In this video essay, we explore the symbolic and psychological underpinnings of the Mad Max film series, focusing on themes of motherhood, milk, and masculinity. We propose that the first film, Mad Max, can be read as a psychological journey of separation between Max Rockatansky and his mother figure, Jessie. Throughout the series, Max encounters various mother figures, culminating in his final reconciliation with Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road.
This reconciliation marks Max’s adoption of a mature form of masculinity, moving away from the psychotic, dominant models portrayed by other characters. The essay delves into rich imagery, such as the tanker representing the mother’s breast, and draws on various artistic and psychological references to illustrate how these themes are woven into the fabric of the films. Join us as we uncover the deeper allegories behind one of the most iconic dystopian franchises in cinema.
Join Dr. Mark McAuliffe, with his extensive background in film and television, as he continues to explore these themes, offering unique insights based on his PhD thesis. Together, we will shed light on the nuanced representation of masculinity in one of the most iconic dystopian series of all time. Dive deeper into the evolving mind of Max Rockatansky at Mad Maxculinity.
Watch the premiere of the public video here: Mad Maxculinity: Milk, Mothers, Breasts & Babies.
Transcript
Milk, Mothers, Breasts and Babies
VO: I want to propose that the first film Mad Max, by director George Miller may be read psychologically, as the infant Max Rockatansky being separated from Jessie, his Mother figure. Then, over the course of the film series, Max reunites with various Mother figures, as he tries to come to terms with this separation and his new-found independence and sense of himself as a man. He finally does so, with Furiosa in the fourth film, Fury Road. In doing so, he has finally begun to adopt a mature masculinity, rejecting the psychotic, dominant model of masculinity portrayed by other characters in the film series.
IMAGES:
The milkers at The Citadel, followed by Max beside the tanker in the desert at night
Max: What is this?
The Dag: Mother’s milk
VO: Max Rockatansky, the lead character across the four Mad Max films is washing his face in mother’s milk.
IMAGE: Tanker being loaded at The Citadel, a warrior running alongside shouting.
Warrior: And today we’re haulin’ mother’s milk.
Followed by image of Furiosa at the steering wheel inside the tanker cabin.
VO: And the milk is coming out of the tanker. Perhaps we should be reading the tanker itself as a symbol of the mother, or at least the mother’s breast. And, further, that Furiosa herself may be read as a mother figure.
IMAGE: George Miller at the ‘Mad Max: Creating the Apoclypse’ GRAPHIC Festival 2015 [1]
Miller: Often these allegorical, metaphorical stories are in the eye of the beholder. Freddy Mercury when asked the meaning of his songs, he said “If you see it darling, its there.” And I think its trueabout everything that has a poetic dimension.
IMAGE: Zoom into Furisosa in the tanker and cut to opening credits of tv show My Mother the car from 1965
VO: But first things first. How could the tanker be the mother ?
Warrior: That’s the order.
VO: Have a look at the opening credits for this tv show “My Mother the Car” from 1965.
IMAGE: Opening credits for tv show “My Mother the Car” from 1965 with its song.
“Well, you all may think my story is more fiction than its fact
But believe it or not my mother dear
Decide she’d come back
As a car” [2]
IMAGE: Nico Lathouris at the GRAPHIC Festival 2015
Lathouris: I think the base of all this whole thing is this providing for a child.
Artist Louise Bourgeois with sketch pad.
Bourgeois: The subject comes back, quite often and it has to do with the Good Mother who provides milk.
Image of Jessie playing the saxophone, Max and baby at kitchen table watching her.
VO: But, let’s go back to the beginning, with director George Miller’s first Mad Maxfilm from 1979. Okay, Max (and the baby, with whom he is being compared here) isn’t drinking milk.
IMAGE: Sculpture of Venus of Laussel, 23,000 BCE
VO: But he is gazing in adoration at Jessie, who strikes a pose similar to one of the earliest depictions of the Great Mother, carved here as the Venus of Laussels, dating back more than 25,000 years.
IMAGE: Aunty Entity and her earrings, followed by statue of Demeter c. 350 BCE.
VO: In her hand is, not a saxophone, but a bison horn, remarkably similar to the earrings worn by Aunty Entity. The horn is seen again more recently in a sculpture of the Greek Goddess Demeter. In her hand she holds the horn of plenty, or cornucopia as its called, providing the world with a wealth of sustenance in fruit, honey and grain.
IMAGE: Louise Bourgeois and sketch of mother and child. Followed by Max running along the road to his dead wife and child.
Bourgeois: The same subject appeared in this drawing where the milk comes down, like this, and falls on the floor, helping nobody, maybe if there is a cat. This is a portrait of the abandoned child.
VO: I want to propose that the first film may be read psychologically, as the infantMax being separated from Jessie, his Mother figure. Then, over the course of the film series, he is trying to come to reunite with the mother figure and finally does so with Furiosa.
IMAGES: Max and Jessie, followed by a little boy escaping from his pusher onto the road with the oncoming vehicles. Cut to Max at foot of the stairs looking up at Jessie as she does sign language towards him. Intercut little boy on the road.
VO: But just as a small child who practices escaping from his mother in an attempt at independence, frequently encounters the hostility of the outside world, all of the films can be read as the infant Max (here apparently even pre-verbal), repeatedly coming and going from the mother figures in the films, in his own search for independence and self realisation.
IMAGE: Lathouris at GRAPHIC Festival
Lathouris: Its almost like a repetition compulsion for Max who’s repeating and repeating everything he’s ever done. And it all goes back to the death of his wife and child and here we are again….
Image of Jessie drying a near naked Max’s hair, large bean bags on the bed behind them.
VO: Jessie should be seen as the primary GOOD mother figure. The bean bags in the shape of giant breasts on the bed behind the couple in this shot (to the left of frame), may be read as symbols of Jessie’s love. She is the good breast who provides comfort, care and nurturing support for the young Max. [3]
IMAGE: Jessie embracing Max after drying his hair. Followed by shot of young couple in similar embrace in a red car, a milk bar across the road from them.
VO: While we’re at it, compare this image of Max and Jessie to the young couple in the red car violently attacked by the bikies later in the film. The young man could be seen to have fallen asleep at the mother’s, sorry, the girlfriend’s breast. The background milkbar sign, like the bean bag breasts in the previous shot, are a playful endorsement of that idea.
Their pose bears a striking resemblance to one of the most famous images of a mother and child, Michaelangelo’s Pieta.[4]
IMAGE: Michaelangelo’s sculpture,
Pope: It all comes back to this in the end doesn’t it. To the mother.
IMAGE: Max breaks away from Jessie’s embrace.
VO: But to Jessie’s disappointment, notice how Max breaks away from her encircling embrace of him. As he does the next morning when, against her wishes he goes off to work to play with his friend Goose, like two kids in the school yard.
IMAGE: Max at the foot of the stairs staring up at Jessie. Followed by an image from music video “Doing Time” by Lana Del Rey of a giant 50 foot woman
VO: And here is an image of Max as a little child. If you think that seems strange, consider this image. [5]
IMAGE: Jessie embraces Max, Bellini’s “Madonna and Child”[6]
And Jessie’s attitude here with Max, might be echoing another famous mother and child, Bellini’s iconic image, of the ‘Madonna and Child’.
IMAGE: GRAPHIC Festival.
Lathouris: This Mad Max thing, its almost like the Oedipal thing. Its like a complex. Its like a constellation in everybody’s psychology. Its an allegory. But not just an allegory of the world that’s political and social, but also an allegory of the world that’s very psychological and deep within us.[7]
Miller: I always say that this film is forward to the past. Even though we go to some post-apocalyptic future…..
Image: Savanna at Crack in the Earth from ‘Beyond Thunderdome’
Savanna: I’m lookin’ behind us now. Across the count of time, down the long haul into history back. I see its the end, what was the start, its poxyclipse full of pain.
Miller: We’re basically going back to a medieval, dark age ….
IMAGE: Max in crowd entering Bartertown. Followed by scenes from John Huston’s Film “Freud the Secret Passion”.
VO: As Max enters the cave-like entrance at Bartertown, he could be seen to be going “into the past” as director George Miller describes it. Max could be interpreted as entering the belly, or womb of the mother.[8] The idea of the cave as a representation of the mother’s womb is an ancient one and its captured here in director John Huston’s film, ‘Freud: The Secret Passion’.
In this scene from Huston’s film about the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (played here by actor Montgomery Clift), Freud dreams of his return to the womb of the Great Mother, the long piece of rope representing the umbilical cord.
IMAGE: Insert Savanna Nix in the hut, cutting Max’s hair, with him falling into the water below. Followed by similar scene of rope and water from the first film, Mad Max 1979.
VO: And here at the Crack in the Earth, arguably another mother symbol, a variation on the idea of a cave, representing the female genital, the womb, or birthplace, we see the young mother Savanna Nix ritualistically cutting the umbilical cord for Max, recalling a similar scene from the first film.
IMAGE: Freud film. Intercut images of Jessie.
Freud: Mother. Mother.
Wife: No dear. Its Martha, your wife Martha.
IMAGE: White Warrior Woman from MaxMax 2; The Road Warrior, followed by Aunty Entity from the third film Max Max Beyond Thunderdome, offering fruit to Max.
VO: Another figure in the Mad Max series is the Warrior Woman in Mad Max 2, The Road Warrior. She too might be seen as a Good Mother, the white outfit aligning her with Jessie. And then there’s Aunty Entity. The saxophone in the background provides a plaintive reminder of Max’s wife Jessie. And, with a flash of her breasts, the fruit offered to Max, hints at the forbidden apple from the Garden of Eden. [9]
IMAGE: Bartertown where Max is offered radioactive water.
But Aunty, with her gang of bad boy bikies and warriors, should be seen as the Bad Mother. Remember, in Bartertown its not nourishing breast milk (or even beer) that Aunty, offers the thirsty traveler. But quite possibly, poisoned radioactive water.
IMAGE: Louise Bourgois’ giant spider sculpture, ‘Maman’ followed by Aunty biting into the fruit. Then an image of Henry Moore’s ‘Mother and Child’
VO: According to the artist Louise Bourgeois, and the many commentators who have written about her sculpture, this giant spider called MAMAN, the French word for mother, represents both the GOOD mother, who nurtures her children, the eggs in her underbelly. But the spider can also represent the terrifying BAD mother who can devour her children, as suggested in this sculpture of mother and child by Henry Moore. [10]
IMAGE: Bourgeois’ sketch of her Mother as a house. Cut to image of Aunty’s eyrie at Bartertown, Bourgeois’ cage sculpture, ‘Spider Cell’, and then the sketch of the fashion item, ‘Crinoline dress, Hoop Skirt c. 1865. Aunty descends from her tower to Thunderdome below, via the long umbilical wire that connects them.
In this sketch, Bourgeois has represented her mother as a house, atop a long-legged female body. [11] It is possible to see a reflection of Bourgeois’ spider, Maman, in Aunty Entity’s tower at Bartertown.
And in this other sculpture by the artist, with the cage below it, as well as in the following sketch of a fashion item from the 19th century, you might also see something like Thunderdome.
Max and Aunty Entity become somewhat reconciled at the end of Beyond Thunderdome.
IMAGE: Aunty in the desert looks down at Max on the ground and smiles.
Aunty: Well, ain’t we a pair Raggedy Man?
Cut to Furiosa, the White Warrior Woman, then Aunty in her Tower;
Aunty; Congratulations. The first to survive the audition
Furiosa is a combination of each of the earlier mother figures.
First of all as the fearsome warrior woman of the second film, then somewhat akin to Aunty Entity in the third film.
IMAGE: Max inside the belly of the tanker.
VO: But later, in the body of the tanker, the protective, life sustaining womb of the mother, Max becomes united with Furiosa.
IMAGE; Max in tanker attaches a plastic tube from his arm to Furiosa’s for a blood transfusion.[12]
Max: Max. My name is Max. That’s my name.
VO: The symbolism is made clear when Max and Furiosa literally become joined with something very like an umbilical cord. So, the film series may be interpreted as an illustration that a mature form of masculinity must reconcile the opposing infantile images of the all-loving and nurturing mother figure (the good breast) with the fearsome, controlling and devouring mother figure (the bad breast).
And also to come to terms with female aspects of his own character. But that’s another essay.
WORDS 1247. (13mins18)
[1] Mad Max: Creating Apocalypse GRAPHIC Festival: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDMSa29P9j0
[2] Around this time there was a number of strange tv shows like, “Mister ED” the talking horse (1961), and “My Favorite Martian” 1963 where characters would converse with unlikely sidekicks. The idea of coming up with another concept may have originated with one of the writing team saying “Let’s have a guy talking to his reincarnated mother – get it, reincarnated? “ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Mother_the_Car
[3] https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/breast-goodbad-object
[4] “The Young Pope”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IlbB_vzwWw
[5] “Doing Time” by Lana Del Rey, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qolmz4FlnZ0
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qolmz4FlnZ0
[7] Oedipus Myth: https://www.britannica.com/science/Oedipus-complex
[8] https://www.aneb.it/the-cave-the-uterus-of-the-mother-earth/
[9] In Aunty Entity we might also see the figure of Jocasta, the mother of Oedipus, who unwittingly married her to jointly rule over the city of Thebes, much as Aunty seems to be offering Max. She later tells him, “You could have had it all !”
[10] https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/moore-mother-and-child-t00389
[11] https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/out-the-ooze/201801/the-freudian-symbolism-in-your-dreams
[12] He also stabs her with a knife, which may be read as a sexual union, reiterating the Oedipal desire for the mother. With his words he also recognises his separateness as an individual,
