In contemporary popular culture, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic crises are often represented as allegories of our present. Contemporary dystopian movies belonging to the cyberpunk or dieselpunk genre such as the Mad Max franchise (1979-present) are the most prominent examples of this; they often depict current crises of capitalism as persisting in a futuristic world. According to Mark Fisher, contemporary dystopian movies generally fail to imagine a future world in which capitalism no longer exists. In his book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Fisher named such reification of capitalist reality in our imagination and cultural productions as ‘capitalist realism.’ This is expressed precisely in the representation of crises, law, and subjectivity in the world of Mad Max. However, in the latest installment of the franchise, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), spectral and dispossessed subjects also play pivotal roles in revealing and negating a spectral figure of law in a way that can also be read as attempts to circumvent the threshold of capitalist realism. In other words, these are attempts at imagining redemption in a world in which capitalist realism has become the norm in post-apocalyptic or dystopian representations.
In his famous book State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben delineated our present as an era in which the state of exception or emergency has become the dominant juridico-political paradigm. In other words, the practice of decreeing or passing special and exceptional legal measures has been normalized to the extent that exceptions have become the norm. And in tandem with major crisis narratives of our time, the state of exceptions produces dispossessed citizens. In the state of exception, law maintains itself after its own suspension, even when it obstructs citizens from accessing their rights. For Agamben, this is the condition of the law of a world in which crises have taken a perpetual form, separated from any kind of judgment that may end it.
Such representation of crisis in a dystopian world is analogous to the representation of normalized crisis that Fisher describes as a symptom of capitalist realism. In Capitalist Realism, Fisher claims: ‘the normalization of crisis produces a situation in which the repealing of measures brought in to deal with an emergency becomes unimaginable.’ It is a situation epitomized by a phrase popularized by Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek: ‘that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.’ To Fisher, dystopian movies and novels of the past were cultural objects in which an alternative way of living could be imagined, and the crisis or disaster they represented were often a prelude to a new world and ways of living. However, in our time, capitalist realism has become so reified in our cultural imagination that even dystopian movies struggle to depict an alternative to the capitalist way of living. Such reification of capitalist realism is radically depicted in Mad Max, as in it the world ends, yet the crisis of capitalism remains – the military-industrial ideology of the possessed subject that ‘killed the world’ not only survives the death of civilization but also has taken over the remnants of post-apocalyptic religion and polity.
The crisis of resources, energy, and war ended human civilization in Mad Max, but the end of civilization did not bring an end to these crises. War for energy and energy for war is the telos of this dystopian world. In the stronghold called The Citadel, Immortan Joe owns everything, including other human beings, because he owns the rarest of the resources in the post-apocalyptic desert – water. Citizenship in The Citadel means the proprietorship of Immortan Joe. It is a citizenship inscribed by dispossession—legally and literally the dispossessed bear the brand of Immortan Joe on their bodies. Yet, although this is a world in which human civilization is dead and survivors fight to the death for the bare minimum, it is not a pure state of nature. It is not that there is nothing in the world of Mad Max that resembles the law, order, government, religion, and political economy as we know; rather, we find within it their exact representatives. The dictatorship of Immortan Joe in The Citadel cannot be reduced to pure thuggery as it is a sovereign order that reproduces—and gets reproduced by—a particular political economy. The society of dispossessed citizens in The Citadel is horizontally structured by their class and also spatially located. The nameless and unaccountable population residing at the base of the mountain on which The Citadel stands lives an impoverished and short life. Only a few members of society, those most valuable to Joe, experience a “high life” at the top of the citadel. Among them are those who belong to his heavily vaulted harem, labeled as his ‘breeders ,’ whose sole purpose is to provide Joe with healthy heirs. And it is the escape and rebellion of these dispossessed subjects that change the telos
of this movie: from a predetermined supply run to the gas town and the bullet firm to a journey through the ‘fury road,’ towards redemption in a socalled ‘green place” – the utopia of this movie.
The representation of religious and political order in Fury Road reveals various forms of indeterminacy and spectrality, which also seem to be an allegorical representation of our present. The ‘V8 cult’ as the unquestioned religion and ideology of The Citadel makes it apparent that the world of Mad Max is not a world in which legal and ideological canons and apparatuses have disappeared. Immortan Joe is the prophet and God of this cult; he is the sole provider of redemption who promises a mechanical reincarnation and eternal afterlife in a paradise called ‘Valhalla’ to his followers.
What makes it difficult for us to grasp Immortan Joe’s sovereign rule as a legal order is that, within this order, we cannot differentiate law from pure violence, religious community from death-cult, leaders from thugs, and the political economy from exploitation and brutality. Apart from being both the capitalist order of property in its bare form and the religious ideology of the v8 cult, the sovereign order of Immortan Joe lies in pure human action, in a zone of anomie. Agamben, in State of Exception, delineates such a zone of anomie as a zone of exception ‘wherein lies a human action without relation to the norm— coincides with an extreme and spectral figure of the law.’ It is a condition in which nomos and anomie become undecidable, as in the body of the sovereign figure who rules through such law.
In the rule of Immortan Joe, we see such undecidability between nomos and anomie. It is a world in which nomos is shown to be a brand of anomie, sometimes as branding on human bodies.
Owing to Jacques Derrida and to its subsequent use in literary and cultural criticism, the “spectral” metaphor generally refers to entities and forms that exist in between binary poles, e.g., life and death, law and violence, real and fiction, powerful and impotent.
For Agamben, spectral law exists within the dual pole of pure applicability and pure being in force – as the force of law. In our contemporary world, the state of exception is generally given a temporary, legal, and human face. But in the world of Mad Max, the exception is given an inhuman and ghostly feature, as the spectrality of Immortan Joe is also visually represented. His skull-like breathing device, skeletal armor, and white powder-covered body give him a living-dead appearance.
Immortan Joe thus appears to be a character ambiguously representing life and death, law and lawlessness, divine and demonic. As if in the sovereignty of a deified living dead, the spectral figure of the capitalist legal order survives beyond its own collapse in a post-apocalyptic world, in symbiotic relationship with a religious order that appears to be a syncretic relic of after-life mythos and redemptive theologies of the old world. But such a post-apocalyptic condition of capitalism is not unlike that of our capitalist present, as according to Fisher: ‘Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.’
In Fury Road, spectral metaphors and visual representations also play crucial roles in attempts at encountering and negating the spectral figure of law. Max, the protagonist of the movie, is a character who represents both spectral subjectivity and spectral law. As an ex-cop, his very existence in the post-apocalyptic desert makes him a figure of the law that dwells in a zone of its own suspension, as we hear him narrating in the prologue, ‘I was a Cop … As the world fell, each of us in our own way, was broken.’ Through his focalization of events, we are confronted with a spectral world that exists in between reality and his lucid imagination, a spectral reality that often saturates the whole post-apocalyptic world of this movie. As a spectral figure of law, Max is not simply the spectral law that haunts, since he is also haunted by those he could not protect. He is haunted by the ghosts of characters long dead, and these spectral figures often become responsible for his actions in the real world. The most decisive of such spectral agencies can be ascribed to an epiphany of Max that provides the group of protagonists with ‘hope,’ and a chance for ‘redemption.’
Immortan Joe is the sole redeemer for his loyal followers. But for Furiosa (a rogue general from Joe’s army), her redemption lies in helping the escaped sex slaves (‘breeders’) find a sanctuary in the ‘green place.’ When the green place turns out to be non-existent, Furiosa and her group attempt to achieve ‘some kind of redemption’ by revolutionizing The Citadel. Such plays around the concept of ‘redemption’ endow it with new significance even after its previous use and promise have been repeatedly exposed as fake or fictional.
For Agamben, ‘plays’ are acts through which characters in Franz Kafka’s novel, The Trial, attempt to study and deactivate the spectral figure of law, so that a ‘new use’ of the law can become possible. In this case, Agamben both follows and critiques Derrida’s interpretation. Derrida, in his book Before the Law (1982), argued that the figure of law represented in The Trial is also a representation of ‘différance’ (a paradigmatic cousin of the ‘spectral’ metaphor). But for Agamben, characters such as ‘a man from the country’ also play with such spectral law to deactivate it and to liberate it. And for him, such plays are also attempts at liberating and making new use of things that were once sacralized and captured within juridico-political or religious spheres.
In Mad Max: Fury Road, the political agency of the dispossessed and spectral subjects often coincides with such plays. For instance, one of the escapees, Splendid, uses her vulnerability and plays with her dispossessed legal condition to protect her comrades, and gives her life in the process. The martyrdom of war boy Nux also deserves attention. The war boys are endowed with spectral subjectivity, as they are short-lived ‘half-lives’ whose appearance symbolizes their condition of being in between life and death, man and machine. They are the fanatic military core of Joe, for whom the theology of martyrdom provides a certain significance to their life. They perform a martyrdom ritual while participating in suicide attacks.
But even after Nux loses his faith in the v8 cult and attempted a coup d’état against Immortan Joe, sacrificing his life for his comrades in the process, he still participated in the martyrdom ritual. Here, the agency of Nux coincides with the transformation of the martyrdom ritual into a ‘play.’ In other words, he inscribes new meaning (death for love and camaraderie) to a ritual which had become meaningless and makes new use of it.
Mad Max: Fury Road not only reproduces capitalist realism in its representation of a dystopian future, but also attempts to confront such realism, and spectral subjects play the role of protagonist in such confrontation. However, we must not lose our faith. As Fisher concluded in Capitalist Realism, ‘The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.’