Movies

[Dæmon]

Fascinating movies

[Dæmon]

Mad Max Saga

A scenario depicting Modern man's condition, particularly the plight of the male in a feminized world.
Wasteland represents Baudrillard's 'desert of the real'. This French philosopher is the thinker sampled, most often, to describe the human condition within a world dominated by Nihilistic constructs, drawing inspiration from Nietzschean lore.
The 'wasteland' is a time/space void of all symbols of a past, stripped of its nature.
A representation of a psychological condition.
A world made into a cultural desert, within which the man seeks out his destiny.
Infinite possibilities of a reality void of all order. Those who 'rule' here are the ones who can exploit the 'lostness' of the average, offering their own corrupt versions of what is absent, or was but is no more.
Memory modifying past/nature to accord with his/her private, subjective, interpretation of the lost real – a surreal landscape populated by 'wandering victims'.
In the first instalment we are told of Max's detachment form reality, with the loss of his family, pushing him 'over the top' into a state of apathetic rage – ego the 'mad' title.
Max often introduces himself as the 'man with no name', a nobody {ουτις} in a world that has lost all identity. His name is given as a gift, a sign of vulnerability when he undertakes a cause, despite his indifferent rage – thymos with no focus. Having lost his past, detached from nature, he has no focus for his anger – madness wandering in a desert where one goes to meet Satan.
He is the 'wanderer' outside the towns, cities, compounds being created within the desert of anarchy, by clever and creative insanity, finding and hoarding a resource that still remains indispensable.
Nature, the past, is buried, but it appears in the wasteland as a water source, or a market in the middle of nowhere, or in the innovation spontaneously emerging from insanity of the 'villain', who becomes, for Mad Max an awakening of his lost nobility, his previous identification as protector (he was a man of law and order), a father, a husband, the paternal symbol degraded to that of homeless 'outsider'.
We get the sense that Max is seeking a place, an identity, to settle his madness, though he does not know it. For him the journey is endless, into the unknown, never staying for more than it takes to 'aid' another in distress, with his or her own goal.
He offers himself as a mercenary, sometimes for a price, sometimes for no reason other than vengeance against those who disturbed him in his wandering madness.
Max is Neo, from the Matrix Saga, with no sense of duty. There is no Morpheus to tell him of his essence, his duty, as the 'one', but then Neo never had a family to begin with. He was lost before and then was given a purpose in a dream, by a dream.
Max follows the reverse journey, from an identity, a purpose, to nothing but wasteland.
He has been reduced down to an act, and to his rage.
The film appeals to the average, young male, who is also lost within a cultural wasteland of a 'culture of no culture' – Americanism called Globalism to hide its source. Males with rage they cannot direct, missing an identity they have no ‘enemy’ but some vague abstraction – State, government, any order not of their own making.
Wasteland is 'chaos' with no order... within which man creates his own personal depiction of order – a hell on earth the lost gravitate to because in the desert there's nowhere else to go.
Capitalism run wild.
Resources are always from the depths of the earth, either as petrol, or water.
Innovating insanity has tapped into a hidden and forgotten, buried, resource he, or she then uses to exploit those who have no access to it – lacking the tools to dig.
Access to the resource is never explained, so we can assume it was accidental.
The one claiming it as his own did not bring it up from the depths, he found it bubbling up. His only claim on it that there was nobody around to claim it for themselves; his only contribution was in how he then controlled and exploited others with it.
Messianic Complex depicted metaphorically as the insane clever mind, the self-promoting, market oriented mind, hoarding and exploiting a resource – a shaman, a preacher, the one who exploits weakness, desperation, and need by presenting self as the creator of the resource, or as the ‘way to its enjoyment’.
The resource rather than producing a rejuvenation upon the wasteland becomes another source of misery.
In the most recent instalment, Fury Road, we see the resource being released upon a thirsting landscape. The 'villain' kept it buried, making himself the conduit to its access, releasing it temporarily to maintain a following – the metaphor is that of a miser, the priestly, who presents self as the 'way towards a hidden truth', a ‘buried salvation'.
Max is the one who shatters this delusion, this myth. He releases what is kept hidden, uncovers it, and then lets it go.
Beyond Thunder-dome gave us another metaphor: pig shit, as the energy that moves the machinery of commerce, upon the wasteland.
Master Blaster – a combination of a midget mind and an exaggerated body, and atrophied head.
Female in the role of manipulator.
Max kills the body to release the mind that was part of a symbiotic relationship, commentating for an atrophied head.
Meme and Gene, the meme has to be released from its symbiosis with a deformed body and primitive brain, with uncertain consequences.
We are never told what the swine consume to produce the shit the city runs on.
One another?
Humans?
Both are probable.
City run on the self-consuming feces, money being the metaphor for feces – economics of barter built on a foundation of pig shit, maintained by dualistic man-child, and symbolized by a female.
Consumerism, producing the symbol of wealth. Consumer and consumed part of an economic dialectic. Nothing new is added. All is recycled.
In Road Warrior the resource is petrol, another product of decaying organic matter.
Trapped by the resource the 'victims' are pestered by a variety of homosexual, freaks, and social warrior types. An amalgamation of Modern decay.
For them the resource must be shared. They deserve it. They demand it.
They want to squander it in their lostness, speeding here and there, thieving, raping, taking of what does not belong to them, compensating for their loss of self with senseless activity.