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

Post by Ernest Mathijs, University of British Columbia

Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015) never stops. As befits an action film, it has a kinetic drive, fast momentum, frenetic movement, high horizontal speed, and moves in a singular direction: straight, in every sense of the word. A simple run from point A to point B and back, non-ironic, not overly serious or complicated, its action solidly centered in the frame, and its pace accelerated to an average of 22.5 cuts per minute (with nary a shot at a regular 24 frames-per-second), Fury Road razes everything in its path–checkpoints, landmarks, or fellow travelers. In fact, Fury Road is so obsessed with linear directions that the rag tag gang of (mostly) women that is escaping the Citadel to look for the Green Place, pass right by it, then realize their supposed dream place is a dead swamp and decide to return, with the same breakneck velocity and via the same route, to their point of departure: the Citadel–back to where they came from, to seek vindication.

As straight as Fury Road‘s narrative is, so swerving are its meanings or themes. Yet, here too, the film bulldozes through whirlwinds of implications the same way Max (Tom Hardy) and Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) crash across the flat, desolate wasteland–with a certain disregard for the finer points of debate or thoughtfulness, and without really hooking onto one particular ideology or philosophy. In doing so, I argue, Fury Road offers, like so much of cult cinema, safe transgressions–as if passing by a car crash site with one eye on the wheel and one on the wreckage. In this short essay I hope to show that Fury Road‘s solid credentials as a cult film, which it already seems to acquire the following of even within the first few months of its release, may well help audiences reach insights more radical or revolutionary than what regular normative and conformist film fare prompt them to. But, those same cult credentials also prevent Fury Road from being recruited as a progressive film and simultaneously save it from being recuperated as only a reactionary, mindless blockbuster.

The term “safe transgression” was coined by Barry Keith Grant (1991). In a seminal essay on the ideological function of cult movies, Grant argued that many cult films appeared to promise revolutionary ideals or instigations, prodding viewers to not only accept the revelations and expositions they proposed (capitalism kills you, gender fluidity is liberating, the world is going to hell, …) but also act upon them and do something about it. Yet, Grant noticed, such actions rarely occurred. Viewers did not start a revolution after seeing Night of the Living Dead, El Topo, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or Mad Max, a film he used as a recurrent example. “Cult films encourage viewers not to take very seriously the threat of the Other,” concludes Grant (135).

At first glance, this conflicts with the debate surrounding Fury Road, which is typified by a high degree of action- and involvement-driven words. Angry initial reactions and calls for a boycott came from so-called men’s rights activists (MRA), self-proclaimed keepers of the flame of masculinity as represented in, amongst others, action films, because there wasn’t enough “guy stuff” in the film have been followed by furious discussion pieces that argue Fury Road is a powerful feminist intervention in genre film and/or a manifesto for radical egalitarianism, or a Marxist exposure of the superstructure of our society’s addiction to gasoline (or guzzoline, to use Fury Road‘s vocabulary), and that, if one adds just a little dose of provocation to these arguments (a little “spray,” to speak with the film’s lexicon of liquids), Fury Road is a call to arms: for equality, women’s lib, or against homosexuality. And you know what? I do think the film is actually all of these, and then some. But also, to paraphrase masculine punk rock band Anti-Nowhere League, not known for their feminist stance: “so what?”

Why “so what”? Because there are so many little indicators that Fury Road is riding the road Grant outlined, of claiming a warrior purpose by transgressing society’s ideology through harsh imagery and language (more imagery than language in this dialogue-sparse film) of that ideology’s violent and arbitrary power base, all the while undermining that purpose, or at least offering enough moments of ambiguity, that any straightforward interpretation becomes “just talk,” one of many possible perspectives that it might as well not be purposeful at all, but rhetoric, circumstance, or incidence, one of dozens of reading protocols.

These indicators and ambiguities are perhaps best encapsulated by the double-necked, heavily adorned electric glam guitar-annex-flamethrower, catapulting itself at the viewer at the close of the film. Even if we accept that the poor guy playing the guitar during the desert chases, tied to a wall of amps, dressed in a red suit (dare we describe it as flaming red?) with a brown leather mask, was a slave, forced to riff a soundtrack to Immortan Joe’s (Hugh Keays-Byrne) army as they battle Furiosa and Max and company, the visual is so coded with hyperbole and camp sensitivity, so easily linked into a convoy of references from Phantom of the Paradise to This Is Spinal Tap, that it layers the scene so thickly it robs it from any “true” transgressive functions–if there were any.

Other examples abound. To be clear, we are not talking here about the extravagant wardrobe, the masks, the overly comic-y names (Vuvalini, Rictus Erectus), or the cars that are a mockery of “muscle cars.” All of these can be seen as fitting a “message” or “function.” Less easily tied into straightjacketed understandings, and therefore working against them, and offering safe transgression instead, is, for instance, the exploitation imagery of the slave wives Furiosa is helping escape. Clad in torn, revealing, white loincloth and tops, the film presents them equally as empowered (warrior women) and exploited (women in prison, to link it to one exploitation genre). But in the strings of references they conjure they are much more: Emmanuelle as much as Khaleesi, but also, with a slightly different looking chastity belt, Ursula Andress’ Honey Rider from Dr. No–as much a feminist provocation to as a satisfaction of patriarchal oppression, and then some.

Or consider the loose use of freakery and disability, notably present with both the “good” and “bad” sides in the story, such as the shot that lingers just a second too long on a legless man to not see the wink to El Topo or Freaks; or the use of programmed “disgusting” moments, such as Nux (Nicholas Hoult) eating a bug (Tom Waits, anyone?). Honestly, when I saw the first chainsaw appear in Fury Road, I laughed out loud. As Mark Kermode (1997) explained, ever since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and definitely since Evil Dead, Motel Hell, American Psycho and–why not–Sharknado, one cannot just produce a chainsaw on screen anymore without knowing the viewer is likely to click into an endless rapids of connections, some trivial, some not. Such moments of surplus meaning take away any transgressive power the film might otherwise have. Too bad there wasn’t a rabbit–though Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior has one.

Most of the commentators mentioned earlier in this essay refer to symbols, such as the fluids gasoline and breast milk (the first themed masculine, the second feminine), as support for Fury Road‘s aims as a political film without taking into account an entire body of knowledge–knowledge that viewers possess readily–about the representations of bodily fluids (yes, gas is turned into a bodily fluid here more than once) as “safe-transgressive” props in cult cinema. Fury Road is cult-by-numbers, and therefore one doesn’t have to do anything with the symbols and metaphors it puts forward–we see them, smile, add more, move on, and never stop.

Against orthodox thought on cult films, which holds a film has to earn its cult status through a lengthy reception trajectory, Fury Road is always already a cult film. It had an obvious built-in cult potential, as many fans and commenters have observed. And not just because its predecessors Mad Max and The Road Warrior had become cult films, but precisely because these films were accepted as cult much earlier on in their reception trajectory than other cults. When Danny Peary included Mad Max in his classic overview Cult Movies in 1981, the film was less than two years in circulation. And Peary readily added The Road Warrior in the third edition of Cult Movies. Not one other franchise was given such preferential treatment. With this legacy, Fury Road simply has to be considered within the framework of cult cinema. In that framework, safe transgression is an unstoppable operative, driving more unilateral interpretations off the road. That doesn’t mean we can’t like the film. I did, a lot. But to ignore safe transgression is to misunderstand Fury Road.

In “Riders on the Storm,” his recent column in the New York Times, well-known pundit David Brooks thundered into the fray with his own network-fueled assessment. Arguing that the “Internet is actually more ideologically integrated than old-fashioned forms of face-to-face association,” Brooks writes: “The Internet will not produce a cocooned public square, but a free-wheeling multilayered Mad Max public square.”

Holding up the post-apocalyptic gladiators of the classic action films as his ideal, Brooks is missing something important about everyday communication online. It’s not so much that individuals don’t engage different ideas, it’s that those engagements can be guided by values far more singular than the diversity they encounter. A bit like Mad Max’s 1973 Ford Falcon XB GT “Pursuit Special”, individuals navigating the Web driven by a high-octane ideology may be really good at one thing in particular: moving in a straight line.

To be fair, Brooks is actually basing his argument on new research coming out of the Business School at the University of Chicago. There, researchers Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro are presenting findings that partially contradict less optimistic assessments like that of Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Cass Sunstein. In his famous book, Republic.com 2.0, Sunstein found that individuals “filter” themselves into ideological enclaves online. Gentzkow and Shapiro’s research, on the other hand, has found that individuals do not avoid the blogs, forum posts, or video clips that contradict their ideological leanings. Instead, individuals both left and right of the political center look across the continuum at those with whom they disagree. These contradictory findings reveal, at the very least, that our understanding of the changes wrought by the Internet is more complex than the issue of who is accessing what. In fact, examples from my own research suggest that it is far more about how new ideas are understood and assessed than it is about which ideas are consumed.

Take for example, the case of fundamentalist Christians discussing their belief in the approaching Second Coming of Christ. While these individuals use the Internet to access a staggering amount of media, they do so with the primary purpose of finding information that suggests how soon (Not if!) the End Times will begin. Creating an enclave of individuals with whom they share a very a specific belief, they look toward outside news sources to provide the raw material for their internally directed ideological discussions.

Of course, you might say: “Yes! But these are just a few crackpots, and not everyday people!” In the research I present in my forthcoming book, Digital Jesus, I harness hundreds of examples that demonstrate that this could not be further from the truth. These individuals are by and large highly educated, upper-middle class, and deeply compassionate individuals who use the Internet to expand the diversity of their belief that the End is near even as they go about their otherwise quite average daily lives. The surprisingly mundane nature of these beliefs makes a bigger point.

To better understand how the Internet contributes to the personal values and political positions of real individuals out there in the world, researchers must get beyond mapping the links between blogs or tracking individual Web surfing habits. While new research challenges our simple notions of how to assess the relationship between what people think and what they do online, it also challenges us to engage in more qualitative and sustained ethnographic research with specific groups of individuals. It’s really only through such fully articulated examples that we can begin to develop a more realistic understanding not only of the diversity of ideas online, but of the diversity of ways individuals find, share, and assess ideas online. To get those examples,we have to get out of the research spaces of our own academic Thunderdomes and talk to people as they go about the daily routines that construct their virtual public squares.