Text, sex, and context

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) is the fourth instalment of the Mad Max film franchise, following Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2 (1981), and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). All four of the films are directed by George Miller (the third in partnership with George Ogilvie), set in Australia, and follow the eponymous protagonist, Max Rockatansky (played by Mel Gibson in the first three and Tom Hardy in the fourth). Mad Max introduces him as a police officer in Victoria's Main Force Patrol in a dystopian future ‘A FEW YEARS FROM NOW’ and pits him against a particularly vicious motorcycle gang (Mad Max: 00:45). Mad Max 2, which was released as The Road Warrior in the US (after Max's nom de guerre), opens with a narrated introduction that establishes the context of the original as the collapse of global civilisation in the aftermath of a Third World War in which nuclear weaponry was deployed. The sequel is set in a post-apocalyptic Australia in which isolated communities and marauding gangs compete for the remaining fossil fuel, the production of which was destroyed in the war. Although the police no longer exist, Max fulfils a similar function in Mad Max 2 and Beyond Thunderdome, highway patrol replaced by Wasteland traversal as he protects the weak from death and slavery at the hands of the marauders. Fury Road also opens with a voiceover, which concludes with Max stating (Mad Max: Fury Road: 00:36–01:07): ‘Once, I was a cop, a road warrior searching for a righteous cause. As the world fell, each of us in our own way was broken. It was hard to know who was more crazy … me or everyone else.’ The voices interrupting Max suggest that the Earth can no longer support human life and that human life has become half-life, subject to radioactive decay, which is evinced by the majority of the characters in the narrative, who appear diseased, deformed, or disfigured. The global ecological collapse is mirrored in Max as an individual, his psychological breakdown involving a paradoxical combination of obsession with those he failed to save and paranoia that everyone intends him harm. He is thus no longer the road warrior defending prey from predator, but a solitary scavenger haunted by failure.