The Mad Max franchise was made about and for an oil-addicted audience. In a post-apocalyptic world where oil has led to war and chaos, the people remaining still value oil above all else. And more than oil, they value the cars that guzzle it.
To be fair, the Mad Max movies are an action franchise, and action movies are notoriously shallow. So how much ethical analysis can I do of cars driving around the Australian outback? Well, I love to over-analyze, so… a lot.
And I’m going to be talking about all four movies, so strap in because there is so much to cover.
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BUT…before we even get into the first Mad Max (1979), there are some things we should establish about its creation. If you want a really in-depth overview of how creator George Miller developed the idea for Mad Max you can watch the below video.
Since I’m talking specifically about questions of environment, I’ll start with the 1973 oil crisis.
(NOTE: I’m skipping talking about 1971, when Nixon took the Dollar off the Gold Standard, which plays into the oil crisis two years later because discussing that would add a whole other thousand or so words).
The crisis began when the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) created an embargo. This was in part a way of retribution, as the embargo targeted countries who supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War, which ended in October of that year. (This is all on Wikipidia—sorry this is a blog, not an essay, so I’m not doing hard-core research).
We’re an oil-dependent world; having oil means having power in the simple ability to withhold it. It's a pretty smart bargaining tool — although at the time people didn’t think of it as a tool so much as a “weapon.” The term ‘oil weapon’ came out of the 1973 crisis and refers to the power to embargo or discount oil prices for political reasons.
So yeah, OPEC had power and they used it. Israel ended up withdrawing troops from the Suez Canal. However, Israel didn’t withdraw troops from the 1949 Armistice Line. And we could talk all about that, but this is not a political history blog, so we’re moving on.
One interesting thing that came out of all this was Project Independence. You’ve probably never heard of Project Independence. I hadn’t. And that’s because ultimately, Project Independence never came to anything. But as an idea, it's fun to play around with.
In November 7th of that fateful crisis year, Nixon announced a plan. The project’s aim was to make the US energy self-sufficient by 1980, largely through the creation of hundreds of nuclear reactors, other alternative energy sources, and energy conservation efforts. One part of the project I loved is: diverting funds from highways into public transport.
Needless to say, none of that happened and America is more dependent on oil from foreign suppliers than ever. Nice effort Nixon, but you were dreaming.
But this does sound like Mad Max, right? Oil crisis creates major problems/uncertainty; oil crisis is averted; people go right back to sucking oil’s giant, environmentally-unfriendly, teet.
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When Miller was first creating the film’s eponymous character, Max was a journalist, not a cop. And the film didn’t take place in a post-apocalyptic world, but in contemporary Melbourne. Bizarre right? Especially for those of you who have only seen Fury Road, it’s hard to think of rough-and-tumble Max as some journalist roaming modern-day Melbourne.
But for a couple of reasons, Miller needed to transform Max’s character and the setting to tell the story he wanted to tell — a story about a man who sees violence and horror so often, he becomes a broken human, enured to the innate brutality of mankind.
The first problem Miller ran into was financial. Miller didn’t have a big budget to shoot on busy streets as he followed a modern Melbourne journalist. And second, and importantly, Miller needed to raise the stakes—the journalist bit wasn’t having the impact he hoped. He needed a profession that really got up close and personal with the dark side of humanity. (I wonder what he thought of Jake Gyllenhaal's performance in Nightcrawler).
So he made Max a cop whose family is targeted by gangs. And, thinking of that 1973 oil crisis, Miller set the story in a not-so-distant future where oil shortages have led to societal collapse. This worked well with his budget. Lots of empty towns, abandoned buildings, and wide open spaces. Apocalypse can be cheap in directorial terms.
Now if you know your oil crises you’re thinking… woah, woah, woah, wait a second…
So, yes: the first Mad Max was released in the year of a second oil crisis, but that crisis did not become important to the plot of the Mad Max Franchise until the second film (we’ll get to that…)
Now that we have that background out of the way, let’s talk plot. First of all, unlike the 3rd and 4th Mad Max movies, in the first Mad Max (1979) we aren’t dealing with a nuclear apocalypse. This is more of your run-of-the-mill chaos and quotidian violence and moral decay sort of thing. This is also what makes the Mad Max franchise as a whole so interesting and so dynamic. Through the progression of the four films, you see a timeline of apocalypse. That’s why it’s so hard to see how Mad Max (1979) is set in the same universe as Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). You’ve got to watch them in order to see them as a chronology.
Mad Max (1979) is an origin story, both of a character and of societal collapse. Max is a highway cop working against motorcycle gangs running wild. What you need to know about this one is that Max is a cop, pointing to a world where there is still some ‘law and order.’ There are still towns that seem to be functioning fairly ok (Max and his family even go out for ice cream, the roads are still decently paved). Basically, this isn’t a full-out apocalypse. But there are some signs of things falling apart: the offices for the traffic cops are in a dilapidated building, and the gangs have a lot of power and very little stopping them from using it.
But between Mad Max (1979) and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981), a lot has changed. There seem to be absolutely no law enforcement officers. There aren’t any towns. The motorcycle gangs have gathered together into small, informal armies. And everyone is fighting over oil.
The oil is being pumped and processed in a refinery run by a small collective. They have built a fence around their refinery and are trying their best to defend it from encroaching gangs.
The Road Warrier is where I first become frustrated with just how bizarre the Mad Max world is. And this is why: the focus for so many of these apocalypse survivors is to get oil. It often seems like this is their only goal: get oil, drive around looking for more oil.
I don’t know about you, but when I picture myself in a post-apocalyptic landscape the things I’m looking for first are food and water. Last I checked, oil is nowhere on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You can’t drink oil. (And yes, in the later movies —which we will get to — water does become an important point of conflict).
From James Bond Quantum of Solace… Bond leaves the villain with a can of motor oil to drink.
This is the thing I struggle the most to understand about this version of the apocalypse. It just doesn’t make sense to spend your days driving miles and miles through a wasteland in search of more gas to drive more miles looking for more gas. It just seems kind of…I don’t know…self-defeating?
But Mad Max’s creators were very invested in symbolism, mythology, and mystery (Miller was influenced by Joseph Campbell’s seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces). They want you to be reading into things.
So I’m going to go ahead and give my interpretation: Mad Max is about the moral decay of society. Oil is what led to this moral decay, and it is what continues to drive humanity deeper and deeper into collapse. In Miller’s franchise: Addiction to oil is in itself a form of moral decadence.
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Okay, quick aside because we are already talking about moral decadence and because it is just not discussed enough: the first two movies heavily feature homosexuality as a form of this moral decay.
Miller sort of lays off the homophobia in the later two films, but man does he use homosexuality as a fear-mongering element in the first two.
I’ve thought about this a lot…another big feature of the Mad Max movies is the scarcity of women. Scarcity of women, scarcity of oil, and later, scarcity of water. A lot of scarcity going on around here.
Anyway, one interpretation of the rise of homosexuality in Miller’s post-apocalypse is that when there are no women, men go crazy and start f*cking each other. But I am afraid it’s not as simple as that…
Homosexuality has for a long time been a signal of sin in the collective cultural imagination. Look at Sodom and Gomorrah. Look at well…the way AIDS was handled by mainstream culture and politics in the early years. Look at the “Don’t Say Gay” bills coming out of legislatures all over the country. There is an idea floating in the horrid miasma of western-Judeo-Christian values that gayness is a quick path to hell.
And listen, I am not the first gay viewer to pick up on this and write about it. One article I found analyzes the character Wez (who wears a butt-plug tail) and his not-so-subtly-coded gay lover, The Golden Boy (who wears a skimpy leather outfit):
“Early drafts of The Road Warrior suggest The Golden Boy was originally meant to be female, but the writers (Miller, Hayes, and Hannat) wanted to demonstrate that gender roles were meaningless in the post-societal world.”
Yes, because the fall of gender roles would be the worst possible scenario (read sarcastically).
Anyway, Wez and The Golden Boy are just two gay figures in The Road Warrier. There is also the fact that there are gangs called “Smegma Crazies” and “The Gayboy Berzerkers.” So you see, Miller isn’t really a master of subtlety.
We can argue all day about whether these gang members are becoming gay because they can’t find a woman or because the fall of society has led them to a life of sin. Maybe it’s both. But still, it’s important to add this to the overall picture of Miller’s universe.
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Now let’s circle back to the 1979 oil crisis (for you astute readers: I did mention this earlier).
So here we go: the first Mad Max movie comes out in 1979. It’s successful. And in 1981, Miller returns with a follow-up: Mad Max: The Road Warrier.
As I’ve said, in this movie, things have really gone to hell. And the oil is a much more pronounced theme. That’s because Miller had help from Terry Hayes in creating the backstory and lore.
Terry Hayes did the novelization of the first Mad Max movie, so he already had a pretty good grasp on what Miller was going for. For background plot-building, Hayes took inspiration from the 1979 oil crisis to help tie the first and second movies together.
1979 was the start of the Iranian Revolution. This led to a major drop in oil production and thus a huge spike in oil costs. With memories of the 1973 crisis fresh in their minds, people in the US rushed to gas up. Things got hectic. President Jimmy Carter gave his “Crisis of Confidence” speech in which he calls for conservation efforts and basically gives a big ol’ slap-on-the-wrist to the American people for experiencing Great American Doubt. The speech also calls out consumerism in Big Way.
Anywho, around this time Carter started working with environmentalists to create a culture of conservation. He did silly things like wearing a sweater instead of turning up the heat. He even got really crazy and put solar panels on the White House.
But the big thing he did in response to the crisis was adopt something called the Carter Doctrine. The Doctrine proclaimed that the US would use force if necessary to keep its power in the Persian Gulf. This was sort of an extension of Cold War proxy-fighting that was going on around this time. See, in 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanastan. And there was the Yemenite war of 1979, where the Soviet Union was supporting South Yemen. Another small but important note: While all of this was happening, there was also a building anti-nuclear movement in the US as a result of the incident at Three Mile Island. (So much was going on!)
As you can see, power, oil, and war: these things are connected.
So what Hayes did, was imagine an alternative ending to the 1979 oil crisis: Iran and Saudi Arabia go to war —the war leaves the oil fields burning, leading to massive oil shortages, and sending the war into an era of global chaos and violence. Eventually… BOOM. Nuclear apocalypse.
Mad Max 2 still takes place before all-out nuclear bombing, but it is certainly happening in a time of war. Here is the opening monologue:
“I remember a time of chaos. ruined dreams, this wasted land. But most of all, I remember the Road Warrior. The man we called max. To understand who he was you have to go back to another time when the world was powered by the black fuel and the deserts sprouted great cities of pipe and steel. Gone now. Swept away. For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. without fuel they were nothing. they’d built a house of straw”
Really dramatic, but really compelling stuff. But let's go ahead and dive into the 3rd Mad Max, Mad Max Beyond Thunder Dome.
Let me just say this is the most chaotic and bizarre of the Mad Max movies. It’s got everything: Tina Turner, a tribe of lost kids, a methane refinery powered by pig shit, a little person who rides on the back of an extremely tall, strong kid who was played by an actor with Down Syndrome (I never said it was politically correct).
This movie is where the idea of a post-nuclear world really sets in. Further, this movie addresses the idea of embargo head-on. Master-Blaster (the name for the little person who rides the tall guys back) uses embargoes to maintain control over a trading town. It does seem to point (in a not-so-ability-conscious way) to the idea that size or intelligence doesn’t matter if you have oil…Here again, we have oil as the ultimate weapon…
Master-Blaster calls for an embargo to assert his power over barter town
This movie really goes all over the place, and I want you to see it for yourself so I’m not going to spend much time on it.
I want to go ahead and skip to Fury Road to conclude this blog post. Partly, because my fingers are tired of typing (I’m blogging for fun which means I get stop when I want to!)
So let’s hit on some interesting points: the idea of the cyborg (see Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto) is strong in this movie. The world is still oil dependent as ever, and the characters talk about their own bodies as if they were cars. They talk about blood as ‘juice’ and their doctor is called ‘the organic mechanic.’ The women are treated as machines of production, they call them ‘breeders.’ It’s all there, and it’s all very strange.
This far into the apocalypse, the car is both myth and reality. They call heaven “the highways of Valhalla,” making infrastructure a part of the Norse afterlife.
The other interesting thing going on is: water. While in the other films we talked about the scarcity of women and the scarcity of oil, in this final film, the scarcity of water is one of the driving issues. In a world that is already seeing the start of water wars and the disasters that occur when clean water is not accessible, this is perhaps the scariest part of the movie.
But also, this might be part of the movie’s moral (if Mad Max could be said to have a moral other than: “cars go vroom vroom hell ya”).
Our dependency on oil destroys the earth and obscures the fact that the liquid we really need is abundant. Yet, as we obsess more over oil, we become more like machines, blinded to our true needs and our animal nature. A side effect of this is an increasingly polluted environment. Like I said before, you can’t drink oil. Still, our dependency on it is now at such a point that many people can’t imagine life without it any more than they can imagine life without water.
Yeah, maybe the moral is something like that.
I’ll leave you with two ironies: one a question, one a fun fact.
How much oil was burned in the making of these films?
In 1987, Miller wanted to make a Mad Max tv show with the actor Jon Blake playing Max. This never happened, because Jon Blake was injured in a car accident.