Cirrus@Austlit

'This book explores the inter-relationship of disability and trauma in the Mad Maxfilms (1979-2015). George Miller’s long-running series is replete with narratives and imagery of trauma, both physical and emotional, along with major and minor characters who are prominently disabled. The Mad Max movies foreground representations of the body – in devastating injury and its lasting effects – and in the broader social and historical contexts of trauma, disability, gender and myth.

'Over the franchise’s four-decade span significant social and cultural change has occurred globally. Many of the images of disability and trauma central to Max’s post-apocalyptic wasteland can be seen to represent these societal shifts, incorporating both decline and rejuvenation. These shifts include concerns with social, economic and political disintegration under late capitalism, projections of survival after nuclear war, and the impact of anthropogenic climate change.

'Drawing on screen production processes, textual analysis and reception studies this book interrogates the role of these representations of disability, trauma, gender and myth to offer an in-depth cultural analysis of the social critiques evident within the fantasies of Mad Max.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The Australian landscape has a long Gothic history, as Gerry Turcotte writes: “long before the fact of Australia was ever confirmed by explorers and cartographers it had already been imagined as a grotesque space, a land peopled by monsters” (10). This grotesque space is brought into focus through the films, the graphic novel, and the videogame of the Mad Max franchise and transposed onto this landscape are survivors and remnants of society, many of whom are coded as disabled. These characters are set against the omnipresent Australian landscape, an unwelcoming land that opposes their very existence, yet whose presence compliments it. This paper will focus on the literary understanding of disability to explore the preponderance of physical differences in the Mad Max franchise. It will focus primarily on the latest releases, dealing with the Fury Road portion of the series, where living with physical impairment is a banal reality. This paper will ask whether the Gothic landscape of the Australian Outback in Mad Max codes the characters as disabled, or whether it is the able bodied characters that are outside the norm, as well as considering the positive (or negative) implications of representations of disability in the franchise.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This article argues that despite the genre status of the Mad Max films as post-apocalyptic sf, the driving force behind many of the images and concerns of the films derives from aspects of Australian history since colonisation. The article compares the way these themes appear in the Mad Max films to the way they are explored in ‘Crabs’, a 1972 short story by Australian writer Peter Carey. This story was later filmed as Dead End Drive-In, a film which itself draws on the aesthetic already developed through the Mad Max films. I use Freud’s theory of repetition compulsion to explore ways in which history is both remembered and deliberately forgotten through imagery that is dislocated from the past to the ‘future’ and thus in effect to a timeless, ever-present or ever-recurring time. The article also argues that Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (a space that is populated by a selected, heterogenerous group such inmates in a prison), describes the reality of the penal colonies forming the origins of settler Australia. The colony’s status as heterotopia has led to a pervasive sense of the ‘irreality’ of Australia for many non-Indigenous Australians, expressed through numerous artworks: a sense that there is no ‘there’ out there, nowhere to run.' (Publication abstract)