Why I Root for the Villain: Immortan Joe

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Why I Root for the Villain: Immortan Joe

Postby Marcuse » Wed Nov 25, 2015 8:19 pm

So let’s get one thing straight from the off: Immortan Joe isn’t a good guy. The thing is, the world of Mad Max: Fury Road is not a place conducive to kind and giving characters. Everyone has to be awful to some degree in order to merely survive, and that includes every single one of the characters included in the film, even the ones who don’t want to be. So in the context that Immortan Joe isn’t an objectively good person, I’d like to argue how some of what he does doesn’t have as bad an effect as it first seems.

He’s brought direction in a world of nihilist corruption

So let’s look at the Warboys for a second. They’re seen popularly as the epitome of testosterone fuelled insanity, their religious fervour for Joe is so fanatical that they’ll do anything for him. They’re referred to by Angharad as victims in their own right.

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What a charming fellow.


But who are the Warboys? Why are they there? They all seem to be there because they’re sick. It’s not just Nux that’s fatalistic and looking for a historic death, they all are. Why? Because they have radiation poisoning, or illnesses that relate to radiation sickness. They’re referred to by Joe in his speech as “half-life war boys”, and I think that’s not by accident. They do live half lives, shortened by the conditions they live in. But instead of them descending into abject corruption, surprisingly the warboys are more or less disciplined. When Furiosa makes the strange move to turn off the road, their senior immediately passes the order down the line without question at first. They have loyalty and discipline, a feature sorely lacking in the wastelands.

Who made them into that? Immortan Joe. We don’t see it in the film so we can’t comment on it much, but they’re obviously his creation. They’re the closest thing to a military in the film, and possibly in the whole of post-apocalyptic Australia. But then what does he choose to use that strength for?

Rebuilding society

Returning to the speech Joe gives at the beginning of the film, he refers to the War Rig being used to acquire gasoline from Gas Town, and bullets from the Bullet Farm. So, the Citadel is about the only place that’s actively trading on a regular basis. The film characterises this as him controlling the people by controlling resources, but the apparently more egalitarian societies don’t have crowds of thousands clamouring at their gates routinely. Sure, the vast majority of them are unwashed peasants, but the very fact they can live as peasants and not have to fight all the time to scratch a living from the wasteland is, compared to the setting, an improvement.

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That guy in the front would have been eaten several times over if he was in the wasteland, at least…


That’s not the only evidence of civilisation the Citadel exhibits; the young warboys are sheltered from conflict until they’re old enough to fight. Immortan’s disabled son lives out his days in peace, ruler in his father’s absence. Amputee Furiosa is provided with a working robotic replacement (though the circumstances of her arrival there might belie less than positive circumstances for this).

Water might be rationed, but we have no way of knowing if that’s due to cruelty, or necessity. Nobody ever directly states that Joe’s withholding it, and the first thing that came to my mind when they opened the pipes up at the end of the film was that it was entirely likely that they would run out exceptionally swiftly if they did not exert some degree of control over the resource.

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I highly doubt that’s an unlimited supply right there.


Finally, the mothers of the failed attempts to breed children are kept within the upper reaches of the Citadel, and live out the rest of their days. They’re also milked like freaking cows, which is to our sensibilities obscene. I’d argue that in an environment like that, their use of resources probably takes precedence over squeamishness. It’s also interesting to note that a deleted scene from the film shows a woman asking to be taken for this, because living inside the Citadel is preferable to living outside of it. Finally, these women are almost all overweight when literally no other character in the film is. In a survival situation, being overweight is unheard of. Max literally eats a gross radiation lizard at the beginning of the film to demonstrate all of them will literally devour anything they can to survive. But on the subject of breeding…

He’s trying to breed normal humans

One thing that comes to mind when we look at the plot relating to Immortan Joe’s wives is; what the hell is he doing with the breeders? Why is it important to him to breed? What about it is so important he keeps a harem of absurdly attractive women in a vault? As much as I can understand explaining this as a male desire to have a vault of absurdly attractive women for his use, it doesn’t seem to make sense for him to expend such effort to segregate them from the world to the point where they don’t know what they’re doing in the real world.

The answer is actually in the film itself. The Bullet Farmer tells us while scoffing at Immortan’s folly.

The Bullet Farmer wrote:All this for a family squabble. Healthy babies, heh.


There it is, right there. Healthy babies. What Immortan Joe is trying to do is breed humans that are not flawed, that aren’t affected by the poisonous wasteland they all live in. It doesn’t make what he does in service to it acceptable, but again, by the standards of the world he exists in, his behaviour isn’t very extreme. He even seems to care about the loss of Angharad, otherwise why were we shown a scene of him and Rictus wailing over her body, when it was possible that the child she was carrying might have lived?

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Does this face look bovvered?


This need to separate the wives from the wasteland also explains why Immortan does absolutely everything to get them back as soon as possible. By escaping, they’re actually destroying the controlled conditions of his efforts to breed humans unaffected by the radiation.

But how does Immortan know about that, and how to protect against it? Surely everyone in the wasteland is a howling savage by now?

He’s preserving science

When Max is captured he’s kept, not as a slave, but as a “blood bag”. This is because the plot required he be Type O, a universal donor. However, how the hell did they figure that out? He was captured by warboys, who don’t seem to be the most technically minded guys. Thing is, Immortan employs a doctor, who was with them and manages to somehow test for Max’s blood type. This is pretty much the only evidence of technology or science being preserved in the film.

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They might not take much care of it…


It all comes from the Citadel. Look at the hanging gardens of plants Joe walks through to the vault, they’re plainly not just basic gardening. It looks like high intensity growing specifically designed for low space environments. The conclusion of the film is that the green place is now no longer the haunted swamp they fled to, but the crowded fortress they fled from. All the best technology and resources are at the Citadel and it’s prospered under the leadership of Immortan Joe.

While I won’t argue he’s a great guy or anything, he’s a bad guy in a worse world. As much as he’s a dictatorial demagogue, he’s trying to preserve what it means to be human in an exceptionally twisted way. But compare him to the insane Bullet Farmer, or the obscene People Eater, and he really seems the lesser of the evils in the film. He even seems to come off as though his peers dislike him for his emotional leanings for his wives. In a sense, seeing people as property is a very messed up way of saying people are valuable to him. Characters like Max aren’t able to generate even that level of interest in others.

Also he totally says shiny and chrome and stuff and that’s just awesome…
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Re: Why I Root for the Villain: Immortan Joe

Postby Macready » Wed Nov 25, 2015 9:55 pm

I felt sorry for him, when he died.
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Re: Why I Root for the Villain: Immortan Joe

Postby Ceiling_Squid » Thu Nov 26, 2015 1:50 am

Interesting interpretation, though he's trying to produce a healthy heir, IIRC, which is a strike against it. Saving humanity through breeding "healthy babies" doesn't really fit with Immortan's M.O. at all. Otherwise he'd be trying to breed healthy men into the gene pool, instead of relying on his own mutant sperm. We can tell that Immortan himself is diseased from the moment we first see them put his armor and respirator on. Both his sons have clear developmental problems, and he is simply trying to create a worthy successor. 

The rest of your points aren't bad, though.
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Re: Why I Root for the Villain: Immortan Joe

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Thu Nov 26, 2015 1:53 am

You will walk the red carpet sugared and glazed!
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Re: Why I Root for the Villain: Immortan Joe

Postby NotCIAAgent » Thu Nov 26, 2015 3:43 pm

As people may already have noticed, I also tend to root for the perceived villains. You know, great historical men, whose intentions and actions were widely misinterpretation by a MANIPULATED MEDIA.

And the most misunderstood of them all is...

Big Boss.

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Tell me, is this the face of a man who did something wrong? He's the legendary soldier, goddammit, and those child soldiers were willing to fight build nukes for his cause!

FUCK YOU KAZ, FUCK YOU ZERO, AND MOST OF ALL, FUCK YOU SOLID SNAKE! YOU TERRIBLE INFANT!
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Re: Why I Root for the Villain: Immortan Joe

Postby Chumbawamba » Fri Nov 27, 2015 11:58 am

test comment pls ignore
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Re: Why I Root for the Villain: Immortan Joe

Postby LaChaise » Fri Nov 27, 2015 12:21 pm

Well I have a vault full of women, but I at least have the decency to cook homemade goodness for them.

#ImmortanChaise2017
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Re: Why I Root for the Villain: Immortan Joe

Postby blehblah » Fri Nov 27, 2015 4:41 pm

NotCIAAgent wrote:As people may already have noticed, I also tend to root for the perceived villains. You know, great historical men, whose intentions and actions were widely misinterpretation by a MANIPULATED MEDIA.




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Re: Why I Root for the Villain: Immortan Joe

Postby Flavaflavius » Mon Nov 30, 2015 6:00 pm

Here's the only Mad-Max villain I root for.

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Last edited by Marcuse on Mon Nov 30, 2015 6:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Why I Root for the Villain: Immortan Joe

Postby EstebanColberto » Tue Dec 01, 2015 2:08 pm

blehblah wrote:
NotCIAAgent wrote:As people may already have noticed, I also tend to root for the perceived villains. You know, great historical men, whose intentions and actions were widely misinterpretation by a MANIPULATED MEDIA.




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It's interesting that these two villains are pretty similar. Both are leaders in a post-apocalypse and both have used religion to control their followers, but one is depicted as a villain that over-exploited a scarce resource (the oil on his ship), while the other is a villain for tightly controlling a scarce resource.

The lesson to be learned is that you can't win. You'll be perceived as a monster no matter what.
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Re: Why I Root for the Villain: Immortan Joe

Postby Masonator » Tue Dec 01, 2015 5:38 pm

Agreed that Joe runs a very tight ship, but with one minor quibble: for a guy who's clearly trying to control a scarce resource, Joe's method of distributing the water seemed suspect, given that 99% of it just soaked into the wasteland.  That part of the movie left me a bit confused, since he could not have had a sufficiently large supply to squander as much as he did, presumably on a daily or almost daily basis.  Considering he has so many settlers, I assume the rigors of that life and the heat of the environment would require a fair bit of water to survive, and it looked to me as if the overwhelming majority of the settlers couldn't collect any of the water distributed and would have to lap up whatever they could on the ground before it soaked into the wasteland. I couldn't imagine that would be enough to live on.  This just seemed like a minor flaw ignored to create an interesting visual quickly explaining why Joe had such a large community and firmly establishing him as a villain with his 'do not become addicted to water' speech, since handing out rations of water to the masses would have created an odd layer of ambiguity into what was otherwise a fairly irredeemable villain.
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Re: Why I Root for the Villain: Immortan Joe

Postby blehblah » Sat Dec 05, 2015 4:34 pm

Unless the big, wasteful release was a show, and regular rations were handed-out in a different way. Sorta like watching a country parade it's nukes down main street once a year. It's a show of power to awe the masses, not a useful method of deploying nukes.

I seem to remember someone in the movie mentioning that he pumps it from the ground. Groundwater is, in some parts of the world, becoming scarce. But then, if you figure how much groundwater it takes to support agriculture in areas where there would be no agriculture otherwise, what Joe is using is a piddling. If he's on a reliable source, and all those pesky farmers are dead, he'd be just fine.

It's like the power of Bartertown being a few folks who know how to raise pigs and produce power from the manure. They don't explore how those pigs are fed, but the Mad Max movies all ignore anything external to the situation, else half the movie would be exposition.

Imagine Max explaining how water pumps require power, and people can't survive on just water, and...

In every previous Mad Max, the central conflict has been about fuel. Not many folks said, "Erm, even with stabilizer, that stuff goes bad right quick - and where do they get water?" This time around water is the source of power (in a political sense), and the audience is not supposed to wonder, "Where are they getting their fuel?"

What Miller does is put a shitload of crash-bang-boom into movies that explore the conflicts created by strength/power/control. If anything, Max is our narrator - our witness. He kicks ass, always ends-up helping the "little guy", and has a real nose for getting in the middle of conflicts, but above all, he finds a way to scrape through.
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Re: Why I Root for the Villain: Immortan Joe

Postby Midas Burroughs » Wed Mar 02, 2016 6:49 pm

The point about him trying to produce an heir was already taken.

So, let's get a bit Rummy. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Yes, he's the only guy shown having a doctor. But what if, say, the Bullet Farmer does too? That he's the only guy shown doing it is a weak argument since it would stretch the movie's runtime even more if they randomly cut to the other warlords' medical staff having tea. That aside, look at the guy. He's an albino Darth Vader without the space magic. He probably needs a checkup every three days or so to even stay alive. It's hard to make a case for that being a redeeming trait for him when he might well be reliant on the doctor for his daily survival.
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