- A Moment of Your Time
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- MTFLM: Mad Max (1979)
Eyes bulging out of someone’s head. A sniper drawing a bead on a naked couple in a field. A child’s shoe tumbling across a two lane highway.
These scenes and many others serve as components of a loud and scrappy engine within George Miller’s Mad Max. The barely-in-the-future dystopian story features many iconic moments, but what makes this film perfect for the first MTFLM is not any particular moment. It’s the way these moments are presented.
There’s much for which this movie can be praised, but the choices in location, color, and image composition are what makes this movie FEEL like a movie.
Location, Location, Location
For a story set amidst the end of days, the areas shown on screen aren’t that decrepit. The film was produced on an incredibly tight budget, so elaborate skull totems and torture chambers weren’t feasible. Of course, “bigger” does not automatically mean “better”, and the film manages to combine a perfect mixture of normality and exaggeration within each set-piece.
It’s easy to forget how many pivotal moments of this movie take place inside stocked bars and functioning hospitals. Functioning to what degree is anyone’s guess, but the point here is that the world doesn’t all end at once. Like air leaking out of a tire, civilization slowly disappears with a barely audible hisssssssssssssss.
This works to the film’s advantage. With people acting somewhat “normal” while the camera constantly shows the places they frequent (bars, police stations, ice cream shops), you as the viewer are forced to wonder why. Why is anyone still going to work? Aren’t they worried about the end? Doesn’t anybody care that packs of marauders are taking over the highways?
With such a severe threat looming large, how does Miller choose to show those highway miles under gang control? Ironically, they’re the cleanest sets of the whole movie. There’s no garbage, just miles of asphalt that winds on and on until your eye is sliced in half by the horizon. Any debris left behind by Toecutter’s gang is intentional. It’s a message to Max the other members of Main Force Patrol: You are trespassing in the new Garden of Eden; watch out for snakes.
Color Coding
Plenty of films use cars and their colors as metaphors for something, but Mad Max takes an extra step by reminding you that, under the worst of circumstances, the difference between humanity and machinery evaporates. You become an engine to maintain. The people around you are obstacles, threats to the resources you think you deserve.
Take the sequence with the couple driving the red Bel Air. It’s no coincidence that the filmmakers chose a red car. Red represents both love and war, desire and destruction, passion and power.
Both the vehicle and its drivers are intentionally out of place. Toecutter’s apocalyptic party is interrupted by the arrival of a piñata. The lush and curvy red wagon cavorts along with these free-spirited “Give Peace a Chance” types behind the wheel. They represent that toxic optimism some of us may feel about an end-of-days event. Maybe it’ll be the best thing for us, you might think. We will escape the rat race and return to something more humane, maybe even a truer form of life.
There’s nothing humane about the things that happen to the couple. The message behind these awful scenes? Your desire for peace and love is a weakness in this new world. The bulls own the roads, and you’ve put a lot of faith in their ability to see red in the same way you do.
Motion and Composition
Even if you don’t want an apocalypse, the apocalypse may want you. When we are between chase sequences, we see a world of captivating evil through Toecutter’s eyes. The actor, Hugh Keays-Byrne, delivers such a clever performance, blending self-assured restraint with egotistic displays of authority. He’s not some savage marauder. He’s the ring leader of a nightmarish circus, and you are his captive audience.
He and his troop counterbalance the other visual details throughout the film. A majority of scenes take place on roads, which maintains a certain amount of visual order. Straight lines from huge blocks of asphalt control the eye. Other than the cars, there’s (intentionally) not much to focus on. You’re already inclined to pay attention to the marauders whenever they’re on screen. However, what makes their presence so unnerving is how expansive their positioning becomes - both on and off the road.
Look again at the first panel in this section. That guy is just up there. It’s not mentioned or explained in the film, so you are left to try and make sense of something senseless. They’re comfortable in the anarchy. Are you?
As You Can See…
I took this photo in the spring of 2020. Bad year. As the pandemic settled in on North America, I was in the midst of moving out of my college apartment. In hindsight, it’s a bit dramatic, and probably in poor taste, to say it felt like my world as a “kid” was ending at the same time the actual world ended.
Yet at the time, there were moments where that felt somewhat-maybe accurate. I think we all had reactions during that 2-year stint where, after reading some statistic or watching something unfold on the news, we thought, “woah, this might actually be it”. Even if your internal voice of reason immediately stepped in and criticized you for worrying too much, or made you feel guilty for forgetting how not impacted you actually were, there was a small, un-shut-up-able part of your brain that selfishly hoped the rage and tragedy and contagion stopped, if not immediately, then right outside your door.
I made many trips from my apartment back to my hometown during that spring, and that repetitive journey took me through long mundane stretches of road not unlike what’s found in George Miller’s Mad Max. Did I see myself as ready or willing to bear witness to the horrors found in the infamous Wasteland? Of course not.
Nevertheless, this film’s matter-of-fact locations, distinctive colors, and fantastical character movements create a viewport out of the submarine that is the reality we’re stuck in. We think we know what futures hide in the depths, yet every so often, something in the distance, something big, seems to pass by. We hope it’s one of the good ones - the peaceful ones, but there’s never any way to be sure.
Thank you for your time.
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