A minute-by-minute analysis of George Miller's film, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).

Blending film criticism with creative nonfiction, each book in the Timecodes series focuses on one film, exploring it minute by minute beginning with minute one, and ending with the final minute before the closing credits.

Mad Max: Fury Road: Movies Minute by Minute is the first book-length analysis of George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road, which reads the film as an anti-capitalist, feminist manifesto. In this interdisciplinary text, Alix Olson mobilizes an unconventional and eclectic archive of radical democratic, ecofeminist and queer theory, feminist poetry, and Afro-futurist literature in order to elicit the film's relevance as a guide for radical political struggle. The book is particularly attuned to Mad Max's depiction of "another world as possible," a slogan which serves as an aspirational impetus for activism, and to the nature of radical social change more broadly.

Through a minute-by-minute analysis, the book weaves together "thought-bites" in order to track pressing questions about power relations within neoliberal capitalism: How might reading the film through contemporary queer and feminist thinkers and activist movements teach us about the possibilities and limitations of resistance? How do utopia and dystopia (pre)figure and interact as post-capitalist horizons? Should we understand ecofeminism as a liberatory or essentializing force? What might the temporality of "slow critique," performed by a minute-by-minute textual reading, expose about our approach to political life more generally? How can popular art uproot the common-sensical of everyday life under neoliberal capitalism and render taken-for-granted logics irrational or dystopian?

Alix Olson is Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University- Oxford College, USA, and co-director of Emory University's Studies in Sexualities program. Alix is the co-author of The Terms of Resistance and How to Revolutionize (forthcoming) and a book manuscript The Promise(s) of Resilience: Governance and Resistance in Complex Times. Her scholarly essays have appeared in journals like New Political Science, Wagadu, and Contemporary Political Theory and in the edited collection Howard Zinn's Legacies: Agitation with a Smile. Olson has shared her work in public venues like NPR's "The Academic Minute" and the Ideas on Fire podcast "Imagine Otherwise." Olson has received APSA's New Political Science award for "making the study of politics relevant to the struggle for a better world" and the Emory Center for Women's "Excellence in Teaching and Pedagogy Award."