Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 55

The Transformation of Mad Max

51

desired goods, but will lead them to the old places where the goods
exist in abundance.
Refusing to listen to his protestations, they insist that Max is
that savior. At length. Savannah, the clan’s greatest hunter—a
tough and appealing girl of about 17—gives up on the reluctant Max
and organizes those who will listen to her. They set off across the
desert themselves. Those who had elected to renuiin behind in their
paradise world say goodbye to Max as he goes after the rebels. After
a fearful desert crossing, the little band reaches Bartertown, where a
great battle is joined with the locals (as is usual in this film series).
Plot complications see Bartertown destroyed and the children on
their way in an airplane which has been miraculously salvaged from
here and there.
Max actually acquiesces this time, accompanying the
children in their escape, but as they are leaving, at the last moment
he must keep the inhabitants of the now-ruined Bartertown from
stopping their flight. The pursuing Auntie Entity allows Max to live,
as he had earlier allowed Blaster to live. However, as in the
previous two films. Max is alone, destitute, and doomed to be a
wanderer in the badlands again.
The children, however, make a new life in the ruins of
Sydney, each night burning beacons for "all of 'em who are still out
there." Savannah, their leader, says, "Every night we does the Tell,
so that we'll 'member who we was and where we came from . . . . But
most of all we 'members the man who finded us, him that came the
salvage."
Children as intrinsically good—those who save Max and he
them—and children as intrinsically evil—the children of William
Golding's Lord of the Flies—come inescapably to mind as
representatives of two diametrically opposed sets of beliefs about
human nature. Are we so flawed that we are doomed forever to
degenerate into the evil-doing, the cruel power hierarchies that the
boys of Lord of the Flies shaped for themselves after their airplane
crashed? They used their pilot as a sacrifice to the abominable
religion that emerged in their little island society. Mad Max's
children, however, build a functioning world of care and love, with an
underlying message of hope for their own futures. Their aircraft
pilot. Captain Walker, has become their awaited savior, not their
sacrificial victim to a bestial god-figure.