"Breaking the Silence: Language permeating landscape in three Australian films" - excerpt on MAD MAX (1979)
Breaking
the Silence: Language permeating through landscape in three
Australian films.
Silvana
Tuccio, Lacunae, Italy
EXCERPT:
Mad
Max
Max is the
hero of the film Mad Max
(1979)1,
a man who has lost his family–a wife and a child, and as Meaghen
Morris puts it: “...his personal sphere has been exterminated.”
(Morris, 2006) Early in the film, we learn that Max is disillusioned
with his job, where violence is a reality. His attempt to leave his
job, however, is curbed by the experience of tragedy. Max remains in
the same job, and subsequently enters into a struggle to gain
dominance over the road where it took place.
Max confronts the “world” with a sense of
hostility. In fact, in the film “the world as we know it” is no
longer made of suburbs and shopping malls, it has rather become a
barren and hostile place, an apocalyptic landscape with the
characteristics of a “desert.” The word desert is popularly
regarded as being synonymous with “empty” and “unlivable,”
and in the lore of colonial Australia, a place that leads nowhere,
where one can perish. The desert takes on other connotations when
viewed from the perspective of indigenous culture, where sites mark
the territory, vegetation is known for its food and health giving
properties, and ways lead to the lands of tribes, each speaking a
different language. The 'desert' landscape represented in Mad
Max is that of colonial lore,
resonating with the trials of the Burke and Wills expedition. The
expedition showed the extent to which the two explorers were able to
“see” into the landscape and to meet its people2.
In colonised lands, the mapping of “unknown” territories through
exploration is the quest to create routes or passages into the
countryside, critical for the expansion of the colonial project. The
outcome of the charting is the overlay of roads onto the landscape.
In this vein, the desert in Mad Max
is mapped with the ultimate landscape trope of the colonial era: the
road. The road is where Max not only locates himself, but it is also
where the tragedy of the loss of his wife and child took place. The
road becomes for Max a space of reckoning, and it reflects his
emotional terrain–on the one hand capable and forceful, on the
other, lost and overwhelmed by hostility.
In the article, “La strada e la scomposizione di
sé. Riflessioni
postcoloniali di un insolito road movie,” (Papalia, 2005) Gerardo
Papalia refers to the road as “protagonist:”
Both sides
provide an alibi and a justification for the unfolding violence: the
absence of nature allows the road to be elevated to the role of
protagonist and signifier; the “population” is the subaltern
constantly needing protection from the “Bikies,” which justifies
the violence perpertrated by the “Main Force Patrol.” (Papalia,
2005).
In Australia, the significance of the road is
established by the urban layout of cities, which privileges long,
straight lanes and a grid pattern of streets on which cars can
circulate. The road connects the city, and in tracts becomes a
shopping strip with stores either side, or even a mall closed off to
traffic, allowing shoppers to walk freely. The road crosses the
boundary between city and countryside without losing its importance.
The road, thus, facilitates communication by acting as a passage to
the transportation of people and goods. Despite this, the road is not
a place of conversation. In Mad Max,
society has degenerated such that the road has become the place of
encounter with the hostile other in an apocalyptic landscape, namely
the Bikers. The Bikers do not acknowledge any law other than their
own, or hold sympathy for any being. In this way, the road is
dangerous not only due to speed, or unruly driving, but because it is
dominated by the Bikers, who prey on the population, and in keeping
with the post-apocalyptic scene, rather than seeking money, they seek
fuel, which in the post-atomic world represented in the film is a
scarcity. Furthermore, Max's wife and child are ambushed and killed
on the road. Thus the road in Mad Max
is where the vulnerable are silenced. There is not just a lack of
talk, there is dead silence.
If it is “the road” that kills, it is where
Max is driven to (violent) action, unable to access the peace of mind
that might atone the experience of loss. With the Main Force Patrol,
he carries out actions against the loud and disruptive Bikers. In the
barren landscape, the population struggles, unable to speak
about the reign of terror that conditions their lives. Violence takes
the place of language; and, along with the inhospitable environs,
works to suppress it. By liberating the road, the vital artery of the
landscape, Max promises to lift the population from their submission
to terror, and allow communication. In this way, Max's role is to
redeem the landscape, albeit the colonial one, from where the chance
for speech might arise, and perhaps even dialogue. However, whilst
Max's actions offer the promise of freedom and the possibility of
language, he enacts equal violence.
In his quest to rule over the highways and free
the population, Max can be likened to the mythological figure of
Robin Hood, in place of taking from the rich to give to the poor, he
trades in audaciousness, taking from the forces of evil to give to
the meek, and most importantly to restore agency over the road.
Having taken things into his own hands, Max has elevated himself to
the status of hero, leading the challenge towards overcoming
oppression, and overcoming the dominance of the Bikers. But to what
extent can Max be successful, considering that the place he inhabits
is “foreign,” and within which there is no chance to be reunited
with his family? In the article, “White Panic, Mad
Max and the Sublime”, Morris suggests
that Max is, in fact, less at home in the post-apocalyptic
environment than might appear. Familiarity with the landscape is
constantly reckoned with in the face of the unpredictable attacks by
the Bikers, whose hostility makes Max uneasy. The fact that Max loses
that which is most precious to him, which defined his masculinity and
social standing as father and husband, shows the extent to which he
is unaware of his vulnerability. Furthermore, Max responds with an
excess of masculine fervor, which transmutes into violence, whilst
the experience of vulnerability is displaced onto the female figure
with child, who embodies the crisis of the ideal family. So, rather
than express his loss, Max is pressed to “fight,” and in doing so
he becomes victim to the very forces that demand “silence.”
Furthermore, Morris suggests that Max is neither a
native of the place nor a settler, he is rather an 'emigrant'. She
writes: “Max is an emigrant with no hope of returning home; his is
a story of displacement and traumatic severance, and it serves on
many levels as a myth of origins projection into the future a scene
of repetitions in which the repetitive ('on the road again', heading
for the Uknown) can always be redeemed as a brand new start.”
(Morris, 2006) The status of emigrant or migrant or immigrant
pertains to those who traverse “seas” to settle in another land,
and in doing so must come to terms with the “unknown,” a place
that is different from what he or she imagined before the departure.
Expecting to find familiarity in the surroundings, whether an urban
landscape or the countryside, even whilst enjoying the newness, the
just arrived person must orient himself or herself around markers
that become familiar with time; when this process is hindered,
estrangement and hostility are created in place of familiarisation.
In the first of the Mad
Max series, which sets the scene for
the following films, the conditions that forge Max's existence are in
fact those of estrangement and hostility–his personal sphere is
challenged. In this, Max is not only driven by revenge, but by the
inability to speak his truth–which lies in the experience of loss.
Not understanding that pain sits within the emotional sphere denial
takes the place of acknowledgement and paves the way for an “excess”
of masculine qualities, which in Max's case fuel his desire for
dominance, as he seeks justice.
Acting as a chorus (to Max's existential state),
and despite Max's attempts at redeeming the road, the population does
not find the resources to regain their status as human beings within
the place they inhabit, and remain oppressed. The landscape they
inhabit is devoid of trees, grass, flowers, rain, and of human
interaction. It is a place that is harsher than the Far West and
wilder than the Amazon, but most importantly, it is more silent than
any urban periphery, from which the post-apocalyptic world in which
Max navigates is drawn.
The Mad Max series,
may well be an allegory for the kind of dynamics that play themselves
out on Australian roads. Like a macabre rite, the nightly news of
television channels across Australia count the death toll on the
roads leading into the city. In this scenario, the road is a place
harbouring danger, and the urban zones are sites of desolation.
Furthermore, the population lives in silent “anticipation” of the
daily count of tragedies on the road; and perhaps, even the return of
Burke and Wills from their expedition.
Mad Max was
made in 1979 and shot on location in
and around Melbourne. The locations were chosen on the fringe or just
outside the city, and it is interesting to note that many of these
sites have gained cult status along with the films. In applying Marc
Augé's definition of non-places, sites on the city fringe have the
potential to be exploited for urban development but have not yet been
taken over by urban sprawl. Most importantly, as abandoned sites they
are no longer enclaves of nature. As non-places, the identity of the
place is subjugated to the function of transit and to the rules that
either allow safe passage or a sense of desolation. Where desolation
reigns, despair and the potential for violence become dominant, even
more so if communication is limited or cut off. The non-places of the
Mad Max film locations function to
create the inhospitable, post-apocalyptic environment that is the
back-bone of the film series, where interaction is hostile and
communication is suppressed, and ultimately depicting a world that
has lost vitality.3
If we consider Max a 'migrant,' as Morris has
suggested, we can see that he is displaced both physically and
emotionally, for Max is not only 'not at home' in the landscape, he
is 'not at home' within his inner sphere. To overcome this state of
ambivalence and detachment, Max 'performs' a kind of masculinity that
makes him into a 'cool' and 'violent' character. In the book Korean
Masculinities, talking about the appeal
of popular Korean male performers and cult film characters, Sun Jung
suggests that being 'cool' and being 'foreign' are the traits that
produce the kind of postmodern
masculinity that viewers from different cultural backgrounds can
accommodate and even desire. She writes: “...because male coolness
is anti-maternal, men must detach themselves from the familial realms
to remain cool. Such isolation results in masculine loneliness and
both these aspects of detachment are distinctive socio-cultural
symptoms of postmodernity.” (Jung, 2011: 121) We can also read
'anti-maternal' as separated from the 'mother country.' In the new
country, Max is challenged to break the silence experienced due to
isolation and to the experience of loss, and perform another kind of
masculinity, which might redeem him. But Max is unaware of this
challenge: that of reclaiming through speech an inner space, where
feelings and memory are situated, and thereby freeing the self from
the demands of revenge, and violence. Instead, he goes out onto the
road to fight and free it from the influence of the Bikers, and in
this way, relegates dignity and status to an external show of might,
where strength, strategy and revenge matter, ignoring the wounded,
humiliated and silenced self, and especially the self which was
witness to the violence enacted on a woman and child, for which it
seems there are no words to be said. So the question is: will Max
ever succeed, despite the landscape that underscores his separation?
Will he overcome the damage and the submission to the silencing
forces and gain an identity at peace with where he lives? Perhaps,
George Millers's latest film in the Mad
Max series, Fury
Road
(2015) might have an answer.