Mad Max's implausible post-oil eco-dystopia

But we can all agree that nuclear war would be bad

I liked but did not love the recent “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.”

Thanks to our modern-day streaming bounty, I was able to pregame by revisiting “Mad Max” and “The Road Warrior” and watching “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” for the first time. After I saw “Furiosa,” I rewatched the magisterial “Mad Max: Fury Road.” — I definitely recommend doing it in that order, both because that’s the chronology of the story in-universe and also because “Furiosa” is more fun and less disappointing if you save the best movie in the series for last.

But watching the movies in chronological order also underscores George Miller’s themes more clearly.

Fury Road (and Furiosa) is a story about life in the aftermath of an apocalyptic nuclear war. Australia, where the films are set, was presumably spared the worst of the bombing. The global economy has collapsed, though, leaving everyone desperately short of oil and manufactured goods (both of which Australia overwhelmingly imports) and even the remote Outback slowly being poisoned by nuclear fallout. But if you pay attention to the opening monologue (or just watch the first two films in the series), Miller’s vision is not that Australia ran out of oil because there was a global nuclear war — it’s that war broke out because the world was running out of oil.

That’s why there is no nuclear apocalypse in the original “Mad Max,” just Australian society teetering on the brink of dissolution due to natural resource scarcity.

That film was made in 1979, when eco-dystopian thought had incredible cultural currency. But by 2015, when “Fury Road” came out, to say nothing of 2024 when we’re watching “Furiosa,” I think it plays as kind of odd. It’s not that we don’t still have eco-dystopians. But they are much more likely to worry that oil is too plentiful than that it’s too scarce.

What’s fascinating, though, is that in the doomer mindset, the line between “the world will end because we are running out of oil” and “the world will end because we are burning too much oil” is paper thin. In her review of “Furiosa,” Manohla Dargis wrote that “in the years since the original ‘Mad Max’ opened in 1979, the distance between Miller’s scorched earth and ours has narrowed.” And this is not a misreading of the author’s intent. Back in 2015, the Sierra Club did a Q&A with Miller in which he agreed that we should see these films as climate change allegory.

The interview also touches on the difference between art and logical argumentation, with Miller arguing that “when you give someone a purely logical argument, you're only involving the intellect,” while great storytelling needs emotional engagement. He says these two things are complementary, and I agree. But that’s precisely why I think it’s worth trying to think more logically about how resource scarcity, war, and environmental degradation relate.

Nuclear war would be really bad

Part of what I find strange about using the post-apocalyptic landscape of “Fury Road” to make a point about contemporary environmental politics is that I don’t think anyone disagrees that the ecological consequences of a nuclear war would be dire. If anything, my casual impression is that most people believe a major nuclear exchange would plausibly lead to human extinction. Miller’s view, that non-trivial numbers of people could survive in an impoverished state, is a relatively optimistic take. But my understanding is that most people who’ve looked at this seriously do agree with the optimists.