Music

A Love Letter To The Doof Warrior From ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’, Cinema’s Greatest Character

All hail the guitar-wielding Doof Warrior.

by Joseph Earp  18 May 2020
mad max fury road doof warrior photo

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Early on in Mad Max: Fury Road, a film exclusively comprised of bugnuts moments, the Doof Warrior makes his appearance.

Strapped to the front of a truck with a series of whipping bungee cables, the Doof Warrior is a blind wastrel with a guitar held in his long, pale hands. A dirty rag across his eyes, he’s a series of thin lines bundled up against one another, like a hovel built out of twigs. Within about three seconds of meeting him, we learn that his guitar shoots great plumes of fire.

And that’s about all we learn about him. The Doof Warrior only just counts as a character. He’s more like set-dressing; a tiny flourish of world-building that director George Miller uses sparingly, to heighten the tension of a film that foregoes dialogue and emotional nuance for sheer, non-stop spectacle.

If Fury Road is nothing but ten miles of bad road, then the Warrior is a burned-out wreck, melting on the asphalt.

Love, Guitars And Memes

Since the release of the film, both Fury Road and The Warrior have stuck close to the forefront of our collective consciousness. On film Twitter (the circle of Twitter occupied by cinephiles and critics) a post praising the post-apocalyptic action epic goes viral every other day.

“Film Twitter is basically a roomful of rabid dogs attacking one another until someone says Mad Max: Fury Road and then everyone’s pacified for a few hours,” is how writer Scott Wampler once put it.

Indeed, just this week, some five years after Miller’s masterpiece was released, The New York Times published an oral history detailing the movie’s troubled production. There’s even a subset of followers on the internet who spend their time making memes and fan art of the character, forming small digital cultures founded on love for the guitar-wielding madman.

Somehow, over the days and months since the film was released, the Warrior has transformed from a bit player to a cultural phenomenon; the film in which he stars from a much-delayed sequel to a beloved work of art.

But why?

So Who is The Doof Warrior?

The Doof Warrior is a sketch in the margins, not a portrait. He has visual precedent, of course. He’s a reference to the marching bands that used to drive soldiers into battle; a little drummer boy given a post-apocalyptic makeover. But while Miller draws on imagery that we all share, he never tries to make such imagery specific.

And that’s the director’s approach throughout the rest of the film, too. We keep hearing about these places — the Bullet Farm; Gas Town — but when we reach them, they are given nothing in the way of context. They exist purely in terms of their initial visual impact. These are vague symbols. They’re signifiers. We know them, somehow, without being able to talk much about what they’re like.

Same with the Warrior. The Doof Warrior’s fate is left open by Miller. So is his backstory. The director has his own version of the Warrior’s origin tale, one that he’s talked about in interviews, and he’s long threatened to write a comic book detailing the young guitarist’s early years.

But none of that is on the screen. Taken on its own — as it should be; as it was designed to be — Mad Max: Fury Road isn’t an interlocked series of mysteries. It’s a simple story, full of fiery, piss-soaked archetypes.

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That makes it very different to most modern Hollywood blockbusters. The Avengers effect means that every movie has to be a mess of hat-tips, clues, and enigmas. The last Star Wars movie, Rise of Skywalker, tried to cram in so many explanations that it had to rely on a Fortnite patch in order to make its plot legible.

Fury Road does no such thing. And The Doof Warrior is the key example of that direct, viciously understated approach. We know him. Not in an academic way. In a direct, uncomplicated manner we can barely put in to words.

Most movies don’t even try to create such characters. And That’s why the Warrior is still so beloved today. The Doof Warrior isn’t just a core component of an all-time great film. He’s the product of a style of storytelling that is rapidly — and sadly — going out of fashion.

Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee and Mad Max obsessive who tweets @Joseph_O_Earp.