Mad Max (George Miller, 1979)
Mad Max stands alone, the first and only film of a genre that surely could be explored and exploited, with interesting results, by action-oriented filmmakers. It is extremely probable, I believe, that if Australian filmmakers began churning out similar violent, futuristic car-motorcycle films full of spectacular chases and crashes – films in which the stuntmen are the stars – it could be the start of an international craze equal to that caused by Italian westerns and Chinese kung fu movies a few years back.
Danny Peary, Cult Movies, 1981
Looking back, the surprise is how much the Australian film industry didn’t follow the example of Mad Max. George Miller’s cult classic is often cited as one of the most profitable films ever made (in terms of proportionate return on investment), yet the flood of road-based action movies Peary half-expected never arrived, and Mad Max and its sequels remain aberrations in the history of the Australian cinema. For whatever reason – I suspect the influence of government funding bodies – the imitators never followed, and Miller was left to forge his own little mini-genre. It is probably just as well: for all the spaghetti westerns that were made, there was only one Sergio Leone, and I doubt an industry of Mad Max clones would have thrown up anybody nearly as talented as Miller.
Miller’s moderate directorial output since – he has directed only four features since the Mad Max trilogy, and that count includes the upcoming animated film Happy Feet – has meant that his enormous talent and influence is sometimes understated. In some ways, his adaptability has also worked against him: nobody is going to advertise Happy Feet or Babe: Pig in the City with a baritone voiceover boasting they’re “from the director of Mad Max,” so his new films tend to turn up with little fanfare. Yet his contribution to the technique and film style of the action genre is immense. Miller’s trademark style of shooting action sequences – with wide-lensed cameras placed low against the ground on speeding vehicles, and the alternation of sweeping camera movements with extremely fast “shock” cuts – has been thoroughly absorbed into the standard grammar of action filmmaking. Yet it is seldom done as capably. Subsequent directors have often abused these techniques, overheating the editing and thus losing the clarity of action retained by Miller’s work. By contrast, Miller’s staging of scenes is notable not just for the visceral sense of speed it creates, but its easy flow and intelligibility. This style is epitomised by a shot I always think of as a “Miller pan:” an apparent side-to-side movement created by having a vehicle wipe across the foreground of the shot, in front of a camera that is moving rapidly backwards, often to reveal more distant vehicles in the middle or background (as in the shot below). Everything is moving in such a shot, which makes it an exciting composition, yet it is at the same time a very informative establishing shot that instantly orientates the viewer. I’m sure Miller didn’t invent it, but it’s something of a signature shot for him because it epitomises the balance of dynamism and legibility in his action sequences.
Miller perhaps underestimated his own work in the film. He would become convinced, for example, that it was the mythic undertones of Mad Max that caused audiences to respond to it. But who – apart from film theorists – needs an unconscious motivation when a rational one will suffice? People flocked to Mad Max not for the mythology, but for the car and bike chases – simple as that. Miller’s action scenes are always exciting and frequently astonishing: they remind me of those in Hong Kong martial arts films from the 1980s, in that they benefit from access to stuntmen crazy enough to try things that their better unionised Hollywood equivalents wouldn’t touch. The sense that the action sequences were put together by a bunch of fearless amateurs is part of their appeal, and differentiates them from equivalent Hollywood films. This feeling has only increased since the early nineties as big budget action cinema has increasingly replaced actual stunts with over-engineered computerised facsimiles.
But Mad Max remains intriguing for other reasons. Even after all these years, with constant self-conscious genre scrambling, it remains an unusual generic hybrid. It isn’t quite that it sprang from nowhere: there was a tradition of motorcycle gang pictures in Hollywood, and even in Australia the film was predated by Sandy Harbutt’s 1974 cops-and-gang picture Stone. Yet it isn’t a traditional motorbike gang or rogue cop film. In many respects, the film is actually more like a horror movie, with the gang taking the role of the malevolent slasher or supernatural force (thus placing it amongst other breakout low budget films such as Night of the Living Dead, Halloween, Evil Dead, The Blair Witch Project, and so on). This is most clearly evident in the farm sequence, which is structured as a straight-out Halloween style stalker / slasher picture, as shadowy figures chase Max’s wife Jessie through a forest and around the farmhouse.
What makes the Mad Max take on this genre so unique and effective is that here the road becomes the final theatre of confrontation. Horror movies usually tend to hold out cars and roads as means of escape, usually in one of two ways. Firstly, they might need to be eliminated sustain the set-up, as with the crashed car at the start of Night of the Living Dead, the collapsed bridge in Evil Dead, or the impossible-to-find car in Blair Witch. Or they can become a source of suspense as characters just reach – or just fail to reach – the refuge they offer (think of Annie’s murder in Halloween, which occurs just as we think she will drive to safety). In Mad Max, however, the car-as-escape idea is reversed, and fleeing in a car only increases the jeopardy. So when the gang rides into town a young couple watch in fear, but without detection, and it is only when they get in their car and “escape” that they are targeted; likewise, the fate of Jessie and her child is sealed when they attempt to leave the farmhouse by car. The usual impulse of an audience watching endangered characters in a horror film is to urge them to get the hell out of there, but in Mad Max that urge is subverted and escape is cut off. It’s a neat reversal of a standard genre convention, and increases the feeling of dread when the film is in its horror mode.
The other reason the location of the threat on the road works so well is because of the ubiquity of cars and roads in our lives. As Spielberg’s Duel had established a few years earlier, driving has become our society’s new shared experience, so there is a primal effectiveness about a film that makes the roads a theatre of conflict. Yet there is also a deeper resonance in Miller’s use of vehicles, and that is his vision of an oil-depleted future. This would be more explicitly developed in the sequels (Mad Max 2 opens with a prologue that very explicitly describes how the world we see in the films came to be) but is hinted at here by the fact that V8s have become a precious rarity.
Where Mad Max works much better than the sequels, though, is in its haunting depiction of this future world. Miller uses distinctive real-world locations, such as seemingly abandoned industrial buildings, in a fashion that is textbook low-budget science fiction filmmaking, but which gives the film’s world an especially compelling feel. Science fiction films tend to show us worlds that are transformed by some earth-shattering change – be it political, social, environmental – prior to the opening of the story, and then explore the ramifications of that change by exploring that world’s differences from our own. This is what the second and third Mad Max films do: the oil wars predate the films, and Max’s milieu is consequently well-removed from our own.
In this first film, though, Miller’s very recognisable use of real-world, familiar-looking settings, makes it much easier to relate to Max’s environment. It isn’t set in a dystopia separated from us by some pre-story apocalypse, but instead what is very recognisably our own society, just a little bit more run down. There isn’t some decisive event that separates us from the world of Mad Max, so much as a slow slide as governments and legal institutions crumble into ineffectiveness as the economy falls apart. Not everybody is some kind of outlaw warrior, as in the sequels: we see plenty of normal, recognisable middle-class people doing regular things (not only Max’s family, but also incidental characters such as the caravan-towing couple near the opening). But these regular law-abiding people are trying to go about their business as the world collapses around them, and they are slowly becoming outnumbered by the lawless.
This makes the film more interesting not just because of the implicit “message” about the danger of an energy / environmental crisis, but also simply because it’s more interesting – or at least more unusual – to see such a convincing depiction of a society in transition. The original Mad Max isn’t so much post-apocalyptic as mid-apocalyptic, and its eerie resonance with contemporary society has only become more unsettling as time has passed.