Mad Max: White Line Nightmare
Before Thunderdome. Before Fury Road. The Original Mad Max Still Rips
Once, I was a cop. A road warrior searching for a cause.
-Max Rockatansky
When you’re staring down the barrel of environmental collapse, it’s easier to imagine the world ending overnight than it is to face the slow-burn catastrophe at your doorstep. The Id erupts with heavy-metal visions: leather-clad bodies and mangled machinery careening through all-consuming desolate landscapes.
The most iconic entries in George Miller’s Mad Max saga are steeped in such phantasmagoric images of apocalypse on the open road, birthing a visual language and prolific subgenre of sci-fi action imitators that dominates the public end-times imagination to this day.
For most casual viewers and even die-hard fans, the original Mad Max film remains more an object of head-scratching curiosity—a low-budget test-run for the maximalist sci-fi action epics that followed. But it’s always loomed large in my imagination. I caught it on a prolific cable run on AMC in my formative early teen years. The bright yellow Main Force Patrol cars, the fresh leather punk-patrolman drip, this infamously weird eye-popping effect insert. Images that lived rent-free in my mind long before Fury Road’s flamethrower guitar god or Furiosa’s metal arm and buzz cut.
To understand who he was—says Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior’s VO narrator—you have to go back to another time. When the world was powered by the black fuel and the desert sprouted great cities of pipe and steel.
On the roads it was a white line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed... men like Max...
It’s a far cry from the far-flung apocalyptic future of its successors, but the original Mad Max has aged into an uncanny new-wave techno Western for our modern era of decline.
In its original context, Mad Max was a low-rent 1979 Ozploitation joint picked up by Roger Corman’s American International Pictures; the kind you might find on a double-bill with such scrappy AIP road pictures as The Fast and the Furious or Death Race 2000. Its director, George Miller, was a doctor by trade, having somehow caught the cinema bug while toiling in the grisly aftermath of road accidents out of the Sydney hospital ER. Miller was particularly fascinated with the pure visual action of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd films.
“I saw the action movie, particularly the car action movie, as an extension of that,” said Miller. “Just the way you could put little bits of film together and make up a kind of a whole sentence. The syntax of filmmaking was first discovered by those [silent-era] filmmakers. And that was the thing that really drove me to something like Mad Max.” For his first script, Miller and co-writer James McCausland put together a fable-esque road western with Miller’s gruesome medical background and Australia’s 1973 oil crisis as direct inspiration.
“Long queues formed at the stations with petrol—and anyone who tried to sneak ahead in the queue met raw violence,” observed McCausland. “George and I wrote the [Mad Max] script based on the thesis that people would do almost anything to keep vehicles moving and the assumption that nations would not consider the huge costs of providing infrastructure for alternative energy until it was too late.”
As for the film’s setting —“a few years from now” when climate catastrophe, oil shortages, and a breakdown of civil order are the name of the game—Miller felt that the story’s exaggerated “fable-type quality” required something just outside of present time and space. But budgetary constraints were the main deciding factor. “We didn’t have enough money to really set it into the far future and degrade it down too much,” said Miller, “so it was set in the near future.”
True to Miller’s “silent film with sound” approach, the film’s opening frames—tight, stark, arresting yet economical—tell you everything you need to know about this near-future Outback. A dilapidated Hall of Justice. A strange patrol car, skinhead cop in the front seat, resting beside the literal and figurative road to anarchy. Not far off, another cop has his rifle scope fixed on an innocent couple fooling around in the brush. He leers and smacks his lips when the call comes in: Some crust-punk psycho killer, calls himself the Nightrider, is making a meal of the road in a stolen V8 Pursuit Special. Life is fleeting ‘round these parts and there’s not much left of the razor-thin line separating the cops and maniacs on the road except a fresh paint job and a bronze badge on a biker jacket.
Enter Max Rockatansky.
Max is a family man, as yet untouched by the new madness afflicting the populace. A fresh-faced White Hat of the Main Force Patrol, one of the last remaining law enforcement agencies. And he stands in immediate contrast to his fellow patrolmen—“glory riders” with the same bloodlust and smell of burnt gasoline on their necks as the “skags” they hunt down on the road. Take Jim “Goose” Rains (Steve Bisley), Max’s best mate on the force and the film’s most compelling “good guy,” such as they exist. We meet the Goose at a diner, right around the time the call for the Nightrider comes in, holding a civilian hostage with grisly road stories. “By the time we got to him, he was sitting there trying to scream with his face ripped off.” He wolfs down his lunch with a wink and a smile. This charismatic motorcycle cop wears the badge for the thrills and spills of the road, you dig? No sense staving off the end of civilization when you’re thriving at the bleeding edge of it.
Jimmy the Goose. The Nightrider. Toecutter. Even with the larger Mad Max mythos still in utero, the first movie etches out an impressive array of the series’ defining qualities. The fever-dream pace and rhythm of the editing (again, a creature of necessity, and what happens when you run out of money three weeks into post-production and have to spend the next year finishing the edit yourself on a hand-wound machine in your kitchen), the off-kilter hyperbolic dialogue, the outlandish (and even more outlandishly named) roster of gear heads and road warriors. The 20th-century hero mythos spread like a funeral veil over the next century’s cataclysmic turn.
“People don’t believe in heroes anymore.” Captain Fifi Macaffee (Roger Ward) tells the police commissioner. They’re listening in on the boys in the garage. Goose has called Max back to the Halls of Justice early, away from his wife Jessie (Joanne Samuel) and baby boy and their quiet wood-paneled granola homestead by the sea, to check out the all-new, all-black Pursuit Special—“the last of the V8’s”—souped up and ready to go. It’s a bribe, begrudgingly approved by the commissioner to keep their star patrolman on the active-duty roster. Fifi is out to restore law and order to his sprawling jurisdiction the old-fashioned way—"give the people their heroes back.” And he aims to make Rockatansky the MFP's own Maximum Force of the Future.
Meanwhile, the Toecutter and his biker gang roll into town to pick up the body of their fallen comrade, the Nightrider. From his first moments on screen, Hugh Keays-Byrne makes absolute mince-meat of the scenery (he’d return to the Mad Max universe as Fury Road’s Immortan Joe 45 years later, the only case I can think of in which an actor plays two different, equally memorable villains in the same series). The Toecutter is everything we’ve come to expect from a Mad Max villain—charming, comical, horrifying and unpredictable. He and the gang run roughshod on the place and terrorize some aging hipster locals with A Clockwork Orange-like aplomb. Max and Goose catch a couple of their victims later on down the road and arrest the pitiful, unhinged Johnny the Boy, a member of the biker gang left behind at the scene.
Here’s where the shit hits the fan belt. Goose is all swag and hot air at the Halls of Justice, taunting a despondent Johnny the Boy in custody, when a couple of ill-suited representatives of the courts arrive and demand the prisoner’s release. “They didn’t show,” exclaims Fifi. “The punks didn’t show, the girl didn’t show, the townspeople didn’t show, NOBODY SHOWED!” No case, no contest. Goose ain’t having it. Max and Fifi have to hold him back from throwing the court reps around and beating Johnny the Boy within an inch of his life. Past, present, or near future—the limits of the law are immediate and crazy-making.
With Johnny the Boy back on the road, Toecutter and the gang make Goose their next target. Our guy is blowing off some steam on a night out in town when they sabotage his bike. Next day, they set him ablaze inside a toppled utility truck. “That thing in there, that’s not Goose. No way.” Max says later on at the hospital, having just uncovered what’s left of his friend—charred and mangled beyond recognition, breathing through a machine. He’s finally had it. In Goose, Max has seen what happens when you give yourself over to the insanity of the road. Time to get out, take off with the wife and kid to what’s left of the peaceful countryside.
Time to kick this motorhead-Western revenge tale into high gear.
The rest of the film plays out like a disjointed fever dream of the archetypal guy losing his family to violence, seeking revenge, and coming out the other end a nitro-saturated husk of his former self. Mel Gibson, a brand new star at the time, applies a grounding, youthful simmer to the character’s turn from tall, bright and handsome to stone-cold road warrior—stalking his enemies in the black Pursuit Special with a supernatural air of purpose. Life. Death. Revenge. All what happens when you’re busy making other plans. “We are the already dead,” says Chris Hemsworth’s colorful villain, Dr. Dementus, in the latest Mad Max Saga. “The question is, do you have it in you to make it epic?”
Fury Road and Furiosa fans may find the movie’s final 15 an abrupt, maybe even underwhelming finale. But like the rest of the film, Max’s final stretch of road to madness (culminating in a killer high-speed chase with the Toecutter and an especially grim confrontation with Johnny the Boy) rips with the kind of lo-fi energy and guerilla stunt work befitting an underground cinematic portrait of a crumbling near future. The one that we, the dregs and droogs of the 21st century, are poised to inherit.
When the world ends, people will go on living. Driving. Killing. Crashing. You can lose it all within the space of an engine’s roar. So you ride the white line nightmare, your only passengers a double-barrel shotgun and a fist full of demons.
The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense
Take what you have gathered from coincidence
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
Crying like a fire in the sun
The sky, too, is folding under you
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue
-Bob Dylan
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