The Road Warrior (1981), the second of George Miller’s Mad Max series, opens with a voiceover (The Feral Kid) explaining how a global war for fuel-toppled nations and decimated the earth, leaving only an empty wasteland, where survivors compete for precious resources in a life-or-death struggle. “Footage” depicts talking-head politicians, images of the massive war (uncannily familiar, as they resemble images from WWII), and, finally, the result: total anarchy, in which gangs terrorize the highways, killing innocent “civilians” for fuel. The sequence ends with an image of the film’s hero, Max (Mel Gibson), standing alone on the empty road in his boots and black leathers, larger-than-life in the boy’s memory. The latest installment of the series, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), employs a voiceover at the film’s opening as well, but this time the voice belongs to Max (Tom Hardy), haunted by his dead daughter, as he explains the one remaining goal after the collapse of civilization: survival. Like Mad Max (1979) and The Road Warrior, Fury Road returns the franchise to the road and to its drivers, reinvigorating the cult series with forceful energy, spectacular chases, and breath-taking imagery.[i]

The Road Warrior (1981)

Though it’s a sci-fi-fantasy series set in the future, Miller’s films draw heavily upon conventions and motifs of the Hollywood western and the road movie, grounding the post-apocalyptic fantasy-nightmare plot in the familiar mythos of the American frontier, yet complicating and updating it in significant ways. It is that graceful melding of the past, present, and future—even in the low budget, sometimes-clunky original movies—that gives the imaginative Mad Max franchise its continuous import and allure.

Mad Max as Western

Much like the western cowboy hero, Max is a loner, a man with a violent past, who travels alone and acts according to his own moral compass, which eventually guides him to help the community of settlers who cannot adequately defend themselves. The series also employs the aesthetics and stage of the open frontier (noticeably bleaker in the Australian-made Max movies); villains who desire all of the resources for themselves (as in Shane (1953), complete with adoring boy); and the sense that it is in this open, unsettled space that our collective future will be determined. In Beyond Thunderdome (1985), the western motifs become paramount—and problematic—as Max encounters a sleazy, corrupt settlement and naïve, helpless tribal characters that resemble Native Americans/Aboriginals, with headdresses, spears, and mohawks.

Interestingly, the Mad Max movies have more in common with spaghetti westerns than Hollywood westerns. Far more cynical than Hollywood westerns, spaghetti westerns, primarily made by European directors in the 1960s and ’70s, are laden with irony and with quirky characters; feature tough-as-nails, anti-social anti-heroes (Max is even introduced as “The Man with No Name” in Thunderdome, a clear reference to Clint Eastwood in the Sergio Leone westerns); and tend to be highly violent, with endings that resist full resolution. The Mad Max series fits this rubric, with its nearly silent, stoic stars, oil rigs that turn out to be filled with sand, graphic displays of violence, and ambiguous conclusions that necessitate sequels. Like the spaghetti western, then, Miller’s series both borrows from and undermines its genre, in this case, the road film, toppling its ideology and offering a drastically bleaker vision of what the road represents.

Mad Max as Road Movie

In the Hollywood road movie, a direct descendant of the western, the open road substitutes for the American frontier. Like the West, the road in such films and texts (Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise, On the Road) promises opportunity, freedom, and renewal, though it rarely delivers on these promises. Traditional road films typically begin with a tremendous sense of excitement and energy as the drivers take the road (cue Steppenwolf), but end in horrific displays of death and destruction as the road becomes a site of danger or runs out altogether. Although the horrific destruction at the end of these American films may belie a sense of anxiety regarding unfettered freedom, the road does lead somewhere, and its travelers usually evolve along the way.[ii]

In the Mad Max series, however, the road appears more circular than linear, leading nowhere in particular, or sometimes right back to where it started, begging the question as to what purpose the journey—and the great death toll along the way—served. Stretching through a desert wasteland where few destinations remain in the post-apocalyptic landscape, the road in these films functions less as a path and more as a nihilistic, never-ending battlefield, where survivors of the global war compete for precious natural resources and the war boys gladly sacrifice their lives for the glory of Valhalla/God. In Miller’s first film, Mad Max, the road battles are even more gruesome, as a sociopathic biker gang (taking a page from Brando’s gang in The Wild One (1950)), kills and rapes along the highway for no other purpose than amusement.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Whereas in Hollywood road movies, the drivers run into danger when they get off the road (typically in the form of ignorant, dangerous rednecks, i.e., people who have not traveled enough), in the Mad Max films, as seen in the thrilling, grisly chase sequences, the protagonists are most vulnerable while on the road. But as there is nothing valuable off the road, the road remains the only impossible possibility, and the sense of the road as connecting places dissipates into an understanding of the earth as a nearly monolithic desert. In Fury Road, after discovering the Green Place is no longer habitable, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), taking Max’s advice, turns the rig around, retracing the hard-slogged steps to return to The Citadel, their original point of departure. Such pessimistic portrayals of the road across the series dismantle the Hollywood road film’s mythos of possibility, infusing the genre with grim, contemporary concerns regarding the downward spiral of environmental abuse and potential global annihilation.[iii]

Just as Miller’s first three films referenced the 1970s fuel crisis and predicted a global war for oil, Fury Road bears unmistakable allusions to the ongoing war in the Middle East, where the West is engaged in an interminable battle for influence—and fuel—against extremists waging a holy war. The road as battlefield rather than frontier alters not only the purpose of the journey, but also its travelers, who are more accurately warriors in Miller’s road films than drivers. Indeed, Aunty Emity (Tina Turner) calls Max a “soldier” at the end of Thunderdome (recall Max is a rogue Special-Ops cop in the first film). The series offers a gendered account of warfare and the roles men, women, and children play in warzones; updating this, Fury Road takes the feminist characters from the previous films and creates the strongest female warrior of the series yet, Furiosa, who, is equal to or even dominant to Max. The films also portray consequences of warfare, not just in the wasted landscape and the high body count, but also in the many orphaned children that populate the series, and in Fury Road, the female sex workers.

Praising Fury Road, Anthony Lane of The New Yorker recently claimed that the original series doesn’t hold up.[iv] But I don’t agree: while Thunderdome undeniably strayed too far from the formula, his comment overlooks the first two films, especially The Road Warrior, which remains, even after the latest installment, perhaps the strongest of the series because of its masterful pacing. Recognizing Road Warrior‘s superiority to the other two, Fury Road‘s creators stuck closest to it, keeping the dialogue to a minimum and adding beautifully stark scenery and a helpful explanation of the war boys’ devotion to their tyrannical leader and his cause. The series continues to be a cult classic not only because of its apocalyptic sci-fi scenario and delightfully campy aesthetics, but also because the series re-appropriates two strong generic traditions, the western and the road movie, and redeploys them to create an environmentally catastrophic vision of the future that we—and our shortsighted ideologies—could create.

[i] Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985) took an unfortunate turn off the road, setting most of its story in settlements, and only resumes the compelling energy of the series during the final chase sequence.

[ii] For an in-depth analysis of the road movie and its evolution over time, see David Laderman’s Driving Visions (Austin: U of Texas P, 2002) and Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, The Road Movie Book (New York: Routledge UP, 1997).

[iii] Certainly, other road films, notably Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Paris, Texas (1984), portray the road as lacking hope, rather than promising it, but Miller’s series contains more specific, contemporary political allusions.

[iv] Anthony Lane, “High Gear: Mad Max: Fury Road,” The New Yorker, May 25, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane

So why are these elements ignored in trade news and minimized in promotional materials? Have the press and industry failed to recognize this as a trend or are they deliberately downplaying this widespread development across the TV landscape? With religion on fictional television growing, why is it so difficult for press and PR to acknowledge this shift within the industry?

We regularly hear talk of television’s greater edginess—its willingness to engage with more explicit language, sexuality, and violence. Yet when it comes to religion, things get more complicated. Since the neo-network era, “edge” has been a leading logic of the television industry: a way to gain the attention of desirable, affluent, niche audiences who are thought to seek programs distinctive in some way from the mediocre mainstream. Since the 1980s, the concept of “edgy” has found many additional markers for distinction. From NYPD Blue’s notable nudity and curse words to South Park’s free-for-all offensiveness, the taboos of language, representations, violence, and sexuality have faded. Religion, however, remained a vagary. When religion appeared, it was in general, sanitized terms or single-episode sensational stories that nevertheless avoided faith-based specificity.

In 1990, Horace Newcomb described religion represented on television as “the deeply, powerfully embedded notions of the good that must come from . . . somewhere” but that avoided specifics of belief. Little changed from that description of how religion is featured on television until the mid-2000s, when Battlestar Galactica, Lost, and the long-arm of The Passion of the Christ’s success enabled a period of multiple attempts at religiously-themed television shows. At that moment, the press noticed the pattern: For instance, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter both ran articles examining the “hot topic” of religious content for television, putting shows like Wonderfalls, Joan of Arcadia, Miracles, and Revelations in relation to each other and wider industrial vicissitudes. However, aside from a few successful shows with multiple seasons, this mid-decade trend died, and so too did the industry’s willingness to discuss religious content as a programming trend. It’s unclear why the industry that was able to make these links chose to stop explicitly drawing these connections and preferring to ignore the trend, but the big gamble and big loss of Kings seems the turning point toward skittishness.

Significantly, whereas Deadline has no problem identifying new trends pertaining to romantic comedies, movie adaptations, and medical dramas—regardless of how many of these series get greenlit or survive for longer than a handful of episodes—few articles appear regarding the increasingly widespread presence of religious series across the television landscape. If such series are discussed, as in this TV Guide article, Biblical series are foregrounded while most science fiction series are left out. (Whither the Sleepy Hollow mention, TV Guide?)

Religion may be perceived as “edgy,” or at least risky, in a business sense in that it is cast as somewhat dangerous in an industrial context. Many industry workers don’t want to talk about it or deflect to bigger “spiritual/humanist” questions. Even if writers use Revelation in a specifically Protestant iteration as the key to a show’s ongoing mythology, they remain careful to couch it among other mythologies that appear once. But religion on TV is the wrong kind of edgy for how the shows, studios, and networks conceive of their target audience. As young Americans and wealthy Americans (as well as coastal Americans) are identified as more and more secular, spiritual, or non-religious by Pew research and through anecdotal encounters, religion—particularly Christianity, which is the main wellspring for this content—continues to be thought of increasingly as belonging to old, poor, Heartland Americans, (i.e., not the desired consuming audience for many of these shows). Moreover, appealing to such an audience is cast in opposition to “edge.” Thus, the industry straddles a fine “edge”: On the one hand, networks use Biblical adaptations to get the ratings of Heartland viewers, on the other hand, they make the case to advertisers that the “right” kind of audience can be attracted to view their other shows by downplaying the religious elements while maintaining they won’t alienate viewers.

In this recent spate of shows, the only notable example of a series that is exploiting its religious content to foreground its edgy bona fides is on Amazon. Continuing to cast itself as the place to go for television that could not appear anywhere else, Amazon Studios picked up Hand of God during its August 2014 pilot season. The series wins at edgy bingo: the main plot of the pilot features a corrupt judge who becomes born-again Christian following the brutal beating of his son and the rape of his daughter-in-law by an assailant that he then discovers via “visions” from God. The judge then conscripts a violent disciple to kill in the name of God. The characters curse freely, the violence is graphic, and drug use is commonplace. Yet it is the exploration of corruption in religion that sets this show apart from others in this recent trend. In bucking the industry’s insistence of downplaying religion as a key narrative element, Hand of God found the “edge” in religion. But you wouldn’t know it from trade press coverage of it.

Director Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar opens with a poignant pan across a bookshelf, showing heavy dust falling atop a toy NASA spaceshuttle, symbolic of the near-future world of the film, where climate change has wrought havoc and people have turned their backs on science. “It’s like we’ve forgotten who we are: explorers, pioneers; not caretakers,” pilot-turned-farmer protagonist Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) laments. “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

Perhaps because of this quite clear dialogue with contemporary politics, many critics have attacked Interstellar’s scientific credibility. Nolan has also weighed into this debate, largely defending his science, and scientific advisor Kip Thorne. But picking the film apart for its lack of fidelity to quantum theory or astrophysics is doing the experience of Interstellar a great injustice.

The film is far from perfect. For such a gifted visual storyteller, Nolan frustrates as he insists on joining the dots with unnecessarily clunky dialogue. For all the visual nods to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Nolan refuses to follow Kubrick’s lead and let the cinematography or visual effects speak for themselves. And there’s something about a misunderstood heroic white man from Middle America saving the human race that looks all too familiar.

But Interstellar’s real value is as an exploration of memory, of hope, and of the power of dreaming of a better tomorrow for our kids.

Let’s take the none-too-subtly named Dr Mann (Matt Damon), for example. Continually referred to as the best, brightest, and bravest humanity has to offer, his improbable appearance in the latter half of the film is one of the first truly hopeful moments, only for that to come dramatically crashing down. The fall of Mann provokes a rather chilling conclusion: it’s not just what’s on the inside, but fundamentally human sociality that keeps us who we are, or at least the version of ourselves compatible with contemporary ethics and values. Staring into the abyss long enough and it’s not the abyss looking back: it’s the realisation that extreme solitude and loneliness breaks even the best of us.

The question of what happens in the final moment of life refracts through the film, and it’s how this moment unfurls for Cooper that shifts the meaning of the film.

One interpretation is, of course, literal: that enabled by future-science so far removed from our understanding it’s incomprehensible, Cooper is able to communicate across the barriers of time and space to his now grown daughter and send her the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe, and save all of humanity. And in an improbable footnote, he also somehow finds his way back to her.

Alternatively, if we can give Nolan’s science the benefit of the doubt long enough to get Cooper into the black hole, then that entire final sequence may just be the adrenalin induced final spark of human imagination before it ceases to be. For a film about the power of imagination, what more satisfying reading can there be than the idea that we get to experience futures where we resolve the differences we’ve had with our children, and along the way play a central role in saving everyone?

Science fiction author Arthur C Clarke once noted that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”; the magic in Nolan’s film is not science, it’s the imagination.

One of the most heartbreaking early scenes comes as Cooper is chastised by schoolteachers because his daughter, Murphy (Mackenzie Foy), refuses to accept their ‘updated’ textbooks which explain that the Apollo missions were faked, to trick the USSR into a fatally bankrupting space race. As someone who dreamt of going to the moon, and beyond, as a child, Nolan’s film feels like a total immersion in that exact youthful sense of wonder. A sense of wonder a new generation might just be sharing as they watch the Philae lander touch down on a comet hurtling through space.

Interstellar’s insistence on looking upward, to the stars, to the future, beyond the confines of what we concretely know: this makes the film more than worth your time.

In the final sequence, Cooper awakens in Cooper Station, and presumes it’s named after him. It’s not. It’s named after his daughter, Murphy Cooper. Murphy and Brand (Anne Hathaway), the daughters of the supposed great men, are the real heroes of the film. They make the scientific data work, and they save humanity; it’s their dreams which ensure our future. Or, at least, that’s the hope.

Smith argues that “Hell On Ice” stands out as a proto-environmental critique. It contemplates the catastrophic collapse of human society, not unlike the Mercury Theatre’s famous “War of the Worlds.” But whereas the “War of the Worlds” broadcast was a science fiction thriller that tapped into anxiety about the looming war in Europe, the “Hell On Ice” show (which aired three weeks earlier) used historical fiction to dramatize the error of human attempts to master the globe. Smith writes, “That makes it perhaps the best companion to ‘War of the Worlds,’ a play in which the thwarted invader is no alien – it’s us. Listening to the play today, ‘Hell on Ice’ is not only a masterpiece of audio theater (among fans, the most beloved of all Welles’s radio works) but a powerful ‘eco-sonic’ critique as well.”

Click here to read Jacob Smith’s full post over on Sounding Out!.

This post is the eighth in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Stay tuned for Antenna’s next installment on Monday, December 16th.

Miss any of the previous posts in the series? Click here for links to all of the earlier entries.

“Parable” responds to some foundational texts of feminist science fiction book fandom, Octavia Butler‘s 1990s dystopian novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). Butler’s novels have never been adapted for the screen, but Chaila didn’t let that stop her. In the absence of a media source other than the print and cover art of the books themselves, Chaila pulled together an intertextual archive from the world around her to craft an adaptation of her own.

We talk about transmedia as a way that media producers can distribute story, character, and worldbuilding across multiple platforms. To make her vid, Chaila engaged in a different kind of transmedia storytelling: one that combines fannish appreciation, critical media analysis, and grassroots production. She found the places and platforms in which stories like the Parable novels were being told, and used Butler’s ideas as a lens through which to gather diverse representations from fiction and reality into a story that articulates lived and imagined dystopias together.

In 1993, shortly after the LA riots, Butler wrote about a Los Angeles splintered between walled communities and the desperate poor, with no state services to rely on and scarce food and water. Amid chaos and violence, iconic protagonist Lauren Olamina flees her home, builds a new one, and very carefully and consciously starts a religion––Earthseed––aimed at gathering people together around the goal of sending humans to the stars. Some elements of the story were easier to find than others. Images of urban disintegration and environmental collapse are easy to locate; a black woman’s coming of age at the heart of them, less so. Chaila found her Lauren in Patricia McKenzie’s role as Reena from the 2005 TV show Charlie Jade, one of many easily-forgotten shows set after the collapse of technological society. As Liz Henry remarked at a different WisCon panel, the stories that speculative fiction has been telling this decade have been characterized by the “mid-apocalypse”; the world is always ending, and stories about how people might learn to live in the ruins are thick on the ground.

“Parable” brings together at least three genres of online video: book trailers, vidding, and political remix. Making videos for books is not a new idea; book trailers have been around for a while. But book trailers, whether for original or fan fiction, function as advertisements to encourage readers to seek out the text. “Parable” is best appreciated if you’ve already read the Parables. Though she was inspired by book trailers, in making “Parable” Chaila was vidding. She sets visual material to a song in order to make an interpretation, craft an argument. WisCon gave her an audience who would both recognize the story she was adapting for the screen and have the vidding literacy to appreciate the interpretations she is making.

The kind of interpetation Chaila makes––of Butler’s story in the light of media sources, and of media sources in the light of Butler––brings “Parable” into the territory of political remix video’s activist interventions into media representation and current events. Chaila has remarked that the footage she found hardest to find was that of the multi-ethnic but largely non-white community Lauren builds. Yet imagery of torture––which takes place in the books but is only briefly described––was far easier to come by. Her search underlines at least one of the reasons why the vivid, visual, and painfully current narrative of Butler’s Parables has never been brought to the screen: the overwhelming whiteness of popular media, particularly science fiction, and the limited range of roles available for actors of color.

Yet the vid’s political intervention does not only come from its weaving of TV and film’s post-apocalyptic sci fi tropes with the constructed story of a rare black woman protagonist. Many visuals Chaila uses are not fiction but news, drawing parallels between Butler’s imagined twenty-first century and the real one. In Parable of the Talents, a far-right organization named Christian America comes to power and persecutes the fledgling Earthseed community for its political and alleged sexual deviance. Chaila links this to Rick Perry and Rick Santorum’s fulminations from political pulpits in 2011, suggesting that these are the figures who could make the real 2020s similar to Lauren’s fictional experiences if we do not learn from her example and try to make things change. An audience member at WisCon wondered whether these clip choices were too specific, whether they would date the vid. Yet these are the moments in the vid that pull us out of the spell its seamless production casts, that make us think not only about the impressive adaptation Chaila has crafted but about the disturbing realities that surround us. Perry and Santorum may or may not be recognizable names in a couple of years, but their iconic similarity to fictional dystopia insists that their mode of politics is not a flash in the pan.

For Octavia Butler fans, the tag line for “Parable” neatly condenses how the vid uses the future of the past to talk about the present: In July 2012, Lauren Olamina will turn three. In vidding novels 19 and 15 years old, Chaila turns our gaze on their prescience. Not only in relationship to apocalyptic fictional tropes, but to the real world and real politics as well.

On the other hand, Battlestar Galactica was over, there was no new Trek on the horizon (What rebooted Star Trek movie?  J.J. Abrams, you are dead to me!), and I hadn’t started watching the new Dr. Who yet.  Maybe it was time to leave the safe haven of sci-fi niche nerdom and dip my toe into a mass program.  BBT had just won a People’s Choice award.  Could all the people be wrong all the time?  I’d give it a chance.  I kept watching and was soon delighted to see the boys play Klingon Boggle, order the time machine from The Time Machine on eBay, and discuss “the problem with teleportation.”  In one episode, there was a double-cameo:  Summer Glau and Nobel Prize winning physicist George Smoot.  Whammo!  This show was nerdtastic.  I even accidentally spotted a spoiler from season 3: Will Wheaton would emerge as Sheldon’s nemesis!  Though touted as “from the creator of Two and a Half Men [Chuck Lorre],” this show was not letting me down, and it didn’t really seem so “mass” after all.  This was a conventionally shot and structured (A-story, B-story, tidy resolutions, etc.) show that was apparently pitched to people who usually gravitate to the Sci-Fi Channel. (What the hell does “SyFy” mean?  SyFy, you are dead to me!)  Except then the show did let me down.

I should back up.  Season 1 was a slow build.  I smiled a lot, but rarely laughed aloud, and the premise that Leonard was in love with the hot girl living in the apartment across the hallway was pretty thin.  Hot girl’s lines were mostly limited to “huh?”  Horny friend Howard’s attempts to score by letting chicks drive the Mars Rover via remote control were maybe a little funny, but not really.  Then, season two turned hilarious.  The writing got tighter, hot girl Penny managed more resourceful retorts, peripheral characters at the comic book shop emerged (soft-spoken Stuart, non-speaking Captain Sweatpants), and sci-fi references got funnier and funnier.  Leonard Nimoy came up a lot.

Then, season 3.  Penny and Leonard become a couple, but Penny doesn’t even know who Stan Lee and Adam West are.  Sheldon is perplexed and asks, “what do you talk about after coitus?”  It’s a good question.  And what about before coitus?  The most distressing moment comes when Leonard and Penny have a fight because she believes in psychics, and he says it’s all hokum.  Leonard asks Howard how he can stay with someone whose beliefs violate all that he stands for.  Howard says he can stand by his principles and break up, but his new girlfriend will be . . . his hand.  Ow.  So Leonard stays with Penny.

We soon learn that Penny doesn’t even count Klingon as a legitimate foreign language.  To top it all off, Will Wheaton’s acting has not only not improved since his ST:TNG days, it has gotten worse.  But the biggest problem is that by the end of season 3 it is clear that the show sees women strictly as sex objects.  And I use this dated language quite deliberately.  When a show gets this misogynist, it’s time to whip out the Women’s Lib. The Sheldon character remains brilliantly conceived and executed, with not a little queer subtext, but, still, this really is a show “from the creator of Two and a Half Men.”

I thought BBT was a niche show disguised as a mass show, but it was just the reverse, and I do think this raises several interesting questions.  As media scholars, we often seize upon “complex” dramas, taking them as emblematic of post-network possibilities, but what role will the three-camera sitcom—rumors of the death of which have clearly been exaggerated—play in the post-network era?  Why did CBS create a show that pretended to target a geek demographic, when it was really looking for lads all along?  Is BBT laughing with or at nerds?  I think it’s trying to have its cake and eat it too.  And, finally, is it really beyond the networks’ ken to imagine a funny show about nerds in which women are not short-changed?  If progressive (or even slightly interesting) gender politics are only viable in the world of niche programming, and if the decidedly niche Comedy Channel is determined to pitch its programming to young males, where does this leave women in TV comedies?  Screw TV.  I’m rooting for Felicia Day, on the Internet.  While The Guild is not Trek-centric, I suspect that all the central characters on the show, male and female, would be comfortable with the notion that Klingon is a legitimate foreign language.  Kaplah!