It is of no surprise that costuming and costume design are important aspects of any film. This is often even more so the case for films that takes place in a fantastical setting, where wardrobe choices can tell us interesting things about the imagined cultures being examined in a film and a character’s role within them. The Mad Max film series is one that has always been notable for memorable costuming choices, but even in this context the costumes of Mad Max: Fury Road are notable in the suggestions that they make about how the ideology of this post-apocalyptic world shapes hegemonic power structures and the roles of people within it. In Mad Max: Fury Road, the clothing and bodily modifications of characters do more than just flesh out this world, instead they are very much tied to what their social roles are, with visual identifiers for who they are and how they are to be related to being in some cases literally inscribed on their bodies. This paper argues that what director George Miller does with his costume choices in this regard is explore the idea of a society built on ideology and hegemonic structure as lived and physically inscribed experiences—the bodies of this place are literally changed in order to visually conform to the roles that they have been assigned to and in that process transformed from individuals into objectified tools of hegemony. This idea of the dissemination and manifestations of power and ideology being much more tactile provides us with interesting questions about both the functionality of socio-cultural processes of meaning-making that predate the Foucaultian ideas of biopower and whether or not these are practices that we could return to in the future.
About the presenterDaniel Gilmore
Daniel is an adjunct assistant professor at St. John’s University, NYU, and CUNY in the areas of Communications and Media Studies. He has a PhD in Communication, Culture, & Media from Drexel University, with a dissertation that focused on the visual organization of surfaces in the context of modern protest movements. His research interests center around ways that people make themselves visible—culturally, socially, and politically—and how that process is often a result of contention.