White Line Nightmare: The End of the World and MAD MAX II:THE ROAD WARRIOR (Part Four) - Dean Semler's contribution to the creation of the hero.

Editor's Note: This is the fourth part of an essay by John Baxter devoted to the creation of George Miller and Byron Kennedy's Mad Max movies. PART ONE considered the cinematic antecedents of the films end of the world settings,  PART TWO looked into the early life and influences of George Miller and  PART THREE looked into the flm's philosophical and literary influences. Now read on....

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 BLUE BUMS IN SEMLER SMOKE.

Mad Max’s lighting cameraman David Eggby, injured when a crane collapsed on another film, was replaced by Dean Semler, whose penchant for shooting against the light, or through dust or fumes (a trademark that earned the nickname ‘Semler Smoke’, and which recalls veteran Hollywood photographers of westerns like Conrad Hall) evoked the stylised aridity central to the film’s success. From the start, the new film bears Semler’s stamp as much as Miller’s. Following a preamble showing the collapse of the world economy, narrated by a croaking ancient (actually the Feral Kid in old age), the camera dips out of monochrome into colour, swooping towards ‘the white-line nightmare’ of the road, to discover the black Interceptor with Max at the wheel : ‘the warrior Max,’ as the narration calls him, ‘the shell of a man…haunted by the demons of the past, who wandered out into the wasteland. And …in this blighted place… learned to live again.’

 

 

Dean Semler

  

In Max II’s somewhat shaky futurology, Iran invades Saudi Arabia, destroying the oil fields and wrecking the world economy.  Society collapses as people fight over the only currency that matters – fuel. Among the scavengers is Max, the wounded, banished hero. Cruising the desert in his black American gas-guzzler – ‘the last of the V8 Interceptors,’ says one nomad respectfully - he stumbles into a war between two tribes, one a confederation of predators led by a masked body-builder called The Lord Humungus, the other a group of proto-technocrats sitting on a home-made oil refinery and a cache of gasoline. Max tries to keep out of the fight, but is lured in by the helpers called for by Propp - the gangling pilot of a one-man helicopter and a silent tyke in furs armed with a razor-sharp steel boomerang. 

 

 

"...the gangling pilot of a one-man helicopter" Bruce Spence

Like most decisions involving science fiction film, the crucial one on Max II was geographic: if the landscape evoked mystery and awe, so would the film. Miller had shot Mad Max in the green countryside of Victoria, but, for the sequel, he went more than 2000 kilometres north. The landscape around the mining city of Broken Hill represented the furthest one could travel into the desert while remaining within driving distance of motels. Even so, the area remained primitive.  Most outback roads were hard red clay, eroded into corrugations. After hundreds of kilometres of juddering washboard, liberated female crew-members who’d discarded their bras staggered to the nearest lingerie shop to buy its most supportive undergarments. Unluckily, the winter of 1978 was also icy, and the lightly-clad cast emptied Broken Hill’s army surplus stores of old overcoats. As co-writer and second-unit director Brian Hannant recalled, ‘The command was usually, “Coats off - Action- Coats on,” I actually saw blue bums.’ 

 

"...a silent tyke in furs armed with a razor-sharp steel boomerang" Emil Minty

 

Miller and Hayes rewrote the script with the collaboration of Hannant, a documentary film-maker and enthusiast for comic books and American action films. They pared dialogue to the minimum, to the extent that none of the characters were named, aside from The Humungus - a slang term, analogous to ‘gynormus’, indicating terrifying size and excess –,  and the leader of the technocrats, simply The Zealot in early drafts, but Pappagallo in the film (after a Sydney restaurant). The helicopter pilot began as Pismo, and the boy as Zak, then Bam-a-Lam, but they’re never addressed by name in the film: the script simply calls them The Gyro Captain and The Feral Kid. 

 

The film-makers exercised more fantasy in naming the tribes. Inspired by costume designer Norma Moriceau's pastel outfits, trimmed with scarves and furs, Pappagallo’s people became ‘Gucci Arabs’. The two main groups within the Humungus’s coalition were ‘Mohawk Bikers’, for those led by the savage Wez, whom Moriceau dressed mostly in punk/fetish loincloths and feathers, while those who clung to greasy tatters were christened ‘Smegma Crazies’, after the material that gathers under unwashed foreskins. The Humungus himself never changes, but his heterogenous followers give him the shifting personae demanded of the mythical villain.

 

Wez (Vernon Wells) and Max (Mel Gibson)

  

Originally the Gucci Arabs were simply guarding a petrol dump, but on the manuscript of the outline, Hannant has written, ‘Not strong enough that they are sitting on the currency of the times – petrol.  Maybe a scene where [Max] is shown it. A big underground vault - in it is a container of liquid gold. Possible to have a small one-man cracking plant, cracking oil?’ Miller chose this option, but vetoed the lake of petrol as too expensive. The Arabs have their refinery, but end up quarrelling over a tanker filled with gasoline, for which they lack a power unit that will haul it - and them - to a haven on the coast. Max offers to provide one, for a fee, and finds himself drawn into the fight on their side.

 

Early drafts showed Max befriending not only the Feral Kid but a tribe of lost children who ambush him in a deserted town. Stranded when their school bus breaks down, they’ve reverted to barbarism. Miller and his writers decided this variation on Lord of the Flies and Peter Pan diluted Max’s isolation, making him, as Byron Kennedy noted on the outline, ‘no different than in MMI. He doesn’t give the impression that he has anything in mind. Wanders here, there and everywhere, seeming sort of reluctant yet doing what everyone else wants just to get a few gals of gasoline. Should either be totally reluctant and doing this under protest, like Clint Eastwood, or aggressively [illegible].’ 

 

"...wounded and cast into the wilderness..."

 

No amount of rewriting solved these problems, which were endemic. As the enthusiasts of Campbell, Propp and Bettelheim soon discovered, ethnography and the box office didn’t always mix. The hero who, wounded and cast into the wilderness, returns to revenge himself, became standard, but any more adherence to classic models made the stories unwieldy. There is little of Campbell or Propp in the Indiana Jones films, for instance, and, while Clint Eastwood launched his popularity with the Sergio Leone westerns and Dirty Harry, both of which adhere more or less to Propp and Campbell, the films with which he widened and solidified his reputation. such as Every Which Way But Loose, have little to do with either, while the sequels to Dirty Harry are more like Jacobean revenge fantasies than tribal tales.  [At its most extreme, the contradiction would entangle Star Wars 1: The Phantom Menace and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in plots through which their characters wander, bemused, tripping over elements of sacrifice, religious dogma and virgin birth. JB]

 

Later, Miller admitted, with exasperation, ‘I’m not claiming that Max is the quintessential hero, because I don’t think he is. He doesn’t quite follow all of the mythological signposts, as it were. But he’s more classic hero than the Lone Ranger – very much someone who shatters one world, and out of that comes the rebirth of another.’ 

 

"...kinetic action..."

Mythological force informs and deepens The Road Warrior but it’s Miller’s flair for kinetic action that drives it. Bruce Spence’s Gyro Captain is a capering grotesque, prancing like a crane in flapping coat and 1920s-style leather helmet, murmuring lubriciously, ‘lingerie…remember lingerie?’ and greedily eyeing Max as he uses a large wooden spoon to empty a can of ‘Dinky-Di Meat and Veggies’ : that Miller went to the trouble of designing and printing a label for this fictitious product was a cultural detail mostly missed even by the Australians at whom it was aimed. 

 

The Arabs’ mechanic is a paraplegic who festoons his wheelchair with urine-filled plastic bags, some of which he punctures with a fork to extinguish a fire that ignites his paralysed legs. Playing the Feral Kid, Emil Minty, communicating in yips and snarls, and turning wild somersaults when his boomerang severs the fingers of one of the Smegma Crazies, known as The Toadie, who tries to catch it – even the victim giggles as he stares at his mutilated hand – seems inspired equally by Cheeta the chimp in a Tarzan movie and Mickey Rooney’s Puck in the Max Reinhardt/William Dieterle Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

 

Every artist begins by learning from the work of his mentors but ends up cannibalising it, and often mocking it too. Miller, no exception, consistently undermines Campbell’s scholarly propositions with eccentric humour, a common response by film-makers to the innate solemnity of future fiction. The Gyro Captain is blood brother to Ernest Borgnine’s cab driver in John Carpenter’s Escape from New York and his jokes resonate with Carpenter’s recurring gibes in the same film, like the “Snake Plisken? I thought you were dead” which everywhere greets its anti-hero.  

 

"...Coats off - Action- Coats on..." Location shot