Mystery solved! They were given a “history woman” by Joe, thus reducing all their knowledge to coming indirectly from their captor. This is the root, I think, of why so many works don’t pass Bechdel: because the male authors don’t imagine that women talk to each other, and even when they do stretch their imaginations to encompass female conversations, authors assume that they, as men, know what those conversations are about.ĭeeper than that, this whole framing device seems to exist to explain the apparent “mystery” of why the wives had knowledge about things outside their prison cell. Even the idea that a man knows when information-exchange is taking place between women. And this is so laughably infuriating to me already, this idea that women only whisper secrets and warnings and hopes and dreams and histories to each other because a man told them to.

Here in the comic, women pass information to each other, but only because a man authorized the “history woman” to teach his wives. It also preserved the fact that women pass information to each other. This made the women different people: Toast obviously had some experience with guns that the others didn’t, Dag or whichever one it was had soaked up homey old sayings from her mother, and so on. Toast knew how to load guns, whereas one of the other women (Dag? I can’t recall) had an old saying about the bullets being “death seeds” (“plant one and a man dies”). See, and here I spent the movie assuming that the women were educated about stuff because they’d lived rich and interesting lives before being captured by Joe. tells us how the wives were educated and had access to books and music and history lessons: Immortan Joe gave those things to them. Why isn’t one of the wives here? Or one of their daughters? Why is this Generic Old Sagely Dude #238,157 and why does it feel like it’s been lifted wholesale from a pre-fab’d story framing device?

But it’s particularly rankling in a movie that was about women defining their lives. The “what you’re about to see is being narrated by an old dude to the new generation” thing has been done to death. And this is partly what I mean about “lazy narratives”: I’ve seen this story before.

Mad max fury road the dag