The Road Warrior

Look, I know this is going to sound like a bad joke or at least like something a person would make up for a quirky factoid, but I bought The Road Warrior on DVD with money I got from my Bar Mitzvah. I don't care about whatever pennies Mel Gibson received from my Tower Records purchase in the year 2002, four years before he'd go on an anti-Semitic rant and confirm what many viewers of The Passion of the Christ had guessed but only Winona Ryder seemed to know, but it's kind of funny to think about celebrating a Jewish rite of passage with the movie that broke Gibson big. It would be like if you were gay and somebody gave you money at your coming out party and you used it to buy a Mel Gibson movie, or if you were a woman and somebody gave you money at your Quinceañera and you used it to buy a Mel Gibson movie or if you were a post-Vatican II pope and somebody gave you money at your papal inauguration ceremony and you used it to buy a Mel Gibson movie. He has a hatred for many peoples, that man.

When I watched Road Warrior then, at 13, it was a mythical experience I had been building up to. My dad had seen Road Warrior in theaters, with a friend who'd already sat through the movie enough times he was able to recite the opening narration as it was spoken. Dad probably only told me this story once, when we passed that theater (which looked like a Disneyland façade and was on a major San Francisco street but only screened porn while I was alive), but it stuck in my head enough that I still know which theater he saw it in and was able to reference it in a review of a documentary about Brucesploitation movies a couple years ago. He wouldn't let me watch The Road Warrior until I was older, but I'd ask what it was like. As an adult, having your child ask for details to a movie sounds excruciating. I can't believe he had the patience to answer all my questions. For some reason, the whole Mad Max world thrilled me to sit and think about before I'd seen much more than a VHS cover. As a tween, I prodded a Road Warrior summary out of my father while waiting for our pizza at the restaurant Tomatina in St. Helena.

When I first sat down with Road Warrior, I had such a hard time understanding the Australian accents I needed to turn the subtitles on, which was the only time I'd done that on an English-language movie before a few years ago, when everybody's sound mixes turned to trash. That may have added to the film's weirdness– its characters were speaking my language, but besides that narrator, their voices may as well have been animal sounds. The few times Max talks, it's in that nasal grunt that closes all phonetic distance between words as disparate as "guns" and "gasoline."

The film's sexuality was also alien. I didn't know if the person on the back of Wez' bike was a man or a woman. If that was a man, Road Warrior was being pretty casual about homosexuality, where every other movie I'd seen with a gay character made a huge deal about it, being gay was one of the gay characters' personality traits, etc. I hadn't see many movies with gay characters at all. At 13, this was, if you can believe it, years before I'd seen Derek Jarman's Blue.

And if that was a woman on Wez' bike, I was looking at her nipples, and Road Warrior was being equally casual about nudity, which was even more surprising.

In the credits, the person on the back of the bike is named "The Golden Youth," clarifying nothing. If it's been a while since you've seen the film, this is The Golden Youth:

I now know The Golden Youth is a man.

The film holds up beautifully, though, and I'm not saying this because he's a bigot who assaulted his ex-partner until her teeth broke, I still think anybody could play Max. Gibson is the least essential part of The Road Warrior and could have been replaced by any tough, quiet guy without hurting the film. In the long lead-up to Fury Road, I never understood why people were angry Tom Hardy would be taking over as Max. This series isn't Lethal Weapon, the guy's (stage) charisma means nothing here. Gibson's fine, but anybody from Dolph Lundgren to Donald Pleasance could have been as effective. Bob Hoskins could have played Max. Grace Jones would have been a cool Max. I'm not taking anything away from the movie when I write that, either. I'm just not sure why, in a series with such beautifully loose continuity, some people talk about the initial Mad Max trilogy like it's a big Mel Gibson vehicle. He's a less charismatic Clint Eastwood. I thought that was the point.

I feel that way, in part, because Max Rockatansky is the only character by this point in the trilogy who acts identifiably like a regular person. He's eating dog food and booby-trapping his car to explode, which are odd and are not things I have done yet in my life, but he hasn't adopted a new name, isn't flying around in a gyrocopter he cobbled together from scraps, his armor all seems more functional than statement-making and he's a selfish prick but he also hasn't used the end of the world as an excuse to murder whoever he comes across. In the time between Mad Max and The Road Warrior, he's been pushed to become more ruthless, but that doesn't mean he's turned into whatever a Smegma Crazy is.

Gibson was 25 when Road Warrior was released and, going by the other actors' actual ages, he was at least ten years younger than most of the characters he meets. He's three years younger than Warrior Woman, the closest to another normal person in the movie, ten years younger than Wez and the Gyro Captain, 17 younger than Papagallo, 16 younger than Lord Humungus.

The Max of 1979's Mad Max is a regular cop with a family. He doesn't look that different in this film. That means characters like Lord Humungus and Wez were people at least somewhat integrated into society (unless they were survivalists living in the Outback, which seems possible but unlikely, considering they've formed this roving gang and now drive around as a big team; I don't think you'd take the Poxyclypse as an impetus to become more connected to other people if you were used to scavenging on your own, you know?). They were, at youngest, in their early 30s when everything crumbled. The Feral Kid grew up in The Wasteland, so you get why he's a little acrobat killing people with a boomerang. He's copying all the other weirdos. His baseline for normal is the mechanic who doesn't have any legs and gets around with a series of pulleys.

Interestingly, the semi-twist that the narration has been coming from a grown-up Feral Child implies Max is such a beacon of normal behavior that this kid who used to communicate with chirping throat noises had his shit so rocked by spending a few days with Max that he grew up to talk like a regular human being.

But so anyway, all of these maniacs slaughtering each other for gas and pleasure most likely had regular lives. Wez might have been into BDSM before the bombs dropped, he might have even had that mohawk, but I doubt he had a wrist-mounted crossbow or that he did this many flips. Humungus might have been disfigured, but he wasn't wearing that mask or calming people down by choking them out. The idea of all of these maniacs once fitting into regular Australian society does not seem outlandish because George Miller and his cast and crew sell everything perfectly. It's a well-constructed world, and I happily accept the idea that as resources became scarcer, temperaments became more flamboyant, until the kind of person who could thrive in The Wasteland was also the kind of person who mounted still-living prisoners to cars like they were hood ornaments.

The Feral Kid's narration treats Max like an unstoppable force for good, but the movies (after Mad Max) treat him like a quietly capable nobody. He's tough and crafty but his motives are murky and he moves on once he's attained the thing he wants. The Gyro Captain stays behind and helps lead the new team to a more permanent safety. Furiosa risks everything to free Immortan Joe's wives and protect The Green Place. Max has a soft spot for the victimized, but mostly he happens to be around. He'll save some kids, but he has to be guilted into it.

If Mel Gibson showed any kind of personality in Road Warrior, if he wasn't just a stoic man whose inner complexity seemed about on level with a dog named Dog's, the movie wouldn't work as well. Everybody got wacky while Max got numb. By design, anybody could do what Mel Gibson does here. He gets no points for starring in the series, and may his terrifying conceptualization of god have mercy on his soul.