Organizing a Family is Far More Precious Than Creation at a corner of the World ——A Comparative Critique of the Mad Max

Organizing a Family is Far More Precious Than Creation at a corner of the World

A Comparative Critique of the Mad Max Series

In the beginning, a youthful and spirited Mel Gibson, clad in a leather jacket and sunglasses, appears on the overgrown plains of Australia. Driving a police car with a hero's demeanor, he ruthlessly crushes a pair of "star-crossed outlaws." What follows is perhaps the most pivotal shot in the entire series, courtesy of George Miller: a simple ascending shot of Mel Gibson removing his shades and gazing into the distance. By choosing this narrative juncture to allow the audience their first real glimpse of Mel Gibson, Miller reveals the full bearing of this futuristic lone warrior. It's a quintessential, nearly clichéd entrance for a hero, but also the moment we realize the Mad Max series is a kind of "road movie."

Themed content slots neatly into place in Mad Max. As in John Ford's films, the Australian outback and American West share cinematic geological value and symbolic resonance—only George Miller veers in the opposite direction. In Ford's westerns, civilization must take root in savage lands, with the American hero—an outsider and emblem of order—invading the territory that is "awaiting transformation." Ford's films thus skew heavily towards "construction" as he sows the fruits of civilization across cinematic landscapes, erecting human dwellings step-by-step. Survival seems beside the point for Ford, who is more intent on society's edifying laws than man’s primal instincts. He's enchanted by cinema's power to reshape the world and build families, a tantalizing textual undercurrent: the allure of "establishing a foothold." However framed, the expulsion of savagery by civilization forms a restless subtext, and Ford's films anchor themselves in "new vistas"—"new" precisely because with each glance at the barren earth, they are cinematically reinvented. As Godard once muttered through an avatar:

"I see a new landscape. But it is new to me because I compare it, in my mind, to another landscape. An old one...a landscape I know well." (In Praise of Love)

Such vistas may thrill genre theorists like Jim Kitses and Ed Buscombe, but more crucial are the images that sustain motion and architectural impulse, fueling our fervor for Ford. In the Mad Max series, however, civilization was jettisoned long ago, and savagery takes the lead. In George Miller's visual idiom, savagery skims the sprawling surface like an inorganic sheen while civilization gradually fades into oblivion. The clearest example: Mel Gibson's shattered family in Mad Max. When that haven disintegrates, he makes a beeline for revenge, learning to navigate a treacherous world. As the sequels unfold, gone is the tough cop exuding law and order, replaced by a coarse, callous figure. Savagery was always the core and terminus of Miller's original Mad Max roadmap. Viewers, strapped into a spectating vehicle, careen down Miller's highway, velocity seemingly at their command. But a covert regime holds sway: the only way is headlong into savagery, with alternative routes foreclosed and even viewing pace tightly controlled. Dread mounts at the thought of downshifting, of decelerating to drink in the sights—a folly, one learns, as the machinations of choreographed chaos yank one into a morass of ornamentalism.

In this light, Miller's films are innately inert. Not an impasse, which stirs latent motion, but the "locking pin" born of an obscured object nosing in from an underlying membrane, producing amplitude when struck by a steady current of scum. Inertia, by contrast, denotes ossification and a sort of bloated filler prose. Scenery may shift from outback to desert across the series, but each vista feels unfortunately mired in a crude context: wilderness as petri dish for civilization's decay, desert as shroud for manic optics.

Revisiting The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, we find that, exploitation-steeped as it may be to critics, its absurdly lush meadows and outlandish murder houses have long since vacated any fixed context, radiating a playful aura like a fairground ride sprung up in a vast field. Just objects, scenes, weather—all a film needs to be confidently shot. The scenery sheds its decorative mantle; dense thickets spread no fearsome intent; the climactic sunset is plainly depicted as "beautiful sight and sliver of light." Put simply, Texas Chainsaw doesn't strive to conjure landscape but artlessly fiddles with cinema's grand bargain: to capture light, to inject fiction into reality's fabric. It succeeds in transfiguring its vistas, sometimes by human perambulation, sometimes by a killer's macabre jig. That's how a film articulates itself, remarking on some corner of the world and remaking it. It's sufficient. Overeager to fashion a spectacle-scape—even if the "new world" is a mere collage of disjointed known quantities—too many auteurs itch to juggle movie magic, coveting its power over matter. They crave conjuring fiction from whole cloth, devising a persuasive pseudo-reality while disavowing film's transformative potential. To his credit, Miller clung to that global reconfiguration when shooting the first Mad Max, a wasteland with sporadic blue interludes. But that was the extent of its allure. Perhaps hobbled by a shoestring budget, the odd smattering of props could finally heave a sigh, no longer so stingy with self-revelation. By the second installment, and now with Furiosa, Miller seems manically fixed on a bare-bones worldview and schematic.

Since the sequel, launching Mad Max films with a montage and voiceover relaying its cosmology has become a hallmark. The first entry, by contrast, deftly limns its stark world through mere scenic superimpositions and a scene of a cop voyeuristically observing a couple copulating in the wasteland. The takeaway seems to be that Miller wants us to know this world before encountering its inhabitants. Exceptions do crop up. Mad Max: Fury Road, the franchise pinnacle, may represent a wholesale insurrection.

Far more precious than fabricating some tract of earth, than brazenly brandishing cinema's fearsome dominion, is the forging of a family, the quest for a text that sustains a friction-like gliding movement. Fury Road is an exemplar.

A solitary soul stripped of his past (Max); a betrayer seeking her homeland (Furiosa); a rash youth bereft of faith (Nux); and a clutch of fugitive women—blunt metaphor alert—escaping a patriarchal stranglehold. Together they form a makeshift family. Almost self-evident, in a way, that a road movie like Fury Road would aspire to a trust-centered family rather than the love-centric clans of melodrama (a related genre). Assembling a family is a concise way of describing our world, of learning to inhabit before learning to behold. Perhaps that—forging fresh kinship and cherishing residual warmth—is the true spirit of genre filmmaking, not the conjuring of flimsy alien worlds. We could argue that in Fury Road, unlike elsewhere in the series, savagery isn't a filigreed pitfall but a crucial precondition for familial coalescence. And though we're ever in motion, the inception of a family—or distant nation—requires that the smallest such unit will never exceed the dimensions of a vehicle. Only upon planting their feet can people gradually raise the rafters of family, for "trust," the loadbearing bond of family, finds its sole sanctuary there.

In contrast to the languorous passages of Furiosa, designed to buttress its savage heroine—the voiding of vocalizations, the callous cooptation of peripheral characters' abrupt expirations in a bid for thematic vengeance and shared pathos—Fury Road's virtue lies in its lean, unwavering adherence to distinct action and attitude. At the tempo of top-tier genre fare, people doggedly discharge their signature deeds: murder, flight, ardor. Fury Road is littered with myriad, muddled exploits (a pity that even Nux's plangent "witness me!" warps into a frosty bon mot), and a newfound mania for amplifying Furiosa's voice. But really Miller is just mulishly agitating for authorial omnipotence. His world, his rules. Still, his carnal cravings never fail to amuse, like the wanton welter of woe crudely spliced in to impose logic (i.e. collage a bygone Furiosa). Characters swell cartoonishly while momentum nearly flat-lines. In Fury Road, a few words from Furiosa suffice to sell her history.

Fury Road arguably boasts the series' best character: Nicholas Hoult as Nux, so staunch in consummating his every gesture. It lends the film a resolve alien to the rest of the Max canon: an unfailingly protean path, a protocol for new kin, a band of endearing beings.

wirtten by Wei Wei