We Are Not Things! Fury Road’s Anti-Slavery Mantra Walter Cronkite School of Journalism Devon Ross WHEN ONE OF THE YOUNG, beautiful Wives in Mad Max: Fury Road starts running back toward her enslaver, insisting that he had given her a “good life,” she is stopped by one of the most often quoted lines in the film. “We are not,” another Wife cries, “things. We are not things!” The message is clear: death as a human is preferable to life as a thing. Better to live without clean water and reliable food than to sell one’s humanity to get them. Like Barb, Mike, and Alexis, I find myself drawn to the binary logic that drives much of a film widely reviled for its supposed attack on gender hierarchies. For me, it is in this moment of insistent distinction, of parsing human from thing, that this film taps into a particular form of Christian/Cartesian dualism that formed the historical bedrock of nineteenth-century antislavery messages. The parsimonious greed of Immortan Joe, who hoards water and beautiful women, and the cruelty of a regime that robs mothers of their milk and warriors of their blood offer a bold depiction of precisely the sort of objectification that Frederick Douglass and other nineteenth-century abolitionists would decry as slavery’s primal sin. I suggest that Fury Road, consciously steeped in antislavery rhetoric, enacts a vision of innocence that has done incalculable harm to both the women and children the filmmakers ostensibly wish to celebrate and has justified the environmental damage that the Mad Max franchise continuously mourns. Rather than a depicting the horror that arises when humans become machine-like things, the film demonstrates that our failure to see ourselves as machines (breakable, finite, needy, overdetermined) is a deadly form of denial. 1 By the end of the film, both the story of Immortan Joe’s brutal objectification of bodies and its counternarrative—the belief that the human body is inherently sacred, somehow outside and above the capitalist exchange of money, blood, and water—seem equally culpable for killing the world. In the nineteenth century, one key argument against chattel slavery involved dwelling on the horrors inherent in using the world “chattel” to discuss the disposition of human beings. For abolitionists, the conflation of a person with a thing—be it an item of livestock or a set of silver— was an act of blasphemy. Human beings, they insisted, are sacred, a realm apart from anything that can be bought or sold. The famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison introduced the enslaved fugitive Frederick Douglass to the public by pointing out the sacrilege of turning a person into an 

We Are Not Things

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