). It may be a bit too “racist” for my colleague Clarey or indeed, anyone else in the largely White Manosphere to say, but I have no problem in the least saying that inner-city, urban Black America has truly devolved into a Law of the Jungle – again, as Baltimore has recently shown us.
I guess that’s why I’ve always been such a huge fan of Sci-Fi, particularly of the dystopian variety, like Mad Max or Robocop or Judge Dredd – because I could relate to the themes these films portray onscreen; after all, they weren’t that far off from my day to day reality as a Black man trying to hold it together in an increasingly falling apart Black America. While my white colleagues continue to do battle with largely white detractors on the (white) feminist side of the aisle, I must continue to deal with the in-your-face reality of anarchy that white feminist agendas have wrought on me and mine.
“Mad Max”, c’est moi.
Recommended Reading: Mo’Nique Proves That “Diva Culture” Is Ruinous To Black Women

About Mumia Ali

Mumia Ali, aka "Obsidian" is a Men's Issues blogger from Philadelphia who focuses on Sexual Politics, Class, and Race, from the male perspective. He is a cofounder of the Men's Issues blog collective known as Just Four Guys, and is Editor of Urban American Affairs for A Voice for Men.

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