u/FunkyPleasance

How lovely the elder brother’s
Life all laced in the other’s,
Love-laced!—what once I well
Witnessed, so fortune fell.
When Shrovetide, two years gone,
Our boys’ plays brought on
Part was picked for John,
Young John; then fear, then joy
Ran revel in the other boy.
Now the night come; all
Our company thronged the hall;
Henry, by the wall,
Beckoned me beside him:
I came where called, and eyed him
By meanwhiles; making my play
Turn most on tender byplay.
For, wrung all on love’s rack,
My lad, and lost in Jack,
Smiled, blushed, and bit his lip;
Or drove, with a diver’s dip,
Clutched hands through clasped knees
And many a mark like these,
Told tales with heart’s stress
He hung upon the imp’s success.
Now the other was brass-bold:
He had no work to hold
His heart up at the strain;
Nay, roguish ran the vein.
Two tedious pacts were past;
Jack’s call and cue at last;
When Henry, heart forsook,
Dropped eyes and dared not look.
There! The hall rung!
Dog, he did give tongue!
But Harry—in his hands he has flung
His tear-tricked cheeks of flame
For fond love and for shame.
Ah Nature, framed in fault,
There’s comfort then, there’s salt;
Nature, bad, base, and blind,
Dearly thou canst be kind;
There dearly then, dearly,
Dearly thou canst be kind

I was in the shower thinking about the violinist argument for abortion rights.  If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a 1971 ( pre Roe vs. Wade) argument that imagined you waking up to find yourself handcuffed to a famous violinist.  You then discover there are tubes of blood connecting the two of you.  You are a the violinist’s blood bank, and without you a cultural treasure and musical genius will die.  Do you have an ethical obligation to accept this or are you morally in the clear to try to find a way to free yourself?
It occurred to me that this is very similar to Max’s position in the first act of Fury Road, and accomplished in such a visceral way that the film cuts through sophistry to make it clear: what the boys are doing to Max is wrong, and if he can get out he has a right to do so.  The death of Nux would not be on him.
Drawing it out, this entire plotline acts as an allegory to an unwanted, forced pregnancy.  Lets even say an unwed survivor of a rape in a regime where abortion is illegal.  Max is violently captured and then kept alive because of his body, a quirk of his genetics.  He is not valued as a person but as a tool of the state to further its power.  The initial insertion of the tubes is against his will.  The connection to this helpless bald pale enemy is not something he ever asked for.  Then he is not allowed to simply wait it out.  He is strapped to the front of the enemy’s vehicle.  The harsh realities of the wasteland are slapping him in the face moment by moment while he is utterly alone and unable to control his circumstances or have say in what happens to him or his body.  The violence is an ongoing one, the trauma was not a single moment but an ongoing brutal violation stealing that which is deepest inside him.  This is not a serene vision of pregnancy.  This is constant danger where life is both fragile and cheap. Max's life is in danger and he is locked out of decisions concerning his own survival.
Fascinatingly, one could take this even farther.  Nux ends up very much acting like a son to Max and his cohort.  “Born” of violation and cruelty, he joins the ranks of those fighting to take down the privilege he was born into.  Nux ends up being both the reason for Max’s hardship, but is also not individually avenged for it once he rejects the system that made him.  
Is this far fetched?  Yes and no.  Yes I think its unlikely George Miller had this allegory plotted out beat by beat.  But its clear that Mad Max is a movie very interested in politics of autonomy.  I think its an interesting thought experiment.

Apologies if this has been posted before. Without even touching what happened "behind closed-doors," licensed psychologist analyzes what was done in public and confirmed by MJ himself and gives strong argument why even that was breaking boundaries in toxic ways.

Portrait of Two Men and Child Wearing Samurai Armor, c. 1870
Ambrotype in kiri-wood box
Unknown artist, Japanese
Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg
St. Petersburg, Florida
On view

 

 

I had an uncle in the Navy; he hated the Japanese;
if he could, he would have eradicated all of them—
he was on an escort destroyer when the kamikazes
were going after the carriers, and I’m in a museum
on vacation looking at these photos from the Meiji
Restoration period, and I began thinking about him;
he would’ve done more Hiroshimas and Nagasakis;
he told how shipmates were blown limb from limb;
carriers, filled with planes and fuel, were crematories;
he drank and gambled and ended up dying in prison
after he’d lost everything he had, including his family;
the museum note says photos were good for tourism,
that Westerners loved photos showing Japan’s history
with samurai and geisha and places that you had to see.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems_and_Ballads_(Swinburne)/Hermaphroditus

HERMAPHRODITUS.

I.

Lift up thy lips, turn round, look back for love,

Blind love that comes by night and casts out rest;
Of all things tired thy lips look weariest,
Save the long smile that they are wearied of.
Ah sweet, albeit no love be sweet enough,
Choose of two loves and cleave unto the best;
Two loves at either blossom of thy breast
Strive until one be under and one above.
Their breath is fire upon the amorous air,
Fire in thine eyes and where thy lips suspire:
And whosoever hath seen thee, being so fair,
Two things turn all his life and blood to fire;
A strong desire begot on great despair,
A great despair cast out by strong desire.

II.

Where between sleep and life some brief space is,

With love like gold bound round about the head,
Sex to sweet sex with lips and limbs is wed,
Turning the fruitful feud of hers and his
To the waste wedlock of a sterile kiss;

Yet from them something like as fire is shed
That shall not be assuaged till death be dead,
Though neither life nor sleep can find out this.
Love made himself of flesh that perisheth
A pleasure-house for all the loves his kin;
But on the one side sat a man like death,
And on the other a woman sat like sin.
So with veiled eyes and sobs between his breath
Love turned himself and would not enter in.

III.

Love, is it love or sleep or shadow or light

That lies between thine eyelids and thine eyes?
Like a flower laid upon a flower it lies,
Or like the night's dew laid upon the night.
Love stands upon thy left hand and thy right,
Yet by no sunset and by no moonrise
Shall make thee man and ease a woman's sighs,
Or make thee woman for a man's delight.
To what strange end hath some strange god made fair
The double blossom of two fruitless flowers?
Hid love in all the folds of all thy hair,
Fed thee on summers, watered thee with showers,
Given all the gold that all the seasons wear
To thee that art a thing of barren hours?

IV.

Yea, love, I see; it is not love but fear.

Nay, sweet, it is not fear but love, I know;
Or wherefore should thy body's blossom blow
So sweetly, or thine eyelids leave so clear
Thy gracious eyes that never made a tear—
Though for their love our tears like blood should flow,
Though love and life and death should come and go,
So dreadful, so desirable, so dear?
Yea, sweet, I know; I saw in what swift wise
Beneath the woman's and the water's kiss
Thy moist limbs melted into Salmacis,
And the large light turned tender in thine eyes,
And all thy boy's breath softened into sighs;
But Love being blind, how should he know of this?

Au Musée du Louvre, Mars 1863.