Riding the Fury Road: Australia's Long Love Affair with Cars

Spoiler alert: this story contains plot information you may not want to know about Mad Max: Fury Road.

Australians love our cars.

While other parts of the world argue about Catholic vs. Protestant, Jewish vs. Palestinian, Sunni vs. Shia, Australia's sectarian divide is largely based around our two biggest auto companies.

We're a nation obsessed with vehicular transport, and this permeates our cinema. But why?

We're all about the isolation. Most of the population lives in cities only connected to the outside world by a single road, and the wild untamed distances between our urban centers make us feel as if the apocalypse is just about to knock on the door. Of all our capital cities, the drive from Melbourne to Sydney is possibly the least wild, the most suburban. It's 878 kilometers (545 miles), or roughly the distance from New York to Cleveland, or Rome to Zurich. Now try Darwin to Adelaide (1,880 miles) or Brisbane to Perth (2,697 miles). So much of our cultural identity is wrapped up in the idea that if you need to get somewhere, you need to be a survivalist expert and have a car capable of withstanding post-apocalyptic conditions.

'The Cars That Ate Paris' trailer.

Our films reflect that this is always on our mind. From Peter Weir's The Cars That Ate Paris to George Miller's original Mad Max trilogy, we've been big on this idea since Australian cinema really took hold. We have no problem accepting that Mad Max one and two are part of the same world (despite society completely collapsing between films), because Max and his car are the consistent through-line.

From documentaries (Eric Bana's Love the Beast) to art house flicks (Clara Law's The Goddess of 1967) to comedies (David Caesar's Prime Mover) to post-apocalyptic dramas (David Michôd's The Rover), we are consumed by the idea of cars as weapons, homes, extensions of ourselves. And in Mad Max: Fury Road, Miller takes this to its logical extreme.

Much has been written about how Fury Road has a strong vein of feminism running through it, but how do the cars themselves factor into this?

When we begin the film, plans are already in motion. Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) has hidden the sex slaves of the dictatorial Immortan Joe in her giant armored rig and is smuggling them away to her childhood home. Unbeknownst to Joe, the rooms that once housed his harem are now empty, repeatedly scrawled with the phrase "We are not things."

Max Rockatansky, our titular hero, is a man whose only instinct is to keep moving. He's never heading anywhere, he's just always on the go. This is in his blood, so much so that he is used as a literal blood bag for one of the drivers in pursuit of Furiosa. He finds himself inadvertently allied with Furiosa—their fistfight is the Mad Max version of a meet-cute—his worldview fitting comfortably into her "just keep moving" plan.

This is where Fury Road's real moment of subversion comes. After all, the idea that women are not property, that they have license, that they can fight back against aggressors, and even be the aggressors when necessary… these are not treated as subversive ideas outside of how they challenge the desires of our villain.

The really subversive idea for the audiences comes about two-thirds of the way through when Max parts way with the women, who have discovered that Furiosa's destination is not what she thought it would be. Their instinct is to keep moving, something Max knows all too well.

But Max goes after them. He stops them. He understands what it is to run away, but he knows they have to turn back. Max knows his choices have not given him what he wants; his entire journey suddenly comes into sharp focus, and although he knows he can never change, he can at least use his experience to benefit someone else. It's one thing to be out for yourself, but Furiosa's mission has been one of salvation.

Max stops them and suggests they go back the way they came. As a narrative choice, this is the biggest moment of subversion in the entire film. In one sense, Miller is telling the audience that the journey they've just been on has been largely redundant, and that the place we've been running away from is actually the place we need to get to.

More has happened, of course: The chase has lured Joe's forces away, allowing for a successful rebellion, and Max has found a purpose (a "drive," if you will) that he didn't have in the beginning, but despite all of that, trekking back the way you came is a tough aesthetic sell.

And yet that's what this is all about. In a kingdom where women are property, the choice is to run away, or to stay and change it. The film never indicts the first option—and in that sense, it's also a refugee story that resonates with Australia's current "boat people" debate—but there's a boldness in the second that makes for great cinema, as both a message and an visceral choice.

The vehicles are the catalyst for everything. They are how the escape is staged, they are both the location of and the weapons used in battle, they are the obstacles to overcome when they break down and the triumphant success when they work, and they are the method ultimately used to win back the day and change the world.

It's a world Max knows he can't be part of. It's in his blood to keep moving, and the final look he exchanges with Furiosa confirms this. She's used the vehicle as a means to an end. For Max, the vehicle is the end.

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