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Mad Max (1979) sits before the post-apocalyptic frame, despite being read into it. This is the thing. The first movie is set in a recognizable near-future Australia where there's still a functioning Main Force Patrol, still courts (sort of), still gas stations and diners and houses with curtains, still a wife and baby and a dog and a beach holiday, and the apocalypse, such as it is, is an off-screen rumor, an oil crisis maybe, a vague civilizational fraying that the cops are losing a slow-motion war against. It's a road movie about police impotence in a depopulated continent where the gangs have better mobility than the state. And that situation is an actual thing that was happening in late-70s rural Australia, not Mad Max specifically, but the built-in problem the film is dramatizing, which is that you have a country the size of the continental United States with the population somewhere around Texas's, vast distances between settlements, a road network that the federal government can barely police, and (this is the crucial part) the post-1973 oil shock hitting an economy that was already by design vulnerable because Britain had joined the EEC in '73 and the Commonwealth preference system was unwinding, meaning Australian agricultural exports were suddenly competing on world markets with no protection, and the wool boom was over, and the country was going through what would later be called the "banana republic" anxiety, Paul Keating's phrase from '86, but the feeling predated him by a decade.

So the first film is a film about a state that can't reach its own periphery, made in a country that was actually worried about whether it could reach its own periphery, by a doctor (Miller had trained as a physician and worked in emergency medicine, which matters, he'd seen what cars did to bodies and the film is built around the medical reality of vehicular trauma in a way no American action film ever was, because American ER doctors didn't make action films, they made medical dramas) who understood that the apocalypse Australians feared most concretely, alongside nuclear war, was being abandoned. By Britain, which had abandoned them. By America, which might. By their own coastal cities, which had abandoned the bush.

The apocalypse had already happened to the Australian interior, in the form of depopulation, decades old.

And then The Road Warrior (1981), Mad Max 2 in Australia, is where the franchise pivots into the iconography that everyone now associates with it, which is the desert, the leather, the modified vehicles, the besieged refinery, the Lord Humungus. And the political-economic reading sharpens here, because the second film is made AFTER the second oil shock (1979) and AFTER the Iranian Revolution and at the point where Australian energy anxiety had crystallized into something genuinely apocalyptic in the cultural imagination, and it's additionally worth noting on the under-discussed material side.

Made during the Fraser government's expansion of Australian uranium mining and at the early stages of what would become the Pilbara iron ore boom, which means the actual material reality of the Australian outback in 1981 was that it was being more intensively extracted from than at any point in its history, with mining camps and company towns and roadtrains and a whole infrastructure of resource extraction that looks, if you squint, EXACTLY like the world of Road Warrior, heavily armed convoys moving precious commodities across hostile distances, fortified compounds in the middle of nowhere, a transient masculine workforce, and a state presence that's basically negligible because the mining companies have their own security and their own logistics and their own everything.

The refinery in Road Warrior is a Pilbara mining camp with the gas turned to oil. The marauders are the inverse of the Fly-In-Fly-Out workforce, what happens if those guys don't fly out, if the camp shuts down and they're left with nothing but the vehicles and the violence-skills the work taught them. Lord Humungus is, by design, a redundant supervisor. The sneering pride, the residual machinery of authority deployed without any institution behind it.

And the further point is that nobody reads it this way because the film is so good at presenting itself as universal, as a kind of Western, or a samurai film (Miller has talked about Yojimbo), that the specifically Australian content gets sublimated into archetype. But the archetype is doing a job. The archetype is letting Australians think about resource extraction, frontier violence, and state absence WITHOUT having to think about them, which is what genre always does and what it's for.

Beyond Thunderdome (1985) is where the franchise breaks, and it breaks for a specific reason, which is that by 1985 the Hawke-Keating Labor government had been in power for two years and was beginning the project of opening up the Australian economy, floating the dollar in '83, deregulating the financial sector, dismantling tariff walls, that would, over the next decade, end the version of Australia the Mad Max films were a response to. The fear of being abandoned was being layered over with the fear of being absorbed.

Tina Turner's Bartertown is a film made by people who can already feel the built-in anxiety shifting and don't quite know what to do about it, so they reach for, of all things, an institutional comedy about a corrupt town with two seats of power (the methane works and the trade hall), which is a much more 80s-deregulation sort of anxiety than a 70s-abandonment one. Notice that Bartertown WORKS as a polity.

It's functioning. The crisis here is reassembly more than collapse, the civilization that's reassembled is grubby and compromised and run by people you don't like. Which is, I mean. That's a very specific kind of disappointment, and it's the disappointment of watching the Hawke government privatize Qantas, not the disappointment of watching the state lose control of the highways.

And then the franchise sleeps for thirty years, which is exactly correct, because the cultural conditions that produced it stopped existing.

Fury Road (2015) is the one to watch, because Miller comes back and makes, by acclaim, the best film in the series, but he's making it in a completely different Australia, AND for a global audience that has by now absorbed the Mad Max iconography as a free-floating set of signifiers (the leather, the cars, the desert) that they can read as climate apocalypse, or oil apocalypse, or general civilizational-decline apocalypse, and which Miller is canny enough to lean into.

The "war on water" framing, the Citadel as a vertically-organized resource state, Immortan Joe's whole setup, this is a film about resource oligarchy in a way the originals weren't yet positioned to be, and it lands as a film about resource oligarchy because by 2015 Australia is a resource oligarchy. Gina Rinehart, Andrew Forrest, Clive Palmer, the Pilbara has produced a class of mining billionaires whose wealth and political influence is without precedent in Australian history, who own private jets and run media empires and bankroll political parties, and the Citadel is that class taken to its logical visual conclusion, the magnate as warlord, the corporation as fiefdom, with a captive workforce and a private aquifer and a propaganda apparatus.

So Fury Road, which everyone wants to read as a feminist film or an environmentalist film or an action masterpiece (it's all of these), is also a film about what the Australian resource economy looks like once the Hawke-Keating opening has run its full course and produced, in place of any deregulated egalitarian utopia, a handful of enormously wealthy private actors who have effectively replaced the state in vast swathes of the country, which is, in the actual Pilbara, kind of literally true.

The major mining companies maintain their own roads, their own ports, their own airstrips, their own towns, their own emergency services. The state delegated its presence to capital. Capital built a parallel infrastructure. The Citadel is what that infrastructure looks like when you take the corporate logos off.

And Furiosa (2024) is, I haven't decided what Furiosa is yet. It's a prequel, which means it's working in a different mode, but the thing I keep noticing is that it's much more interested in the geography of the wasteland as a connected system, the Citadel and Gas Town and the Bullet Farm as a triangulated trade network, which is a more 21st-century way of imagining the post-apocalypse, where the apocalypse functions as the reorganization of complexity into something meaner, the end-of-complexity reading giving way to it. The supply chain survives, and it gets uglier.

The thing about all of this is that the films keep WORKING, and they keep working because Miller is a good enough filmmaker to translate the specifically Australian material conditions into mythic structures that other audiences can use for their own anxieties, Americans read Fury Road as climate apocalypse, Europeans read it as resource war, Chinese audiences I'd guess read it as warlord-era nostalgia repackaged. And all those readings are available in the films, are deliberately available, but they're sitting on top of a much more local underlying material that's about a specific country's specific relationship to its own emptiness, its own distances, its own resource economy, its own fear of being left behind by the Anglosphere it used to belong to.

Except the specifically-Australian-conditions argument has a problem, which is that the post-apocalyptic vehicular genre emerged simultaneously in places that share none of those conditions. Enzo Castellari's *The New Barbarians* (1983) came out of Italian genre cinema, Cirio Santiago's *Wheels of Fire* (1985) out of the Philippines, *Fist of the North Star* (1983) out of Japan, all of them running the same basic formula of vehicular violence across depopulated landscapes, none of them responding to Australian oil anxiety or Pilbara extraction or the unraveling of Commonwealth preferences. The form is convergent. The global audience wanted post-apocalyptic road war, and multiple national cinemas provided it independently.

Fury Road itself was shot in Namibia, not Australia, the Namib Desert standing in for the Australian outback because the Australian locations Miller had scouted were too green after unexpected rains, which means the most Australian film in the franchise, the one that most precisely captures the Pilbara-as-Citadel political economy, was physically made on a different continent entirely. The relationship between the films and the Australian landscape turns out to be contingent rather than constitutive, which doesn't invalidate the Australian reading but does suggest it's one available reading among several rather than the hidden truth underneath the archetype.

And the further consequence is that the imitations never quite work. The hundred post-apocalyptic films that lifted the Mad Max iconography couldn't lift what was underneath it, because what was underneath it was the experience of living in a continent where the state can't reach you and the multinationals can, and most countries don't have that experience, or have it in a form that produces something other than action movies, novels maybe, or just a quiet civic depression.