The Charlize conundrum: Sex symbol & feminist

Gwydion Beynon on how Charlize Theron took on the Hollywood machine – and won

Three years ago, my girlfriend and I finagled ourselves a table at Le Quartier Francais, in Franschhoek. We foolishly opted for the menu with the wine pairings. Every new course arrived with a fresh glass of wine, which meant that of the twelve courses we were served, I remember only about the first six. What I do remember from that night (apart from the bill, which was truly unforgettable) was a conversation I had with some Aussie blokes I bummed a cigarette off on the restaurant’s verandah. They had just flown in from Namibia, where they had been shooting Mad Max: Fury Road.

I felt a surge of jingoistic pride. “How was it working with Charlize?”

“Not fun”, apparently.

I wasn’t surprised. If you read between the lines of much of the reporting on Theron, there are winks and nudges about her cattiness, her ego, her sense of entitlement.

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And then I saw her in the extraordinary film Mad Max: Fury Road – twice, in two days -- and it sent me chasing my tail down a rabbit hole. Who is Charlize Theron? What does she mean to me, to my country, to the world, to herself? And more worryingly, who am I?

To be honest, I hadn’t ever thought much about Theron. I’d always felt a kind of generic pride in her success, but I’d never even seen Monster. Her insistence on wearing prosthetic teeth, piling on the pounds, and obscuring her astonishing beauty had always struck me as mildly unpatriotic.

Mingled with that pride was something else, harder to articulate.

One of my strongest, earliest impressions of Theron came from watching her switch rapidly from her well manicured Californian accent to her native Afrikaans, on a local talk show. The speed and ease of this oscillation between her two selves gave me whiplash, and felt like it pointed to some fundamental contradiction - a contradiction that has never resolved itself in my mind.

She is an American-African, who adopted an African-American baby as a single mother. A mother, who swears like a sailor (just read her latest profile in Esquire). A model-turned-actress who’s most celebrated role is that of a prostitute-turned-murderer. An outspoken activist against domestic violence engaged to a man once charged with domestic assault. Who is this woman?

In wading through some of the ephemera of her promotional appearances on Youtube, I happened on three visits she has made to Late Show with David Letterman - spanning ten years - that seemed to offer the beginnings of an answer.

It becomes apparent from the moment Theron walks into his studio that David Letterman is an old perv. He licks his lips, sizes her up and fetishises her body, as his bandleader lays down a score of drum rolls and rim shots to punctuate his lechery. But watching Theron in this arena of male desire, pirouetting, ducking and weaving - like a ballet dancer in a boxing ring - one can catch a glimpse of a prodigious power and forbearance.

He paws, and she parries. He leers, and she laughs – but her laugh is so obviously fake, it feels defiant. She strikes poses, angling her face and body as if to deflect his gaze. Her legs shine with a supernatural radiance, but her eyes are as cold as diamond.

One senses, in these overheated libidinous exchanges, that Theron has spent a lifetime navigating men like David Letterman. Entitled, powerful men – who believe that their power gives them special access to her beauty and her body.

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I think then of Theron, on the set of Mad Max: Fury Road, for seven brutal months. I can imagine the dust and the heat and the unrelenting schedule. And then I imagine the men. Hundreds of them. Stunt drivers, pyromaniacs, steroidal über men and gearheads; revving their engines, firing their guns, flexing their muscles, blowing shit up, and giving vent to their wildest fantasies.

Never in the history of cinema has man unleashed such a cacophony of id.

In all this mayhem, Theron is harried by a niggling anxiety: Was she participating in the creation of yet another macho fantasy? In interviews, she has admitted to her skepticism. Would director George Miller would follow through on his promise to create a powerful female character? Lest we forget: for all its gonzo inventiveness, the original Mad Max trilogy was an unapologetic fantasy of male individualism. Any film trilogy that gave Mel Gibson to the world has a lot to answer for, too.

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And in this city of men, in the dust storms, and the fumes of exhaust and testosterone, Theron is also, somehow, trying to raise her newly adopted son.

“Not fun” indeed.

Miraculously, Theron manages to ride this great war rig to victory. She holds this improbably overstuffed theme ride of a movie together. She is the heart and soul of the film, and her performance feels like revelation.

In fight scenes, she moves with an exquisite economy and supple strength, but it is in stillness that she most comes alive. When her face fills the frame - her eyes set on the horizon, or snatching glances in the mirror of her truck at the unrelenting mechanical convulsion of thwarted male desire edging ever closer - she is utterly compelling: fearful, but undaunted, courageous but not proud. She spoke at Cannes about how the film “celebrates everything there is about being a woman.”

And that feels right.

But it feels to me, in these intimate close ups, that her gender is beside the point. What we are seeing, beneath the oil smears and the dirt, is her unvarnished humanity. She is a hero before she is a woman, as she bears down against the elemental forces of sand, fire, wind and the male libido.

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It’s always dangerous to conflate an actor and her role, but the parallels in this instance are so delicious that let us choose to live dangerously.

Mad Max: Fury Road takes place in a post-apocalyptic future in which men have screwed everything up. Fuel, water and food are all hard to come by, and the only people who seem to have any fun are the baddies. Chief among them is Immortan Joe, who rules over his desert kingdom from atop a fortress called The Citadel, where he keeps a harem of beautiful indentured wives - his ‘breeders’ - locked up in a giant bank vault.

The Citadel reads as a perfect allegory for Hollywood in 2015. A crusty old empire, desperate to hold onto its power, eking out the last of its natural resources, whilst holding sway over the unwashed masses with awesome special effects. We are introduced to Immortan Joe as he presides over a grand carnal ceremony that culminates in the ecstatic ejaculation of precious water from his secret underground reserve onto the crowd far below. It feels like an after party at Cannes, or maybe a night out on Leonardo DiCaprio’s yacht.

In this dangerous reading of the film, Immortan Joe is David Letterman. He is Bill Cosby. He is Roman Polanski. He is Woody Allen. He is every Important Man in Hollywood – every director and producer and studio head who believes that his power and status give him special right of access to all the beautiful women in the kingdom. Coruscated with suppurating boils and outfitted with a mouth grill of horse teeth, he even bears a passing resemblance to Harvey Weinstein.

Charlize Theron plays Imperator Furiosa - Immortan Joe’s crack driver. At the start of the film, she sets off in her armoured truck to fill up the tank at Gas Town, but after travelling a few clicks, she takes an unexpected detour. It turns out her oil tanker contains a commodity even more precious than gasoline: Immortan Joe’s five smoking hot breeders. Furiosa is not on a petrol run - she is staging a bank heist.

She is taking her charges to a mythical feminist Utopia called, ‘The Green Place’, where she was born (I couldn’t help thinking: that’s not how I’d describe Benoni).

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Joe leads his army out, to retrieve his women, and that’s really all that happens for the rest of the movie. Oh ja, and then there’s this guy Max, who claims to be Mad, but is mostly pretty Dull, who gets mixed up in Furiosa’s story by accident.  

There’s a moment where Max first closes in on Furiosa and her bevy of stolen beauties in the desert. They’ve got the old hosepipe out, and are hosing each other down. It’s straight out of a Playboy shoot from the nineties. In fact, the image bears a striking resemblance to Theron’s own Playboy shoot from the nineties, in which she posed naked in the desert, holding up diaphanous sheets of material in the wind, as if about to set sail (hopefully straight to the nearest American Apparel to pick up some new clothes). 

Anyway, Max and Furiosa fight for a while, until they realise they’re better off working together. Later, in one of the few exchanges of dialogue in a movie that could be the loudest silent movie of all time - he asks her what is driving the breeders asleep in the back seat. She says ‘Hope’. He asks the same question of her, to which she responds, ‘Redemption’.

It’s never made explicit what Furiosa is seeking redemption for. But we can fill in the blanks. She helped oil the wheels of the machismo machine. And it has cost her - she lost an arm in the process, which she supplements with a glorious steam-punk prosthesis. She has paid her pound of flesh.

It is in this exchange that the true potency of our allegory crystallises. For by some extraordinary fluke, Mad Max: Fury Road dramatises the contradiction that sits at the heart of Charlize Theron: she is both a product of the Hollywood machine of male desire, and a woman of her own furious self invention.

Theron’s origin story has already taken on the quality of myth, but it bears repeating. A dancer turned model from a small town, with a tragic family history, comes to Hollywood as a teenager. She is discovered by an agent who witnesses her tantrum in a bank. She plays small roles in bad films, but her star quality shines through.

In these early films, her beauty and her body are the source of much of her power. She pays her pound of flesh… but what does she get in return? 

She is briefly, the ‘It’ girl. She gets to work with some Important Men. Woody Allen casts her as  nymphomaniac supermodel who can be brought to orgasm with a single touch, which is a great career move, apparently. She makes the most of a couple of medium sized roles. But then, her career stalls. When her agent insists on auditioning her for more of the same exploitative body flicks, she fires his ass.

And then – as a 27-year-old, with no experience as a producer - she produces a defiantly dark and low budget film as her own starring vehicle. Monster represents a courageous reclamation of both her body and her agency. In Monster, she transforms her body from an object of male fantasy, to a subject of female truth. 

The role wins her an Oscar, and she is set on the path to superstardom. 

Except that it’s not so simple.

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Hollywood is a machine built by men, operated by men, and largely in service of men. After her Oscar, she appears in some memorable roles, but few great films. It’s as if she can’t quite resolve the schism between her two selves, and neither can Hollywood.

So she takes a three-year hiatus. She produces. She does humanitarian work. She speaks out for marriage equality. She dances through the labyrinth of male desire… but the Minotaur remains.

In Mad Max: Fury Road, Theron has stopped dancing, and started fighting. It seems to me that in this role, as in her life, Theron has finally found a way to make sense of her contradictions. Theron has been through the machine. It chewed her up and spat her out, before she remade herself in her own image. And now she is trying to save other women from the same fate with the hard won knowledge she now has of the machine.

In Mad Max: Fury Road, Theron is fighting for the Immortan Joe’s indentured wives. In Hollywood, she has recently taken on the fight for equal pay for female actors, and started speaking out vocally against the entrenched patriarchy and sexism in the industry.

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What hope does Theron have in the real Hollywood? On the recent Avengers: Age of Ultron press junket, Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) cheerfully called Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) a slut. Letterman is running victory laps around his studio in a golden farewell to Late Show. Polanski continues to be celebrated as one of the great auteurs of his generation. Cosby goes unprosecuted. And Harvey Weinstein will not be charged in the recent groping scandal that briefly diverted his legal team. 

But perhaps we are living in an era of Peak Testosterone. Perhaps the great well of male id that has been fuelling so much of Hollywood’s production for the past 100 years has already been tapped out and will soon start to run dry. As women claim their place in society, surely we will tire of the endless procession of misogynist anti-heroes strutting their way across our silver screens, and hold the lecherous men who set them marching to account.

With all the fervour of a new convert, I desperately willed the movie to conquer all at the box office, and was therefore deeply disappointed to learn that it had been comprehensively beaten by some chick flick I’d never even heard of called Pitch Perfect 2. And then I took pause. A film, written by a woman, directed by a woman, and with an overwhelmingly female cast, had just made $74-million (about R880-million) at the US box office. In that moment, I realised: maybe the tide has already turned. Maybe I’m about to be washed out to sea. And maybe I should be.

Because when I think back to that evening in Franschhoek, in conversation with those Aussie blokes, I’d have to confess to giving voice, in the private Citadel of my own head, to my own personal Immortan Joe. And when he heard that my accomplished Oscar-winning compatriot didn’t play nice with the boys, he growled, ‘Yeaaaah… Just what I always suspected. Bitch.'

But in this astonishing film, and through her astonishing life story, Charlize Theron holds out to us all the tantalising – if painful – prospect of redemption.

About the author: Gwydion Beynon is a writer in television and theatre. His new play, El Blanco: Tales of the Mariachi, starring James Cairns, will debut at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in July.