by John Rhall
After showing the lovely couple crash their convertible the film cuts to the main protagonist Arthur Waldo and his brother George by way of distinct contrast. George is driving their down-at-heel car coupled to a beat-up caravan (because Arthur is afraid of driving) and nether of the brothers could be described as belonging to the elite. This contrast between the good-looking couple and their claim to a wealthy lifestyle can be seen as casting Australians under the spotlight of the lesser breed, with the beautiful couple representing the aspiration to American values and Arthur and his scruffy brother representing the have-nots who are required by capitalism to remain at the bottom of the heap (Shiach 33). Further images reinforce the binary oppositions of wealth and poverty; a dead kangaroo being bundled into the boot of an old car (presumably for food for poor people); blurred scenes of men idling outside an unemployment office (32-35). Like the couple in the convertible, George and his brother also crash, only this time we see what causes the crash; a beam of light shoots out of the bushes blinding George, forcing him to swerve and overturn their vehicle. George is killed and Arthur is knocked unconscious. Arthur revives in the Paris hospital but the crash has awoken repressed memories of a previous accident in which Arthur has hit and killed a pedestrian some years before; a horror of guilt that has caused him to give up driving altogether. Arthur also seems to have had a few bits of his brain knocked out, or, to be kind, he appears to be suffering from prolonged concussion as he acts in semi-permanent bewilderment for the rest of the film.
The mayor of Paris, Len Keeley, seems to take pity on Arthur and insists he stays with him and become a part of his family. That Arthur is perceived as more than an outsider but as “ethnic other” is a fact overlooked by many critics who wonder why Arthur is spared instead of joining the zombies in the local “hospital” or simply killed. It could be argued that the mayor is determined to assimilate Arthur in order to diffuse his “threat” to the group in a similar way that the drunken yokels of Wake in Fright unconsciously attempt to assimilate Grant, the foreigner in their midst (Shiach 33). Robin Wood in An Introduction to the American Horror Film argues that there are two ways to deal with the “threat” offered by an infiltration of “ethnic groups” to a culture, and the one chosen by the mayor is one outlined by Wood as encouraging the ethnic to “behave as we do and become replicas of the good bourgeois” thus reducing the threat of their “otherness” to the cultural group (200). This quick insertion of Arthur into the midst of the weirdness that is the town of Paris, and the acknowledgement that his “accident” has left him in a child-like state, achieves two things. The first is that the viewer will see the unfolding story mostly through Arthur’s eyes, and the second is that because Arthur is bereft of the power of action, in that he is incapable of righting any wrongs that he sees, the viewer is kept in a state of anxiety coupled with frustration. As the story unfolds we continue to see it through Arthur’s eyes as we discover that the town is filled with parasitical humans who live off deliberately-caused car accidents. The inhabitants could be viewed in much the same way as the early-day coastal scavengers of England who lit false beacons in order to cause shipwrecks and gather the plunder, killing the survivors as they found them (Morris 1477). Thus the social landscape of Paris can be seen as a town of scavengers and murderers with a possible inbred population, judging from the almost comical actions of the “womenfolk” sitting on their verandas polishing useless metal fittings from the car-wreck booty (Dermody and Jacka 94-96). Meanwhile, what is presumably their inbred offspring wander the streets wearing car badges and other car-related regalia, when they are not lurking inside their odd collection of “monstrous” vehicles – for which they rarely have enough fuel to drive (Shiach 32). Not content with simply killing-off any survivors from the hapless travellers who come past Paris, the town plays host to a “mad scientist”. This ghoulish caricature of a doctor is allowed to conduct experiments upon the occasional living victims. The town then houses the ruined results of his work in the Paris sanatorium.
Brian McFarlane sees The Cars That Ate Paris as one of two films which “contrast a peaceful-looking setting with human events of appalling violence” (79). The other film McFarlane references is Mad Max, about which he argues: “The dramatic effect lies in the contrast of the landscape with the violence and terror of the human behaviour seen in everyday surroundings” (79). Except, that unlike Mad Max, the town of Paris and the events surrounding it could hardly be described as the “everyday”, unless McFarlane and other critics identify with the thematic structure of The Cars That Ate Paris in a way that overlooks the difficult task this film has of appealing to the sense of a “suspension of disbelief” (Carroll 64-68). It could also be argued that the town of Paris and its coterie of evil lunatics could not possibly exist outside of a nightmare which of course is precisely the province of the horror film. The fact that Arthur spends the greater part of the film trying to “awake” in order that he might flee indicates this (Shiach 33-34). Nightmare or not, fantasy or not, the metaphors for Australian life are strong in The Cars That Ate Paris with the portrayal of the classic generation gap between the older car-wreckers and the youth who have to scrounge for the pieces they discard. While the mayor extorts the younger people to work harder he ignores their complaints of not getting a fair share of the spoils, and is seemingly heedless of the growing resentment and threat of revolt his attitudes and those of the other older men are fermenting (33). This dysfunctional relationship is not contained within the context of young men and older men but extends to the home of the mayor, his treatment of his wife and adopted daughters, between the local doctor, his patients and his Hippocratic Oath, all the way through to the Reverend Mulray and his pact with God (34). It is interesting to note that the Reverend Mulray is also considered an outsider like Arthur but is not viewed in the same way. This can be seen when the mayor warns Arthur not to talk with Mulray, or to tell Mulray anything he might then use against the town (34). It is a pointed reminder that evil cannot coexist with any trace of God, that it must distance itself at all costs, and is shown when the Reverend Mulray is finally murdered by the town idiot at the mayor’s behest, thus removing an obstacle to the total demonisation of the town, and all who may enter it.
Chapter 6
Mad Max and Social Disintegration
Dermody and Jacka maintain that the original Mad Max film is difficult to study in isolation from Mad Max 2 and that by grouping them it is easier to follow the growing disintegration of societal values prompted by an emerging anxiety based on loss of order, loss of resources – oil particularly, and the dread of facing a “post-industrial” wilderness (2: 140). Delia Falconer argues that all three Mad Max movies trace the progressive view of “the road” as a “violently contested site” in the first of the trilogy to ultimately disappear into the “landscape of mythic sights” in the final instalment (249). She believes this represents “both the road’s liberation from colonial narratives of empire and its absorption into a deregulated postcolonial spatiality” (249). However, the points raised by Dermody and Jacka concerning a reading of these films are strong ones, and an argument can be mounted that would see Mad Max (1979) and Mad Max 2 (1981) being analysed as a longer single film, perhaps made up of a before and after motif, as Mad Max 3 (1985) according to them offered “little of the intuitive play with mythic archetype that made Mad Max 2 so rich” (2: 239). And even Falconer herself later points out that the third Mad Max instalment “is far less affectively fraught” arguing it has a “strangely jokey, tongue-in-cheek quality: even life-and-death conflicts are rendered comic” (264). It has been argued that once a horror film veers into the lane of comedy it tends to loosen its hold on the empathetic response of its intended audience, thus diminishing the “threat” contained in the text, while the horror text that remains “adult” still carries with it the “complex psychological, emotional, physical and ideological charges of ancient folklore, fairytale and myth” (Wells 35). Mad Max (1979) introduced a
vision of a world “a few years from now”, the fictive “future” world of Mad Max 2 (1981) is one of complete social breakdown bereft of even a flicker of law enforcement, where the only form of civil protection is violence and the only form of justice is more violence. The emerging landscape of this yet-to-be-realised Australia can be seen to relate to the American Western and the actions of its archetypical hero figure, or in this case, Max (Maltby 118). On a certain level the entire Mad Max trilogy could be seen as an Australian Western by its appropriation of the cinematic conventions and iconic representations of any number of revenge centred period Westerns from Hollywood, particularly those blood-splattered “spaghetti” Westerns made famous by American actors such as Clint Eastwood (124). In Mad Max 2 the scenes of the vehicles shielding the oil-refining base can be seen as reminiscent of a circle of wagons in a John Ford movie. The attackers circling the base only require feathered headdresses to complete the symbolism as their arrows find targets among the battlement protectors. Dermody and Jacka see this and other action-chase scenes featuring hybrid machines that are neither car nor horse being ridden by people that are not quite human as “grotesque imagery” (2: 173). This, they claim, paints the attackers as “identifiably demonic”, something that allows obvious oppositional activity in a way that the “creeping anarchy which threatens to spill over and saturate the entire world (in the first Mad Max) cannot” (2: 173). The landscape of Mad Max 2 is also more deformed than that of its predecessor offering as it does a constantly alienating environment of hot sands and venomous reptiles, both human and animal, in a waterless vision of if not hell then it’s only one stop removed from it; a place where the slightest mistake can mean a cruel and merciless death. However, as in the Cars That Ate Paris and unlike Wake in Fright, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith these films are self-consciously portraying a world that does not exist and has never existed.
This first film of the Mad Max series presents a tale that is more realistic by locating the action in a naturalistic and recognisable setting. Ross Gibson notes this about the first Mad Max: “Its horror is expressed in a suburban, or worldly, idiom” (159). Although Gibson also notes the fantasy influence by such things as the futuristic reference in the titles he does not see it as transgressing the boundaries of “plausibility” (159). Gibson sees this mainly because of the director’s expressed opinion of Mad Max as a “report” concerning the almost “endemic road carnage” in Australia at the time (159-160). However, the degree to which the dangers of the roads are featured and the way in which the futuristic police are forced to deal with it, it could also be seen as placing the film outside any conventions of reality that would have been in place in 1979 or even now. The police in Mad Max are clearly painted as a thin blue line between civilisation and barbarism with their use of the pursuit cars (that will later become kill-machine projectiles) named interceptors, along with the ready availability of weaponry and the desire to use it as a first resort. Dermody and Jacka describe the landscape of Mad Max as one defined almost entirely by the roads, and they see these roads as “a labyrinth in which a gladiatorial struggle takes place between the last zealots of law and order, and the growing forces of darkness.” (2: 139). Mad Max may easily be read as an essay on the collapse of society due to a variety of pressures, not the least of these being a failure of the rules and obligations of a civil State and its citizens to adhere to a basic set of principles of behaviour (Rattigan 191).
Undue tolerance and the muddled belief in the “rights” of others to do what they please has lead to a breakdown where the rights of others has been translated to do what they damn well like, along with the incompetent officials who are seen to be floundering in their attempts to protect their citizens. The crumbling edifice of the police headquarters is a visual metaphor for the crumbling autocracy and the anti-social attitudes of the gangs who now rule the road in this vision of a future Australian landscape. O’Regan looks upon the symbolism of the Mad Max films:
At its heart, Mad Max was a story of mutilation, disempowerment and re-empowerment. Its maiming was carefully choreographed: a hand missing here, a limb there, a leg in plaster, a body beneath a tent in too appalling a shape to be seen...the film inscribed upon the male bodies on screen an almost hysterical anxiety – a fear of literal and symbolic castration (104).
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This disembodiment reassembling can be seen in the early part of the film, with a foregrounding of glimpses of Max, his eyes reflected in his sunglasses, his gloves slowly embracing his hands, as bit by bit Max materialises into the nightmare vision of his territory and thus his landscape becomes reflected again in his sunglasses (Johinke 119). The picturing of the road police guarding what is obviously the artery ways to the cities proper shows a guarded fortress mentality as true civilization retreats to the larger and more defensible metropolises, with those left behind pictured as the ones who dare to live on the fringe and at the mercy of the lawless and nature: “Clearly all societies are confronted by a nature they have to deal with” (Strinati 123). That this isolated pocket of society is seen to depend for their protection upon a handful of the legalised lawless, personified by Max, suggests a situation that has no remedy, a situation that is hopeless. This sense of hopelessness pervading through the community is seen when the Captain of the embattled police pleads with Max to give the people back its heroes “because they have stopped believing in them” (Falconer 258). Even Max is confused by his actions and admits to his wife “I’m beginning to enjoy it” referring to his almost suicidal attacks on the Toecutter gang, and adds that if he stays “out there” he’ll end up just like them “a terminal crazy) (258). Max is thus shown to fail his presumed societal obligations by becoming judge, jury, and executioner when revenge overrides any obligations he may feel to the community that invests in him. When Max goes forth to slay monsters he runs the risk of becoming a monster himself, this much he admits to the Captain of police when he attempts to resign from the force – something apparently that Max has done before only to keep coming back. Either Max has a taste for blood that will not go away or Max has been infected with the same virus as those around him.
Like an earlier Australian film On the Beach (1959) that purported to be set a few years into the future and told the tale of group of people waiting to be overwhelmed by nuclear fallout so too does Mad Max appear to tread in the shadows of this theme with the lonely police outpost, and by inference the area it is charged with protecting, slowly losing the battle against forces that will eventually overwhelm and obliterate it. Fredric Jameson compares the events of Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior in the USA) to On the Beach in his discussion of films that use the threat of a “breakdown of civilization and a universal anarchy and regression to barbarism” to address the underlying anxiety prevalent in a society (383). Jameson refers to a society that has reached a level of comfort and security at the expense of others and is now fearful of any imagined loss of what they now feel is an entitlement. Like the characters in On the Beach, who cannot stop the slowly spreading cloud of nuclear fallout from finally overwhelming them, so too can be seen the apathy and sense of helplessness permeating Mad Max. Max’s statement that he and his family might head north is telling because Max is only thinking of a direction rather than a destination, as though he is aware that like those living out their final days in the last city on earth in On the Beach there is really nowhere left to go. The hopelessness of the community is also reflected in their desire to exclude themselves from any involvement in maintaining law and order as witnessed by the couple fornicating in their car and then fleeing at the first sign of trouble from the motorcycle gang – that they are afraid of the outlaws but not concerned about public morals or retribution from the law speaks loudly of a contempt for order, along with any consideration for the rights of others. This creeping dysfunctional morass extends to the police headquarters where Max’s captain Fifi Macaffe is willing to display himself stripped to the waist to a young Max
in what may be described as homoerotic posturing thus revealing his own contempt for example setting, “Fifi’s status is undermined by his unlikely name and by the fact that he is feminised by being located chiefly inside the office – where he is seen bare-chested and tending indoor plants.” (Johinke 120). Even the police mechanic, who has assembled the latest and fastest interceptor car, openly brags, with much smirking, that the parts were gathered “here and there”, putting himself and his position in law enforcement in league with the scavenging forces Max and his fellow officers are attempting to control (Falconer 249-259). Further debasement of the police is shown when one of Max’s fellow officers openly drools as he views a fornicating couple in a field. As he watches them through his telescopic gun sight he is torn between his desire to keep watching or answer an emergency call to action. The landscape of social behaviour is as much under the microscope in Mad Max as the naked couple viewed through the police gunsight. The only outpost of authority that has not succumbed to decay is the hospital which is seen as neat and efficient in its handling of the damaged bodies that come its way. There is no attempt to rationalise this oppositional image except perhaps to equate it with the only other places that have a relatively controlled environment, the café and the bar; thus the film singles out those things that society, including the motorcycle gangs, must preserve to the last; a place to gather and drink, a place to gather and eat, and a place to gather and be healed. It could be seen that even thugs need care, when the one who loses a hand trying to snare Max’s wife’s car with a chain is seen in a latter scene with a neatly bandaged stump; hardly something that the gang could achieve without medical help. So while these needed venues are allowed to function without being troubled everything else concerned with societal values is viewed as continuing to crumble.
