“The Mad Max films are a kind of modern myth-making, a notion that is present even in the way they treat continuity. If you sat down and tried to piece together a timeline for Max or his world over the course of the four movies, it wouldn’t add up. Instead, each movie functions like a different story someone is telling about Mad Max, the Road Warrior. He is an archetypal figure within a new mythos. It doesn’t matter if it’s the same sawed off shotgun that sparks and fails the first time Max tries to use it—what matters is that there is a gun like that, because Max has a gun like that. Just like Max has a leather jacket carried down from his days in the Main Force Patrol, and at some point he or someone near him will wind a tiny music box. In each Max story, there are certain symbols that are constant, like Orpheus’ lyre.”
—Tarra Martin, “Ride Eternal” (Bright Wall/Dark Room, Dec. 2015)
I cannot put into words how much I love that the “continuity” of these films is a broad swirl of repeating motifs and patterns rather than any kind of hard and fast timeline.
It makes me sad that this isn’t a more readily intuited concept, and that actually a lot of people react with hostility to it. Talking about Fury Road and the previous Mad Max movies this summer, I found myself insisting that it doesn’t actually matter whether the gyro captain from Road Warrior and the pilot in Thunderdome are the same character or not. They just fulfill a similar role in the myth.
As a teenager I read way to many superhero comics, and something that ultimately drove me away from them, and comics in general for a time, was the continuity bubble. A new mega-event each year, an ever-increasing volume of interlocking pieces to be put into play, meant to appeal to only the most “hardcore” reader, and if you aren’t spending money on just about every single title a publisher puts out, the story is incomplete.
It’s the most short-sighted kind of storytelling. And eventually people will get tired and peace the fuck out. I sure did.
And as I watch the film industry be swallowed alive by one superhero movie after another, each one a semi-independent appendage in a larger “universe,” employing these same continuity-heavy storytelling practices, I find myself so relieved that Mad Max exists.
Where it does not matter where each little piece of story fits inside a cumbersome mechanism meant only to milk you of your dollars. No retelling the origin story every five years.
Where it’s just:
“My name is Max.”
“My world is fire. And blood.”
*stomps a lizard and away we fucking go.
