Fifi Macaffee, authoritarian homoeroticism, that stairwell scene: Mad Max (1979)

29 Nov, 2024

I'm into the original Mad Max movies right now. It's a whole thing but I'm handling it. You can read the first casualty of that here: I wrote about queerness in The Road Warrior and Max Rockatansky as bisexual archetype for Unwinnable #181, my first cover story! So exciting.

Here's the second casualty of this phase I'm in. I had two paragraphs in that article tying it to the first movie and specifically the character of Fifi Macaffee, Max's leather daddy police chief. Then I decided I was getting off-topic and cut it. Unfortunately, I still have shit to say: I think it's really fun to look back at Mad Max (1979), a homoerotic but nominally heterosexual revenge flick, through the lens established by The Road Warrior (1981), a movie about gay people killing straight people for hoarding resources. How better to explore this theme than through Max's affectionate, authoritarian bear of a boss who won't stop pushing him around?

The Road Warrior contains traditional, heterosexual enclave societies, representative of the old world, and transgressive, homosexual outlaw gangs, representative of the new world. Max straddles both, thus: bisexual. (That's my first thesis). Mad Max, on the other hand, is shortly pre-apocalyptic, taking place in a world that looks more or less like ours that has not split into The Road Warrior's binary yet. Max is a cop in the Main Force Patrol, hunting down bikers. What this means is he wears a fetish suit and drives a car really fast. Sound familiar? It should, since The Road Warrior's got an entire faction of Lord Humungus' cronies that are just ex-cops, wearing the same leathers and driving the same tricked-out vehicles as Max's colleagues had been pre-crash. The first thing to note is that the defenders of traditional society, in the first movie, look a lot like the guys they're chasing. They're a "hegemonic masculine power structure [that] retains a tentative hold on a crumbling and chaotic society," (Rebecca Johinke, Manifestations of masculinities: Mad max and the lure of the forbidden zone, 2001), but when approached through The Road Warrior's binary, they tick all the boxes of the outlaws: vehicular violence, homoerotic aesthetics, and hierarchal power dynamics.¹

Max's boss, police chief Fifi Macaffee, is the best expression of this contradiction. Played by queer icon Roger Ward, Fifi is a massive, mustached authoritarian whose role in the film is to keep his hand firmly on Max's neck, preventing him from retiring and retreating back into the soft world of his straight family life. He's a proto-Pappagallo in that he's a dominant authority figure with a vested interest in directing Max's life, but he takes a different approach than Pappagallo's accusatory moralism, first bribing Max with "candy" (the V8 Interceptor) and later bullishly flattering-cum-steamrolling him into withdrawing his resignation. A much younger, more emotionally open Max is a prime target for these ploys; he lets Fifi steer him into exactly the position he didn't want to be, back on the road, trying to tell the difference between himself and the bikers. Max is coerced by a figure nominally representative of the old world order into continued exploration of his talent for the queer precepts of speed and violence, justified by the MFP's legal authority.

The notorious stairwell scene between Fifi and Max has enough loaded language and physicality to support a queer reading on its own. First, Fifi is shirtless for some bizarre and unknowable reason. This doesn't seem to bother Max, who hands in his resignation and promptly watches Fifi crumple it up and toss it away. Fifi isn't just Max's boss in name — his manner towards Max is casually dominant and possessive, a state of affairs that is peacefully accepted by Max throughout the film (most notably when Johnny the Boy is released from police custody and Max spends the whole scene physically restraining his partner on Fifi's behalf. Good dog!) When Max tries to leave the scene, Fifi orders him to stop, and Max does. Fifi follows him down the stairs, crowding into his space, establishing himself as larger and more physically powerful and forcing Max to look up at him. Contradicting his dominant body language are his actual lines, which are flamboyantly insincere and boldly homoerotic: Do you want me to beg? Do you want me on my knees, crying? (Max laughs instead of being disturbed; he's clearly used to this dynamic.)

Neither character seems to give much serious thought to Fifi's "hero" monologue, which reads partially as a legacy from an earlier draft of the script and partially as Fifi giving lip service to what they're pretending they've been doing (protecting traditional society) instead of what they're actually doing (structurally condoned vehicular manslaughter). In fact, there is an undercurrent of mutual understanding to the way they treat Fifi's elevator pitch (stairwell pitch?): the argument that he used on the bureaucrat earlier in the film is laughed away by characters that are privy to insider information, that know the whole truth of the MFP. Fifi says, we're bringing back heroes; Max says, no, we're not; Fifi winks and says, but doesn't that have a nice ring to it? Max is included in this collusion, this dishonesty, in the way the MFP is justifying itself to the institution from which it derives its authority. Meanwhile, Fifi knows his favorite driver knows the truth of things, even if just subconsciously. Here's an argument: the mutual understanding of closeted homosexuals, passing — convincingly or not — within the heterosexual environment. Just a thought!

Then Max tries to explain himself. Again, the blocking of the scene means that Max is looking up at Fifi, as he's a few steps down the stairs. He's positioned vulnerably, neck exposed, making his case to the figure that's actually in control. I'm scared, Fif, he says. You know why? That rat circus out there — I'm beginning to enjoy it. Read: transgressive outlaw life, violence as dominant force, ramming your car into the back of another guy's car. Everything that we know by the next movie will be codified as explicitly queer. Fifi's argument for is that Max is good at these things; Max's argument against is that he likes these things. He can feel himself falling for an alternative lifestyle, something different than his life at home with his wife and kid, and it scares him. Max couldn't be farther from the archetypal individualist action hero in this scene; in immediate contrast to Fifi's sarcastic comment earlier in the scene, Max is the one begging, pleading for the authority figure in his life to let him act on a decision he's already made. He wants Fifi's understanding and approval, but he needs his permission.

Fifi, of course, isn't so easily manipulated by a pretty young man asking him for something. He comes down the stairs and crowds Max into the wall. He tells him — doesn't ask him — what he's going to do. He slaps Max's cheek affectionately; he holds him by the chin and shakes him. Max lets it happen. His response to actions that, in a normal masculine match-up, would be intensely disrespectful is to go quiet and let Fifi do what he wants. It's this blind acceptance of hierarchy that feels like it echoes into The Road Warrior, where it will be made explicit in the post-apocalypse by chains and leashes and collars. Society has yet to collapse, but the dynamics that will become so prominent post-crash are already starting to show themselves amongst the blurring boundaries of the MFP. (It's also interesting and subversive of traditional masculine action heroes that Max is an instinctive follower, not a leader — first with Fifi, and then with Pappagallo and Aunty Entity.)

So Fifi tells Max not to resign, to instead take a break with his family and come back with a clear head. He makes a flirtatious and leading joke about tagging along when Max doesn't run off fast enough. Then, down the stairs, he shouts:

You'll be back, Rockatansky! You're hooked, Max, and you know it!

How's that for coded language! Max is hooked on the boundary-crossing lifestyle Fifi is selling him. Fifi understands both Max's talent and taste for the MFP, for homoeroticism and vehicular violence, for things that look a lot like that future of apocalyptic queerness. It's the seductive lure of transgression and homosexuality that Pappagallo tries to protect his people from in the The Road Warrior, just without the explicitness of The Road Warrior's binary. Fifi's position is still nominally condoned by society. He's right in a way: Max isn't doing anything heterosexual society doesn't allow… at least not yet.

Fifi is a "decidedly camp character," but I would argue against Johinke's claim that he's "feminized" by his lack of action on the streets.² Instead, I'd read Fifi's flamboyant behavior as another expression of his confidence and dominance. He's an aggressively masculine man, physically larger than the rest of his men, as well as being the top of the food chain in the MFP; what's going to stop him from manhandling or teasing Max? He doesn't need to assert his masculinity or match with the in-group. He's free to play around, which he does plenty. He strikes a chord between domineering and flirtatious. He commands a crew of violent young men and openly spoils his favorite, who also happens to be the most handsome, most talented, and most obedient. He might, as a character, be confusing or unsettling, but he's certainly not weak. In fact, when society does collapse, he's exactly the kind of person that will be shown to rise to the top: not like Pappagallo, but like Humungus.

Johinke makes a similar point in her assessment of The Road Warrior. Humungus' gay bikers are the villains, but their masculinity and capability is never challenged, in contrast to the stereotypical portrayals of queer characters at the time. They are "warriors who ooze tough masculinity [and] perform [it] far more effectively than most of the other male characters."³ It's the same with Fifi, who is "an ambiguous figure," both a protector of traditional society and a "camp polluter" of the institution itself.⁴ He's the first instance of the homoerotic patriarch, the leather-clad violent benevolent, who becomes canonized to the extreme in The Road Warrior. Max, then, plays the role of Wez, the perfect right-hand man for the rat circus, a talented killer with a strong hand on his neck. Miller has spoken to how the characters are mirror images of each other. Max is right to worry about the path down which Fifi is leading him. Fifi has the legal authority of the MFP, but the MFP won't be around for long, and when society splits in two, where will vigilante drivers in black leather land?

Anyway, Roger Ward is a babe and he was right to bully Mel Gibson in that stairwell. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.