“...inevitably these new societies mirror and comment upon our own.” deal with the changed nature of society in the wake of cataclysm, the strange new priesthoods, the caste systems of the genetically stable, the worshipers of techno- death, the rigid pastoral theocracies in which mutants and machinery are taboo, etc.; for inevitably these new societies mirror and comment upon our own.” All the elements of the post-apocalyptic films that have followed come from The Road Warrior . The action takes place on a deserted landscape that looks sort of lunar. Battles between animalistic people are fought with tattered old cars doing the jobs of horses in a medieval joust. The humans seem to have regressed, either through some form of disease, radiation, or planetary alteration. And there’s usually one lone fighter who can help an overpowered community survive the onslaught by a band of marauders. If that sounds familiar to moviegoers who have no taste for such fare, this is because the post-apocalyptic movie is basically a Western. Substitute the endless dusty vistas of The Road Warrior for Monument Valley. Substitute a gang of rustlers or a hostile Native American tribe or a misdirected posse for the snarling, giggling Hobbesian youth. And substitute Shane for Mad Max. Westerns comprise in aggregate the most popular genre in the history of motion pictures. By one estimate, more than 75% of the movies made until
who has helped him to the dog. Surprisingly, the film was not a success. The successful film that really pursued the closing argument of Planet of the Apes came along four years later from Australia. In Mad Max , civilization has basically ended, not because of nukes but because of gas shortages. Writer-director George Miller saw how the oil embargo of 1973 hurled all advanced industrial societies into ruinous recessions and conjured up the sense that it would take very little to send us back into the Stone Age... Or into the state of nature, which is where a young cop named Max Rockatansky finds himself plunged. He is supposed to keep the peace, but the cackling, marauding bands of gas thieves make a mockery of his efforts – and then rape and kill his wife and child. By the end, Max is handcuffing a crook to a car that he has set to blow up. He gives the guy a saw and says that it’ll probably take 10 minutes for the car to explode – so maybe the guy could saw off his own hand in five. By the time its sequel, The Road Warrior , rolled around in 1981, there had been a second oil shock, the Russians had invaded Afghanistan, and Communists were on the move in Central America – and up on screen, any semblance of a civil society in Max’s world was long gone. Cities and governments had disappeared entirely. Life had become tribal. People no longer had normal names – they were Wez and the Gyro Captain and the Feral Kid and Lord Humungus. And what gave them status was the nature and condition of the vehicle in which they traveled. As the novelist Michael Chabon has written, “Typically [the post-apocalyptic stories]
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