Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’s Fantastically Demented Ending, Explained

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga has one of the bleakest, most twisted endings of any studio franchise movie in recent history. It’s also a little disgusting in a fantastical, body-horror kind of way. That it somehow also manages to bring the timeline of the film right up to the very beginning of Mad Max: Fury Road makes it that much more fascinating.

Here’s what we actually see at the end of the film: After Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) overtakes Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) — the man who robbed her of her childhood, killed her mother, practically sold her into slavery, then killed the one other person she grew to love — she mulls how to finally end him. He insists that killing him would turn her into him. She then “takes away his voice” (presumably cuts off his tongue) and stands there with him, in silence, wondering what to do.

And then she turns him into a tree.

More accurately, she plants him into the ground, alive, high up in the hydroponic gardens of the Citadel, with a peach tree growing out of his crotch. A living repository of human knowledge, the History Man (George Shevtsov) says in voice-over that Furiosa herself told him how she handled Dementus. We then see Dementus: old, desiccated, but still alive, as much mulch as man. We then see a red ripe peach growing out of that tree — its first fruit. Furiosa takes that peach and serves it to Immortan Joe’s brides, then leads them into the War Rig, hiding them inside its storage tank, essentially setting up their flight to the Green Place in Fury Road. In fact, the end credits feature brief snippets from the 2015 film, probably to remind viewers of what happened in that movie but also maybe to end on a slightly more triumphant note than the totally demented actual finale of Furiosa.

None of this comes entirely out of the blue. The movie opens with young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) stealing a peach from a tree on the outer edges of the Green Place. That’s when she sees a small gaggle of Dementus’s pirates killing and cutting up her horse. She’s discovered as she tries to scuttle their motorbikes and is whisked away with them as they flee into the vast desert. The men who have stolen her also take the smooshed-up peach with them as evidence of the bounty of the Green Place. When Furiosa’s mom (Charlee Fraser) comes to save her, she takes away the peach and its pit because one of her tasks is to make sure nobody finds out about the Green Place. But when they’re cornered and Mom has to make her final stand, she gives Furiosa the peach pit and tells her never to forget where she’s from.

The girl keeps that pit on her person at all times over the course of the film. When her hair is long, she hides it in her hair. When she cuts her hair, she puts it in her mouth (though she does still talk, so she probably also has a convenient pocket in which to stash it). Beyond being a source of growth and life, the pit becomes a symbol of who she is. The Wasteland is a world in which nothing can grow. (The Vuvalini, you might remember from Fury Road, carry a box of seeds with them — a last vestige of the Green Place, which by the time that film takes place has vanished.) The seed is hope.

The entire last act of the movie unfolds in unconventional fashion. We expect that there will be some spectacular final battle, a massive confrontation that pits our two central characters against each other at long last. But Miller refuses to give that resolution to us. The filmmaker has always been fond of putting stories within stories in an effort to underline the mythical quality of his films and the ways that humans use myths to endure. His last film before Furiosa was Three Thousand Years of Longing, which was all about the life-changing power of stories that people tell one another. And so the big final war at the end of Furiosa is seen mostly in glimpses during a montage, as the History Man’s narration tells us of “the 40-day war of the Wasteland,” placing it against many of the great, destructive conflicts of the past. (“The Saxons fought the Vikings, the Sumerians fought the Elamites …”) What we see is spectacular but brief.

But now, Furiosa becomes the Furiosa we know from Fury Road. She carves off her hair into a buzz cut and fashions a mechanical prosthetic arm for herself. She goes into the House of Holy Motors, where the Citadel’s cars and trucks are assembled from spare parts, and asks for a vehicle for herself. Everything usable has been taken off to battle, so she gets a busted jalopy with only three wheels. She putters along with that to the front, where she switches to a harpoon-outfitted car while Immortan Joe’s sons, Rictus and Scrotus, argue over which of them will drive it into battle. Watching her go off into the distance, the History Man declares, “That is the darkest of angels. The fifth rider of the apocalypse.” Setting us up for what at that point we assume will surely be a grandiose, bloody, epic ending.

At this point, Dementus is already defeated. His army is shattered and gone. All that’s left are a few of his closest lieutenants. We see them speeding off across the desert as they start to get picked off by Furiosa, who has proven herself to be as expert a sniper as her mom was before her. When Dementus sees that they’re being pursued, he bids a quick, dismissively funny farewell to his people (“We’ve done some mighty things together. Uh, good-bye”), and they all go in different directions. Furiosa follows the one she thinks is Dementus, but this turns out to be Smeg, his loyal messenger and servant, in disguise. After doing away with him, she trains her rifle’s scope on the two remaining riders, each going in opposite directions. One, she sees, is overtaken by a group of Rock Riders, the scavenging biker gang that inhabits the canyon on the edge of the Badlands outside the Citadel and that made such a memorable appearance in Fury Road; that turns out to be another impostor, the one-eyed Squint. We then see Dementus riding into a sandstorm, convinced that he’s lost her.

And then the film fades out. When we fade back in, Dementus is quietly waking up inside a makeshift tent post-sandstorm. He goes to take a drink of water but sees that his water bottle has been cut and drained. He realizes he’s been found. He steps out of the tent. He looks around. Furiosa appears behind him. It’s a scene straight out of a Sergio Leone western.

“You are a freak,” Dementus says, chuckling. “You could’ve nicked me in the night, but you didn’t. So you must be that other thing. Are you that thing?” He seems to know that this is someone with a personal vendetta who wants to see him in agony before she kills him. He tries to run away, but she quietly follows and overtakes him. She takes off her face covering and asks, “Remember me?” (That’s the line she’ll later utter to Immortan Joe, before killing him, in Fury Road.) He responds, “You fabulous thing. You crawled out of a pitiless grave, deeper than hell. Only one thing will do that for you. Not hope — hate.” But at this point, Dementus recognizes Furiosa only as the woman whose lover, Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), he tortured and killed when he had his people drag him to death. He does not remember her as the little girl he stole from her mom and who he pretended was his daughter before trading her to Immortan Joe.

“Fifteen years ago, there was a woman,” Furiosa now tells him. That doesn’t jog his memory. “Do I get a clue?” he asks. “Was she your mother? Sister?” He starts hazarding some guesses, asking if she was a redhead and how she died. (“Did she scream? The ones that yell the least don’t stick.”) Dementus has killed lots of women, it seems, in his days on the Wasteland.

Miller is reminding us that these movies are about our capacity to destroy ourselves. And it’s quite a thing, to remind the viewer that your hero is doomed.

“My childhood, my mother — I want them back,” Furiosa yells. “I want them back!” Now, Dementus finally starts to really lose his cool. “That’s how I feel!” he says. He too has lost his family: “My own magnificent beauties, taken unjustly. I too crave revenge.” When he tells her that she won’t gain anything by revenge, she tells him that she’ll remember his face. She speaks of her mother again: “Despite what you did to her, she was magnificent.” He tells her that after he’s gone, she’ll still be mourning her “mommy magnificent.” He reminds her that no matter what she does to him, “you can never balance the scales of your suffering.”

Then Dementus has what appears to be an epileptic seizure and passes out, a moment of unexpected vulnerability. While he’s unconscious, Furiosa snips off the teddy bear he has always carried and that he gifted to her as a child. Waking up, as if from a dream (or in a dream), Dementus finally recognizes her. “Little D?” he asks, using the nickname he gave her when she was a child. One wonders if the image of a girl holding a teddy bear spurs an even older memory for him — that of his own child, perhaps.

“Someone worthy of me,” he now reflects quietly. “Just two evil bastards out here in the Wasteland … We seek any sensation to wash away the cranky black sorrow.” He tells her that no amount of sensation (or destruction) will ever be enough. “We are the already dead, you and me,” he says, reminding her (and us) that everybody out here in the Wasteland is dying, that in many ways the only ones fortunate in this world are the ones who are already gone. Miller is reminding us that these movies are about our capacity to destroy ourselves. These are meant to be bleak, sad, tragic films. And it’s quite a thing, to remind the viewer that your hero is doomed.

These lines do complicate and humanize Dementus to some degree, but they’re meant not so much to make us feel bad for him as to give us additional context for all these characters. Everybody’s lost somebody in this world. The living memory of happier times was an element of the Mad Max saga that Fury Road largely discarded; in that movie, the apocalypse might as well have happened a century earlier. But in Furiosa, we understand that we are not so far from the Before Days. We could compare Dementus to Praetorian Jack, who talks of how his parents were soldiers who believed in fighting for a cause. As tough as he is, Jack uses that memory to inspire his decision to help Furiosa; he has maintained some sense of who he is. Dementus, however, clearly reached his “terminal freak-out point” long ago. Although he retains the teddy bear as a memory of what he’s lost, it hasn’t helped him maintain any sense of himself. If anything, it’s made him more and more psychotic.

And this is when Furiosa will have to decide what to do with him. Because she too has transformed over the course of this movie, shedding her identity multiple times and having adopted the role of this supposed avenging angel. Everything is leading up to this point: the History Man’s prophecy. Dementus’s proclamations. Our expectations. She should kill Dementus. But he makes the point (as, let’s face it, defeated villains have throughout movie history) that killing him will only make her more like him. “The question is, Do you have it in you to make it epic?” Dementus asks her.

That’s quite a word: epic. It feels as though Miller is nodding to his own work, to the fact that he has been making these Mad Max movies more and more sensational as he’s gone along. Maybe it’s a subtle explanation for why Furiosa’s mood is so different, why the movie doesn’t always go for easy spectacle and go-for-broke action scenes. Why it ends on an extended, almost philosophical dialogue in the desert instead of some great final action set piece.

At this point, as Furiosa mulls what to do with Dementus, we can assume her mother’s words, “Never forget who you are,” are echoing in her mind. This is when the film takes a step back. In voice-over, the History Man tells us that Furiosa took away Dementus’s voice and that they spent the rest of the day in silence. He tells us that there are those who say Furiosa killed him right then and there, as we see her shoot Dementus in the head. But then he says that there are those who prefer that she did more than just execute him, as we now see him tied behind her vehicle, running to catch up — presumably to die the way Praetorian Jack did. We then see him tied to a tree, crucified, which is the way her mother died.

Then the History Man says he heard “the truth” from Furiosa herself. This is a common motif in fables and tall tales and the kinds of stories that Miller paid homage to in Three Thousand Years of Longing: the narrator who purports to have the facts straight from the source, even though, of course, he wasn’t there. At this point, we are fully in the world of myth. So there is even a possibility that this story itself is not true. But we now see Dementus, buried halfway into the ground, the tree growing out of him, “its soil human.” We see a hand pick the sole red peach that has sprouted from this tree — its first fruit. We hear Furiosa saying, “This is not for you or me,” almost as if addressing Dementus. No, this fruit is for others. It will indicate that there is some hope for growth in this scorched life.

The Wasteland is a place where nothing can grow, where the earth, we’re told repeatedly, has become poison. But here we have something new: a symbol of a human’s ability to grow something beautiful. On the level of metaphor (which is a level on which these films always operate), it works marvelously. There’s an earlier hint of this in the movie when Furiosa as a child cuts off her hair and turns it into a wig with which to escape the clutches of Rictus. Her wig is tossed over the edge of the Citadel and lands on a dead branch sticking out of the rock. As the years pass, we see that branch grow around her discarded hair and actually sprout a bunch of leaves. Miller uses this to show the passage of time, but note that there are other branches in the background that remain as stumps and do not grow. The hair, the contact with living material, rejuvenates the dead branch. It’s another fablelike touch, but it suggests that, even in this bleakest of entries in the Mad Max saga, there might still be something to live for.

All throughout the film, Furiosa has been plotting her escape. Every time she’s foiled for a different reason. First, she attempted to stow away on the War Rig and wound up fighting alongside Praetorian Jack and becoming part of his crew. Then Jack cooked up a scheme for her to escape while he was making a run to the Bullet Farm. There, she returned to help Jack. Then she and Jack attempted to escape together, only to be caught by Dementus. It was never the right time for Furiosa to escape. By waiting for the tree to bear fruit, she essentially allows nature (or whatever sick version of nature exists in this film) to pinpoint the right time. Because when the peach ripens, she has effectively come full circle from the day that she tried to steal a peach and wound up losing her childhood. What makes this film’s finale so truly bizarre, so indelible, is that even as it presents us with what might be the series’ most grotesque and surreal image, it also gives us, at long last, some reason for hope.

Bilge Ebiri , 2024-05-24 22:23:14

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