Recently, I decided to rewatch the 2015 movie Mad Max: Fury Road, for the first since 2018. I absolutely loved it when I saw it then, but I was curious if it holds up. Reader, it very much does. I think the extraordinary virtues of this movie have been extolled enough at this point–in my previous review, if nowhere else. It’s a stunningly well-constructed film, a two-hour action scene that is perfectly paced, perfectly established, and full of subtle, complex character development and simple, inescapable themes. It is a masterpiece of storytelling and filmmaking. But you already know all that!
So today, I’m going to talk a little about the potential historiography of Fury Road instead.
In this framing, I am choosing to accept the events of the movie as the accurate, God’s-Eye-View of the actual historical events that led to the Fall of Immortan Joe and the creation of what we may provisionally refer to as the Democratic People’s Republic of the Citadel. Presumably, however, in the post-literate society of the Wasteland, this history will be passed down in the form of oral tales, traditions, ballads, and chronicles, told over and over again, changing and evolving until they are finally written down, in the same fashion that the Homeric epic poems were not codified until approximately four centuries after the events they purport to relate took place. Centuries, perhaps millennia in the future, as civilization in Australia and the world rebuilds itself, scholars and academics will study this corpus of literature to try and understand the legends of the founding of their country. And I think they will be absolutely baffled by the existence of Max, and his role in them.
You see, I imagine that Furiosa will be a generally well-attested to quasi-historical figure. Many of the legends surrounding her will be dismissed as myth, but I think historians will accept that there was probably somebody named Imperator Furiosa who led the Revolution, overthrew the Old Regime and founded the new government, even if she perhaps did not ride a Golden War Rig out of the highways of Valhalla, and strangle Immortan Joe with a silver chain, etc. After all, somebody had to do it, and a major military leader turning on her superior and staging a coup d’etat makes as much sense as anything else. Furiosa also makes a lot of sense as a culture hero, somebody who can be credited with the transformation or establishment of their society. As a member of the Vuvalini, she represents an outside force that can be brought in to replace the previous set of values and ethics, but as a high-ranking member of Immortan Joe’s army, she shows that integration is possible for those who served the old regime. There isn’t a contradiction between those two roles, the historical and mythic. Gilgamesh is remembered today mostly for his eponymous epic, detailing his epic battles with monsters and journey to the Underworld, but he appears on the Sumerian King Lists, and may have been a real figure at one point. Or perhaps a better example would be King Arthur, whose entire modern mythos is clearly a much-later invention, but may well have been based on a historical Romano-British or Welsh war-leader who fought the invading Anglo-Saxons in the 5th or 6th centuries AD.
The point is, these are well-recognized tropes and patterns of myth and history, and I have no trouble believing that historians in the future will be able to recognize them. But what I suspect they will not understand is why halfway through most of the traditional ballads, this random guy named “Max” walks out of the Wasteland, helps overthrow Joe, and then vanishes from the historical record without explanation.
I like to imagine three schools of historical theory. The first we may call “The Interpolation School”. These scholars believe that “The Legend of Max” was a preexisting ballad with entirely separate provenance. Either intentionally or accidentally, some chronicler or balladeer confused the stories and inserted Max into the “Furiosa Cycle”. This is actually a relatively common phenomenon with folk music and folklore, as stories passed down through oral tradition mutate and change with each generation. An extreme example can be seen with the traditional English folk song “Matty Groves“, which eventually became the American ballad “Shady Grove“, a song which features virtually nothing in common with it anymore, or how with the Irish song “The Bantry Girls Lament“, about a young soldier sent to fight in the Peninsular War (1807-1814), which features references to the “Peelers“, the British police force first established by Sir Robert Peel in 1829.
We can also look to the Matter of Britain, the great Arthurian story cycle. As mentioned above, these are stories that first first come from the Welsh and Celtic Briton sources, but as they are eventually increasingly told by French minstrels in the High Middle Ages, they increasingly come to focus on a new character, French knight Lancelot du Lac. If you read Le Morte d’Arthur, you can’t help but notice that the entire Grail Quest portion seems to have an entirely different viewpoint than the rest of the narrative. In Virgil’s Aeneid, his attempt to craft an epic national founding myth for Rome, he deliberately sought to tie his story and characters into the older Homeric Epics, borrowing from their prestige and reputation. And perhaps the most infamous example of this phenomenon is Biblical texts, and the long history of exegesis there. Later translators and transcribers interpolating their own additions is a perennial problem, especially in regards to Christian interpretations of older Jewish texts.
George Miller’s own take on the “cannon” of Mad Max certainly seems to fit into this lens. In a press conference for Fury Road he famously said:
All the films have no strict chronology. It’s probably after Thunderdome, but it’s an episode in the life of Max and this world. It’s basically an episode, and it’s us revisiting that world. I never wrote the story, any of the stories, with a chronological connection.
Where does Furiosa fit into the Mad Max timeline? George Miller says it doesn’t matter, Austen Goslin (Source)
This certainly lends credence to the idea of Max as a recurring folk hero, the protagonist of a cycle of songs and stories without clear historicity or connection. We can image him like Robin Hood, with a set number of “standard stories” that can be retold in any order; “Robin Hood Wins the Archery Contest”, “Robin Hood Meets Little John”, “Robin Hood Fights Sir Guy of Gisbourne”, “Robin Hood Rescues Maid Mariam”, etc. You’ve seen at least one of the movies, right? Likewise, we can imagine ballads like “Max the Patrolman“, “Max the Road Warrior“, “How Max Escaped Thunderdome“, etc, with his insertion into the “Furiosa Cycle” likely a way to spice up the story with a fan-favorite character.
However, I think that other academics would disagree. They don’t have access to the omniscient narration of the Maxiverse that we do, or knowledge of the “true” chronology. I imagine they would maintain that other Max legends–if they still exist–are in fact derivative of his role in “The Ballad of Fury Road”. It seems likely to me that some people would find the idea that their national foundation mythos was constructed from popular stories to be deeply unpalatable, in the way we might reject claims that Benjamin Franklin was a well-known trickster deity, inserted into the story of the American Revolution to help boost sales in France. We could refer to this school of thought as the “Max As Metaphor School”. They believe that Max is a constructed composite character, designed as a proxy for the great unwashed masses of the Wretched to give them a role in the story. In his quest for redemption, the original authors wanted their listeners to see that the Revolution required the services of all people, and that through cooperative service, we could regain our humanity.
Credence here might be lent by the structure of Fury Road–while Tom Hardy conveys an extraordinary amount of pathos and emotion through facial expressions and grunts, it might not be easy to communicate that nuance through orally-transmitted epic poems and ballads. It wouldn’t surprise me if later critics find Max to be a remarkably simple character, one without much motivation or story of his own, seemingly perfectly designed to serve as a foil for Furiosa. Myths are usually messier, with a lot more dangling bits and inexplicable detours. In the film’s final epigraph, we can see a moral here, as the story begins its journey from event to history to legend:
“Where must we go….
We who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves?”
– The First History Man
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Wandering the wastelands of post-Apocalyptic Australia is here presented as also a spiritual wandering, a loss of essential humanity and self-worth. In Max’s journey from nameless wanderer, with no goal except survival, to a comrade and member of a group who fight for each other, someone willing to give up his own lifeblood to save Furiosa, we can see the narrative of how we too, the listener of the story, can redeem ourselves, can dedicate our life to something bigger, and find purpose beyond mere continuation, merely driving across the salt flats for a hundred and sixty days until you run out of food and gas. Max’s lack of nuance here is a feature, not a flaw, and his return to the masses of the Wretched at the end symbolic of his transmutation. Sometimes, you have to invent a national epic for your people, as with James Macpherson and his The Poems of Ossian (1761-1763), a compendium of supposedly ancient Celtic lore he claimed to have discovered–though it is now widely accepted that he wrote them himself in order to help popularize the Scottish cultural revival.
I suspect, however, that members of the Interpolation School would dismiss this as utter nonsense; a mountain of speculation and motivated reasoning, built upon no evidence whatsoever. To believe this school of thought, you would have to assign a level of intentionally to the Ancient Bards of the Wastelands that can be supported by almost no historical evidence, assigning the motivations of modern Citadelian nationalists backwards in time to people who likely would have no understanding of the context being ascribed to them, the classic sin of presentism. These two interpretations would dominate the academy, and most attempts at analyzing Max and his role in the Matter of the Wasteland would focus on one of these two lenses.
There is also a third school of thought, who maintain that Max was probably just some rando who wandered out of the Wasteland, helped stage the Revolution, and then wandered off again without telling anybody much more than his name. This, however, is a very disreputable theory, widely-regarded as absurdly naive, and all but the most scapegrace scholars hold it in contempt.
