What Mad Max Means to Us
I came to Mad Max back-asswards. I saw Beyond Thunderdome as a kid and loved it. The post-apocalyptic aesthetic, the action, the weirdness, the Tina Turner-ness. It was slick and fun in an ultimate 80’s sort of way. Then I sought out The Road Warrior and to me it was a kind of cheaper, weirder (somehow) prequel. It had none of the production shine of Thunderdome and I remember being underwhelmed. Finally I saw Mad Max and had this weird sense that I had been watching an apocalypse in reverse. An unwinding of the end into a beginning. I was confused and disappointed and, while I saw The Road Warrior multiple times in the years since and grew to think of it as my favorite of the series, I never really watched Mad Max again until college. There, I saw it as part of a film class and it was like seeing a completely different film – or more appropriately the same film seen by a different person. It hit me different. It’s the slow destruction of the world and a human being, turning them both into something lesser, something crazy. Something mad. While Fury Road is now my favorite of the series for sheer entertainment value, Mad Max is absolutely the best film, and I’m glad it’s in the Canon.
–Bob Cram
Regardless of whether George Miller has over $150 million or a shoestring budget at his disposal, he knows how to shoot the hell out of action sequences. Mad Max’s goofiness might occasionally be to the film’s detriment, but the 1979 classic is also an exhilarating rush of adrenaline that knows full well how to keep upping its stakes and thrills. It also has the advantage of being helmed by a star-making role from Mel Gibson as a near-silent but deadly police officer from whom this iconic film series gets its name.
–Cian McGrath
Welcome to the Pre-Apocalypse
It’s not hard to see the allure of telling stories set in a post apocalyptic world. The post apocalyptic world is a world where all bets are off. It’s a blank canvas that you can throw paint on, do whatever you want with. All of the laws and social structure and morality holding everything together are swept away in one fell swoop. From there, you can build whatever world you want on top of the ashes of the old one.
But it’s a lot harder to tell a story that exists in between. In the space where civilization and post apocalypse overlap. That’s tricky. It’s not as neat or tidy as a complete reset. And not as easy to imagine. Because there are questions you have to answer. What does a world teetering on the edge of collapse look like? How does it get to that point? What still works and what doesn’t and why? These aren’t easy questions to answer.
This is the world that Mad Max, the original film in the popular franchise, exists in. And it’s why it’s so starkly different from its more popular post apocalyptic sequels.
Mad Max has never been my favorite of the franchise. That would easily be The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2). Maybe that’s because it’s the film I grew up with, the one I know best, and the one I’ve seen the most. And maybe The Road Warrior is the better movie if we’re going off sheer entertainment value. The second of the Mad Max movies moves at such a brisk pace, but it never feels like it’s rushing past stuff it can’t explain. It’s simply one of the best action movies ever made, and it owes no apologies for that fact. But the older I get, the more I appreciate Mad Max’s more subdued, more complex world, and the more I think it’s unfairly overshadowed by its more action-oriented sequels.
If you’ve never seen the original Mad Max, I suggest you quit reading and go watch it right now. Seriously. But if you insist on reading on and you don’t know what it’s about, here’s the gist.
The Story of Mad Max
Mad Max opens with a chase. An outlaw biker that calls himself the Nightrider (Vincent Gil) has killed a cop, stolen a police cruiser, and is on the run. The Main Force Patrol is in pursuit. After throwing off several of his pursuers, Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) picks up the chase, which ends when the Nightrider drives his stolen Pursuit Special into a broken down semi truck. The Nightrider and his female passenger are killed.
It’s just another day on the dangerous roads of pre-apocalyptic Australia for Max, but it turns out that the Nightrider belongs to a larger gang headed up by the Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne), and the Toecutter is not too happy about his bro being wasted by the fuzz.
If you are thinking Mad Max is gonna adhere to a strict revenge formula, you are right in one sense but wrong in another. Mad Max does culminate in a face off between Max and the members of the Toecutter gang, but it’s not as straightforward and on the nose as it would be if this movie were written today. Maybe that’s why it’s not quite as satisfying from a narrative perspective as The Road Warrior or Fury Road, and to be honest I’m not sure if that is by accident or by design. If it’s by accident, well, fair play to writers George Miller and James McCausland. But if it’s by design, that makes Mad Max all the more impressive, because the randomness of the violence and the circumstantial way that the plot plays out the way it does is much more true to real life. But to sum it all up, the Toecutters kill Max’s wife and toddler, driving Max to become the titular Mad Max. He goes on a revenge killing spree and the movie ends.
Good Guys vs Bad Guys
Like any good sci-fi film, Mad Max doesn’t hit you over the head with what it wants you to think. Which means there are different ways to think about it. One of the more obvious ideas the movie is wrestling with is the line between the good guys and the bad. At a critical moment in the movie, Max decides to quit the force. His reason? He’s afraid he’s becoming one of the “terminal crazies”, and that the only difference between him and the bad guys is that he has a badge to legitimize his actions.
At the beginning of the movie, one of the cops in pursuit is blatantly determined to kill the Nightrider. He makes no attempt to disguise the fact that arrest isn’t even an option. Later on in the film after one of the Toecutter’s gang is released on a technicality, the Main Force captain Macafee (affectionately called Fifi) tells his patrolmen they are free to do whatever they want as a response as long as the paperwork is in order. In other words, kill the bastards and write the paperwork up so that it looks like the law was followed.
Macafee is also seemingly concerned with heroism. A few times in the film he laments the fact that people don’t believe in heroes anymore. He pleads with Max not to quit the force, telling him “You and me, we’re gonna give them back their heroes!” Max asks if he expects him to “go for that crap”, and Macafee grins as he says “You gotta admit I sounded good there for a minute, huh?”
Here we see a breakdown in the society’s belief in itself, belief in its myths, as a parallel to the breakdown of civilization itself. A society that doesn’t believe in itself, has nothing to fight for. It falls into chaos.
Order vs Chaos
Mad Max is kind of an odd movie at times, and it can be a bit hard to follow. And I think this is intentional. It’s meant to reflect the chaos that is rushing in to take the place of order. By the time we get to The Road Warrior, chaos has run its course and a new order has risen. The conflict that propels the plot of the sequel forward is the fight over resources. Namely oil, which is refined into gasoline. The actions of Lord Humungus’s gang aren’t random. They are violent and murderous, but they want the oil that Pappagallo’s tribe is sitting on. Humungus and Pappagallo’s groups represent two different types of order trying to assert themselves.
The Toecutter’s gang in Mad Max, on the other hand, represent chaos. Their actions are random. This is why the movie feels a bit odd and narratively disjointed, I think. Because chaos isn’t tidy. It doesn’t follow neat little narrative rules. So you get odd scenes of violence that don’t really make much sense. Like the scene in the small town when the Toecutter goes to pick up the remains of the Nightrider. Seemingly out of nowhere the gang begins to terrorize the town. They chase a fleeing couple down and wreck their car and then assault and (probably) rape them both. There’s no rhyme or reason to their actions. Maybe they smelled the fear of the townspeople and simply acted the way predators would.
Nasty, Brutish, and Short
Before Max becomes Mad Max, he tries to escape the pull of chaos. He quits the force and reorients his focus toward his family, toward life. But chaos finds him anyway. The Toecutter gang aren’t looking for him when they find his wife. It’s random. They just happen to be in the same place at the same time. Despite his efforts, Max is pulled into the churn. And in the end he becomes one of the madmen. And of all of the cops on the Main Force Patrol, Max was the only one who was actively resisting the pull. He was the only one who walked away from the struggle that threatened to pull him under along with the people he was tasked with putting away.
Max’s fall and his transformation to Mad Max is the fulfillment of the Hobbesian view that the natural state of man is a state of constant conflict, every man for himself. Without the structures of society or government to keep these tendencies at bay, man simply falls back into an animalistic state.
Maybe Macafee is right. Maybe the world needs its heroes. But it has to believe it deserves its heroes. It has to believe it deserves saving. Without belief, no amount of muscle can hold it all together. And Max is symbolic of what happens when that belief erodes.
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