Mad Max 2026

 

The Interceptor

The Lord of the Rings is a great trilogy, both as books and movies, but it’s not my favorite trilogy this morning. I’m here to talk about Mad Max, the Road Warrior, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Both stories are allegories, LOTR in the grand universal sense, MM in the lowdown ‘fighting for our lives here, boss’ sense. Both stories apply to our current situation in America, but one is more useful as a tool of both engagement and patience. That would be the guy with the leg brace and the bad attitude.

It doesn’t hurt that I identify personally more with Max than I do with Frodo Baggins or, for that matter with Aragorn, Gandalf, or Legolas. There’s an otherness about both settings, but Max’s focus on roads, vehicles, speed, and gasoline are close enough to my own youth that it’s easier for  me to be behind the wheel with him than dodging orcs on the ramparts of Gondor or in the caves of Moria. I have driven fast, a lot, and in more ways than one, very often in pursuit of adversaries more numerous and powerful than myself. 

For a long time I thought this was a customary kind of journey for men through life. But as I get older, I see more and more men camped on the side of the road, arranging broken details of other lives into a semblance of home. Except that they are indeed homeless. Whereas I am still on the road, scrounging for gas and tires and discarded can goods that can keep both my motor and me running toward tomorrow, where something better may turn up.

Increasingly I feel as if I am becoming disconnected from people I have regarded as my kin in various ways. Though we may share much in terms of education, values, chunks of life experience, and basic stances with respect to good and evil, I detect a growing distance between me and them. I have struggled to figure out what is creating that distance. I believe it may come down to my perspective on the difference between patience and acceptance.

As much as they may seem to be, neither one of these is a passive state. Patience is active persistence in who you are. Acceptance is aggressively active denial of what you don’t want to confront in yourself. It is the source of the plague that has infected the western world since the Late Sixties: Instant Gratification. I’ll be circling back to this term and its meaning in a bit. But first it’s time to explain my title.

I said I identify with Max. I do, not just in some figurative sense but more basically than that. Not once but several times in my life, I’ve lost everything. The first Mad Max movie, often overlooked for its low budget and haphazard release, is the story of a man in troubled times losing everything. The Max narrative begins with a nation hovering on the brink of chaos, with its hero trying to protect his family and nation from rising chaos. By the end his family is dead, and he is entering a terrible new world. A symbolic scene in the middle of the film is a solo motorcycle ride by Max’s best friend, a 130+ mph run through the winding ribbon of asphalt that bisects the wastelands of the outback.

Goose presaging the end of police officer Max.

I can relate. I’ve had a half dozen bikes myself. I also had a friend like Goose. We chased each other in cars through the backroads of New Jersey’s three southernmost counties, often topping a hundred mph in rural flatlands. That friend is the passenger in my car during this episode from my 20s, when I was dealing with losses of my own.

We were well above 100 mph when we reached the high school.

Just to prove the incident described above was no one-off, here’s one more of our high-risk vehicular adventures, which also included trucks, speedboats, water skis, an airboat, and of course motorcycles. Then we’ll get back to the serious stuff.

The car was subsequently towed into Will’s private junkyard and forgotten.

Will and I discovered Mad Max together. A promising poster at the Landis Theater in Vineland, on the outer edge of the Jersey Pine Barrens. We were hooked. Even found it at some drive-in theater weeks later, where the projectionist left an entire reel out of the picture for watchers who were probably otherwise engaged. We didn’t ask for our money back, but we were definitely present for the weekend release of the Road Warrior a couple years later. The opening sequence is one of the very best I’ve ever seen in a science fiction movie, far better, for example, than the long scrolling essay that begins the Star Wars franchise:

Yeah. Lean back. Get comfortable. Watch the whole clip. It’s important.

The critics at the time took note of the Road Warrior, because it was groundbreaking, a cinematic event. Far more impressive in filmic terms than Mad Max in a way that fooled them into thinking this was the movie George Miller had really wanted to make the first time if only he’d had the money. But the first movie is indispensable to understanding Max. When we first meet Max, he is living a dual life. He’s a family man maintaining a naively idyllic relationship with his wife and daughter while at work he is policing a deteriorating world filling up with predatory brutes and contagious lawlessness. He loses everything at the end of Mad Max, but it is that loss which he carries with him every leg-braced step of the way through the rest of his saga. Why he never has to say much about personal matters in the Road Warrior. We already know (or are supposed to). And why the second and third movies are not about driving fast and killing people but about his redemption as a man in a world mostly populated by wild animals.

Why do I stress the significance of the before and after in the Max narrative? Because you can think of me as the old man’s voice at the beginning of the Road Warrior clip above. Most of the people I see speaking, writing, and acting publicly these days remind me of the moviegoers who never saw the under-appreciated first movie and only met Max and his world in the second movie, after the roof had fallen in on civilization. Max was there before. He remembers just how quickly the whole world can change, which the opening is trying to tell us, but there are some things you can’t tell to the ones who weren’t there.

I have found that just five to seven years of difference in chronological age between me and my younger colleagues amounts to an insuperable cultural gulf, even a fundamental disconnect. By the time most of them reached puberty, their peers were already using George Carlin’s seven dirty words, the ‘Pill’ was synonymous with birth control, Gloria Steinem was glamorous, the Vietnam War was a national nightmare, SDS had torpedoed a Democrat Convention with protesters from the left, Woodstock was history, the Watergate burglary that would bring down a President was only months away, and the popular culture was well along in mounting the past:

What they had no way of remembering personally was the Kennedy Assassination, the tidal wave of drugs that entered the teen world in the mid-1960s, the introduction to the popular culture of the terms ‘Generation Gap’ and ‘15 minutes of fame’, a plurality of adults who dressed up to go out to dinner and parties and church, and the near certainty that you could attend a sporting or other public event without ever hearing a four-letter word. 

Why does this sea change in culture matter? Because the disconnect I’m experiencing has to do with the fact that people only a few years younger than I am are unaware of just how quickly huge changes in the nation as a whole can occur. Yes, they recognize the kinds of change represented by spectacular single events, but these tend to function as distractions resting on top of an overwhelming amount of stuff that has stayed pretty much the same all their adult lives. To a much greater degree than they realize, the New Normal is relative stasis. Relative because what is staying the same is not circumstances but rather a state of continual gradual decline the population as a whole is powerless to reverse. The schools are getting worse, the children are getting more sullen, the drugs are getting more dangerous, the national debt is getting bigger, the churches are emptier, the houses are more expensive and less well built, the malls are going slowly out of business, the factories are closing and closing, the cars are getting duller and more expensive, the food is less tasty, the clothes are more slutty and ugly, the sex is less exciting, the future is harder to look at, you can’t go anywhere without hearing torrents of words it’s no longer worth trying to teach your kids not to use, and the number of times every family sits down to dinner together is less every year…

Why I say acceptance can assume an active mode. This is the universal one: Instant Gratification.

Nobody really thinks he can save the world anymore. It would be nice maybe, but in the meantime all anyone can do for sure is look out for Number One today, right now, and let the Future take care of itself. 

This is the natural constituency of the Democrat Party, which has long known that nothing can ever really be fixed. What can be accomplished is the amassing of personal comfort and power by being one of the people in charge of the huge unfixable mess. Why the path to electoral victory is awakening the resentments and gratification imperatives of all the conceivable categories of victim in the nation. Tell them what they want to hear and rest assured that when you break your promises, they already knew you would and are okay because they have stopped looking at the scary world of consequences for selfish instant decisions. 

Instant gratification as a basic M.O. for contemporary living has eliminated the future. The Overton Window of people thus afflicted is just a painting on a wall, like the paradise called Shell Beach  in the extraordinarily perceptive movie Dark City.

It doesn’t really exist. Because Dark City is a prison located in an unreal universe.

Sadly, there is no hope for the ones who never look critically at the painting of Shell Beach. My concern here is only with the MAGA citizens of Dark City. These are the ones who have recognized the delusion of Shell Beach but must take remedial lessons in overcoming the crippling side effects of the Instant Gratification M.O. so many have been brought up with today.

Back to Max. At the beginning of the Road Warrior, he is in reflexives survival mode. He has lost his illusions about human virtue. He keeps going because he was a cop and it is a cop’s way to keep going, to keep persevering in achieving small victories against the bad guys. Then he stumbles onto the movie’s equivalent of MAGA, the island of civilization and hope marooned in an incredibly hostile wasteland.

He dismisses them at first. He regards them as sleepers captivated by dreams he himself has discarded. He makes a deal for gas and immediately loses the last two personal connections he still cares about, his dog and his Police Interceptor. This is a second and seemingly final death for him. 

Death and Resurrection. I know that feeling too. Some other time maybe.

Then Max does what? Realizes he’s in the company of human beings who might be worth saving, and he, well, he goes back to work.

“Defend the fuel.”

Where MAGA is right now. The leader is telling the truth. There is only one way back to civilization. When his followers have their Shell Beach moment. It’s too hard. There’s too many of them. Too many miles to go. We can’t make it. You’ve led us here on a fool’s errand. Yada yada. The Epstein Files. The F-bombs. The unrelenting hatred and lies in the press. The roughneck behavior of ICE agents. Nobody told us about Greenland. Or Canada. Or Venezuela. I still can’t afford a new car or a college education for my kids. It’s been a whole year already… You’ve led us on a fool’s errand.

Why you need to talk to me. (The boy in the last clip is the old man of the opening narration, as I am here.)  The stasis you believe in is also a delusion. It is not inevitable that everything has to keep falling apart. The falling apart you think is a permanent condition of American life happened in the space of a very few years’ time. It can also be reversed in a few (more) years’ time. But not if everyone in this island bunker thinks his or her own pet peeves come before “defending the fuel.” Which is, in reality, the whole of the Trump agenda. Remaking a safe and secure America as the fuel for the whole civilization that has stood for God against the atheist totalitarians in the last century and a half.

Yes, there will be casualties. Some, many, of us won’t be with you to see the glory of a great new dawn for the United States of America. But that’s no reason to throw down your weapons and wait for the murderous hordes to take everything you have left.

Me, at the moment, I am Max watching you fling your weapons to the ground. But I know where the tanker is and a lot more than most about how to restart it.

You thought I was going to talk about Thunderdome and Tina and the sweet army of future children who have been my real audience since the last time I lost everything? No. Not today. Today I’m telling you to walk through that lying Shell Beach sign to the real future good men and women dream of.