The Miraculous Manu Memorial Movie Month, Mmmmm!

Mad Max (1979)

I apologize to those already expecting a visual feast from my commentaries. I did not take screencaps for this movie because:

a) I was worried about the time commitment on a work day, to pause and rewind it and crop it and export it and run them all through Irfanview to make them smaller and then upload them. This worry was unfounded, because I was careful to arrange shorter movies for work days, and I will not stress about this in the future. But also,

b) Mad Max is an action movie. For an action (or horror) movie, you the viewer are along for the ride, a passenger. Not that it can't be analyzed or that it is "just a movie, turn your brain off," but on a first viewing you certainly don't want to rob yourself of its pacing, and it doesn't traffic in delicately-composed shots and subtle nested levels of irony. (Instead, it traffics in traffic. Like, cars.)

No, Mad Max is a story about good and evil, justice and insanity. That is to say: good justice, evil insanity, evil justice, and finally good insanity. We meet the titular Max, quite sane actually, as a sort of police officer, indeed the force's most competent and bad-ass member, in a mildly post-apocalyptic future "a few years from now." (Indeed, it's hard to tell that there even has been any sort of apocalypse if you've somehow never become familiar with the premise of the Mad Max franchise. Everyone dresses and acts much the same, the only clue is really that our "police officers" are more like good samaritans in leather than any real organization.) This is demonstrated with one hella sick car chase that opens the film, in which all of Max's compatriots fail to apprehend The Night Rider until Max arrives and, before he's even done anything, reduces the whooping and hollering bad guy to tears. (There's an explosion at the end!) This is our Good Justice.

In doing so, however, Max has incurred the wrath of The Night Rider's affiliated motorcycle gang, the Acolytes, (name not mentioned in the film, I believe, but on the Wikipedia page,) who are the embodiment of Evil Insanity. They enact a campaign of terror against Max, sometimes intentionally, sometimes inadvertently, as their evil insanity would imply, beginning really with immolating his partner on the force. He is driven to quit the force or at least take a few weeks off, stating, quote:

"Any longer out on that road and I'm one of them, you know? A terminal crazy... only I got a bronze badge to say I'm one of the good guys. "

He's righter than he knows. This does not stop the Acolytes from continuing to enact their brand of Evil Justice, killing his dog, wife, and child, and severely wound him. (Action doesn't really work unless the hero gets badly wounded, in all possible ways. You could say the same about all genres, but in action it has to be tactile and visceral.) For Max, it is no longer about maintaining order. It is about revenge. He suits up and kills every single person in the Acolytes. Finally, having killed the leader, he finds the lowest-ranking member of the gang scavenging for clothes. Instead of just killing him, or apprehending him (as we've already seen this man apprehended and let off on technicality — perhaps another form of Evil Justice,) Max devises a sadistic death-trap, hand-cuffs him to an upturned automobile, sets up a sort of fuse that will ignite the gasoline and oil, and implores him to cut off his own ankle, because it's faster that way. He drives away from the ensuing explosion without looking behind him. This is our Good Insanity. He truly was... a Mad Max.

A useful point of comparison for all of this, I think, is Dirty Harry. (The original, I haven't seen the sequels.) In Dirty Harry, the titular Harry Callahan, is, from the beginning of the movie to the end, in favor of cutting corners and using excessive force to lay down order. He does not really have an arc. Instead, the rest of the world almost bends around him to justify his existent values, showing how the due process of law impedes public safety, until finally these external obstacles are dismantled and Harry is able to have his druthers and chase down the evil, insane Scorpio — and in doing so, in killing his counterpart, erase his own reason for existing as a modern cowboy, lending a certain bittersweetness to his ultimate victory. (Until the sequel!)

These stories end in, essentially, the same place. But where Dirty Harry spends its time on negating forces external to the main character, Mad Max focuses on the journey of Max, how you can get this right-thinking man to internally embrace his insane world, making its hard-fought ending feel more justified and wholesome, less likely to irk the liberal-minded viewer leaving the theater. (Although you could say that's the point of Dirty Harry, along with soothing 1970s America's open wound shaped like the Zodiac.)

Overall, a very very good movie, and I liked it a lot.