The title card that opens the 1979 original. Mad Max places the action in the very near future, which is just “in a few years.” George Miller’s cult action thriller captured the nervousness of a world on the brink. The film depicts a not-quite-post-apocalyptic Australia, where gangs of high-octane lunatics cruise the roads on motorcycles and souped-up muscle cars, trying to outrun the last of the lead-legged cops: Mel Gibson’s Max Rockatanksy. Reviewing the film is exceptionally rewarding, and not just because of the courage, offbeat humor, and brio of Miller’s direction. It reflects some of the environmental stresses of a world of potentially dangerous fuel shortages, which threatened the entire oil and plastic framework of our modern world.
Miller remembers this time without particular fondness. He remembers that in the mid-1970s, all of Melbourne’s gas stations closed. Save for one. The atmosphere was bitter. The tension was thick. “It only took 10 days,” Miller says, “in this peaceful, benign city for the first shot to be fired. Someone got ahead of a long line, which stretched for city blocks, to get fuel. If that could happen in just 10 days, what would happen in 100 days?”
In five films, including the new Furiosa: A Mad Max SagaMiller’s franchise continues this decline. In the original image, the world is still quite intact. There are restaurants, hospitals and happy families. People even dress more or less normally. It may look a little like our world: one that is collapsing but has not yet completely collapsed. At the time of 1982 crazy max 2 (released in the US as The road warrior), any vestige of civilization has been destroyed by an accelerated period of resource war, nuclear conflict, and ecocide. Humanity survives in clans and traveling bands, dressed in feathers and dusty leathers.
In 1985 Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, civilization is based on barter for trade, collecting pig droppings for methane, and resolving conflicts through gladiatorial combat. In the hit 2015 sequel, Mad Max: Fury Road (which Rockatanksy recast, putting Tom Hardy in the lead), things were almost cartoonishly bad: fertile women were transported across vast wastelands in tanker trucks, access to fresh water was monopolized by tyrannical dictators in skeletal half-masks, and all of humanity seemed to exist in a state of frenzied, crazed madness. If that first film was a warning (against the fetish for speed and power, against the excessive extraction of precious riches from a planet that could hardly afford to give them up), the more recent films seem more topical than prophetic: sado-comic visions of our own lives. maddening and resource-deprived world.
Crazy Max The films are driven by a guiding incoherence. They offer a critique of car culture, resource scarcity, and the very things that may well lead our world toward its own demise, no matter how many electric vehicles we buy. The inhabitants of the desolate lands extol automobiles, motorcycles, engines and, especially, gasoline as fetish objects. But at the same time, the pleasures of movies are guilty of this same exaltation. The thrills are derived from high-octane racing, dangerous car maneuvers, body-shattering crashes and everything. engine roar of everything. They’re like war movies that ask us to thrill at the violence and audacity of combat, while muttering, “This is really horrible, you know?” There is no effort to reconceive a world condemned by its pathological obsession with machines that consume crude oil. Rather, the apocalyptic backdrop only provides fantasies of further decline.
Maybe it’s a mistake to take movies with characters called “Pig Killer,” “Rictus Erectus,” and “Pissboy” too seriously. But Mad Max The images underscore a deeper absurdity underpinning the genre of ostensibly environmentalist (or at least environmentally sympathetic) post-apocalyptic entertainments that are often called ecofictions, or cli-fi, for “climate fiction.” “The climate crisis and the grotesque climate inequalities are things we are really struggling to process,” says Hunter Vaughan, an environmental media expert at the University of Cambridge. “These films touch on our collective inability to adapt to this crisis.”
Vaughan is the author of Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: The Hidden Environmental Cost of Movies. His text analyzes the environmental impact of the film industry, from the beginnings of Hollywood to the present. Understanding that the industry is inherently (and devastatingly) dependent on resources, he has come to view the very idea of “environmental films” as a bit absurd. “Movies like Mad Max and Avatar” he explains, “they’re just doing what Hollywood has always done, which is relying on choreographed violence and the temptation of spectacle. But they can offset that to some extent by appearing to have some kind of environmental message.”
The whole notion of “cli-fi” as a genre suggests something a little sinister: that the well-intentioned parables of early climate fiction have now become subservient to the demands of the genre. Take Denis Villeneuve as an example. Dune photos. While perfectly competent as expensive pieces of blockbuster cinema, they barely engage with the novel’s ecological concerns. Author Frank Herbert was originally inspired by the historical ability of certain indigenous civilizations to live in harmony even in the most hostile environments, a noble idea that, in the Hollywood version, takes a backseat to confusing ideas about interstellar jihad. and the sheer pageantry of the proceedings. . In addition, Mad MaxThe original warning siren has been toned down a bit as the films developed their own generic language. The collapsing world is now just a canvas on which (tremendously entertaining) action scenes unfold.
