The Mad Max Effect: Road Warriors in International Exploitation Cinema

225 Pages·2021·27.684 MB·English

by  James Newton

i
The Mad Max Effect
ii
Global Exploitation Cinemas
Series Editors
Johnny Walker, Northumbria University, UK
Austin Fisher, Bournemouth University, UK
Editorial Board
Kate Egan (Northumbria University)
Tesjaswini Ganti (New York University)
Joan Hawkins (Indiana University)
Kevin Heffernan (Southern Methodist University)
Ernest Mathijs (University of British Columbia)
Laura Mayne (University of Hull)
Constance Penley (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Eric Schaefer (Emerson College)
Jamie Sexton (Northumbria University)
Iain Robert Smith (King’s College, London)
Dolores Tierney (University of Sussex)
Valerie Wee (National University of Singapore)
Also in the Series:
Disposable Passions: Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies
of Adult Cinema, by David Church
Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond,
edited by Austin Fisher and Johnny Walker
Exploiting East Asian Cinemas: Genre, Circulation, Reception,
edited by Ken Provencher and Mike Dillon
The Politics of Nordsploitation: History, Industry, Audiences,
edited by Pietari Kääpä and Tommy Gustafsson
iii
The Mad Max Effect

Road Warriors in International
Exploitation Cinema
James Newton
iv
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks
of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in the United States of America 2021
Copyright © James Newton, 2021
For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi constitute
an extension of this copyright page.
Cover design: Johnny Walker and Eleanor Rose
Cover image: Mel Gibson in Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, 1982. Dir. George Miller
© Kennedy Miller Production / RNB / Collection Christophel / ArenaPAL
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4229-5
ePDF: 978-1-5013-4231-8
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Series: Global Exploitation Cinemas
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v
Contents

Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Origins of the road warrior 13
2 The Death Race lineage 35
3 Contextualizing Mad Max 55
4 Post-apocalypse now! The politics of Mad Max 79
5 MadMaxploitation! Transnational road warriors 107
6 Fury Road and the imitation of exploitation 141
7 Mad Max and the metatext: Fan engagement and online culture 159
Conclusion: A few years from now 183
Films Cited 191
References 199
Index 209
vi
Acknowledgements

As with the writing of any book, there are numerous people to thank, including
various colleagues who offer help and guidance, publishing staff who assist in
the production, as well as friends and family who contribute in less obvious
but perhaps equally important ways. If you had knowledge I was writing this
book at all then you undoubtedly helped in some small way. More specifically,
I would like to thank the following: Chris Pallant, for looking over the proposal
in its very early stages; editors of the book and Global Exploitation Cinemas
series, Johnny Walker and Austin Fisher; Peter Stanfield, whose advice is always
quick and to the point; Xavier Mendik, for pointing me in the direction of a film
I wasn’t previously aware; Lee Kenny, for his point about the video rental store;
Nigel Mather, for sourcing references, often without me asking; Nick Furze, for
proofreading the manuscript when it was in a shocking state and correcting my
many typos, poor writing and errors and also suggesting some additions. Finally,
thanks go to the artists who gave up their time to answer my questions about
their work: Brian Trenchard-Smith, Brendan McCarthy, Paul C. Miller and the
chaps at Murlyn Films, Stephen Longhurst, Patrick Olliver and Phil Lyndon. It is
their creative efforts that inspired me to write the book in the first place.
1
Introduction

At the 88th Academy Award ceremony in 2016, costume designer Jenny Beavan
walked towards the stage dressed in biker jacket and boots to collect an Oscar
for her work on Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015). Within days, a Vine
shared millions of times online revealed an assortment of film industry figures,
including nominated directors Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Tom McCarthy, watching
her walk past, but failing, in the eyes of observers on social media, to afford her an

appropriate amount of respect and applause (Wiseman 2016).1 The case became a
cause célèbre for feminist journalists, who used the Vine as evidence of Hollywood’s
antipathy towards women who fail to meet particularly narrow beauty and
grooming standards. The incident came only weeks after Beavan was described as
looking like a ‘bag lady’ by actor and writer Stephen Fry when winning the BAFTA
for costume design in London, where she had attended the ceremony in similarly
ramshackle and eclectic attire. While admirably playing down both incidents (Fry
and Beavan are actually close friends), Beavan explained that her choice of outfit
‘was just giving a little wink to Mad Max’ and pointed out that her leather jacket had
the logo of the film’s villain emblazoned on the back (Carlson 2016).
The social media furore followed the appraisal in much of the popular press
that Fury Road was an example of a feminist Hollywood movie, because of its
apparently strong female co-lead and its ‘call to dismantle patriarchies’ (Valenti
2015). The debates surrounding this interpretation, and the subsequent response
on social media to Fry’s BAFTA joke and the Oscar Vine, briefly placed Mad
Max at the centre of a cultural battleground: the pawn in a debate about attitudes
towards women in the media. This was in addition to the attention it received by
being a winner in several other Academy Award categories, including editing,
production design and sound mixing.
1 Vine is a now-defunct social networking app that allowed for the creation and hosting of very short,
six-second videos.
2
2 The Mad Max Effect
The events signalled a new chapter in the journey of the four-film franchise
directed by George Miller: from its beginnings as a low-budget Australian
action film, through two sequels of increasingly expanding budgets, a thirty-
year period of inactivity where it existed as a cinematic memory, to being a
critically acclaimed Oscar winner in Fury Road, that cost in excess of $150
million to produce. Mad Max, as a brand, had shifted from its cinematic
margins in exploitation cinema all the way to Hollywood and the mainstream

media.2
Mad Max (1979) featured Mel Gibson in his first starring role. He played
Max Rockatansky, a black-leather-clad police pursuit driver for the Main Force
Patrol, in a rundown, and energy-depleted, future Australia, who seeks revenge
when his wife is left comatose and his baby son killed by a gang of pillaging
bikers led by the Toecutter. Aside from its box office success worldwide, where
it returned $100 million from a production budget of $350,000, its impact was
also measurable in that it opened up tax incentives for filmmakers whose movies
could demonstrate ‘Australian credentials’ and be shot and released within a year
(Simpson, Marawska and Lambert 2009: 23).
Its international success led to The Road Warrior (1981) (simply called
Mad Max 2 in most territories other than the United States – one of the few
countries where the original did not have much impact upon initial release),
which was set in a post-apocalyptic world of biker gangs scavenging for
gasoline in a world of decreasing resources. Max is cajoled into assisting a
peaceful community who live within an old oil refinery, whose capacity for
gasoline production has forced them under brutal siege by a gang of punk-
attired marauders.
Set after an oil war that has destroyed much of the civilized world, The
Road Warrior’s aesthetic clashes tapped into the New Wave music and fashion
zeitgeist of 1981, while its narrative was derivative of Hollywood westerns in
its structure of a lone gunman protecting a vulnerable rural community. With
a reported budget of $4.5 million, The Road Warrior was at the time the most
expensive Australian film and meant that the series had quickly transcended its
exploitation origins from an economic standpoint, if not in their general tone
and effect.
2 I am considering ‘exploitation cinema’ in a similar manner to that of Robin Wood, who writes that
he uses the term like he does the phrase ‘arthouse cinema’, as a signifier ‘operating both within the
film as “style” and outside … as publicity, distribution, etc’ (1986: 124).
3
Introduction 3
Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985) was set, according to its novelization,
fifteen years after the events of The Road Warrior and co-starred singer Tina
Turner as the matriarch of a brutal desert community built on the trading and

bartering of goods.3 It was even bigger in terms of scale, with a self-conscious
attempt to edge towards the kind of mainstream action and adventure films
produced by Steven Spielberg at the time. The inclusion of soft rock songs on the
soundtrack (by Turner herself) and a noticeable reduction in the extremity of its
violence helped to distance the film from criticism endured by its predecessors.
In Fury Road, the series’ reboot, Max (this time played by Tom Hardy) assists
in the rescue of four reluctant ‘wives’ of despotic warlord Immortan Joe and his
army of devoted, but radiation stricken, ‘War Boys’.
The sequels (and to a lesser extent the original 1979 feature) establish a
set of conventions and iconography that would come to be closely associated
with the ‘brand’, or idea of, ‘Mad Max’. First, there is the trope of Max being
a reluctant saviour of a group of innocents who are being terrorized by vastly
more aggressive and savage gangs fronted by muscular and dominant tyrants.
Second, the backdrop for the narrative conflict is the struggle over vital
resources in a world that no longer produces anything on an industrial scale.
Third, the physical action in the series predominantly features motorized
vehicles; of chases involving cars, trucks, motorcycles and buggies; with
frequent spectacular collisions and smashes resulting in injury and death.
Miller identifies the inspiration for this aspect as being what he sees as a
uniquely Australian car culture, an observation that emerged from his past
occupation as a doctor treating road traffic accident victims (Martin 2003: 30).
Finally, the general aesthetic of the series is built around a sense of detritus
from the twentieth century and the rescuing of discarded material to create
vehicles, buildings and costumes. The mise en scène is packed with the flotsam
and jetsam of twentieth-century life, consisting of reapplied cultural markers,
icons and industrial scrap.
Prior to the extraordinary renaissance of Mad Max as a franchise (signalled
also through the release of a high-profile video game based on the films in
2015), brought about by the critical success of Fury Road, the name of ‘Mad
3 Beyond Thunderdome was co-directed by George Ogilvie, who was brought in to direct dialogue
scenes and lessen the workload of Miller due to the death of his producer/collaborator Byron
Kennedy in a helicopter accident during pre-production. Though I refer throughout the book to
‘Miller’s series’, I do so mainly for ease and not to downplay the significant creative influence of
Kennedy on the first two productions, or indeed any of Miller’s other collaborators.