Mad Max

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MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME

Australia, 1985, 107 minutes, Colour.
Mel Gibson, Tina Turner, Bruce Spence, Helen Buday, Rod Zuanic, Frank Thring, Angelo Rossito, Paul Larsson, Angry Anderson, Robert Grubb, George Spartels, Edward Hodgeman.
Directed by George Miller and George Ogilvie.

While Mad Max ends as a grim, even despairing legend, Mad Max 2 ends as a myth of rebirth.

This meant, of course, that expectations were high for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, hope that the third episode would improve on previous films. One of the aims was to develop Max as a character, to tell a `more human story'. Mel Gibson remarked in interviews, ‘In the Road Warrior Max was a sort of closet human being. In this one his protective layers are peeled away. There's a lot more depth, variety and humanity to the man.

Max is still an obvious hero. The lyrics of the Beyond Thunderdome theme proclaim that `we don't need another hero'. Out of the desert, this hero comes to right wrongs and lead lost children to safety and to rebuild, physically and spiritually, a new world. Max is hero enough.

The basic symbol of Beyond Thunderdome, as of the previous films, is the journey, both the journey through the desert to a new promised land and Max's own interior journey, from isolation to commitment. The journey, undertaken for others, becomes a spiritual quest. In the traditional myth, the hero is tested on the journey and his qualities of courage and endurance come to their peak. Again, in the traditional stories, the evil powers that attempt to control the destiny of the hero and put obstacles in his path tend to be symbolised by the witch and the ogre. In Bartertown, the ogre is a complex combination of gentle giant and intelligent dwarf. The witch, a beguiling one, is Tina Turner's Aunty Entity. The writers of Beyond Thunderdome have ensured that the basic ingredients for myths are contained in their screenplay.

In its pop culture style, the films are more like animated comic strips, strong, sharp and clear delineation of characters and situations, straightforward plot lines, larger-than-life treatment, funny, melodramatic, and occasionally slambang. It reminds us how the comic-strip style is a valid and effective 20th century mode for myth-making, where strength and persuasiveness lie in their psychological credibility, despite the heightened characters and events.

This brings us to the meaning of the myth of Beyond Thunderdome: the post-nuclear world, the future society, the saviour-figure and the vision.

The post-nuclear world. While the film opens with striking helicopter shots of desert, the audience is plunged into the radio-active relic village, Bartertown, a grimy, dark-alleyed collection of buildings, a market centre reminiscent of feudal times but whose wares are more often broken modern technology. This ugly world has an underworld, a steaming grand sty where pigs grovel and guzzle and excrete to provide the power for Bartertown to survive. High above the people is the ruler's domain, a variation on a tree cubby-house but where law and power are taken as serious games. The central focus of Bartertown is Thunderdome, a geodesic dome building, an indoor colosseum where gladiators swing and fly in to-the-death combat. Bartertown says that our future-world is poisoned, struggling for some order, surviving but barbarous.

By contrast, across the sand-blown desert and away from the wreckage of a jet, is the oasis called `The Crack in the Earth', caves, a pool, greenery, an Eden of lost children who live in hope. Finally, in a grim realisation for local audiences, there is Sydney itself, recognisable in outline, a broken bridge and the dust and darkness of a nuclear night, a sad promised land where children sit among the ruins attempting to learn about the past and begin rebuilding. Before they find their home, Max and the children must go back out into the desert for a final struggle to elude the machines.

This is the world of the future. What of future society?

The population is small, isolated, cut off by disaster from its roots and similar communities, forced back on survival values and dog-eat-dog tactics of power-hunger and greed. Jedediah, the comic Bruce Spence, immediately swoops out of the sky and steals Max's camels and exchanges them in Bartertown. Bartertown's inhabitants look filthy, furtive, avaricious, either slinking around, aggressively double-dealing but coming alive like the bread and circus audiences of Roman empire gladiatorial combats at Thunderdome. They are stimulated by blood-lust. The hierarchy symbolise this society, from Frank Thring's obscenely bored, eye-patched Collector to Angry Anderson's punk-angry guard and Aunty Entity, Tina Turner embodying energy, chain-mailed, grasping her bow, strutting in her loft, swinging down into Thunderdome, making seductive deals with Max, upholding her law and order philosophy and exuberantly enjoying the battles. Society is cruel, eerie, corrupt.

In the bowels of Bartertown are the slaves, chained and condemned to work among the pigs. Ironically, one of these, the Pig Killer, is one of the cheeriest individuals, helping Max to escape and sending a dog carrying a water can out into the desert to sustain him. But in this underground is the power to confront Aunty Entity and her attempts to impose law and civilisation: the Master- Blaster stoker, powerful in brain and brawn, yet a composite of giant with crippled dwarf. In the deadly battle in Thunderdome, introduced by the satanic-smiling compere, Dealgood (`dyin' time's here') the brawn is paradoxically revealed to be a gentle giant, a baby-faced man whose innocence was controlled by the powerful mind of the dwarf.

The inferno is peopled with distorted creations parallel to those of renaissance painters with the hells of last judgements, human gargoyles that suggest mythical monsters that who are, in fact, guttering and spouts. The human beings are part of a literally radioactive civilisation; they are plagued and plague-ridden.

The contrast is, as so often in myths, with the desert. The desert is a place of survival but also of purification, self- discovery. While pilot Jedediah and his son have a trap door from sand to haven of hoarded loot (which they can and do sacrifice for others), the desert is refreshed by oases, cracks in the earth, pools and waterfalls, cool caves and verdant slopes.

Here the society is in direct contrast to that of Bartertown - children, their memories clutching to images of skyscrapers and a technological past that has betrayed them. The hulk of their jet is set like a whale stranded on wind-blown dunes. They are suspicious of adults but, like older wanderers of the Australian desert, paint their aspirations on cave walls and yearn for a saviour. They recite and gesture their oral history, childlike and sing-song, and hope that the stranger, Max, is the one that they had hoped and longed for. This `tribe' of children, boys and girls, hunters and guides, Mothers, becomes, by default and by yearning, a chosen people (some with doubts who are swallowed up by the desert, some wise fools, others trusting disciples).

In their search for home they, like Max, are pitted against Bartertown-on-wheels led by the laughingly vindictive warrior queen, Entity, and her frequently-destroyed but indestructible henchman. Out in the desert, after the nuclear armageddon, the forces of light, pursued by the forces of darkness, clash with their enemies and win. The gloom of Bartertown gives way to the hope of the children. In the ruins of Sydney, they begin again, passing down their tradition, so that the resilient human spirit can live and create anew. `We don't need another hero'; all we need is to go Beyond Thunderdome.

What began in pessimism is transformed into optimism. The audience is invited to participate in a journey from despair to hope. Beyond Thunderdome is set in an aftermath of the end of the world. But it is not the end of the world.

1.The impact of the series? Worldwide? The iconic character of Max? Futuristic? Apocalyptic? Saviour warrior? In line with mythic heroes from various cultures including the samurai?

2.The mythology and the comic book story? From a contemporary policeman to a futuristic warrior? The road warrior?

3.Expectations of this sequel, Max’s character, heroics, plot, action? Themes?

4.The big-budget production, Mel Gibson and Tina Turner, the sets, action, Maurice Jarre’s score?

5.The prologue, Jedediah the pilot and his flight, the truck, Max stranded in the desert, his losses, wandering?

6.The presentation of Bartertown, the sign, the visuals, the decay, survival, Max’s entry, the crowds, the market, the gases and the pigs, energy? The costs and the time? The guards? Max’s arrest, the confrontation, Aunty Entity’s arrival, the warriors, the various tests, Max’s confrontation and winning? The arrangement of the deal?

7.Thunderdome, Doctor Dealgood and his emceeing the events? Sinister? The Colosseum crowds? The arena? The Master Blaster and the two people? The editing of the fight? Max winning, the deaths? Max and the confrontation with Aunty Entity? Leaving?

8.Max in the desert, the struggle, the wound, rescued, surviving?

9.Savannah Nix and the rescue, the group, the children, their survival, dress, heritage, broken English language, slang? The vague memories? The relics? The story of Captain Walker? The images? Recounting the myths?

10.Max, cared for, recovery, with the children, his leadership? The various personalities within the group? Scrooloose?

11.Savannah Nix and her wanting to leave, go back to the city, for the learning, for the machines? Her decision, the group around her, Max trying to stop her, shooting, the water escaping? Their leaving while he was sleeping? The pursuit? The group finding Savannah, the dangers, sinking in the sand, the rescue?

12.Max’s leadership, the group going to Bartertown? The attack? The pigs, freeing the Pig Killer? His offering the truck? The people of Bartertown, Entity, the officials, the Collector? Frank Thring as sinister? The chase, the MC and his announcements?

13.The pursuit, the editing of the chase? Ironbar and his relentlessness? The crashes, shooting, the Pig Killer wounded?

14.The children, the hold-up, Jedediah Jr? The plane, the group being rescued, the planning of tactics? Jedediah and the lift-off with the plane? The runway too short?

15.Max, staying behind, the confrontation with Aunty Entity, her admiring him, letting him go?

16.The children, their arrival in Sydney, Sydney and the bridge destroyed, the Opera House? The memories, verifying what they had been told? Their telling the story – and the future telling of the story and the memories?

17.The mythic warrior, wandering the desert, Mad Max as the final icon?

18.The final credits song – ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero’? On the part of the children and Max having saved them?