Star Wars: Let’s Face It, the Jedi Were Always Jerks

Nearly seven years after its release, one of the most controversial scenes in Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi continues to be when Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master and veritable legend, tells the next generation about what the Jedi really represent. While training the franchise’s newest protagonist, Rey (Daisy Ridley), Mark Hamill’s now grizzled and […]

The post Star Wars: Let’s Face It, the Jedi Were Always Jerks appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga spoilers.

It all begins with a a peach. That is the first thing audiences are asked to bear witness to at the start of George Miller’s long-awaited Furiosa. And it’s this simple luxury for which young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) will soon be cast out of paradise. Never one to make a play toward subtlety, even when he strives for plenty of nuance, Miller knows exactly what kind of loaded comparisons he’s demanding audiences to make. A girl; a red, ripe piece of fruit; and a forbidden act that invites lifelong punishment. Despite being only a child, Furiosa’s action will cause her to be stolen from her mother (Charlee Fraser), her sister, and the beloved Green Place. She will then spend the next 20 years desperate to get back to that land, but as viewers hopefully remember from Mad Max: Fury Road, it is by that point a fantasy which is never meant to be.

Like Eve from the Bible and other Abrahamic religions—a woman who allegedly stole an apple from the Tree of Knowledge and then convinced Adam to likewise condemn himself to banishment outside the Garden of Eden—Furiosa’s desire will lead to exile. She is sentenced to survive in a Wasteland where her mother is burned alive, her childhood is stolen by a false prophet calling himself Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), and her seeming soulmate (Tom Burke) is later brutally murdered before her eyes.

This is just one of the many striking images from antiquity, both of a biblical bent and otherwise, that Miller interweaves throughout Furiosa. There is also the aforementioned Dementus’ introduction where he is clad in a pristine white robe and beard, making him the spitting image of most Western depictions of Christ; the tribulations of an adult Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) are meanwhile described in the film as an odyssey, a la one of Homer’s two foundational texts of Western literature; and the other Homeric masterwork, The Iliad, is more overtly alluded to when Dementus’ followers conquer Gas Town with a veritable Trojan Horse, and again when the same fiend desecrates the body of Furiosa’s potential lover, Praetorian Jack, by having it dragged behind his motorcycles as it’s fed upon by dogs—just like Achilles is said to have done to Hector three thousand years ago before the walls of Troy (where his wife also looked on). Even the name “Praetorian Jack,” like “Imperator Furiosa,” is taken from actual Roman history, with both being titles of honor and power in an age of empire.

So yes, Miller is playing with some very ancient imagery in Furiosa. Yet when I sat down to interview him, he also noted that it’s an image of humanity itself.

“It’s a reduced future that we have here,” Miller said. “It all starts next Wednesday with all the things we read in the press all happening at once… and people have to survive in a much more elemental world, which is much more akin to the sort of pre-20th century and even earlier medieval times… and that simplicity basically allows you to examine behaviors that are constant throughout the human narrative. In all cultures, all nooks and crannies of the world, these same stories are told.”

It is indeed a familiar story. But how Miller chooses to recontextualize it for Furiosa feels remarkably fresh and, perhaps in some circles… heretical.

Consider again the first major sequence which evokes Eve and the apple. For millennia this story has been used as a justification for the subjugation and marginalization of women. Eve is easily deceived, as “Genesis” tells us, by a serpent. She in turn clouds Adam’s better judgment. Despite the husband being the suggested superior in the text, he too bites from a forbidden fruit and follows his wife into damnation.

But that is not remotely like anything that is actually happening in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga when you examine the scene. For starters, as young Furiosa reaches for the peach, she is not seeking something that is forbidden or a pleasure for herself. In fact, she already has her peach and t