 Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981, 94 min.) written by Terry Hayes & George Miiler & Brian Hannant. directed by George Miller. Mel Gibson and the Decline of the West “I'm just here for the gasoline.” –Max The study of genre cycles yields some fruitful results, and nowhere more clearly than in the western, with its rich heritage and mythology dating back at least as far as the pre-cinematic Leatherstocking Tales of novelist James Fenimore Cooper and the rugged paintings of Frederic Remington. In the primitive phase, the western is being tested out in cinema as fundamental myth, appealing not only to American audiences, but global ones, with the astonishment of spectacle and cross-cut editing in the early The Great Train Robbery (Edwin Porter, 1903). In its classical phase, the western establishes the conventions that genre audiences love to enjoy, tweak, twist, and expect. From the cattlemen/farmer dichotomy to the church settings and barn dances of the John Ford films of the 1930s, to the good guys wearing white hats and the women civilizing the wandering males, the classic western meets audience expectations and reveals that the world is stable and reliable, after all. Props and ritual costumes abound, whether horses, guns, saloons, or whatever. John Ford’s Stagecoach would fit the bill as a classic western. In the third cycle of the western, one meets revisionism. Here the myth is challenged, tested, and even partially abandoned. Maybe the Indians are the good guys and the cavalry are the oppressors in Fort Apache or Cheyenne Autumn. Maybe the hero has psychological doubts, as in The Searchers or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. Maybe he can’t get it up anymore, whether to mount a horse or do some mid-life bounty hunting, as in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. The western comes in for outright mockery in the fourth cycle, parody. Anything by Mel Brooks fits here, such as Blazing Saddles. But with The Road Warrior we have an extension of the western into a dimension that the quartet of cycles above cannot contain: the actual destruction of the west in a barbaric undoing of all the conventions, hopes, and dreams of classic westerns. The Road Warrior goes beyond revisionism to explore the decline of the west, questioning its myths and leaving us in a dry, parched desert of doubt and despair.  Closely
related to the western genre
is that of the Japanese samurai film.
In fact, one imaginative studio publicist for The Road Warrior
explicitly likened it to the Japanese genre, with its codes of honor,
its
individual, somewhat mysterious hero, and its beleaguered
townsfolk. Here Mel Gibson, in his early role as
Australia’s “Mad Max,” is a wanderer who comes, Samurai-like, as a
mercenary
who assists a besieged community against a marauding horde. But instead of feudal Japan, the setting here is uncomfortably close in time and space. The place is Australia, a supposedly civilized western nation, once part of the British Commonwealth. The time is the near future, maybe only fifteen years from now. But the situation has escalated drastically from our own day. In 1979, only two years before The Road Warrior was made, the western world suffered from gasoline shortages, and motorists lined up their cars around the block waiting for the precious commodity. The President Jimmy Carter imposed a national 55 mph speed limit, and told us all to turn down the thermostats and “conserve energy.” We have not since had quite that level of panic and mania, but such a scenario is never far from our minds, as world oil prices zoom ahead, and our Middle East supplies are in constant jeopardy. In The Road Warrior, the gasoline shortage crisis has finally gone mad. Warring industrial nations have decimated each other and depleted global petroleum supplies. Having built empires on oil and making society dependent upon it, the house is crumbling down, now that there is no more of the priceless fuel. Without petroleum, the modern world as we knew it has disintegrated. The machines have sputtered and stopped. Like the little pigs who built their house on straw, so those nations which constructed a network of industries, transportation, and lifestyles based on the ready availability of oil have had their shelters blown away, leaving them naked.  In
this scenario, mankind’s veneer
of refinement and protocol has been chipped away. People have
devolved to the plane of barbarism. They loot, burn, and
plunder. It is the survival of the fittest, a rugged
and secular individualism. Only those
willing to become scavenging hyenas can remain on the road. The premise being that men will kill for a cup of gasoline, the landscape is populated only by a shocking collection of survivors, in the bleakest sense of that word. The protagonist is Max, played by Mel Gibson. He lives in his driving machine, a V-8 Interceptor, with his grungy dog. A self-ostracized wanderer, Max lost his wife and family in the precursor film, Mad Max. Now he is a burnt out “shell of a man,” tells the opening narration. He has no apparent occupation or destination. His lot must be like Cain’s, condemned to pace the earth scavenging for a few drops of fuel, only to go on to the next source. Max is led to a vista of incredible bestiality. Like wagons circled against an Indian onslaught, a small band of Aussies with a modicum of humanity are defending a remote refinery, using an armored bus as a sliding gate into the compound. They wear togas, like some sort of ancient Greek keepers of the flame of learning. They represent the powerful myth of community as in the classic John Ford westerns, all for one and one for all … usually.  Their
predators are the “marauding
horde” of motorcycle, squad car, and jeep-riding warriors who encircle
them
with intimidating threats and hoots.
They wear fearsome feathers, armor plate, masks, and animal
skins. Cowboys and Indians, anyone? Max, the loner hero, is
drawn into the
fracas as he attempts to the return of one the togaed wounded for a few
barrels
of petrol. Even should he get a full tank, one wonders where Max will go. Where can he go anyway? The landscape is totally barren. “Stark” would imply a contrast with something else. But the locale of The Road Warrior is without fence post or telephone pole. The spot is actually near Broken Hill, New South Wales, an isolated mining town in the red dirt desert 800 miles west of Sydney.  With
no place to go and the
inevitable prospect of the fuel’s final run-out, why not head for the
coast and
at least return to an agrarian society?
That is where the togaed group seems to be going once they can burst
loose with a cache of oil. But for now,
the degradation of their present wasteland is painted quite
consistently by
young producer Byron Kennedy, director George Miller, and art director
Graham
Walker, right down to the ugly canine and the sight of men hungrily
eating
canned dog food. There is even a
boomerang-wielding wolf-boy. The Road Warrior is a visceral experience of non-stop action, camera movement, and high-speed vehicle stunts. This is the car chase movie to end (we hope) all car chase movies. The violence is perpetrated with medieval weapons, notably sharp instruments of sundry configuration. Classic action-adventure musical scoring by Brian May contributes to the relentless heart-pounding soundtrack. All this gripping action can leave the viewer quite wrung out at the end, with a huge sense of relief that it’s all over. Here we may refer to the research literature with its opposite views of violence-viewing as either a constructive, vicarious catharsis, or the contrary, a stimulus to go out and do likewise.  Futuristic
films with a social
consciousness message raise certain questions of the filmmaker.
Hey, we thought the future was going to be
gleaming, high-tech, and filled with leisure, not this regression to
the cave. Does the film help us by showing us our plight,
so that we may take corrective steps to avoid the prophesied
doom? Or does it hurt us by immobilizing us with a
sense of the doom’s inevitability? If myths are the stories society tells itself for inspiration, courage, and revitalization, then The Road Warrior is depressing indeed. It says the fun is over, folks. Say good-bye to your cars, your freeways, and your comfortable, energy-consuming lifestyles. Look forward to a bleak, dusty, animalistic existence. Maybe those Survivor TV shows and attitudes like getting rid of The Weakest Link are the forerunners of a world where it’s every man for himself, every woman for herself. Community is lost, we don’t care a whit for our neighbors, and the future looks like hell. Essay © Dr. John R. Hamilton. Dr. Hamilton is the director of Azusa Pacific University's Cinema and Broadcast Arts program, and was previously director of media studies at Grove City College. He is a professional filmmaker with numerous documentaries and a feature film production to his credit ("Mary and Joe"). As former head of the film unit at World Vision and president of Del Rey Communications, Hamilton has traveled the world producing persuasive media for non-profit and commercial clients. He publishes regularly in journals such as Literature Film Quarterly, and is currently researching the economic ramifications in Italian Neorealist cinema. |
