A minute-by-minute analysis of George Miller's film, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).

Blending film criticism with creative nonfiction, each book in the Timecodes series focuses on one film, exploring it minute by minute beginning with minute one, and ending with the final minute before the closing credits.

Mad Max: Fury Road: Movies Minute by Minute is the first book-length analysis of George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road, which reads the film as an anti-capitalist, feminist manifesto. In this interdisciplinary text, Alix Olson mobilizes an unconventional and eclectic archive of radical democratic, ecofeminist and queer theory, feminist poetry, and Afro-futurist literature in order to elicit the film's relevance as a guide for radical political struggle. The book is particularly attuned to Mad Max's depiction of “another world as possible,” a slogan which serves as an aspirational impetus for activism and to the nature of radical social change more broadly.

Through close analysis, the book weaves together “thought-bites” in order to track pressing questions about power relations within neoliberal capitalism: How might reading the film through contemporary queer and feminist thinkers and activist movements teach us about the possibilities and limitations of resistance? How do utopia and dystopia (pre)figure and interact as post-capitalist horizons? Should we understand ecofeminism as a liberatory or essentializing force? What might the temporality of “slow critique,” performed by a minute-by-minute textual reading, expose about our approach to political life more generally? How can popular art uproot the common-sense nature of everyday life under neoliberal capitalism and render taken-for-granted logics irrational or dystopian?