by Derek Smith 12/7/08

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Post-apocalyptic films have the unique ability to examine mankind’s most brutal instincts and basest desires.  No film so fully embodies the potential of this sub-genre to shake its audience from their complacency and does so with such unflinching lucidity as George Miller’s The Road Warrior.  From the brown desert clashing against a bright blue sky to the harsh black leather against the softness of white flesh, Miller paints, in unapologetically broad strokes, a frightening yet thrilling picture of a world devolved into a Darwinian nightmare.  Dominated by two groups – one a tribe of leather-bound savages, the other a roughshod militia, clad in angelic white cloth, that hoards what remains of the oil supply in the infinitesimal hope of making the 2,000 mile trek to the coast – the film re-imagines the Australian outback as a desolate wasteland upon which it takes its central protagonist, Mad Max, and transforms him from vengeful cop to an almost mythical being who saves mankind from the depths of Hell before disappearing down the seemingly endless stretch of highway where the film’s drama unfolded.

Despite becoming something of a savior to the gas-guzzlers, Max is anything but a Christ figure.  In fact, he isn’t much of anything now that he’s quenched his thirst for revenge.  He merely wants enough gas so he can be on his way and the fact that the film makes it fairly explicit that Max has literally nowhere to go makes him, and the film, infinitely more interesting.  In this post-apocalypse, he shares neither the hope for a bright future nor the hatred necessary to devolve into barbarism as exhibited by the Alice Springs chapter of Sadomasochists Anonymous, but rather embodies the purely instinctual desire for survival.  Devoid of any need for human connection or communication, Max oddly enough represents the realist stuck between two opposing extremes.

Considering that while Humungus and his band of miscreants have been offed by film’s end, the “white militia” will surely face similar threats tenfold so the dream of actually reaching the coast is feeble at best and more than likely as delusional as Sam Lowry’s magnificent fantasies in Brazil, whose fate I wager they share.  The explosion of their home near the end of the film can be interpreted as a hopeful beginning of a journey towards regeneration and a new and better place, but realistically, it represents the impossibility of achieving stability and the notion that home, in this new world of there’s, is now a transitory concept; one that can only exist peacefully when confined to the imagination.  It is Max alone, the embodiment of objective, unemotional rationale who meets the brutality of this world head on, realizing that greed has destroyed the potential for anything more than fleeting happiness, so he is left like a hamster on a wheel to drive and survive since that is what his base instincts demand of him.  The film doesn’t necessarily side with his worldview nor does it push it upon the viewer, but that it’s presented in such a way that takes nothing away from the sheer spectacle of the film and its mesmerizing set pieces speaks to the skill with which Miller mixes genre tropes with social commentary.  Nihilism has never been so fun!