The Future Belongs to the Mad

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.

-T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”^[1]

This summer marks the release of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the fifth installment of Australian auteur George Miller’s Mad Max franchise. Since its debut in 1979, the post-apocalyptic, diesel-driven desert Wasteland of the Mad Max universe has become one of the most enduring tropes of world cinema, spawning hundreds of imitations ranging from the big budget Hollywood epic Waterworld (Kevin Reynolds, 1995) to scrappy micro-budget grindhouse films like 1990: The Bronx Warriors (Enzo G. Castellarito, 1982), part of a distinctly Italian analog to the spaghetti Western that scholar John Hay dubs the “pasta postapoc.”^[2]  Music videos by artists as diverse as Tupac Shakur and Phil Collins have paid homage to Miller’s dystopia, as its reach extends far beyond action cinema, to literature, art, fashion, music, comic books, video games, and even that great theater of the American proletariat, professional wrestling. The term “Mad Max” itself has also entered the cultural lexicon, as a metonym for an anarchic post-apocalyptic world, evoking what is perhaps the most popular collective vision of the future toward which our present society is hurtling at top speeds.

“The way these stories arise out of the filmmaker is not a conscious thing,” George Miller once remarked. “Those of us who did Mad Max 1 were the unwitting servants of the collective unconscious, we definitely were, and for someone who was fairly mechanistic in his approach to life, for whom everything conformed to the laws of physics and chemistry, it is quite confronting for me to be suddenly made aware of the workings of mythology, and I’m in wonder of it.”^[3] Miller, who had recently discovered mythology scholar Joseph Campbell and his book Hero with a Thousand Faces, was referencing a distinctly mid-century theory of hero stories as trans-historically possessed of deep structural continuity. Setting this curious possibility aside, it is undeniable that Miller was also channeling a collective unconscious highly particular to the time and place in which he was making art. And if the enduring popularity of his vision is any indication, we are still stuck inside the historical morass that produced Mad Max, no matter how much we may spin our wheels in an effort to move beyond it.

 A Few Years from Now

Fifi Macaffee: They say people don’t believe in heroes anymore. Well damn them! You and me, Max, we’re gonna give them back their heroes!

Max Rockatansky: Ah, Fif. Do you really expect me to go for that crap?

Fifi: You gotta admit, I sounded good there for a minute, huh?

–Mad Max (1979)

The original Mad Max begins with a breakneck cannonball run toward oblivion. It is, we are told, “a few years from now…” and a rapid barrage of images welcomes us to the future: A decrepit industrial building labeled “Hall of Justice,” with these very letters hanging askew, seems to crumble before the viewer’s eyes. A forlorn highway painted with a skull and crossbones is adorned with a sign announcing fifty-seven road deaths that year alone, on the “high fatality road” monitored by the Main Patrol Force (MPF)—which a vandal has modified to read “Farce.” A pudgy, juvenile cop from MPF, known commonly as “the Bronze” for the color of their badges, uses the scope of his sniper to spy on an anonymous couple engaged in some of the only sex we ever see in Miller’s dystopia, as his partner dozes off in the car, feet dangling out the window. A quaint wooden road sign indicates we are just three kilometers away from “Anarchie Road.” It is a world, as cultural theorist Evan Calder Williams puts it, defined by “apocalypse that has not happened but has been happening.”^[4] Unlike the subsequent films, Mad Max is not set after a cataclysmic event like a global nuclear war, but unfolds in the slow downward grind of a society coming apart at the seams.

The MPF cops’ lackadaisical idleness is shattered by a call over the radio: a dangerous criminal known as the Nightrider has murdered one of the Bronze and taken off with his V-8 Pursuit Special, the fastest car in their arsenal. A scruffy biker with wild eyes and matching “mama duke” girlfriend riding shotgun, the Nightrider taunts the Bronze over their own radios with manic glee: “I’m a fuel-injected suicide machine!” he bellows. “I am a rocker! I am a roller! I am an out-of-controller!” One MPF squad car after another, painted to resemble flashy race cars, engages him in a raucous chase, tearing through the remnants of a downtown area known only as “population.” In the process, these inept and overeager “officers” of some vaguely defined law wreak as much havoc on pedestrians and fellow motorists as does the criminal biker psychotically proclaiming himself “born with a steering wheel in his hand and lead in his foot!” Sometimes indifferent to the damage they’re causing, other times celebrating it with sardonic glee, the cops desperately want above all else to keep moving—or “stay in the game” as they put it—as they drive their vehicles into the ground. Before long, though, all stuck are in place. Meanwhile, a disembodied MPF dispatcher cautions fruitlessly: “Remember, only by following instructions can we hope to maintain a successful highway program.”

In between shots of MPF’s ineptitude and insanity, we receive glimpses, à la Sergio Leone, of the their finest driver, one Max Rockatansky, played by a twenty-one-year-old Mel Gibson, as he cooly prepares to take the wheel of his own Pursuit Special. Max is in no rush, he will get his man. And he does, with almost absurd alacrity; no sooner does Max appear on the scene than the Nightrider’s mad delusions crash and he is reduced to tears. “There’ll be nothing left!” the Nightrider cryptically bemoans as Max closes in on him. “It’s all gone.” As the Nightrider deflates so too does his mama duke—there is no happy ending for this romantic duo’s flight.

In fact, there is to be no happy ending for anyone. It’s all gone, and there’ll be nothing left. Facing the twilight of the modern world, and oppressed by the imperative to keep going at full speed, the Nightrider runs head-on into another, unrelated car accident, meeting the first of the franchise’s many fiery demises. Exiting his own suicide machine, which can be counted on for plenty of homicides before reaching its final destination, Max looks on in mock horror, feigning innocence in the grisly affair as only a cop can do, as we see him all put together for the first time. Artistic flourishes aside, though, Mad Max remains a grindhouse affair, and the death of the Nightrider sets off an escalating spiral of vengeance between Max and a gang of menacing bikers that will transform him from a well-adjusted family man to the solitary Road Warrior of the sequels.

All told, there’s not much original about Max: he’s the sullen, leather-clad progeny of James Dean and Marlon Brando, especially the latter’s seminal motorcycle movie The Wild One (László Benedek, 1953), visibly tormented by the violence that masculinity requires him to perform on others, and most of all, on himself. His harsh moral universe is largely framed by the law-and-order vigilante genre that gave us Death Wish (Michael Winner, 1974), and its overlap with the fascist archetype of the cop forced to break the law in the name of order, exemplified by Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971). “Can’t you see they’re laughing at us!” Max’s best friend the Goose wails as another criminal walks free at the hands of slippery lawyers and a broken court system. “I’m not a bad man, I’m sick,” one of the film’s biker villains insists when Max finally catches up with him. “Psychopathic, you know, personality disorder! The court, man, he said so!”

Predictably enough, when they are denied justice in the failing court system, Max and his cop colleagues find it on the road. “See you on the road, Scag!” one of them taunts a biker who has beaten his charges on a loophole. “So long as the paperwork is clean,” McAfee subsequently tells the MPF, “you boys can do what you like out there.” “With taglines like ‘When the gangs take over the highways, pray he’s out there somewhere,” and “The last law in a world gone out of control,’” writes cultural theorist Travis Linnemann, “the film’s narrative emboldens the fear and savagery of a lawless Australian frontier and offers the violent retribution of an unhinged cop as antidote.”^[5]

Meanwhile, this thin line between lawman and the lawless, often dramatized by morally-ambiguous midcentury westerns like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966), provides the primary narrative tension in the first Mad Max film. “That rat circus out there,” Max warns the MPF chief Fifi McAfee. “I’m beginning to enjoy it. Any longer out on that road and I’m one of them, a terminal crazy. Only I’ve got a bronze badge to say I’m one of the good guys.” As the violence intensifies, Max even quits the MFP and takes his wife and child to the countryside, fleeing the unfolding catastrophe into increasingly improbable and maudlin domestic scenes. But as with the Nightrider, the delusion of escape cannot be sustained; the bikers catch up with the Rockatanskys and brutally strike down Max’s wife and son, and with them, his only remaining ties to society. Max then becomes resigned to the sort of nihilistic spectacle of automotive death satirized so deftly in Death Race 2000 (Roger Corman, 1975) and The Cars That Ate Paris (Peter Weir, 1974), fusing eros and thanatos in the explosive cauldron of an internal combustion engine. Mimicking the Nightrider, Max steals a police V-8, wreaks the boilerplate vigilante vengeance that the audiences paid to see, and like the grizzled, world-weary protagonist of Ultimate Warrior (Robert Clouse, 1975), tears off into the literal and figurative wasteland beyond our crumbling world, as the credits roll.

At the risk of stating the obvious, Mad Max is not without its cliches, many of them from avowedly right-wing cinema. “He will Lose Everything,” jokes journalist Luke Buckmaster, “in a case that This Time is Personal.”^[6] The original 1979 film can be viewed as a rote and belated entry into a decade of thoroughly mean movies representing, in the most exaggerated and often racist terms, the decline of postwar Keynesianism and the advent of a world defined by chaos and secular instability, even for white people living in the imperial core. The whole biker genre launched by The Wild One, especially The Wild Angels (Roger Corman, 1966) built upon the juvenile delinquent panic cinema of the 1950s to depict society beset by nihilistic fiends added by every variety of speed. Mimicking the descent of Death Wish’s Paul Kersey and countless imitators stripped of their liberal illusions by encounters with such a menacing criminal Other, Max helps bridge the idealism of postwar liberalism to the era in which Margaret Thatcher could proclaim there to be no such thing as society—a notion Miller carries about as far as it can go. Not to mention that the sheer virtuosity of the films’ thrilling stunts, which render social collapse as an object of prurient consumption, can seem an awful lot like a celebration of antisocial behavior unmoored, at long last, from obligations to others.

It is especially tempting to consider the first film as celebrating nascent neoliberalism, as Mad Max bucked the traditional Australian model of government-funded cinema and relied solely on private investors—who made a fortune off the surprise international hit, reigning for twenty years as the most profitable movie of all time.^[7] There’s also the stubborn fact that many of Max’ biker enemies seem to be queer, adding an uncomfortable dimension to their narrative role of menacing the nuclear family, and with it, society itself. In short, there is therefore a strong case to be made, along with critic J. Emmett Winn, that the franchise constitutes “Reaganite entertainment,” and much cause for concern, first raised by Australian public intellectual Philip Adams, that the nihilism at the film’s core makes Miller’s dystopian vision little more than “dangerous pornography of death.”^[8]

All of this, however, requires reading Mad Max and its sequels as uncomplicated celebrations of the worldview they present, when they are in fact much more tortured treatments of the breakneck acceleration of capitalist society toward the irreversibility of a catastrophe which is already underway. Surely the post-apocalypse often appears sexy and cool, but after all, this is the movies, and neither Miller’s craftsmanship, nor the fun he has doing it, should be confused with endorsements of the Wasteland. Instead, the Mad Max films embody the deeply unsettling paradox of revulsion and seduction in the face of human disfigurement, destruction, and ultimately, total annihilation; they are faithful to the uncomfortable truth that the end of the world can be taken as an aesthetic object, just as self-destruction, on an individual or social level, can be hopelessly intermingled with extreme pleasure. Most importantly, the Mad Max films betray the nagging desire, however blunted by the intoxication of accelerationism for its own sake, to make it all stop, to reverse course, to escape. Central to understanding this profound ambivalence at the center of the Mad Max films is the foremost avatar of the suicidal stupidity of capitalist life: the personal motor vehicle.

Fuel-Injected Suicide Machines

And which driver is not tempted, merely by the power of his engine, to wipe out the vermin off the street, pedestrians, children and cyclists? The movements machines demand of their users already have the violent, hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment.

-Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life^[9]

The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race in the Mad Max films. Arriving at the scene of a grisly car wreck midway through the first film, Chief Fifi Macaffee casually remarks: “The old meat grinder’s humming tonight, eh?” It was a common sight, not simply within Miller’s fictitious world of “a few years from now,” but in the director’s own time as well. George Miller grew up in the small Queensland town of Chinchilla, part of a sprawling network of Australian suburbs which, like those in much of America, render the resident hopelessly dependent on the personal motor vehicle. Accordingly, one is also dependent on gasoline, the costly, poisonous, non-renewable fuel upon which much of the world’s infrastructure has been foolishly erected, most often at the direct expense of mass transit. “The main street of town on Saturday night,” Miller recalls, was the domain of “just the kids in their cars. By the time we were out of our teens, several of our peers had already been killed or badly injured in car accidents.”^[10]

Like J.G. Ballard, whose 1973 novel Crash comes closer than any other cultural artifact to distilling the startling transformation of human subjectivity by automotive culture, Miller flirted with his craft while enrolled in medical school. Unlike Ballard, Miller actually worked for several years as a doctor, including during the development of Mad Max. “Working in the hospital I had developed a morbid fascination with the autocide we practice in our society,” he later recalled, “every weekend I’d see so many young people who’d been killed, or maimed for life, on the roads. You’d see the road toll in the paper on Monday morning and it was accepted with a shrug. It was almost like a weekly ritual, with people being randomly selected out as victims, as sacrifices to the car and the road.”^[11] To help finance Mad Max, Miller and his creative partner Byron Kennedy operated a kind of private ambulance service, dealing often with the carnage of car crashes. The experience, in turn, solidified the concept of the film. “In mid 1975,” recalled Kennedy, “in one weekend there were about twenty-five people killed on Victorian Roads. You could see that people had come to accept the fact that people could die on the road… So we thought there’s probably some sort of basis for a feature film in that.”^[12]

There was no speed limit in Australia at the time, and a so-called “hoon” culture predominated, valorizing dangerous driving as a marker of masculinity, in practices similar to American drag races, games of chicken, and most recently, the consumerist spectacle of the “sideshow.” And while the autocide Miller witnessed was —and remains—widely considered a fair trade for the supposed convenience and freedom afforded by the automobile, hoon culture demonstrates something far darker, and stupider, than this Faustian pact. This was Miller’s great contribution to cinema: a sort of automotive death drive, a pointless celebration of the destruction of bodies and the ecosystems they rely on, which can titillate when it should repulse. It is no coincidence that film scholar Christopher Sharrett finds in Miller the depiction of Western “car culture” as a “collective repetition-compulsion propelling humanity toward obsessional behavior and, eventually, suicide.”^[13] But Miller is not interested in scolding individual people for their callousness or ignorance—though there would be plenty of blame to go around. He is concerned rather with the objective reality of a total world, prefiguring and foreclosing alternatives, which leaves individuals with little choice but to play along with the thrilling spectacle of automotive death. A post-apocalyptic scenario, then, becomes the perfect vehicle for discussing the here and now.

In this context, it’s useful to think back to the car chase that opens the Mad Max franchise, in which pedestrians are forced to dart back and forth, dodging madmen and their murderous machines, through a disgusting landscape of garbage-strewn cement. Far from science fiction, this is a common experience in much of the world, and in the US at least, it seems to have become far worse since the Covid pandemic, which apparently transformed stop signs and traffic lights into gentle suggestions. Car horns, intended to be tools to warn pedestrians and fellow motorists of danger, are used instead like the lungs of a petulant toddler. Meanwhile, in a sort of ordinary everyday arms race, cars get bigger and meaner every year. It is extremely difficult to opt out of this profoundly stupid world; in Max’s universe, as in ours, the only alternative to tooling around in a carcinogenic cage is the still more dangerous and logistically daunting prospect of being caught without one. Such is the freedom afforded by car culture. And this sad paradox is nothing new. Historian Cotten Selier describes the mass marketing of the automobile as “the crucial compensation for apparent losses to the autonomy, privacy, and agency registered by workers under the transition to corporate capitalism” in the United States. As workers became less powerful, they could feel more so on the highways—in between shifts, of course, and while the jobs lasted. “In contrast to the sensations and structures of the factory floor and the bureaucratic office that reminded workers of the imperatives of control,” writes Selier, “driving still felt and looked like freedom.”^[14]

Today, the collapse of automotive employment, and many of the Steel Belt cities that revolved around it, coupled with the increasingly murderous nihilism of car culture worldwide, and the actually-existing-apocalypse of climate change, give us a clearer sense of what promise that purported freedom really contained. This is particularly palpable around the historical conflation of automotive acumen with masculinity. Countless men, following in the footsteps of Max, cram themselves into muscle cars and absurdly large pickup trucks—most often with pristine beds—in an effort to procure, for outrageously high costs inviting all manner of financial predation, that most elusive of all prizes: being a real man. And it is unavoidable to note the similarities between Max’s iconic 1973 XB GT Ford Falcon coupe and the Dodge Challenger—the car used by a young Nazi named James Alex Fields, Jr., to attack a crowd of antifascists in Charlottesville, West Virginia in 2017—is such that, as a casual Internet search reveals, some owners have taken to modifying their Challengers to look like Max’s “last of the V8s.”^[15]

“Dodge has a bad reputation among car industry watchers,” writes the venerable Marxist bard Jasper Bernes, “who believe it ‘markets [its] cars to sociopaths.’ Ads for the Challenger are adorned with slogans like ‘Come At Me,’ ‘Ultimate Aggression,’ and tellingly ‘This is America, Drive Like It.’ A reboot of a 1970s muscle car, the Challenger was released at the tail end of a series of nostalgic remakes of 60s and 70s models. Throughout the commodity boom of the 2000s, as oil prices rose on the back of the Iraq War, US automakers put out a number of these retro gas guzzlers, flipping the bird at the new century and its rising temperatures. They hearken back not only to a golden age of American automaking but to the prosperity that accompanied it.”^[16] Fields, however, had as little of a chance of returning to the world “before” as did Max, no matter how fast he drove his muscle car and who else had to suffer for his macho delusions.

“When the motor vehicle no longer takes a man to and from his place of employment and home,” writes gender theorist Ezekiel Crago, “acting as the means for him to prove his worthwhile masculinity as breadwinner for his family [—] because the road no longer connects places of production, where wage labor is performed, and reproduction, where labor power is produced [—] it becomes a meaningless path. It is then re-inscribed with meaning by becoming the only place left where a man can prove he is the master of his own destiny.”^[17] This is, of course, a lost cause. “It’s a town full of losers,” belts Bruce Springsteen in the paean to automotive autonomy “Thunder Road,” “and I’m pulling out of here to win!” The belligerence of this resolution is betrayed by its futility; there is, after all, nothing left to do “except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair.” The inevitable outcome of the characters’ “one last chance to make it real / to trade in these wings on some wheels,” is that they will eventually run out of gas, road, or free time, and be forced, like the Nightrider, to face that “It’s all gone.”

It is here that the automotive fetish of the Mad Max franchise cuts to the heart of our society’s breakneck dash toward annihilation. The subjectivity that has arisen around the personal vehicle is the purest distillation of the suicidal myth of the monadic individual, at war with the world, obsessively locked in a high octane death race toward the vanishing point of ultimate gratification. Communal bonds and the well-being of others, represented by crosswalks, climate accords, and other suspiciously feminine incumbrances to gasoline powered libidinal discharge, are unacceptable checks on the autonomy of the driver. Essential components of life—water, air, soil—are fouled, sometimes irreversibly, in the name of freedom, autonomy, and other cliches that mean nothing without strong communal ties and an ecosystem to support them. Automotive culture thus bridges the selfish, self-mutilating, sociopathic predation of capitalist subjectivity, especially the masculinity that has coevolved with the gas guzzling death machine, with capitalism’s intractable push toward the destruction of life on a global scale.

“We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed,” wrote Italian philosopher F.T. Martinetti in the 1909 “Manifesto of Futurism,” part of the avant garde of incipient fascism in Italy. “A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath … a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the [Greek sculpture] Victory of Samothrace.”^[18]Before long, the world would see just what that exaltation of mechanized speed, as an end in itself, would mean for the soft bodies of living beings, and the earth they rely upon for sustenance. And today the consequences of this “new beauty” weigh heavily on any possibility of the future, and, increasingly, its impossibility.

Despite his distinction as perhaps the greatest director of automotive action, remarkably little of this is lost on George Miller. Reviewing Mad Max, film critic Jonathan Rayner cites multiple instances where cars are, far from the vehicles of boundless freedom, traps in themselves—as seen in the films’ multiple crash victims consigned to perish within them.^[19] “The motorcycles and autos of Mad Max,” argues Sharrett, “signify a technology that has found little use but to be placed on a circular unproductive course, simply to be used up and destroyed.”^[20] It’s not a stretch to say that the dead end fate of automobile dependency structures the entire franchise. “It’s a lot of stuff that is clearly exaggerated from the present,” Miller remarked in 1982. “There was petrol rationing in Australia then, and it was surprising how quickly things degenerated. After just three or four days there was always some kind of aggression in the petrol queues. People’s normal life-style was threatened, and they were suddenly going after each other. We had a lot of fun exaggerating that.”^[21] Such biting satire was, however, lost on many viewers from the start. Following the film’s 1979 debut, Australian filmgoers sat in the parking garage above the theater, revving their engines.^[22]

The Corpse of the Old World

 One day cock of the walk, next, a feather duster… So much for history!

-Auntie Entity, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (George Miller, 1985)

The two Mad Max sequels of the 1980s take us beyond a society in decline and into the wasteland following its complete collapse. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (George Miller, 1981) begins with a narrated montage heavily inspired by the rise of Reaganism, the Iranian Revolution, and lingering insecurity heldover from the OPEC oil embargo of 1974. “For reasons long forgotten,” the narrator intones, “two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. Without fuel they were nothing. They’d built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked but nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled, the cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear.” We are also informed, in an act of creative retroactive continuity, or “retconning,” that the original film was actually set in the aftermath of a great, singular catastrophe, rather than offering a more interesting (and realistic) glimpse of a gradual one unfolding in slow motion.

The Mad Max franchise has come to exemplify fallout cinema, and enduring radiation is a central theme of the later films, beginning with Beyond Thunderdome. But as in the original, overt nuclear themes are absent from The Road Warrior. Even the film’s opening narration never suggests a nuclear war has taken place. Instead, Miller curiously blends footage of World War II with images of gasoline infrastructure, and global scenes of social unrest from the late 1960s. Significantly, the original script called for the pivotal events to be: “A MOB OF ARAB STUDENTS storm a heavily-fortified embassy and raise the Iranian flag” and: “U.S. SOLDIERS LAND… on a beach in the Persian Gulf and fight their way across the sand.”^[23] The Road Warrior is nonetheless underwritten by these events, understood however stupidly, as it imagines the world as an increasingly tribal battleground, in which bands of poison belching predators vie to expropriate the nonrenewable resource upon which it was built.

Simultaneously, and more intelligently, the film invites us to pay close attention to how social crisis transforms the individual human beings subjected to its cruel whims. “In this maelstrom of decay,” the film’s narrator continues, “ordinary men were battered and smashed. Men like Max, the warrior Max.” Post-apocalyptic stories are, of course, never really about the future. Mad Max was a distinct product of its historical moment, posing the problems of the downward grind of liberal democratic societies, increasingly irreversible ecological degradation, and the near-complete subsumption of human social activity into the commodity market. How, the films ask, are these extraordinary, objective shifts changing the ordinary people who are forced to inhabit them? Or, in the words of a latter-day Miller creation, the First History Man: “As the world falls around us, how must we bear its cruelties?”^[24]

The Road Warrior finds Max already fully nomadic, tearing up the Wasteland’s dirt roads in his “last of the V-8s,” living simply to fill his gas tank. His MPF leathers have tattered and his hair grown shaggy, eliminating whatever distinction persisted between Max and the bikers at the end of the first film. It was in The Road Warrior that Miller and costume designer Norma Moriceau perfected the signature look of the Mad Max universe, fusing punk and BDSM gear with a distinctly orientalist treatment of tribal garb and other symbols of the mythic American and Australian frontiers. Whereas the bikes in the original had been superficially modified to appear appropriately futuristic for “a few years from now,” the vehicles of The Road Warrior are gleefully pastiche abominations. And so too are the bad guys.

Led by the outrageous Humungus, nicknamed the “Ayatollah of Rock and Rollah”—the specter of crisis in the Middle East is never far from this film—Max’s nemeses are tougher, meaner, and significantly gayer than even the most flaming of his foes in the original film, which is no mean feat. While Vernon Welles, the actor who plays Max’s pink-mohawked nemesis Wez, has since denied any homosexuality in the film, it is difficult to otherwise explain why his character keeps a gorgeous young twink named “The Golden Youth” on a leash, and spends much of the movie avenging his death in a lover’s fury—much less why the tribe is divided into two divisions, the “Gayboy Beserkers” and the “Smegma Crazies.”^[25] (What seems to be the lone heterosexual couple in the gang, we learn, even does it with the woman on top.) Befitting Max’s own descent into depravity, however celibate, the Gayboy Beserkers appear as a squadron of uniformed cops who ride their cruisers into battle, sirens blaring. The film’s misanthropic core is captured best by a prominent piece of graffiti on a broken down truck rig: “The vermin have inherited the Earth.”

The Road Warrior is largely based on the classic American western Shane (George Stevens, 1953), and, accordingly, a traumatized and self-exiled Max spends most of the film trying to avoid the social entanglements imposed on him by a small settler community that needs his help.^[26] Led by one Papagallo, the settlers have established a small defensive fort, built from the twisted metal of the past, around a small oil pump. But unlike the genocidal sociopaths who settled the American and Australian frontiers, these settlers have made only the most perfunctory gestures toward building any sustainable community, and like the zombie shoppers of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), are stuck absentmindedly reenacting their petroleum-dependent lives from “before.” This time, however, the community is forced to live in the nasty environs immediately surrounding an oil rig, as the distance between extraction and consumption is abolished and oil dependence is revealed as an utterly disgusting addiction. It’s also a curse; possession of this resource makes them natural prey for the tribe of Humungus, who lay constant siege to the fort, circling it endlessly in an unsubtle evocation of the Indian raids of western lore.

Max, of course, just wants a tank of gas and to be left alone. But society nags him. “You’re happy out there, are you?” Papagallo scolds Max. “One day blurring into another? You’re a scavenger, Max. You’re a maggot. Did you know that? You’re living off the corpse of the old world.” In contrast to the leather-clad deviants outside their gates who howl with laughter when one of their ranks loses his fingers, Papagallo’s tribe appears dressed in white, care for each other, and speak of the future with hope. “We’re still human beings with dignity,” Papagallo insists. But the horizon for their deliverance is quite literally a tattered old tourism brochure. “Paradise!” one of them tells Max, proudly brandishing its glossy depictions of improbably exotic climes. “Two thousand miles from here. Fresh water. Plenty of sunshine. Nothing to do but breed!” To their white surprise, holding onto the Wasteland is simply not worth the trouble. In a turn of events all too rare in the crimson annals of settler colonialism, this tribe wants to flee the outback, toward the coast whence their ancestors came.

The cheap moral binary posed by the bikers and settlers is simple enough, especially the part about breeding. Papagallo’s tribe is intended to set up Max at a crossroads common to the western, between working for a common good, or remaining one of the vermin he once fought, but has now become. But if this is George Miller’s way out of the nightmare he has evoked, he can scarcely believe in it himself, and Max doesn’t have a chance. In a tantalizing twist, Papagallo’s tribe detonates their oil well, and seemingly every vestige of the old world with it, and flees to the mythic north. While the film’s culminating car chase furnishes us with twenty of the finest minutes of film to ever grace the silver screen, it offers precious few answers about how the settlers came to live otherwise once they escaped. For his part, Max cannot be persuaded to accept a ride in the film’s literal deux ex machina, a small gyrocopter that we have already seen crash (anticipating the real helicopter crash which would, two years later, claim the life of adrenaline junkie Byron Kennedy). Whereas the opening montage had teased Max’s incipient journey as that of “a man who wandered out into the Wasteland, and… learned to live again,” ninety minutes later, this promise is forgotten. Unchanged, except maybe for the worse, Max remains in the wasteland, along with Miller, and the rest of us.

“One might even ask,” ponders journalist James Newton, “what right do Max and the Lost Children have to come and destroy Bartertown?”^[27] At face value, there’s really no good answer. The town’s justice system leaves much to be desired—it relies on the literal spin of a wheel—and all conflicts are handled with fights to the death in the titular Thunderdome. But this isn’t any worse than anywhere else in the Mad Max universe, and the existence of basic infrastructure, especially a distinct kind of renewable energy, seems a whole lot better. Quite frankly, it’s unlikely that Miller thought much about the question, because the film never bothers to try to explain itself. It could merely be a side effect of his close emulation of The Cars That Ate Paris and The High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1973). But a better answer seems right under our noses.

Bartertown is Auntie Entity’s best attempt to reconstitute the old world, rooted in commodity exchange and the bellum omnium contra omnes codified into civil law. Everything has a price, and human life is only as valuable as its owner can afford to be. Auntie Entity has made these ideas a reality in an impressive way. And that is precisely why Bartertown must be destroyed. While Miller is never clear how to move beyond the world he has created, he understands on some level that the reconstitution of capitalist society is a dead end. It is, he decides, better to simply destroy Bartertown before it can grow, than to treat it as the “left wing of the possible” which Max and the children can help reform. We are, after all, invited by the film’s title to imagine a world beyond the Thunderdome. And as Tina Turner put it in “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” a song written especially for the film: “Out of the ruins / Out from the wreckage / Can’t make the same mistake this time.” Dare we venture that, in the explosive denouement of Bartertown literally caving in on itself, we can faintly hear the righteous demand, from which any imagination of a liberated future must proceed: “Death to Amerika!”

Lost in the Australian Wasteland

Where must we go… we who wander this Wasteland in search of our better selves?

-The First History Man, Mad Max: Fury Road

The story goes that Miller first got the idea for Fury Road while crossing the street in Los Angeles.^[28] It’s easy enough to believe; watch enough of these films and it is difficult to not see them playing out all around you in the United States. Whereas Beyond Thunderdome had alienated critics and fans alike for taking Max out of his car and into a wasteland of sluggish melodrama, Fury Road is one big, loud, epic car chase evenly clocking two unforgettable hours of cinema. Besides being widely hailed among the greatest action movies ever made, and netting six Oscars, Fury Road is perhaps most notable for Max being something of a bit part. If Mel Gibson hadn’t conclusively aged out of the role, his racist and anti-semitic rants—first disclosed after, what else?, an arrest for drunken speeding—disqualified him as a leading man by the time Miller made the film. (This, despite the best intentions of that great fascist auteur, S. Craig Zahler). Rather than center the film on a new Max, Miller gave the franchise its first real heroine: Imperator Furiosa Jabassa (Charlize Theron), a warrior truck driver serving the autocratic warlord Immortan Joe. In an archetypal enclosure of the commons, Joe’s monopoly over fresh water, which he calls “Aqua Cola,” ensures his absolute sovereignty. Immortan Joe thereby rules the Wasteland.

Fury Road is a story of defection and flight. Before we meet Furiosa, she has decided to abscond from Immortan Joe’s heavily fortified, towering Citadel, along with five of his impressed wives who Joe has conscripted into sexual slavery in the seemingly fruitless effort to bear a child untainted by nuclear fallout. Her plan is to escape to the fertile land from which Furiosa was taken as a youth, the Green Place. Under the pretense of a routine supply run, the women sneak out of the Citadel with Furiosa at the wheel, one of them leaving behind the message: “Who killed the world?” What follows is an earnest attempt to escape the dead world by fleeing its core and building an alternative society on its periphery.

When Furiosa diverts her heavily-armored “war rig” away from the ordinary supply route, one of Immortan Joe’s “war boys”—radiation-poisoned men guaranteed short lives, organized into a death cult around worship of the automobile—asks where they are going. “It’s a detour,” Furiosa replies. This will prove truer than she realizes. Furiosa’s exodus is fraught from the start, foiled by a double-cross and overwhelmed by Joe throwing the entirety of his empire’s resources into catching up with her. (In what would have been a clever topical joke if the film hadn’t taken years to complete, Joe’s cannibal accountant, the People Eater, scolds: “You, sir, have stuck us in a quagmire!”) All the while, Max, captured by a war boy and stripped of his V-8, is largely along for the ride, though his driving skills eventually earn him Furiosa’s respect and he becomes an important member of yet another improbable and tenuously assembled team.

There is only one problem: the Green Place, that great Gaian refuge from the parched patriarchy of the Citadel, simply does not exist. All that remains of the Vuvalini, the tribe of Furiosa’s youth, are a small band of grizzled nomads roaming the desert on motorcycles. Whereas Furiosa had promised the wives that these “Mothers” of the Green Place preserved a caring feminine alternative to macho brutality of the Wasteland, they are shocked to learn that these survivors simply kill anyone they encounter, like any other of its vermin. Like Max, who is still wandering in a traumatized semi-fugue state, there is no home waiting for Furiosa anywhere. Exiting the Wasteland is a sad fantasy. Evading the empire to live on its margins is impossible.

At this realization, and upon the urgings of Max, who finally emerges as the film’s hero, the war rig turns around, headed back to the Citadel, to make war on Immortan Joe. Fury Road ends with Furiosa and Max returning triumphant, announcing the death of the great tyrant, and Furiosa assuming leadership, letting the water flow freely. The raggedy peasants outside cry “Let them up! Let them up!” as Furiosa and the wives are raised into the heights of the Citadel, where power resides and resources are hoarded. Max, as ever, cannot be compelled to stick around.

And why would he? “Miller,” writes scholar Bonnie McLean, “creates a seemingly happy ending that reveals an uncertain future with no way to actually solve the world’s problems.”^[29] Befitting the great hype around Furiosa being a “feminist” movie, perhaps we are to assume that Furiosa will be more benevolent than Joe, and that should be enough for us. If, as a popular meme at the time insisted, the answer to the film’s central question is that “toxic masculinity” killed the world, perhaps Furiosa’s “female masculinity” contains the seeds of a just society.^[30] But the behavior of arrogant and callous men didn’t kill the world, the capitalist mode of production did, and decades of “diversity, inclusion, and equity” initiatives have shown that the ruthless administration of a suicidal global order is remarkably flexible with regards to the race and gender of the individual technocrats. Given the objective limitations she faces, hemmed in by ecological collapse and the need to brutally ration what sustenance remains, it’s unclear how Furiosa will be much different from her predecessor. Philosopher Sarah Kizuk therefore calls the Furiosa story “Wonder Woman with cars and leather harnesses and stuff.”^[31]

Furiosa is correct to conclude that liberation cannot be realized at the margins of a total world. But this insight remains a far cry from substantive social transformation. “We are unlikely to ever see a sequel to Fury Road where Furiosa’s regime, like the 1917 Russian Revolution, has caused even more [sic] instability and oppression than Immortan Joe’s,” Newton concludes, “and now has to also be smashed and ruined in order for a better world to materialize.”^[32] This would, of course, be an almost necessary progression, in Miller’s world as in ours. But Furiosa’s assumption of power is a fitting end to a films that can be situated—alongside Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019), Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023), and most recently Nathan Fielder’s 2023 HBO miniseries The Curse—in the annals of powerful male directors obsessing over the purportedly waning relevance of men in the upper tiers of the American workforce. And by making the latest film a prequel, Miller opted to set aside, in classic Hollywood fashion, the problem of the day after Furiosa’s seizure of power, allowing Fury Road viewers to savor her victory, provided they don’t think too hard about it.

A marked departure from the frenzy of Fury Road, Furiosa is a sprawling visual poem of doomed deliverance, failed escapes, and tracks in the sand vanishing only to be followed anyway. Sniper fire rains down on unsuspecting victims, ending their lives before they even see what’s coming. A pair of motorcycles are set aside for a romantic flight to a Green Place that we already know doesn’t exist, or won’t in the near future, but Furiosa and her lover don’t even get the chance to use them and find out. Gasoline and fugitive supplies are spread across the desert sand as tokens of another foreclosed line of flight. We even glimpse the Green Place of Furiosa’s youth in all its solarpunk splendor, knowing that within the space of two decades it will be reduced to a gray and lifeless bog. As the story begins, a young Furiosa picks an improbable fruit, signifying her permanent banishment from this paradise and its impending disappearance. “There is nowhere else,” she is later warned, when plotting her return to the Green Place. “This is the Wasteland. Wherever you thought you were going doesn’t exist.”

While Furiosa is Miller’s most ambitious effort at worldbuilding yet—exploring the rudimentary division of labor between Gastown, the Bullet Farm, and the Citadel, and introducing a host of compelling new characters, like the First History Man, who serves up “wordburgers” of factual information from the world before the fall—more compelling than the story itself is the growing mood of claustrophobic enclosure that hems in young Furiosa, and everyone in her world, including Immortan Joe himself, on all sides. We know what is coming in Fury Road, and we see, time and again, how it could never have been any other way. Even Max himself is further reduced to a pure spectator; in a brief cameo, he simply watches the action unfold from afar, alongside his “last of the V-8s,” which we know he is about to lose yet again.

“My childhood, my mother, I want them back,” Furiosa demands. “You are never gonna get anything close to what you want,” remarks the cruel warlord Dementus, who has taken these away, and knows better than anyone that he cannot return them. There is no recapture of an earlier time, no escaping the Wasteland. The film’s final world is a particularly sour morsel of nihilism, as Furiosa declares: “Each of us in our own way will vanish from this earth. And then, perhaps, some uncorrupted life will rise to adorn it.”

“One criticism that has been made of the Mad Max movies,” writes Buckmaster, “starting with the first, concerns a perceived logical gap in the core premise. If they are based in a futuristic world where the scarcest, most precious commodity is petrol, why do the characters spend so much time hooning around in fuel-guzzling machines? Why not use methods of transportation that don’t squander petrol, their most valuable resource-and the currency most important to their survival?”^[33] Even the ordinarily astute critic Evan Calder Williams is too intoxicated with his own intellectual superiority to the films’ premise—“one needs gasoline in order to drive around and kill others to steal their gasoline, but in doing so, one consumes the gasoline that one had”—to appreciate that this just might be the point.^[34]

“Despite—or more likely because of—the focus on cars, speed, metamorphoses, and escape,” writes scholar Claire Corbett, who worked as an extra on the set of Beyond Thunderdome, “one of the main themes in these stories thus emerges as circularity, leading to an enduring sense of stasis despite the exhilaration of the long chase sequences.”^[35]Furiosa brings this into sharp relief. Befitting a prequel that culminates in the beginning of a long, circular chase, it bends the Mad Max franchise into a neat Ouroboro. In the most extreme of anti-climaxes, the film concludes with the final of many returns to the start, with true escape never possible.

Surely George Miller, the great action auteur who has conjured the essence of car culture with the hallucinatory mania of Hieronymus Bosch, the problematic grandiosity of Leni Riefenstahl, and the urgency of an apocalypse already underway, does not lack imagination. The stuckness in place of Mad Max, then, however its colorful ensemble of characters can spin their wheels, is a far more profound reflection of the historical cul-de-sac in which even the most strident critics of advanced capitalist societies find themselves. Miller’s characters can’t go any further, because Miller can’t go any further, because, simply put, virtually nobody can. Diagnosing such “crisis cinema” back in 1990, Sharrett observed: “contemporary culture is now at the stage of recognizing the bankruptcy of capitalism and patriarchy, but validates them anyway.”^[36] Decades later, not much has changed, except the tenor is more hopeless than ever. So what’s left to do, besides race in circles?

 Beyond the Citadel

[T]he world is already apocalyptic and… there is no event to wait for, just the zones in which these revelations are forestalled and the sites where we can take a stand.

-Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse^[37]

“Mad Max has effectively become a synonymous substitute for ‘post-apocalyptic,’” writes John Hay. “But what other post-apocalypses have thereby been closed off…?”^[38] Hay’s proposed alternative is positively puerile: the return of American chauvinism, via Kevin Costner’s 1997 mawkishly patriotic film The Postman, which exalts the return of the US from an end-times scenario through the labors of a lowly postal worker. In reality, the presumed death of the United States of America is one of the few silver linings to be found in Miller’s dystopia, and is also just deserved, as the US has done far more than any other nation state to make Mad Max real. To rescue Americanism from the ashes of an apocalyptic event, as Hay proposes, would be a giant step backward—and this, recall, is why Bartertown must be smothered in its crib. But what if Hay is closer to the answer than it might seem? What if the solution could be found in that which is simultaneously hidden and ubiquitous, in both the films of George Miller, and the societies whose death drive they represent so viscerally?

Taking a step back from the sheer enjoyment that the Mad Max films demand of the viewer, it is more than a bit jarring to realize how effectively Miller has crafted an entire mythology around tribal life in the Australian outback completely devoid of actual indigenous people. As Claire Corbett writes, “images and references to Indigenous people in the Max Max world are so evanescent as to be dreamlike, and yet they’re unmistakably and critically present.”^[39] Token symbols like boomerangs and didgeridoos, and settler tropes like forts under siege by savage Indians, are nonetheless inhabited by white settlers reduced to “purposeful savagery,” as Furiosa’s love interest remarks of her in the latest film. Beyond Thunderdome is the most explicit in its simultaneous fetishization of indigeneity and disavowal that it has any history in Australia predating colonization. “These images of white ‘tribal’ children with their cornrowed and dreadlocked hair, dressed in skins, leaves, armbands, and loincloths, Corbett concludes, “seem to be almost mocking, adding the insult of parody to the injury of absence.”^[40]

This is hardly innocent. The Road Warrior was funded in part by billionaire mining magnate Lang Hancock, a far-right firebrand who publicly campaigned to end indigenous rights to mineral-rich land, and even called for the “race” of indigenous “half-castes” to be eliminated through eugenics.^[41] The franchise has also figured in the broader cultural campaign to recast white settlers as real Australians. It offers “a mythic trajectory for Australia,” argues scholar Delia Falconer, “in line with our emergent ‘new nationalism,’ in which historical relations must be ignored in order to facilitate a productive future, and settlement can be rewritten and authenticated as ‘indigenousness.’”^[42] But it seems that what fuels the indigenous erasure in Mad Max is a more banal, but no less destructive, function of the ordinary everyday ignorance that settler societies require of their adherents. And it helps explain the fundamental stuckness within which the series finds itself, and which it shares with the societies in which it represents. Unable to chart a way forward, and chauvinistically ignorant of alternative modalities of being in the world, all that’s left to do is clutch firmly onto to the reins of the fuel-injected suicide machine.

“The Mad Max franchise constructs a collective national nightmare for non-indigenous Australians,” write anthropologists William S Chavez and Shyam K. Sriram, “a society built by transported convicts and colonizers gone ‘savage’ following global catastrophe.”^[43] But does it have to be this way? Why, in the face of existential destruction wrought by capitalist modernity, should the turn toward indigeneity in settler societies be a nightmare? Is not the very problem of Mad Max the destruction of the Earth and debasement of its people by a society that has reduced life and land to so many, interchangeable objects of exchange, to be depleted and destroyed as a matter of intrinsic, individual right? What else leads out of this morass but a new communal politics, grounded in an alternative spirituality capable of restoring true dignity to life? What would be so wrong with making a resource like gasoline sacred, to be used only on the most special of occasions, as part of a social system organized toward preserving the planet for generations to come? It is a sad irony, though supremely appropriate, that the very ways of being omitted from Miller’s dystopia likely offer the elusive keys to moving beyond it.

“Land is the terrain upon which all our relations play out,” writes indigenous scholar Mike Gouldhawke, and it can even be seen as a living thing itself, constantly shaping and being shaped by other life forms. Land isn’t just a place, it’s also a territory, which implies political, legal, and cultural relationships of jurisdiction and care. Settler claims to sovereignty and private property are also relational – that is to say, transactional. They reflect the relationship between an individual citizen and their state, as well as a particular way of relating to one another and to the world – social and economic systems of domination, individualism, competition, and exploitation.^[44]

The contrast is stark, and immensely practical: one world must be defeated, the other made to thrive. And it is all connected. “There will be no end to these wars of empire,” wrote the recent student occupiers of Cal Poly Humboldt, in the indispensable publication Crimethinc., “if the struggles in ‘first world countries’ don’t develop teeth and begin to embody solidarity and ‘land back’ as more than symbolic gestures.”^[45] What this means concretely remains to be worked out in collective practice, but cannot be achieved with the same old fetishism of piggish imperialist “luxury,” automated and communist or not. The necessary cessation and reversal of genocidal projects like American exceptionalism and Zionism must be accomplished alongside social practices that respect all land and life, and place their inherent value above whatever possibility for profit, or opportunities for antisocial “leisure,” they provide.^[47] This imperative will demand we develop more profound relationships with the world and each other, unmoored from the imperative to constantly consume, traverse great spaces, and make a big mess in the process, while also putting to rest the vapid valorization of luxury consumption that has sadly come to transcend the class line. The solution for moving forward, then, is far closer to a politics of “degrowth.”^[46] But it has likely yet to be given a suitable name, much less articulated coherently.^[48]

In his criminally understudied masterpiece Heman Melville, Marxist intellectual Loren Goldner tarries extensively with another doomed voyage straight to oblivion: that of the Pequod and its crew in Melville’s Moby Dick. Goldner situates the Pequod’s voyage within a crisis of a bourgeois society deprived of the myths which once sustained it, and therefore no longer able to believe in itself, but simultaneously unable to accept that its only possible supersession is that of worldwide communist society. Moby Dick, Goldner argues, thusly follows “Ahab’s demonic self-destructive quest, the crackup of a whole civilization built on the isolated bourgeois ego,” as a grand parable in which a motley crew unified by capital is unable to collectively reverse its suicide mission.^[49]

The book’s final hope, however dim, does not come from Ishmael, the kind of disaffected, functioning-depressive intellectual who writes wan and overlong scholastic reflections not unlike the present one, while secretly coveting submission to strong men like Ahab who he claims to disavow. Instead, Goldner argues, Melville invites us to consider that the modern capitalist subject must rediscover the “antemosiac cosmic men,” harpooners Queequeg, Tashtego, and Dagoo, representative of an older world, of cosmological unity predating the divergence of logic from mythology. These figures embody a communal metabolism with nature that stands in sharp relief to Ahab’s compulsive courtship of acceleration unto death.^[50] In contrast  to the linear “great leap forward” wanly awaited by Billy Bragg in song, this theory of history understands social change as operating in a “‘helical-vorticist’ fashion, wherein elements of earlier mytho-historical modes ‘return’ in higher modes.”^[51]

This is not a call for the vulgar appropriation of “indigeneity”; there are already enough white yoga teachers burning sage in the strip malls of America as it is. Instead, Goldner invites us to formulate, within advanced industrial societies, a profound engagement with antemosaic, cosmic forms of life, which reject the reduction of life on Earth to so many objects of manipulation and destruction. In place of the dead letters of our blood-caked religious texts, a new spirituality is order which sets aside the psychosis of unseen worlds in the hereafter—a doctrine which, perhaps more than anything else, explains the popular apathy toward environmental destruction here on Earth—and places the preservation of the real world at the center. This should not be a set of “beliefs,” in the common sense of being divorced from sensuous practice, but must be rooted in a practical engagement with existence that treats life and land as sacred.

And where better to start than the simple mantra of 2016 anti-pipeline movement at Standing Rock, “water is life,” under which a motley crew of rebels fought for a future worth inhabiting? “Whereas past revolutionary struggles have strived for the emancipation of labor from capital,” writes indigenous scholar Nick Estes, whose helical-vorticist titled book Our History is the Future draws clear lines from Standing Rock to the necessity for mass struggle, “we are challenged, not just to imagine, but to demand the emancipation of the earth from capital.”^[52] And at the center of this existential struggle is the unavoidable necessity of global communism. Any time spent clarifying this vital political convergence will be almost certainly well spent.^[53]

At a recent memorial for Goldner, who died this past April, his long-time comrade Amiri Barksdale reflected on the enduring significance of Herman Melville for understanding our historical conjuncture. “Now that capitalism has well and truly swallowed the world,” Barksdale remarked, “we are now all aboard an aluminum and carbon fiber Pequod, sailing a spectacular sea of lies, word salad, and AI generated content. Though it is now helmed by blinkered technocratic billionaires, they still believe their own lies, and are hoist on their own petard of arrogance and ignorance. Who else is aboard? What fires their passion for freedom? What do they want?” To chart a way forward, Barksadale concluded, it is imperative to “see the future in the present and in the past. That’s the only way that Marx can be right in the 1844 manuscripts when he writes, from the future, that ‘man returns to himself not as he began at the origin of his long history, but finally having at his disposal all the perfections of an immense development, acquired in the form of all the successive techniques, customs, religions, philosophies whose useful sides were – if we can be permitted to express ourselves in this way – imprisoned in the zone of alienation.’”^[54]

Which brings us back to Max, hopelessly stuck in a distinctly deranged zone of alienation, awaiting the return of humanity to itself as a matter of bare survival. “The science fiction of a communist society is inspiring not when it is most outlandish and fantastical,” write revolutionary scholars Phil A. Neel and Nick Chavez, “but when worlds fundamentally different from our own are shown to be nonetheless constructable from the mountain of bone bequeathed to us.”^[55] Such is the challenge to which we are invited by the Mad Max universe and its persistent failure to conjure a way out of George Miller’s dystopia—as the need for real deliverance becomes a simple matter of survival. How much worse, one wonders, does our own world need to get, before this becomes common sense? “Who’d have thought 20 years ago,” Miller observed back in the halcyon days of 1999, “that people would one day be nostalgic for the apocalypse?”^[56]

Dedicated to Loren Goldner, a road warrior who hated cars.^[57]

——-

^[1] in The Waste Land (New York and London: Norton, 2001), p. 5.

^[2] John Hay, “The American Mad Max: The Road Warrior versus the Postman” Science Fiction Film and Television 10 (3) (Autumn 2017), p. 315.

^[3] Sue Matthews, 35mm Dreams: Conversations with Five Directors about the Australian Film Revival (New York: Penguin, 1984), p. 234.

^[4] Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse: Luciferian Marxism (London: Zer0 Books, 2011), p. 24.

^[5] Travis Linnemann, The Horror of Police (New York: NYU Press, 2022), p. 89.

^[6] Luke Buckmaster, Miller and Max: George Miller and the Making of a Film Legend (Melbourne: Hardie Grant Books, 2017), p. xv.

^[7] Buckmaster, Miller and Max, pp. 36, 98.

^[8] J. Emmett Winn, “Mad Max, Reaganism, and The Road Warrior,” Kinema, Fall 1997; Philip Adams, “The Dangerous Pornography of Death,” The Bulletin, May 1, 1979.

^[9]  E.F.N. Jephcott (trans.) (London and New York: Verso, 2005), p. 40.

^[10] Quoted in Buckmaster, Miller and Max, p. 4.

^[11] Matthews, 35mm Dreams, p. 236.

^[12] Quoted in Buckmaster, Miller and Max, p. 25.

^[13] Christopher Sharrett, “The Hero as Pastiche: Myth, Male Fantasy, and Simulacra in Mad Max and The Road Warrior,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 13 (1985), p. 84.

^[14] Cotten Selier, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 13, 66. A key exception to this is the liberation of adolescent sexuality from the strictures of the nuclear family, in which the automobile proved a key setting. This likely could have been accomplished, however, in ways that did not permanently warm the planet past habitability.

^[15] Buckmaster, Miller and Max, p. 39.

^[16] Jasper Bernes, “Our Streets,” Verso Books (blog), August 24, 2017, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/3371-our-streets.

^[17] Ezekiel Crago, Raggedy Men: Masculinity in the Mad Max Movies (Lausanne, Switzerland: Peter Lang, Inc., 2020), p. 67.

^[18] Reprinted in James Joll, Three Intellectuals in Politics (New York: Pantheon, 1960), p. 181.

^[19] Jonathan Rayner, Contemporary Australian Cinema : An Introduction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 43

^[20] Sharrett, “The Hero as Pastiche,” p. 83.

^[21] David Chute, “The Ayatollah of the Moviola: Interview with Dr George Miller,” Film Comment 18 (4) (1982), p. 29.

^[22] Buckmaster, Miller and Max, p. 91.

^[23] Terry Hayes, George Miller & Brian Hannant, Mad Max II, April 13, 1981, accessed at https://imsdb.com/scripts/Mad-Max-2-The-Road-Warrior.html.

^[24] Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.

^[25] B&S about the Movies, “Interview with Vernon Welles,” June 6, 2020, https://bandsaboutmovies.com/2022/06/06/exclusive-interview-with-vernon-wells. Miller also disagrees with Welles. See: Matthews, 35mm Dreams, p. 245.

^[26] For a detailed examination of the western origins of the Mad Max franchise, see: Martin Holtz, “Mad Max and the Western,” Studies in Australasian Cinema 17 (3) (2023), pp. 141–53.

^[27] James Newton, The Mad Max Effect: Road Warriors in International Exploitation Cinema (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), p. 96.

^[28] Buckmaster, Miller and Max, p. 261.

^[29] Bonnie McLean, “’Who Killed the World?’: Religious Paradox in Mad Max: Fury Road,” Science Fiction Film and Television 10 (3) (2017), p. 427.

^[30] Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Duke University Press, 1998). For the cringe memes, see: https://www.tumblr.com/feministmadmax.

^[31] Encrypted Signal correspondence.

^[32] Newton, The Mad Max Effect, pp. 95-96.

^[33] Buckmaster, Miller and Max, p. 29.

^[34] Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, p. 26.

^[35] Claire Corbett, “Nowhere to Run: Repetition Compulsion and Heterotopia in the Australian Post-Apocalypse, from ‘Crabs’ to Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome,” Science Fiction Film & Television 10 (3) (2017), p. 348.

^[36] Christopher Sharrett (ed.), Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmodern Narrative Film (Washington, D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 1993), p. 5.

^[37] p. 12.

^[38] Hay, “The American Mad Max,” p. 309.

^[39] Corbett, “Nowhere to Run,” p. 338.

^[40] Corbett, “Nowhere to Run,” p. 339.

^[41] Buckmaster, Miller and Max, p. 144; William Finnegan, “The Miner’s Daughter,” The New Yorker, March 18, 2013.

^[42] Delia Falconer, “We Don’t Need to Know the Way Home,” in Steven Cohan, Ina Rae Hark (eds.) The Road Movie Book (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 262.

^[43] William S. Chavez and Shyam K. Sriram, “‘What If We Were Savage?’: Mad Max Transmedia as Speculative Anthropology,” The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 35 (1) (2023), 28.

^[44] Mike Gouldhawke, “Land as a Social Relationship,” Briarpatch, September 10, 2020, https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/land-as-a-social-relationship.

^[45] Crimethinc., “From Redwood Trees to Olive Groves, the Commune Grows A Statement from the Tree Occupation at Cal Poly Humboldt,” April 29, 2024, https://crimethinc.com/2024/04/29/from-redwood-trees-to-olive-groves-the-commune-grows-a-statement-from-the-tree-occupation-at-cal-poly-humboldt.

^[46] This is not a simple matter of replicating the existing lifestyles of advanced capitalist societies with different technologies. Electric vehicles (EVs), for instance, are not a practical alternative to the gas guzzlers they are heralded to replace. From the disastrous mining practices that extract their necessary elements like lithium, to the outsized wear and tear they put on roads and other infrastructure, while continuing to foul the air with brake particulates, rubber, and other pollutants, and of course, relying on electricity, most of which comes from polluting sources. In short, EVs continue the environmental harm of gas powered cars while simultaneously functioning to stand in the way of the only serious solution: the elimination of personal motor vehicles, and their replacement with public transit infrastructure that allows everyone, especially people with mobility issues, to get around comfortably and sustainably. And just imagine what beautiful public spaces we could create if there weren’t cars everywhere, spreading their filth and danger while turning their operators into homicidal maniacs. See: James Warren, “Electric Cars Won’t Save Us, They’ll Make Our Cities Worse,” Human Centric Design, July 22, 2022, https://www.humancentricdesign.org/post/electric-cars-make-cities-worse; Nina Lakhani, “Revealed: How US Transition to Electric Cars Threatens Environmental Havoc,” The Guardian, January 24, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/24/us-electric-vehicles-lithium-consequences-research.

^[47] See: Kohei Saito, Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto (New York: Astra House, 2024).

^[48] A fascinating project I am still wrapping my head around goes by the name of Decomposition and seems to deserve close attention. See: https://decompositions.noblogs.org.

^[49] Loren Goldner, Herman Melville: Between Charlemange and the Amtemosaic Cosmic Man (New York: Queequeg Publications, 2006), p. 5.

^[50]  Goldner, Herman Melville, pp. 116-118.

^[51] Goldner, Herman Melville, p. 25. We can set aside, for now, the question of whether the mode of life that has enabled the real possibility of planetary extinction can be deemed “higher” in any possible connotation.

^[52] Nick Estes, Our History is the Future (London and New York: Verso, 2019), p. 257.

^[53] For a good starting place grounded in concrete struggles, see the interviews collected in Peter Gelderloos, The Solutions are Already Here (Northampton: Pluto Press, 2022). Additionally, Mike Gouldhawke has assembled an invaluable compendium of writing at the intersection of Marxism and indigenous radicalism. See: “Marxism & Indigenous People,” https://mgouldhawke.wordpress.com/marxism-indigenous-peoples.

^[54] Courtesy of the author, used with permission.

^[55] Phil A. Neel and Nick Chavez, “Forest and Factory,” Endnotes, December 2023, https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/forest-and-factory.

^[56] Quoted in Adrian Martin, The Mad Max Movies (Redfern, Australia: Currency Press, 2003), p. 47.

^[57] Much of the life’s work of Loren Goldner can be found on his website Break Their Haughty Power. Besides the indispensable Melville book, Goldner’s unique and invaluable theory of American politics, history, and culture can be found in the essay collection Vanguard of Retrogression (New York, Queequeg, 2001), which, as the young people say, goes so hard it’s unreal, beginning right on the cover.