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Like all dictators, Dr Dementus sustains himself on a drip-feed of delusion. Played by Chris Hemsworth in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Dementus peacocks his way through the Wasteland, speechifying, showboating, and salivating at the thought of mass domination. He rides a chariot cobbled together from the remnants of a forgotten past, chews sausages made of human flesh, and strongarms himself into the minds of his minions. But despite overt nods to the many leaders of today, Dementus isn’t the sort of one-note villain you’d normally see in a summer blockbuster. “We cannot be soft,” he yells in one scene, a little teddy bear strapped to his chest to offset his guzzolene-fuelled mania.
His goals are fairly simple, but his motivations are murky. Dementus aims to expand his empire and present formidable opposition to the Wasteland’s numero uno warlord, Immortan Joe. But for long stretches of Furiosa, he engages in a sort of performative villainy that feels more a product of his own deficiencies than a genuine desire to do evil. Director George Miller runs the risk of short-changing his own protagonist, played by the very able Anya Taylor-Joy, by giving Hemsworth the room to exercise his unhinged urges. But he justifies the tonal dissonance by creating easily the most complex antagonist of his insane franchise — an antagonist whose autocratic aggressions will resonate across the world, but more acutely in an India that is currently in the process of deciding its fate.
Also read – Monkey Man: Dev Patel’s controversial action film worships two gods, Hanuman and Amitabh Bachchan
It isn’t unusual for politically motivated films to be delayed during an election year. But these films are always blatantly obvious about their affiliations and intentions. In its own way, however, a film like Furiosa can get away with making sweeping statements about the world without so much as raising an eyebrow because it deals in allegory, while others, like Monkey Man, are suppressed because their imagery is more identifiable. In fact, the recent Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes was even more pointed in its takedown of ruthless leaders who weaponise religion by elevating themselves to godlike status in the eyes of their people. Like that film’s antagonist, Proximus Caesar, Dementus is thirsty for knowledge, and keeps a slave for the express purpose of providing him with important historical information. He understands dictatorship because he has studied it.
A still from Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
“They exploit you, they enslave you, they wash their feet in your sweat and blood. They rule only because people choose to follow. The power is with you,” Dementus declares in an early scene, as he rides into Immortan Joe’s lair with his ‘congress of destruction’ and offers Joe’s oppressed subjects an ‘attractive choice’. “Join me,” he says, luring them with the promise of a brighter Wasteland, positioning himself as an alternative to fascism. Dementus does have a point, but despite his surprisingly astute understanding of power, populism, and the sustained punishment of the masses, he doesn’t want to lead Joe’s people to salvation, but wants them to live under his thumb instead.
In a society without freedom, there is no overcoming two fundamental truths. First, it is in the interest of those who hold the power to ensure that the less privileged fulfil specific roles, which explains the existence of a character named ‘Piss Boy’, whose only job in Furiosa seems to be to pour bottles of urine into the fuel nozzles of trucks. Second, women will be reduced to objects, playthings, and breeding machines to breed more breeding machines. The only reason they aren’t erased entirely is because if they are, the men wouldn’t have anybody to rule over; these are the men who will find ways to twist an act of abuse into an act of honour. Like offering their own wives and daughters as vessels through which godly overlords can birth their progeny. An idea like this wouldn’t seem out of place in the lawless world of Mad Max, but more worryingly, it seemed par for the course when a ‘bhakt’ recently chose to post it on social media.
Furiosa’s mother is murdered before her eyes in the film’s largely silent, Disney-coded first act. Dementus appears to ‘adopt’ her, but hands her over to Immortan Joe as a diplomatic offering in exchange for more control of the Wasteland’s resources. To survive the horrors of Joe’s kingdom, to avoid becoming one of his many ‘wives’, Furiosa does the only thing that she can do in a patriarchal society. She disguises herself as a boy and bides her time until she is able to answer the call to home and return to the ‘Green Place’ — the matriarchal land of abundance that we first heard about in Mad Max: Fury Road.
But that film’s orgiastic achievements in action choreography often tended to drown out the thoughtful tragedy at its centre. In Fury Road, Furiosa returns to the Green Place, only to discover that it no longer exists. There is no room for independent women in a world ruled by men, the movie appeared to be saying. It was a particularly pessimistic ending to what was essentially a loud, and often ridiculous action film.
A still from Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
But was it hope that sustained her for all those years, or was it hate? In Furiosa’s equally excellent climactic showdown — which isn’t the loud action spectacle that many might have expected but an intimate conversation about conflicting ideologies — Dementus points out the inherent similarities between the two emotions. Incidentally, these are often also the platforms that two opposing political parties might contest on, especially in elections during fraught times. But if Dementus can be believed, hope and hate are interchangeable. “There’s no shame in hate. It’s one of the great forces of nature,” he tells Furiosa in the film’s climax, prepared to be executed in cold blood. But he also offers her a word of warning. “I too crave a big bellyful of revenge,” he says, as the camera switches between closeups of Hemsworth’s prosthetically altered face and the teddy bear strapped to his body.
Dementus’ family, it is implied in as many words, was also killed. The teddy is his last tangible memory of his ‘marvellous beauty’, his child. But nobody in the Wasteland can claim to still have parents. The murder of Mad Max’s family in the first film compelled him to seek revenge against the warlord responsible for it. But having accomplished his mission, he devoted himself to a life of decency. The cold-blooded killing of Furiosa’s mother turned her into a warrior who’d years later risk her life to save those of other women. Neither she nor Max chose the path that Dementus did.
He couldn’t ignore ‘the cranky black sorrow’ of his loss, he understood that the scales of suffering could not be balanced by retribution. And so, Dementus dedicated his life to numbing himself through ‘sensation’ — the thrill of the chase, the danger of death, and the euphoria of power. “We are the already dead, Little D,” he tells Furiosa, using the same name that he had for her when she was a child. The climax recalls the philosophical question that the movie opened with: “As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?” And in its sombre climax, it reveals the answer: we brave a falling world’s cruelties by not embracing those cruelties ourselves.
Post Credits Scene is a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there’s always something to fixate about once the dust has settled.
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