Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 51

The Transformation
of Mad Max: Reluctant Savior
in a Devastated Landscape
The recent cult films Mad Max. Mad Max: The Road Warrior.
and Mad Max; Beyond Thunderdome. can be viewed from two angles:
first, the usage of children in each film; and second, the progression of
the character and actions of Mad Max, as he is acted upon and
transformed by the presence and function of children in each of the
three plots.
The background to the story line is a world devastated by a
nuclear holocaust in the recent past. The reasons for the war and the
identity of the antagonists are not given. The survivors are
attempting to cariy on, as nearly as possible approximating the life of
the past. The past, however, is dead, as is, one would think, the
land. Therefore, there seems to be no future, only a bleak, sterile, and
brutalized present. Hence the disappearance of children (or, more
accurately, a child) in the first film. The reappearance of children in
the second and third films represents, respectively, both the
apparent death of the planet, an abyss of despair, and the beginnings
of hope again. The gradual re-emergence of optimism in Max
throughout the progression of the films represents hope for the human
race. He begins as an ordinary man, and becomes nutd in both senses of
the word: murderously angry at his losses, and driven to the brink of
insanity by later events.
In the first of these post-Armageddon films, there is one
child—Max’s son—who along with his mother is deliberately struck
and killed by a brutal and crazed gang of bikers. The second film.
Road Warrior, features a number of children living with adults in a
barricaded desert oil refinery under siege by another brutal and
vicious gang. One child, however, is the focus of a peculiar, wordless
and touching relationship with Max—a semi-wild mute known as the
Feral Kid. In the most recent (third) film. Beyond Thunderdome. Max
is saved by a group of children (who are the survivors of a plane crash
years earlier), and he, in turn, is of service to them.
In Mad Max. Max Rockatanski is a simplistically portrayed,
pure-hearted policeman. He is a member of the Mobile Force Patrol