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Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
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Note: This text, from early 1992, was part of my
initial attempt at writing about the first three Mad Max films. I subsequently developed this work in
my book The Mad Max Movies (Sydney: Currency
Press, 2003).
One of the most striking features of the Mad Max cycle is the manner in which its
instalments take place in starkly different, even incommensurable, fictional
universes. From each film to the next, there is a quantum leap; effectively,
only the character of Max binds them – and even he is scarcely the same kind of
hero in the third film as in the first.
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome has a much more elaborately conceived, fictional world than its two
predecessors; this fact constitutes its most engaging aspect. This is so
because, instead of the largely mobile battles between individuals or social
groups, Thunderdome is largely an essay on the nature of civilisation – with Max still the
archetypal wanderer who allows us to traverse and compare different modes of
social life. Bartertown, in particular, is a
fascinating conception, with its economy running on "blood and shit".
The film is unusual and ambitious in many respects, and on its release certainly disconcerted those critics
and viewers expecting a topper to the pure, cinematic kineticism of Mad Max 2. The film has its spectacular set-pieces
(particularly the final chase), but they are distributed throughout a rather
reflective, three-part story structure, each part taking place in a different
natural or social environment.
The second part – featuring the long, theatrical,
“dreamtime” recitation on the origins of civilisation by the “Children of the
Crack” (clearly the model for the Lost Boys in Spielberg’s Hook [1991]) – is the least action-oriented, and (to this critic among others) the
most archly self-conscious moment in the film’s “essayistic” trajectory.
George Miller has been aware at least since Mad Max 2 of the potently mythic
dimension of his work – with its iconic, character archetypes (such as the
outsider-hero) and its universally recurring themes (conflict, survival,
establishment of a settled society). In Thunderdome this dimension is foregrounded; the film is, in
Ross Gibson’s words, "unequivocally mythological". Gibson (whose own
feature Dead To the World [1991] clearly reflects his particular reading of Miller’s work)
has provided what is, without doubt, the fullest and most perceptive and
sympathetic account of Thunderdome.
(1) It has the great virtue of linking supposedly timeless mythologies (as
Miller might see them) with historical, political and national ones.
According to Gibson, the film is a primary, Genesis
myth: the birth of a civilisation. Although dismissed by some as a purely “pan-internationalist”
project with little Australian specificity and resonance, Gibson convincingly
argues that it gathers “leitmotivs and icons from white Australian history” relating
to the national myth of “transcendental failure” (which includes figures such
as Leichhardt, Burke & Wills, and Patrick White’s Voss).
Yet the film’s Utopian force comes from the way it
twists and renegotiates this myth. Instead of the grandly pathetic spectacle of
the Gallipoli legend/myth from wartime, we are offered a vision of social
growth and integration based on pervasive strategies of improvisation,
adaptation and the canny re-assemblage of all signs, props, meanings and
situations to hand. Max is hero in this instalment really only to the extent
that he is a model improviser, making his way like everyone else.
As Gibson remarks, this view of the world and its
workings can be construed as Baroque; the film’s astonishingly florid, visual
style bears this out. No longer tied only to the thrills and frissons of action
cinema (as in Mad Max 2), Miller’s
direction reaches here for grand moments of epiphany and elation that are tied to the film’s over-arching thematic. For such
a busy and sweeping film – the work, in fact, of two directors, Miller and
George Ogilvie (who apparently focused more on the actors, while Miller handled
the overall construction) – it reveals remarkable, internal coherence on close
study.
For all its undoubted, mythic substance, Thunderdome still
asks (and deserves) to be appreciated as an often garishly fascinating pop
culture artefact, full of “hooks” for a contemporary audience. From a
commercial viewpoint, the cast is a crazy-quilt of showbiz entertainers past
and present, a veritably Eisensteinian “montage of attractions”
mixing Mel Gibson with rock stars (Tina Turner and Angry Anderson), fruity
theatrical performers (such as Frank Thring and Edwin Hodgeman), a dwarf (Angelo Rossitto),
and colourful character actors including Bruce Spence (already prominent in Mad Max 2).
And, as coherently baroque in its aesthetic as the
film may be, it is also (in the manner of much popular culture) a bit “schizo”
as well, if we take this term, in the current context, as a metaphor for
cultural dissociation rather than a clinical descriptor of a mental condition –
a spectacle which straightfacedly decries (in its Thunderdome set-piece) the barbarity of spectacle! That’s
fine pop double-think for you.
The vast transformations wrought upon the heroic
function of Max constitute one of the major fascinations of this entire film
cycle. From family man to revenger, survivor to nomad, hired gun to wasteland philosopher,
Max has often been a reluctant and ambiguous hero – with the requisite dark
hints that he could just as easily be a murderous mercenary, a ruthless
scavenger or a psychotic, death-driven loner.
Max’s ambiguities are partly classic ones, the
ambiguities of Kurosawa’s The Seven
Samurai (1954), James Stewart’s roles for Anthony Mann, or George Stevens’ Shane (1953); but they are also modern, finely
in tune with amorality of contemporaneous heroes like Snake Pliskin in John Carpenter’s Escape From New York (1981) or Travis Bickle in Scorsese’s Taxi
Driver (1976).
Thunderdome bravely closes the Mad Max cycle – at least for the 1980s –
by, in essence, erasing Max’s hero status almost completely. At the end, he is
really only making his way, like anyone else, through the surreal signs and
settings of a world yet-to-be.
MORE Mad Max: Mad Max: Fury Road
MORE Miller: Babe, The Witches of Eastwick, Lorenzo's Oil
NOTE
(1) Ross Gibson, “Yondering:
A Reading of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”, Art
& Text, no. 19 (October-December 1985); reprinted in his essay
collection South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992).
© Adrian Martin January 1992 |
