Mad Max and the Western

ABSTRACT

The Mad Max films were among the most successful exports of the Australian New Wave and had an enormous impact on shaping what the cinematic post-apocalyptic landscape looks like around the world. In line with Tom O'Regan's argument about Australian cinema's dialogue with Hollywood cinema, I argue that a productive way of looking at how the films create meaning is in the way they position themselves in relation to a genre that looks back in time rather than into future: the Western. Using as analytical frame the works of two key theorists of the Western, Will Wright and Richard Slotkin, I want to show that the films individually and collectively invert certain structural elements and developments of the genre. The first film subverts ideas of regenerative violence, questioning the justification and social value of self-defense and vigilantism. The second film echoes classical Western tropes regarding mobility and sedentary life, individual and community, savagery and civilization, garden and desert, which the third film further explores. In this way the films contribute to a dialogical identity of Australian cinematic identity in relation to the dominant Hollywood cinema as a critical interrogation of its national(ist) mythologies.

KEYWORDS:

• Mad Max
• George Miller
• Western

Introduction

According to Tom O’Regan (1996, 1), Australian cinema, like other Anglophone national cinemas, derives its contested identity from an inescapable relation with Hollywood cinema. This relation can take many different forms, encompassing efforts ‘to effectively compete with, imitate, oppose, complement and supplement the (dominant) international cinema’ (O’Regan 1996, 49). If imitation and opposition are the twin poles which productively coalesce in Australian cinema, then the realm of genre with its controlled relationship of repetition and difference constitutes this dynamic’s most notable incarnation. I want to demonstrate how the productive treatment of American genre formulas in the first three Mad Max films generates a particularly rewarding manifestation of an original, oppositional appropriation of an American genre by Australian cinema by subverting or in fact inverting its narrative principles and ideological implications, thereby embodying a national cultural/cinematic identity in opposition to US American culture/cinema exposing the deficiencies and hypocrisies of its dominant cousin.

The Mad Max films were among the most successful exports of the Australian New Wave in the 1980s 10BA era and had an enormous impact on shaping what the cinematic post-apocalyptic landscape looks like around the world, but a productive way of looking at how the films create meaning is in the way they position themselves in relation to a genre that looks back in time rather than into future: the Western. The Western is of course the American genre par excellence, serving as foundational myth for the US. Using as analytical frame the works of two key theorists of the Western, Will Wright and Richard Slotkin, I want to show that the films individually and collectively invert certain structural elements and developments of the genre.

On the surface my approach seems far from original, as the Mad Max films, particularly part 2, have been repeatedly related to the Western in scholarly commentary (see Rattigan 1991, Crago 2020, Chute 1982, Sharrett 1985), often by pointing to director George Miller’s own awareness of Joseph Campbell and his theories about universal mythological structures spanning many different cultures. In this view, Max, like other Western protagonists, is another ‘hero with a thousand faces’, and the films more general deconstructions of myths and their validities (Chute 1982, 27, 30; Sharrett 1985, 82; Rattigan 1991, xx; Gibson 1992, xx; Martin 2003, 39–40).

While these insights are valuable, I want to reverse the trajectory and regard the films not as general comments on myths and mythmaking but as specific reworkings of the American Western. With this approach I partake in a contested discourse over the status of the Western in Australian cinema history. Cooke argues that as ‘Australian history […] in its broad strokes – colonial invasion and settlement, suppression of Indigenous peoples, and the installation of the legal, technical, and urban infrastructure of modernity – bears striking resemblance to the history of the United States’ (2021, 219), there also exists in its cinema history an iconographic and narrative overlap, with bushranger and drover films in the early twentieth century standing at the beginning of a tradition that developed simultaneously with the American Western (2021, 220). Yet, as opposed to European Westerns, these films are not solely conceived as commentaries on the American genre, but rather as manifestations of locally grown representational conventions. The fact that Australian Westerns tend to eschew the more affirmative ideological leanings of its dominant cousin, being instead skeptical about the value of law and order, justified violence, individual heroics, and taming the land (2021, 226–227), can be regarded as resulting from the different ways in which Australian colonial history played out as much as it can be simultaneously seen as a critical counter-narrative to the American Western. Limbrick argues along the same lines by seeing both the American and the Australian incarnations of the Western as being part of a ‘settler colonial cinema’ which transcends national boundaries and which is in its specific national manifestations in constant dialogue with each other (2007, 69), and Hamilton agrees that the genre is a forum for ‘dialogue and cultural exchange between Australia and America’ (2017, 35). Hence Australian Westerns are as much about Australian history as they are about the American Western. In fact, by utilizing American Western conventions, they become statements about Australia.

While Cooke, Limbrick, and Hamilton remain rather abstract about how certain genre conventions circulate in both cultures and in various films, my argument is that by looking at the Mad Max films’ concrete treatment of American genre conventions, we can acknowledge the films as more definite commentaries on Australia as a failed counterpart to America, more specifically as revisions of white European Anglo colonial efforts (Morris 2006, 83). Weaver demonstrates how the cultural history of European conceptions of Australia is informed by the idea of a ‘shadow to more optimistic visions’ of European colonization (2011, 2). Where the US developed a mythology propagating European settlement as a success story with resonant concepts of Manifest Destiny, wilderness turned into a garden, and the frontier as a middle landscape of perfect and rejuvenating balance, Australia conceived itself as its uncanny counterpart, a ‘dead heart’ (Weaver 2011, 85), signifying an unconquerable obstacle to European settlement efforts and laying bare the moral deficiencies of the project as a whole, its failure not just on the level of accomplishment but on the level of righteousness. If the dominant narrative that celebrates Anglo settlements outside of Europe is the Western, then the Mad Max films are the Australian manifestation of its counter-narrative, not celebrating but denying the progress, indeed the validity of settlement and instead emphasizing regression, disintegration, disillusionment, exploitation, and corruption as the dominant features of European colonial efforts.

Will Wright and Richard Slotkin

Will Wright sees the Western as an American myth with the function of fulfilling socio-psychological needs of resolving cultural conflicts, structuring social experience, and affirming and reinforcing social institutions (1975, 2–7) particularly by reflecting the changing economic make up of post-war America between the 1950s and 1970s, from a policy of free market capitalism to a policy of corporate capitalism (130–131).

The basis for this allegorical illustration is a recurrent structure consisting of a fixed set of three character groups: hero, villain, and society, whose relationships are modified according to the social developments that take place in reality. In the classical plot, which dominates from 1930 to 1955, the hero is a man of the wilderness who enters a society. He possesses a unique set of skills, usually expressed in acts of violence, by which he is granted a special status but also regarded with suspicion by the community. The hero is strong while society is weak and under threat by the villains, who are strong just like the hero. The weakness of society is linked to its values, which emphasize community, equality, and pacifism, whereas the villains represent the free market at its most evil: selfish, exploitative, greedy. The hero is drawn to the values of the community, but also has similarities with the villains. He initially avoids an involvement in the conflict, but takes up the fight when a friend is killed or threatened. He fights alone, defeats the villains, afterwards relinquishes his status (hangs up his guns), and becomes an accepted member of the community. Alternatively he leaves the community for good after he has defeated the villains (Wright 1975, 32–49). The violence the hero engages in conforms to Richard Slotkin’s conception of regenerative violence serving to secure the wellbeing and progress of civilization. But in order for the community to stay free from its corruptions it needs to be perpetrated by an outsider. The hero embodies the country’s ambivalent relation to violence, as it can indulge in its fascination and awe, while at the same time keeping society unblemished (Slotkin 1992, 12). In this way, the classical Western solves the problem of America’s bloody colonial expansion by simultaneously acknowledging and displacing the violence involved. Wright argues that the classical Western illustrates how the fierce pursuit of self-interest, as embodied by the hero and as fostered by capitalism, is essentially beneficial for the community, because it is through the individualism and special skills of the hero that the community is saved (Wright 1975, 130–152). Hence the perfect symbiosis of individual and social concerns is achieved.

The vengeance variation modifies the classical plot to a certain degree and becomes more prominent between 1949 and 1961. The attitude and function of the three character groups basically remain the same as do the values they represent, but the relations between them are slightly changed. The hero is or was a member of society. The villains do harm to him (and society), but society is too weak to punish the villains. So the hero has to leave society in order to take revenge. A representative of society asks the hero to end his quest for revenge, to reel him back in, as it were. The hero gives in but is provoked by the villains, which forces him to fight and defeat them, but this fight and defeat are often alleviated by either creating a situation of self-defense or defense of others or by having the villains die not by the hands of the hero but by other instances of poetic justice, so that the renouncement of violence (while simultaneously satisfying the audience’s fascination for it) remains central (Wright 1975, 59–74). While the regenerative aspect of violence is still recognizable, the vengeance variation illustrates a beginning rift between hero and society. This rift signals the economic shift in American society towards a separation from concerns with social benefits of the free market towards a more individualistically oriented economy (Wright 1975, 154–163).

The rift becomes a clear break in the transitional Western, which Wright locates in only three films of the 1950s. In this plot, society has thus transitioned from being the fulcrum of values for which the hero fights to being the oppressive enemy against which the hero has to defend himself (Wright 1975, 75–85). This idea is then fully developed in the professional Western, which dominates the genre from around 1960. In these films the single hero is replaced by a group, the members of which all have special skills and a strong allegiance towards each other. They exist outside of society and have no particular interest in it other than entering into contracts for jobs. Their fight against the villains is animated variously by an interest in money, a love for the job and the competition, and a commitment to the group, but there are no regenerative qualities that inform the violence. Society is simply irrelevant (Wright 1975, 85–123). With the professional plot, the Western celebrates a corporate identity, an allegiance to a self-perceived elite group divorced from social responsibility, which purely acts out of group interest (1975, 174–180). This is the trajectory of the Western’s mythical reflection of American society.

Mad Max

The Mad Max films attack the Western myth of a functioning social model that America self-assertively tells itself as much as they project Australia as a place in which the failure of this myth is on display. The inversion of the myth begins by setting the films in the not too distant future, as opposed to the foundational past of the Western, a time in which a promising becoming of civilization has turned into a disillusioning decline. The shift towards modernity implies that, rather than civilization establishing itself against the savagery of the wilderness as in the classical Western, it is the advancement of civilization that causes savagery. In Mad Max the car replaces the gun as the expression and the tool of violence; the road, interweaving and connecting the settlements, replaces the wilderness as the location of savagery (Martin 2003, 13). As Miller himself declares about the origins of the film, working as a doctor in an emergency hospital he sensed a social acceptance of violence in the ubiquity of road accidents he encountered (O’Regan 1996, 105). The dependence on the mobility of the car and the acceptance of the violence that comes with it is woven into the fabric of the society.

The opening scene of the film illustrates these points while echoing the scenario of the professional Western (Sharrett 1985, 85). The group of professionals is the police force, and it is engaged in a pursuit of the villain who has violated the integrity of their group by stealing their best car, a V8. As police, their duty should be first and foremost to protect civilization, but their relation to society is at best one of ignorance, at worst one of threat. They basically use the roads for a private war against their enemies, with society becoming innocent bystanders and victims. The villain, who calls himself the Nightrider, seeks freedom on the road, the expression of an anarchic spirit defiant of social authorities. The confrontation with Max, the last opponent he faces after the rest of the police have wiped themselves out, leads to a profound and wide-eyed despair over the futility of existence, the limitations of freedom in modern society where ‘it’s all gone’, as he says (Miller 1979). It is that moment of realization that seems to cause his spiritual defeat and manifests itself in the subsequent crash into the obstacle on the road. By setting the cycle of violence and the vengeance plot in motion, the figure of Max is both hero and villain.

Subsequently, the bike gang’s terrorizing of a small town, which they enter in order to retrieve the coffin of their fallen comrade from a train station, echoes a classical Western scenario but is crucially not unmotivated and rather a direct result of their anger over the police brutality that led to his death. This cycle of revenge is perpetuated by the police. When the townspeople do not show up for a court hearing to convict the lone gang member found at the scene of the crime, Johnny the Boy, Max’s closest friend Goose attacks Johnny. Goose is the loose cannon of the police group, often failing to keep personal animosities, lustful violence, and masculine swagger within the boundaries of social responsibility and professional group membership. In turn, he is singled out by the gang as the victim of their revenge. Echoing the death of the Nightrider, he is at first made to crash, then burned alive. The man to do it is Johnny the Boy, whom Crago reads as counterpart to Goose, both failing to fully conform to group requirements, with Goose lacking restraint and Johnny lacking the cruelty towards the non-member (2020, 82). Johnny is forced against his will by the gangleader Toecutter to set the gasoline-soaked wreck in which Goose is trapped on fire. By demanding the expression of group allegiance in eradicating its enemies, Toecutter embodies the dark side of professionalism, the abandonment of ethical-social concerns in order to secure group membership.

Max’s seeming apartness from the lustful and reciprocal revenge cycle is essentially only a façade. What makes him an effective interceptor is his proneness to violence, which is kept at bay only as long as civilization maintains its tenuous hold on him, but the potential for monstrosity lurks within him from the beginning. He admits that he is scared of becoming like the ones he is after. The similarity between villain and hero are of course nothing new in a Western context, but where classical plot and vengeance variation advocate the social integration of the hero, Mad Max demonstrates with striking consequence the disintegration of the relationship between hero and society. As in the vengeance variation, Max starts out as a member of society. His responsibilities as a husband and father, lovingly taking care of his wife and small child, seem to co-exist with his police work, but the conflict between them is palpable. Equally palpable is his resistance against the mythic narrative that police captain ‘Fifi’ wants to impose upon him. Several times in the film evokes the social need for ‘heroes’ like a repetitive mantra by which he tries to keep Max in the group. Yet, not only does the film present this desire for heroes as empty phraseology and a delusional imposition of a narrative serving manipulative purposes, it points out this insistence on a violent savior figure, as propagated by the classical Western, as the cause for the regression into mayhem at the end of the film. This resistance culminates in his reaction to Goose’s death. He refuses to take revenge for the death of his friend and, bringing forward the penultimate act of the vengeance variation, prefers peaceful civilization to violence. This structural rearrangement lays the basis for the hero’s later inability to relinquish violence. He refuses it ‘too early’, and by joining civilization at this stage, contributes to importing the threat that emanates from him into the realm he tries to protect.

The correspondent encounter with the villains is peculiarly random, happening while Max and his family are on vacation. It is almost as if the randomness accentuates the necessity and inescapability of the mythic pattern imposing itself onto Max’s narrative. The villains provoke Max’s wife Jessie who knees Toecutter in the groin and takes off in her car, inadvertently ripping the hand of one gang member clean off who tried to attach himself to it with a chain. So the crucial act of violence that sets the second cycle of revenge in motion is again perpetrated unintentionally by a representative of society victimizing a villain. It is an act of violence that allows an interpretation emphasizing the self-destructive violence of the villains, who bring harm upon themselves by attacking social boundaries, but also for an interpretation that emphasizes society’s complicity in ignoring the destructive effects of the technology they use, the chain, a recurrent symbol, signifying the perverted dependence that exists between human and car. In the subsequent confrontation the villains kill Max’s and Jessie’s young son baby and maim Jessie when they run her over in a fitting and cruelly just demonstration of the vulnerability of the human body caught between vehicle and asphalt, the twin achievements of modern civilization.

This then is the next important modification of the vengeance variation. With the quasi-death of the representatives of society that would reel the hero back into the fold on his quest for revenge, Max is no longer held back by any social restraints. He becomes like the foil characters of the film’s first half, defiant like the Nightrider, vengeful like Goose. He steals the V8, essentially copying the villainous act that opens the film to hunt down and kill the villains. As he moves further and further away from society, his actions lack any regenerative quality. He tortures a car mechanic to find out about the whereabouts of the villains, then he runs a number of gang members off a bridge after he has provoked them to follow him, then he chases the Toecutter into an oncoming truck, repeating to an extent the death of the Nightrider by forced collision. This aspect of provoking the villains into self-destructive violence emerges as a pattern, which evokes and simultaneously dismantles the justificatory strategies of the vengeance variation. As Martin puts it, ‘Max almost never hits or shoots anyone directly; rather he waits, goads, catalyses situations, at best forcing the opponent’s hand. […] violence is displaced’ (2003, 28). But of course, this is a parody of the hero’s conventional absolution from violence. He is very much to blame as an embodiment of the grim ‘social acceptance of violence’ in the road accident, which is portrayed not as the unfortunate by-product of vehicular progress, but as an act of malice provoked and perpetrated by the supposed hero (Martin 2003, 30).

Equally grim and even more cruel is Max’s final act of vengeance on Johnny the Boy, ironically and fittingly the one gang member who was most resistant to the cruelty of the gang. Max finds him plundering another crash site, ties his ankle with handcuffs to the wreck and sets up a candle next to the outpouring gasoline, telling Johnny to hack through his ankle if he wants to make it out alive. By dropping a hacksaw next to the pleading villain, he absolves himself from any accountability for impending death and grimly confers it onto the villain. And of course, this is precisely the ideology that the Western in its vengeance variation seeks to convey, that evil is responsible for its own demise, that civilization can distance itself from the violence needed to defend itself, that the hero uses violence which is justified and regenerative. It is this distancing, justificatory impetus of the Western that the film rejects and exposes as masking the cruelty inherent in its ideas of justice. Because the poetry of justice is alarmingly present: Johnny can choose between burning like Goose or being maimed like Jessie, tied by chains to the vehicular life he has chosen for himself. The poetic closure of the cycle of violence, however, does not diminish its troubling effect. Instead of being satisfied by the display of reciprocity, we are deeply disturbed by it.

At the end there is no redemption, no return for the hero to civilization. The final shots are of the expressionless hero sitting behind the wheel locked in permanent mobility and of the empty road, endless and leading nowhere. The transformation of the hero thus reaches its completion by demonstrating the consequence with which the efforts of the Western to integrate male individualism into social purposiveness are inverted to show that violence as a consequence of but not a benefit to social processes, can only lead to isolation. Max becomes the Nightrider, hero and villain are conflated, as the myth is dismantled.

Mad Max 2

In criticism Mad Max 2 is more routinely related to the Western than Mad Max, particularly to the movie Shane due to its similar structure and the presence of a juvenile character and consciously mythic frame (Rattigan 1991, 197; Chute 1982, 29; Martin 2003, 39). Shane is named by Wright as the prime example of the classical Western. Yet Mad Max 2 introduces some crucial reversals that dismantle that film’s myth of social progress to arrive at what Crago calls a ‘cautionary Shane’ (2020, 20).

Where the classical Western according to Wright justified the free market economy of mid-twentieth century capitalism, the opening montage of Mad Max 2 is about its failure. The global economic system has collapsed in a competitive battle over resources, which led to a devastating war. Politicians and their ‘talk and talk and talk’ (Miller 1981) cannot stop the social disintegration. So the twin values of the classical Western, self-interest and communal collaboration, are not only incompatible but have both led to apocalypse. Weaver points out the reality of petrol rationing at the time the film was conceived and thus the film’s reflection of contemporary social concerns over economic conditions and developments (2011, 92; see also Chute 1982, 29). The film therefore, like the classical Western, indeed functions as an economic allegory, yet not with the intent of narratively resolving conflicts and affirming a status quo, but stoking and extrapolating these conflicts with the intent of a subversive commentary on the state of things.

The world of Mad Max 2 is introduced when we literally emerge from the V8 engine of Max’s car and are thrown right away into chase, as allegory of the free market and as a display of vehicular nomadicism (Sharrett 1985, 89). Regarding the latter point, the opening narration states that in this world only the mobile ones can survive. Mobility is thus presented as a curse and a trap (Crago 2020, 118), not an expression of freedom. Such a lifestyle requires fuel, and this is where its connection to an imperial and competitive attitude lies. Echoing Johnny the Boy in the first film, after outracing his opponents Max encounters a crashed truck and instead of caring for the dying and dead passengers, he plunders it, anxiously retrieving the leaking gasoline in pots and pans. In their desperate fight for its diminishing resources, humans are singularly geared towards scavenging, seeing other humans as enemies or objects to be used in this quest for maintaining mobility.

The community is a fort in the desert populated by settlers pumping oil from the ground. This fort is under constant attack from the so-called vermin, who seek to capture the oil. Following the classical structure, the settlers are portrayed as weak, capable of fighting back but lacking the strength to hold out for long against the ferocious villains. But there are also important differences to the classical model. The settlers are not really settlers. They do not want to establish civilization in the desert to turn it into a garden, but, recognizing the impossibility of such an endeavor, they want to get away to the coast. This is a crucial reversal of the Western myth, negating its very purpose of celebrating the foundation of society and instead emphasizing the futility and failure of the civilizational project (Morris 2006, 85; Weaver 2011, 83–84; Sharrett 1985, 88; Crago 2020, 165).

The leader of the settlers calls Max a maggot, grouping him with the vermin outside the gate, because he scavenges the land just like them. He expresses a social skepticism of the individual from the wilderness that is entirely in line with the classical Western. But what the film shows is that the society is just as parasitic as the villains. All they do is pump oil from the ground. The scattered chickens in their compound do not detract from but only stress the fact that, unlike the farming community in Shane, they do not produce or cultivate anything, all they do is take resources (Crago 2020, 69–70; Sharrett 1985, 88). They are the vermin.

Because of the visual depiction of the villains, some wearing Mohawk haircuts and loincloths, and their siege and encircling of a fort, the connection to the Western is made fairly explicit. Freely mixing costume codes that additionally encompass police uniforms, S&M wear, and flamboyant camp drag, the vermin are, along the lines of part 1, a grotesque parody of social constructions of savagery (Indians), authority (police), and masculinity/sexuality (S&M, camp). They represent society in a grotesque state of reactionary decadence, extrapolating its most harmful deficiencies (Sharrett 1985, 84; Crago 2020, 103, 115–116, 121–122; Martin 2003, 49). Their leader Humungus is a grotesquely disfigured, muscle-bound, mask-wearing creature of monstrous masculinity (Crago 2020, 127). The vermin derive their villainy, as in the classical Western, from their embodiment of free market savagery, lusting for the possessions of the community.

The hero simply wants fuel in exchange for his services, initially bringing back the wounded into the compound, then driving the truck he encountered earlier into the compound as a vehicle to manage the planned escape. As in the classical Western his selfishness benefits the community, as animosities and suspicions towards him develop into a grudging respect and an underlying fascination. He does not develop any desire to be part of this community. When he offers to drive the truck that will supposedly contain the ‘life juice’ of gasoline and lead the settlers to the supposed promised land, he does it because, as he says, he ‘has no choice’, possibly as a self-conscious wink at the inescapability of the mythic narrative imposed upon him (Martin 2003, 50). If this constellation modifies the classical structure at all, then it is in the more pronounced rift that exists between society and hero, the relations between them remaining use-oriented on both sides, professional. By integrating this professional attitude into the classical structure, the film weakens its implications of a symbiotic relationship between individual and community. In fact, what the film turns out to suggest is a rejection of the mythic hero altogether, a relegation of his actions from central to the community’s well-being to a marginal distraction.

Key to the rejection of the hero is his relation to the Feral Kid, which in turn echoes the relationship between Joey and Shane (Chute 1982, 28). In Shane Joey is looking up to the hero and tries to emulate him and his violence despite the mother’s (and by extension society’s) wariness, which culminates in witnessing the hero’s defeat of the villains in awe and ends with his wish for him to return when he rides off into the wilderness. This constellation crystallizes the Western’s treatment of violence, acknowledging and celebrating its allure yet providing a simultaneous distance and reverential enshrinement via the perspective of a child. In Mad Max 2, this constellation is significantly modified. It is the Feral Kid who initiates a revenge subplot when he kills the lover of main villain Wez with his metal boomerang, in a way reenacting Max’s actions, antagonizing the villains and provoking their retaliatory spirit while remaining aloof towards the settlers. Naturally, he shows a great affection for Max, enthralled by his skills and violence, and Max reciprocates with kind attention and the gift of a music box. So the question the film asks is whether the Kid will become another Max, and the solution the film offers is the rejection of the hero by cathartically confronting the consequences of his actions.

All of this happens in the final chase. Max drives the truck supposedly containing the precious fuel out of the compound and is immediately pursued by the army of vermin while the settlers provide defensive assistance on the truck and in accompanying vehicles. As Crago points out, the true cargo of the truck turns out to be not the fuel but the Kid, who has hidden away in the driver’s cabin (2020, 166). Showing a giddy enthusiasm when seeing Max in action, as he kills the invading vermin with his shotgun while keeping the truck on the road, the Kid soon enters into the action biting and scratching. As opposed to Joey, his confrontation with violence is immediate and not just spectatorial. The involvement with violence is intensified when Max tells the Kid to retrieve the shells for his gun that have fallen on the engine hood, risking his injury and death. When the Kid is about to reach for the shell, Wez who was catapulted over the hood earlier suddenly emerges from right in front of him with a grotesque and bloody grimace. This is the moment of confrontation with what the kid could become when grabbing the actual and proverbial bullet, echoing the revenge cycle he started. Martin argues that Wez and Max represent dueling fathers figures competing over the soul of the kid (2003, 60), but I would suggest that the film posits Max as gateway to violence and Wez as the monster waiting behind the door, and the Kid must extricate himself from both of their grasps. The Kid retrieves, frightened and wiser, and the chase ends with a self-destructive collision, Humungus driving into the truck and smashing Wez and his own vehicle to pieces after he has lost control of his nitro-fueled propulsion. The truck swerves off the road and falls to its side with sand pouring out of its tank. The precious resources turn out to be worthless, the chase a mere distraction, which drives home the point about the absurdity of heroic action (Crago 2020, 90–92). The settlers have escaped with barrels of gasoline hidden away in a van, leaving the hero to mingle with the vermin, using him just like he used them. As Sharrett puts it, Max becomes a ‘limping hero without ritual function’ (1985, 87), and the Kid has learned to reject his ways. In the final reversal of Shane, he together with the settlers leave the hero behind, rather than the other way round. The memory of Max remains, but it is a memory without reverence, without a wish for its return. In this way the film evokes and rejects the classical Western structure and its mythic function.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

The third film in the series evinces a more general critical concern with societal dependencies on myth (Rattigan 1991, 194; Martin 2003, 69) and the yearning for savior figures (Gibson 1992, 159, 161). The film features two variations of the classical structure, both of which are designed to question the validity of its ideological function of affirmation.

The first half combines the classical with the transitional structure. After being robbed of his possessions while roaming the desert, Max is forced to enter civilization in the form of Bartertown. As opposed to the classical structure, society in this town is well-established and strong, its economic foundation of trade providing satirical commentary on free market capitalism. The dominance of an unregulated market results in a ubiquity of commercial enterprise and rhetoric with everything, including the hero and his skills, being reduced to commodity status. Society’s leader, a black woman called Aunty Entity, is a tyrant ruling draconically and charismatically from her ivory tower (Miller and Ogilvie 1985).

After demonstrating his skills of violence, Aunty wants to use Max to fortify and increase her power. Her enemy is Master, a diminutive man who rules the Underworld and knows how to win energy out of pig shit in another satirical commentary on civilizational dependency on natural resources. Aunty wants to control him by defeating Blaster, a giant of a man who carries Master on his back, functioning as his physical manifestation of power. Master Blaster is constructed by Auntie as the villain threatening Bartertown, and Max has come to protect it from evil. While this structural arrangement aligns with the classical Western, its ideological implications are notably different. The motivations of Aunty are exposed as a power grab, not as driven by social interests threatened by external enemies. The hero is a tool made useful not by the persuasiveness of communal values but by money and force. Appropriately, the confrontation takes place in an arena called Thunderdome and is staged as a gladiatorial spectacle to satisfy the masses, simultaneously containing and showcasing masculine violence (Crago 2020, 187). This is the film’s commentary on the ritual function of the myth as performed by the Western: it is a staged entertainment meant to affirm the status quo and existing power relations, pacifying society and convincing it of its own righteousness while hypocritically indulging in the bloodlust it can simultaneously distance itself from. The twist in the film is that the hero refuses to let himself be instrumentalized for this ritual function. He proves skillful, exploiting the weaknesses of his much bigger opponent, but when he recognizes that underneath the mask of Master is a childlike, mentally challenged man instead of a conveniently evil villain, he throws away his weapons. The hero recognizes the cruelty of the ritual and thereby dismantles its structural and moral integrity. Accordingly, he is expelled, following the transitional Western structure, but the damage to the myth is done.

The second half echoes the classical structure and sees Max enter the second community of the film, a tribe of lost children, which has made a home for itself in the oasis of the desert after surviving a plane crash many years ago. While the settlement in the oasis is visually almost paradisiacal, the children have developed a messianic mythology out of the scraps of history composed of artifacts from the plane wreck like photos, postcards, and records that expresses the yearning for a return to their origins on the coast led by a savior figure. This mythology is presented as childishly naïve and distortive, and Max, who is chosen to be their savior, ridicules it and refuses once again the hero role, advising them to recognize the benefits of their condition. Yet, as in Bartertown, he is forced into the role of what is essentially a misguided narrative pattern when some kids go off into the desert on their own trying to reach the mythic coast, so he sets out to rescue them from their foolish endeavor.

Ironically, this rescue involves the return to Bartertown in order to kidnap Master and gain his expertise for resources. Hence, in a reversal of the classical structure it is now the hero who becomes the threat to an established community as he takes away its foundation for existence in order to use it for a return to civilization’s origins. The hero thus actively sabotages the conquistadorial enterprise to send the children back ‘home’. Aunty mobilizes her army while Max puts the children and Master on a plane. Again the hero is used as a vital distraction in order to save society and provide the means for their escape.

The ironic consequence of his actions is displayed in the coda. The children arrive in the destroyed, post-nuclear Sydney, a dark, ruined place, a far cry from the paradise of the oasis. The film closes with the children sitting in a circle telling stories of the hero who saved them, clinging with an unfounded doggedness and delusional grandeur to the myth. But if the myth brought them to this place, the ruins of their civilization, the image of regress, then what good is the myth? What the film does, then, with this final image is to summarize the trilogy’s attitude towards the American Western and its affirmative function of justifying and legitimizing history, identity, and condition of a culture. It exposes the mismatch between the myth’s illusions of affirmation and the reality of social decay and apocalypse.

Conclusion

The deconstruction of the genre and its ideological implications is achieved by the films’ systematic reversal of classical Western structures, presenting the hero as at best a distraction, at worst a misleading or ineffective irrelevance and his violence non-regenerative and corrupting, presenting the villains as skewed mirrors of society’s deficiencies, and presenting society as misguided, naïve, and foolishly drawn to its own demise. In this way, the Mad Max films illustrate how the Australian incarnation of the Western can articulate a negative counter-myth to America’s Western by consciously referencing and transforming its structural elements. In the debate about the status of the Australian Western as a homegrown tradition vs. a reply to an essentially American form, the films can be seen as manifesting a conflation of these two contrastive views. They articulate something about an Australian cultural identity by modifying the American incarnation of the genre, confirming the conception of Australia as a cautionary and critical negative counterpart to America by laying bare the deficiencies of the colonial efforts upon which both countries are founded. Returning to Limbrick’s argument that the Australian Western exists on the negative, critical spectrum of an international ‘settler colonial cinema’, one can find an apt illustration of this argument in the Mad Max films at the same time as realizing how this criticism relies on a dialogical evocation of the American genre’s more positive structural basis. This analysis has shown how productively and explicitly the particular method by which critical settler colonial cinema expresses its meaning can be appreciated if this dialogical aspect is taken fully into account, if, in other words, Australian Westerns are looked at through the lens of the American Western. This specificity of meaning creation is the decisive gain I hope to have shown with my approach.

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Martin Holtz

Martin Holtz earned an MA and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Greifswald in Germany. He has published two books: American Cinema in Transition: The Western in New Hollywood and Hollywood Now (2011) and Constructions of Agency in American Literature on the War of Independence: War as Action, 1775–1860 (2019). He currently teaches American literature and film at the University of Graz in Austria.