Trailer for Mad Max: Fury Road (dir. George Miller, 2015).
Fury Road, the latest film in the Mad Max series, is released on 15 May. What would Ballard have made of it?
Well, as far as we can tell from this insane trailer, although Fury Road blends elements from all three previous Max films (rogue cop – the first Max; mutant kids – Thunderdome), the truck chase that takes up much of the film is clearly a reboot of Mad Max 2 (aka The Road Warrior).
And of course, Ballard loved Mad Max 2, going so far as to anoint it ‘Punk’s Sistine Chapel’.
To celebrate George Miller’s latest masterpiece, we are proud to present this Ballardian primer to the Mad Max Universe, featuring quotes from Ballard interviews and excerpts from my forthcoming book, Applied Ballardianism.
Quotes by J.G. Ballard
“Mad Max 2 is by far the best of the Mad Max series. With its insane vehicles and fearful body-armour, it is a vision of Armageddon as autogeddon. Mad Max 2 is punk’s Sistine Chapel.”
Quoted in ‘J.G. Ballard’s Top Ten Science Fiction Films’, The Independent, 25 May, 2005.
“I loved The Road Warrior – I thought it was a masterpiece. For ninety or so minutes I really knew what it was like to be an eight-cylinder engine under the hood of whatever car that was; the visceral impact of that film was extraordinary. And seen simply from a science-fiction point of view, it created a unique landscape with tremendous visual authority.”
Ballard, interviewed by Jonathan Cott. ‘The Strange Visions of J.G. Ballard’, published in Rolling Stone, Number 512, 19 November 1987.
International trailer for Mad Max 2 (aka The Road Warrior; dir. George Miller, 1981).
“One SF movie that did impress me, and colossally so, is The Road Warrior. That stunned me – I thought that was an amazing movie. The impact of the thing! Also, it was a credible future. I believed that. Technically and imaginatively it’s a stunning movie, and judged just as SF I thought it was very impressive.”
“Even allowing for vast budgets, the unrivaled resources of today’s special effects, high-definition lenses and optimum film stock and processing-how often do you see a film like Mad Max 2? They all ought to be like that!”
Ballard, interviewed by Andrea Juno & V. Vale. ‘Interview by A. Juno & V. Vale’, published in RE/Search 8/9: J. G. Ballard (RE/Search, 1984).
“Did you see Mad Max 2? That’s a wonderful film, a genuinely apocalyptic movie. Mad Max I is not so good, and Mad Max III goes into SF of the worst kind. It must be seen in the cinema, not on video.”
Ballard, interviewed by Lynne Fox in 1991, published in J.G. Ballard: Conversations (ed. V. Vale, RE/Search Publications, 2005).
“Mad Max 2 doesn’t hold up on the small screen. It needs the big screen. I saw clips on TV before I saw it in the cinema, and I remember thinking, ‘Oh, it’s just a lot of trucks plunging around.’ When I saw it in the cinema it just overwhelmed me… I have seen it recently; in fact, someone gave me the three videos, the first, the second and the Thunderdome one, which was a big disappointment, and I have watched it again. I think it’s an amazing film, a genuine small masterpiece in its way. Some films just demand the big screen, really; they lose everything on TV.”
Ballard, interviewed by David Pringle, published in SFX #9, Feb 1996.
Extracts from the forthcoming book, Applied Ballardianism: A Theory of Nothing, by Simon Sellars.
Opening chase scene from Mad Max (dir. George Miller, 1979).
Following: excerpt from Applied Ballardianism:
“Growing up in Melbourne, I was subjected to an endless stream of roadkill public safety announcements. We all were. Made by the Transport Accident Commission, these horrific productions warned of the nightmare on our roads and were filled with scenes of carnage, yet I was ashamed to discover that their primal jolt thrilled me to the bone. The TAC staged their cautionary accidents with machine-gun editing, speed-cranked action and hyperfluid camerawork, all trademarks of the film Mad Max, which fourteen years earlier had reinvented the cinematic car crash.
The film’s tortured anti-hero is Max Rockatansky, a burnt-out, speed-addicted cop in a decaying, pre-apocalyptic society, where hotted-up cars sanction the murderous impulses of the dehumanised psychos behind the wheel. Max captures precisely the seductive, split-second cyborg rhythm of high-octane driving, but what was the TAC’s real intent? ”
Montage of Australian road-safety public-service announcements (produced by the Transport Accident Commission, 1989-2009).
“To manipulate the viewer to climax with state-sanctioned illicit thrills? There can be no other conclusion. The Max aesthetic is triggered at the point of impact, the precise moment when we’re supposed to solemnly condemn the terror of the roads, to feel the fullest revulsion at the casual violence underpinning our lives. Just as the hyperstylised Max implicates us in the total horror of the road crash, seducing us with the undeniable pleasures of speed, so the TAC embraces the total aesthetic experience of the film crash. They are two versions of reality, separated by ideology.
Doubtless the Transport Accident Commission films were designed to evoke the iconic role Max plays in the Australian psyche, mimicking the film’s stylistic tropes, drawing upon its cultural resonance as a storied symbol of our predilection for vehicular carnage. Yet placed within their shocking, ‘naturalistic’ context, the Max-style impulses generated by the TAC productions are unnaturally disavowed.
Crash sutures the duelling ideologies. The novel embeds Ballard’s concept of ‘inner space’, an alternative mindscape generated when his characters react against totalising systems of control so that ‘dream and reality become fused together, each retaining its own distinctive quality and yet in some way assuming the role of its opposite’. He frames this paradox in the simplest terms: ‘By an undeniable logic black simultaneously becomes white.’
Inner space is the engine of ambivalence that powers Crash, since for all the novel’s radical sexuality its side effects are queasy and disturbing, revealing the flipside of Ballard’s subversive dream logic. One particular sequence, riven with existential dread, forced me to plot my uneasy childhood, with its normalised backdrop of violence, onto new coordinates.
For many years, the narrator had been ‘bludgeoned by billboard harangues and television films of imaginary accidents’, the British equivalent of the TAC ads, bequeathing him a ‘vague sense of unease that the gruesome climax of my life was being rehearsed years in advance’. He even has a premonition of how he will die: filmed unwittingly for one of these televised psychodramas on a secret road, its location known only by the filmmakers.
One day, he crashes into another car on the motorway and admits his fate: ‘After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda, it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.’
Although I was dimly aware that his rendezvous was a symptom of the inexorable logic driving Vaughan’s program of posthumanism, that night I understood only this: white had become black. Under the watch of the ominous sign, the slip road where I’d parked had become the mysterious road upon which ‘Ballard’ would meet his doom, and I was marked for death simply by having viewed the TAC ads, thrilling guiltily to their superbly crafted Max aesthetic, my attraction to technique absorbing me into a hyper-simulated world where there was no escape from the vectors of speed and trauma.
For the historian Graeme Davison, ‘the apocalyptic violence of Mad Max recalls a moment when Melbourne’s roads were truly killing fields’. The sign, with its confronting statistics, begged a return to form. It sent a message: the killing fields had re-opened for business. The sign’s single question mark, bolded in a blood-red font, press-ganged us all into a drive towards death, coercing us to beat the record, as if we were powerless to halt the carnage.
Davison is a sober writer, not prone to hyperbole. In fact, Max’s director, George Miller, developed the film’s script after experiencing two threshold moments. During the global oil crisis of the mid-70s, he read in the paper about frustrated motorists who’d turned feral at a Melbourne petrol station, attacking each other for the last drops of fuel. Later, working as a doctor in Melbourne, he treated numerous road-accident victims and was struck by the nightmarish intensity and frequency of the crashes. For Miller, these events were interconnected, as if the city had been possessed by a malevolent force. In the 70s, drink-driving was horrifyingly common in Melbourne, frequently accompanied by savage aggression. There were so many road deaths, around a thousand every year, that Miller said it was ‘as though we are operating under some immutable law of nature. We make funny noises, but none of us really understands what’s happening. The USA has its gun culture, we have our car culture.’
Mad Max upholds this view of technological carnage as natural law. After Max’s wife and son are slaughtered on the open road by a biker gang, he seeks revenge. He steals the police force’s fastest car, a Ford V8 Interceptor, and brutally kills the bikers one by one, running them off the road or chaining them to homemade bombs. Max has been stripped of his humanity, savaged by the ongoing car wars and hopelessly addicted to speed and violence (he’s like a kid in a candy store when he first sees the Interceptor). He has become as psychotic as the gang he hunts, and when he walks into police headquarters to retrieve his secret weapon, a clever screen wipe shows the Interceptor instantly driving back out, replacing the broken man from a moment before—as if Max has become the machine. To Melburnians, Mad Max is not fiction but a documentary.”
Below: still from Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, dir. George Miller).
‘Escape’ by Junkie XL, from the soundtrack to Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).
The post Mad Max: ‘Punk’s Sistine Chapel’ – A Ballardian Primer appeared first on Ballardian.
He must have rehearsed his story a dozen times, aiming to get it just right, to tell it with a perfect mix of curiosity and candor: “I was lookin’ for pieces with my metal detector, up above the river terrace in Avenham Park. That’s in Preston, near me home in Bolton.” He would tell experts at the university that he’d found a treasure wrapped in a leather sack and hint that he might have uncovered something special, a piece of Anglo-Saxon history. It sounded possible, maybe even plausible. With luck and a bit of prodding, they would find their own way to identify it as an ancient reliquary, a silver chalice dating back to the tenth century. But inside the vessel was the real gem, a touch of medieval magic that could only be called inspired.
