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

It has been the most significant moment in Australian media policy since the early 1990s, when the Broadcasting Services Act and the Telecommunications Act, as well as the Classification Act, were legislated. While these were major initiatives at the time, they were pre-Internet forms of media law that did not anticipate the tsunami of change associated with digitalization, convergence and the globalization of media content.

While other countries are considering changes to adapt their media laws for convergence, Australia has been a world leader in commissioning such major studies that address these challenges head on. A common theme of these reports is that incremental change and policy “muddling through” are no longer sufficient.

In particular, media regulation continues to be primarily based upon the platform of delivery (print, radio, television, telephony, the Internet), whereas media convergence has dislodged the technological bases that tied content to platforms. The Australian Communications and Media Authority has referred to a resulting series of “broken concepts”, ranging from the truly anachronistic, such as the ban on live hypnosis on television, to those which addressed a once-important concept that has been overwhelmed by new developments, such as the separation of carriage and content.

The Convergence Review identified three areas where continued government intervention is justified. First, there is the need to maintain a degree of diversity in media ownership and control. Second, there is the question of content standards, both in terms of news standards and classification of media content in line with community standards. Finally, there are expectations that Australians have around the continued availability of locally produced content that is broadly reflective of Australian culture, identity and diversity.

The question of who should be regulated has become much more complex in a convergent media environment. In discussions of media influence, a distinction is commonly made between “big media” on the one hand who should be regulated more – the name “Rupert Murdoch” will often appear at this juncture – and the Internet on the other, which should not be regulated at all.

But “the Internet” is as much The Guardian Online, BBC World or CNN.com as it is blogging, citizen journalism, or online mash-ups. The commercial mass media and non-commercial user-created content co-exist in the online digital space, so questions of media influence return in a different form.

The Convergence Review sought to address that question of when a media organization becomes “big”—and hence appropriately subject to regulations based on its potential for influence—with the concept of a “Content Service Enterprise” (CSE). The Review defined a CSE as a media content provider that has over 500,000 Australian users per month, and $50m per annum of revenues from Australian-sourced professional content. Interestingly, the 15 companies that met these guidelines are all conventional media businesses, but the CSE label could in principle be extended to companies such as Google and Apple.

If the CSE concept were extended to global media companies, the question would arise of Australian jurisdictional authority over these businesses. At present, there is a regulatory stand-off, but it may be that future jurisdictional authority will be shared and brokered between Australian agencies and other authorities. In the ALRC Review, this was referred to as deeming, where the classifications given to media content by online “stores” such as Apple ITunes or the Google Android platform could be recognized under Australian media law, subject to approval by the Australian regulators.

Much attention has been given to the question of “who regulates”. One of the difficulties with these discussions is that we think of regulation in terms of how much, rather than in terms of the relationship between its instruments and its outcomes. One message that came through from the ALRC Review was that Australians were less concerned with who classified different media than with the question of trusting those doing it to have an appropriate professional distance from corporate self-interest.

Another difficulty is that convergent media policy brings together different organizational cultures and traditions of regulation. Whereas it is still pretty clear who constitutes the television industry or the newspaper industry, it is less clear what constitutes the Internet, digital content or social media industries.

Meeting with Apple, Google, Facebook or Microsoft introduces you to very different corporate entities, with very different organizational cultures, business models, and relationships to their consumers. Establishing a new regulatory framework for convergent media raises not only the challenges of established media operating across different platforms, but the ever-growing fluidity attached to the concept of “media” itself.

For the first ten years or so of television in Australia, from the first broadcast on September 16, 1956, most major cities in Australia had two commercial television stations Channels 7 and 10 as well Channel 2, the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s (now Corporation), somewhat akin to a local version of the BBC, operating on the VHF band. In the mid 1960s an additional VHF station bearing the call sign of 10 or 0 opened in most of the major cities. In 1979 the government added a new television station SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) operating on the UHF and VHF bands. SBS catered to the 20% or so of Australians who spoke a language other than English at home. With the addition of Imparja Television, a remote area service controlled and owned by Aboriginal Australians, and some other stations in smaller cities, these city based stations, now consolidated as networks, are the main players in free to air television in Australia. Cable television did not commence in Australia until the mid 1990s.

In 2001, digital television was launched in Australia. The digital spectrum carries a High Definition format service (1080i) and as well as another formats such as 576i and 720p. After initially limiting new digital channels to the ABC and SBS the three commercial networks were allowed extra channels. Uptake was slow, but between 2007 and 2010 the number of households making the switch to digital rose from 28% to 77% of the population and networks are scheduled to abandon analogue transmissions on the VHF and UHF spectrums by 2013. Each of the commercial networks and SBS has two additional digital channels and the ABC has three more channels.

Online these free to air services are promoted on the http://www.freeview.com.au website. In addition to the commercial channels, both the ABC and SBS participate in this campaign. The ABC has no advertising unless one counts the shrilling of their in house products. SBS has some advertising but only in the breaks between shows. In the space of two years, Australians in the major cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth have gone from five to sixteen free-to-air channels.

With all these channels and with the competition of cable television, in a national market of 22 million people, advertising dollars might be a bit thin on the ground, which helps explain the need to sell free tv to viewers. But just what are the advantages of all these new channels?

Around the time I was in Australia, the Seven Network was launching its new digital channel 7mate. According to my brother-in-law the Seven Network has carved out a niche with a female audience and 7mate attempts to cater to a more male audience. If you happen to be in Melbourne on December 18, 2010, you can watch Christmas Carols on Channel 7 from 8.30pm to 11pm or on 7mate Mega Disasters, which is preceded by Air Crash Investigation and followed by Stewardess School lending some symmetry to the evening. Other fare on 7mate includes Magnum, PI, The Rockford Files, and Knight Rider. Re-runs of old shows does not differ too much from some cable channels and in many ways these digital channels replicate cable’s offerings. For instance, over at the Ten Network one of their additional digital channels, One HD, is an all sports channel.

The threat these digital channels pose to the profitability of cable television is demonstrated by fourth generation media magnate James Packer’s purchase of a hefty chunk of shares in the Ten Network. His apparent intention is to switch the One HD channel from sport to carrying Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News channel, which would halt the competition that One HD poses to Packer and Murdoch’s sports channels on cable operator Foxtel.

Advertising dollars go where the viewers are and “free” tv needs those viewers for their business. New technology and the associated lower costs for delivering channels has allowed free-to-air to compete with cable for these dollars.

The two leaders, Prime Minister Julia Gillard (Labor) and challenger Tony Abbott (Liberal), both of whom recently toppled their predecessors in party-room coups, are now frantically searching for their own identity. And that’s what the election itself is increasingly about. Even though both have substantial track records as ministers, they are untried as national leaders. The real conundrum of the campaign – for them, if not for voters – is: Who the heck are these people?

left: the real Kevin Rudd (former PM) -- minus gall bladder -- on the comeback trail; right: the "real Gillard" has been unleashed. So who has been running the campaign up to now? (graphic: Liam Phillips)

Is their identity authentic (“real”) or produced by campaign strategists (“fake”)? Can voters trust what they see? The phrase of the week has been: “Will the real [insert name of opponent] stand up?” There has been persistent doubt about whether Tony Abbott is real. Now Julia Gillard has personally unleashed her own real self, in an attempt to halt a catastrophic slide in the polls. But was the “real Julia” a campaign ploy?

If the prospective Prime Ministers don’t know who they are, there are plenty of old ones around to teach them. Ousted PM Kevin Rudd popped up (after his understandably bilious gall bladder was removed at the weekend), as did former PMs John Howard, Paul Keating, Bob Hawke and Malcolm Fraser, topped by former Labor leader (never PM) Mark Latham, posing as a 60 Minutes “reporter.” All of them seemed to do most damage to their own side of politics, some willfully.

Former Labor leader Mark Latham confronts Gillard during a street walk (source: AAP)

Tony Abbott likened the Labor Party to a soap opera. One paper likened the entire spectacle to Days of Our Lives.  The Liberals tried to cash in, calling for “grown-up government,” as if they weren’t part of what one of them dubbed the “Vain and Ruthless” script. Said Gillard: “I’m the Prime Minister of this country, I’m not a human interest story.” Since when were these different things? Maybe it’s a generational divide, but if so the usual polarities are inverted. Middle-aged politicians are having adolescent agonies, trying out different personae and fixating on gender issues (watch ‘The Sunday papers’ here).

Meanwhile the kids are becoming more alert to the risks involved in appearing in public with more than one identity: “You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg caused blogosphere consternation for saying this – but wannabe PMs might want to think it through.

So is there anyone left in Australia who harbours political ambitions, personal integrity, a strong stance on environmental issues, and a unified and universal identity?

Crikey, yes! There’s Bindi Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter heiress, wildlife crusader and media celebrity, who’s got her own TV show (Bindi the Jungle Girl), fitness video, Bindi Wear clothing and a Hollywood movie (Free Willy #4 with Beau Bridges), which was reviewed on IMDb thus: “Australia should consider Bindi Irwin to be a national treasure.”

What Americans think Australians look like (photo: Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images AsiaPac)

Although she’s the star of a magazine called Crikey, Bindi doesn’t – yet – own the eponymous website Crikey.com, whose mission for its brand of independent journalism is: “to bring its readers the inside word on what’s really going on in politics, government, media, business, the arts, sport and other aspects of public life in Australia. Crikey reveals how the powerful operate behind the scenes, and it tackles the stories insiders are talking about but other media can’t or won’t cover.”

Bindi’s Crikey! sticks close to the Irwin family business and wildlife appreciation, but this doesn’t mean she is uninterested in politics. She’s given us all fair warning. Months ago, aged 11, she made her announcement where it matters, in the 2m-circulation Australian Women’s Weekly: “I really am about making the world a better place. And, who knows, you may one day see me as prime minister or president.” American readers may wish to note that she leaves open the question of whether to rule Dad’s Australia (Prime Minister), or Mum’s USA (President) – making what could be called ‘Obama’s choice’ about nationality.

Either way, she repeated her ambition at her 12th birthday bash at Australia Zoo (of which she is heiress) on July 24: “As kids we are the next voters, the next decision makers and the next generation making a difference on our planet.” The pollies (that’s politicians, not parrots) have nothing to fear until at least 2016, when Bindi is old enough to vote and to take office. By that time we might look forward to “grown-up government” at last.

right: looking forward to grown-up government: the hopeful candidate celebrates her 12th birthday

Down under, well beneath the consciousness of the wider world, the 2010 Australian Federal election has an unreal, dreamlike air. We’re not talking Aboriginal Dreamtime here; we’re witnessing a new creation myth.

In your dreams: This is how we do politics in Australia. Prime Minister Julia Gillard (Photography by James Cant. Styling by Stav Hortis).

Julia Gillard is Australia’s first woman Prime Minister. She was installed barely a month before calling the election, deposing predecessor Kevin Rudd in a ruthless poll-driven coup on June 24, reducing “Kevin07” overnight from rooster to feather duster. According to the local media, the real interest in all this is that Gillard is also a “ranga” (redhead, as in orangutan), an atheist, childless and never-married, and the first Welsh-born PM anywhere.

All these weird factoids focused on Gillard’s past. She wanted to focus on the future. Not having a prime-ministerial track record to run on, apart from the back-stabbing, she used the Inception method. First, she bored us all to sleep. Then, she tried to implant a message in our subconscious. When she announced the election on July 17 she used the campaign slogan “Moving Forward” 24 times in five minutes.

A media savvy public dismissed the over-mediated message out of hand. It was mocked with the inevitable “Julia Gillard’s Moving Forward Dance Remix.” The Daily Telegraph analysed 50,000 comments from online platforms: “A massive 73 per cent of comments made across social media sites made negative comments about Ms Gillard’s Moving Forward slogan – or MoFo as the Twitterati have cynically branded it.”

Tony Abbott, leader of the Liberal-National Coalition opposition

After a week of phoney-war campaigning, the leaders of the two major parties – Labor Gillard and conservative rival Tony Abbott – met for their first and only TV debate. Did that move Australians forward? Nope; the winners of the debate were: #1, the worm or “polliegraph,” a media-invented device for recording – and influencing – viewers’ preferences on-screen; and #2, earlobes (Gillard’s proved to be pendulous). Oh, and the season finale of Masterchef, whose timeslot the debate wisely vacated.

The worm turns; the earlobes emerge.

The public took more notice of media about the election than the election itself. The ABC (our PSB “national broadcaster,” averaging about a 15% audience share, known to all as Auntie) wiped the floor with the commercial networks by not taking it seriously. Biggest winner was Gruen Nation, an election-special version of a regular comedy panel show about advertising, which topped the ratings that day (33.2 % share), followed by the return of comedy pranksters The Chaser with their own election special, Yes We Canberra! with fewer viewers but a whopping 42% share in its timeslot.

Gruen Nation advertises itself as “the national bullshit detector”: “An election campaign is about show business. But while everyone else will be busy discussing the business, at GRUEN NATION we’re only interested in the show.” Even the normally ABC-baiting Murdoch papers were impressed: “While the debate was widely panned by viewers for its lack of passion, Gruen’s dissection of political advertising and spin was a welcome relief.”

Attentive readers of another Murdoch paper would know that all this is an example of what I’ve called “silly citizenship,” in a chapter in Stuart Allen’s recent Rethinking Communication. Or, as Emma Tom put it in The Australian:

Another feverish––and fascinating––writer in this area is Queensland academic John Hartley… “In mainstream media the rise of satire TV, notably The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, has propelled comedy, send-ups and spoofs to the centre of the political process,” Hartley writes. “Comedy is becoming a more trusted source of political information than partisan commentators in mainstream news … Comedy is the go-to source for civic understanding”. (‘First the Porn, then the Culture.’ 10 July 2010)

The unruly blue-collar unions took note, running spoof election ads on YouTube, supporting the mythical “Fair Go for Billionaires” ticket.

"I wouldn’t mind going out to dinner with her!"

Something I had not foreseen was the importance of fantasy fashion as a “trusted source of political information.” But, in the otherwise “disastrous” second campaign week: “Gillard won big with a 13-page cover spread in the widely-read Women’s Weekly, a highly sympathetic piece that penetrated well to an audience well beyond the headlines that were otherwise plaguing her” (New Zealand Herald, 31 July 2010). These pictures may or may not win her the election, but they are certainly having an impact on the heart-rate of her opponents. The maverick spokesman of the National Party, Sen. Barnaby Joyce, liked what he saw – while doubting its reality:

I don’t know who she is, but I wouldn’t mind going out to dinner with her! … I’ve got no problem with people doing themselves up, but some of those photos it’s just, I don’t know, it’s not the same lady I get in the lift with.

There are still three weeks to go to polling day on August 21. Anything might happen to turn this Australian dream into the usual nightmare.  So, as Australia dozes fitfully under the spectre of anti-immigration, climate-sceptic, religious-right populism (and that’s just the Labor Party), the question remains: is there someone who will stand up for the real issues?

Meanwhile – here’s a reality check: just watch out for the spin.

Warner Bros. Pictures