I’m always concerned when I see someone talking about how “cool” the world of Mad Max is without acknowledging that it is a living hell that was caused by people. I don’t mean that it was caused by the whole of humanity, but rather that it was caused by the people in charge — their thirst for power, their inability to see the reality that exists beyond their own egos, their inability to admit that the very systems that handed them power are killing everything, and their insistence on spreading a pestilence of lies that keeps others from understanding reality.
Today, We’re All Living in Mad Max’s World by Jim Poe (Jacobin Magazine)
George Miller’s Mad Max film series has become synonymous with the postapocalyptic genre. At their core, however, Miller’s films aren’t so much a prediction of the future as an indictment of our capitalist present and the ruthless individualism that maintains it.
For a very long time, I thought the Mad Max films were rather silly, but then I realized that the only thing silly about them is that anyone is alive at all in a world that broken.