Mad Max’s Ongoing Apocalypse
Mad Max’s Ongoing Apocalypse
Contemporary anxieties in the future’s Wasteland.
OUR IMAGE OF MAX ROCKATANSKY and his adventures is dominated by sojourns through the Australian outback—the Wasteland—as he is chased by S&M enthusiasts with names like Lord Humungus or forced to do combat in the Thunderdome or serve as a “blood bag” for a cancer-riddled War Boy blasting along the sandy flats in pursuit of a war rig filled with sex slaves.
But when you rewatch the original Mad Max, you quickly realize it’s not a post-apocalypse movie. Rather, it’s a pre-apocalypse movie, a movie set just before the fall of civilization. And as a piece of storytelling or filmmaking, it less resembles the desert-chase installments in the series—The Road Warrior, Beyond Thunderdome, Fury Road, and Furiosa—than it does 1970s crime thrillers or vigilante pictures. Mad Max is closer in tone and spirit to Dirty Harry or Death Wish than anything else: Max is a cop constrained by rules and regulations; roving gangs of psychotics make life miserable for the people he encounters; and eventually he has to take the law into his own hands.
It’s often said that sci-fi projects are just reflections of now but more so, and that is absolutely the case with director George Miller’s quintet of apocalyptic masterpieces. (Well, quartet plus Thunderdome.) Miller, despite having lived through an age in which every material aspect of human life has improved—from infant mortality to the number of people raised out of poverty to the reduction of global malnutrition—Miller’s vision turns time and again toward the end of it all. And every time he peers into the future, he sees the present day’s problems reflected back at him.
MAD MAX SETS THE TEMPLATE HERE. Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) is a cop trying, and failing, to stem the tide of insanity sweeping over his nation. The freedom of the open road has come to represent anarchy, as monumental accidents caused by lunatics driving at excessive speeds have become commonplace. (Indeed, Miller is a medical doctor and this film was inspired, at least in part, by the traumas he saw come into the emergency room during residency.) Guys like the Nightrider (Vincent Gil) and the Toe Cutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne) roll their motorcycle gangs into town, raping and robbing at will. The cops are nearly as nuts but still constrained by the law; when no one shows up to testify against one of the members of the Toe Cutter’s gang, he goes free. Needless to say, that manipulation of the bureaucracy will have dire consequences for Max, his friends, and his family; you can’t help but see shades of Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) throwing his badge down in disgust when Max announces he’s quitting the force.
If Mad Max is a meditation on creeping fears of rampant criminality, then its two sequels, The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome, are very much about the fear of resource wars. In the former, Max is obsessed with obtaining gasoline: when he comes across a wreck, he siphons off what he can; when he comes across an encampment being circled by raiders, he agrees to lead their convoy to freedom if they give him as much as he can carry. Meanwhile, in Thunderdome, Max finds himself up against the two-man team of Master Blaster (Paul Larsson played the Blaster, Angelo Rossitto the Master), who maintain control over the trading outpost of Bartertown because they control the flow of the methane gas derived from pig shit that runs the place. When the Master is displeased by the disrespect from Aunty Entity (Tina Turner) and her crew, he announces an “embargo.” He literally uses the word embargo, spinning a wheel and cutting off the flow of energy, calling to mind OPEC’s efforts in the preceding years and decades.
And in the two most recent entries, Fury Road and Furiosa, it’s ecological collapse that is first and foremost on Miller’s mind. In the first, Furiosa (Charlize Theron) is desperate to return to the Green Place whence she was kidnapped; it was, we are told, an area of unusual abundance. Yet when she arrives with Max (now played by Tom Hardy) and the wives of Immortan Joe (Keays-Byrne again), it has been reduced to dust and desert, yet one more area where the land has spoiled.
In Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the prequel that opened last week, we get a glimpse of the Green Place and it’s almost a parody of an environmentalist’s paradise: windmills and solar panels abound, the people there creating endless rivers of green power with which to grow their crops. Contrast that to the oily grime of Immortan Joe’s Gastown, the Bullet Farm, and the Citadel, which reek of exhaust fumes and putrefying flesh (the best surface on which to grow maggots for cheap protein).
But even Joe and his minions understand the importance of ecological balance: after Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), a throwback to psychotic raiders like the Toe Cutter, captures Gastown, he demands a greater share of the resources to keep the fuel flowing. More milk, more water, more maggot paste. Hearing of his demands, the People Eater (John Howard) scoffs. It can’t be done, it would lead to resource collapse. Their troika of cities would return to dust and desert, like every other place in the wasteland.
Indeed, one of the most fascinating things about Furiosa is the extent to which it recasts Immortan Joe as less of a sociopathic sexist with control issues and more of a man with an eye on the future. From the crops he raises to the society he has fashioned, he is trying to build something at his Citadel. Even the efforts to create a “full life” (not genetically mutated) line of children with his wives—as twisted as it is—is done in the hopes of getting humanity back on track, of keeping mankind from degenerating into twisted, two-headed monstrosities. This is not to say that Immortan Joe is the Real Hero of the Movie or anything like that, but he contrasts starkly against Dementus.
“Hope?” Dementus screams at one point. “There’s no hope. Not for them, not for any of you. Certainly not for me.” That line reading has stuck with me over the last week. In part, because it’s delivered with such gleeful viciousness by Hemsworth. But also because it feels like the key to the whole series. At its heart, the Mad Max series is a rejection of hopelessness; Max himself could have become a Dementus-like figure, a man who lost his family and succumbed to cruelty. It is in keeping hope alive that Max (and, later, Furiosa) finds reason to go on. The films almost feel like Miller’s effort to convince himself to keep going, that in the face of endless nightmares—rampant crime, resource decline, ecological collapse—society will find a way forward.