Abstract
The Australian landscape has a long Gothic history, as Gerry Turcotte writes: “long before the fact of Australia was ever confirmed by explorers and cartographers it had already been imagined as a grotesque space, a land peopled by monsters” (10). This grotesque space is brought into focus through the films, the graphic novel, and the videogame of the Mad Max franchise and transposed onto this landscape are survivors and remnants of society, many of whom are coded as disabled. These characters are set against the omnipresent Australian landscape, an unwelcoming land that opposes their very existence, yet whose presence compliments it. This paper will focus on the literary understanding of disability to explore the preponderance of physical differences in the Mad Max franchise. It will focus primarily on the latest releases, dealing with the Fury Road portion of the series, where living with physical impairment is a banal reality. This paper will ask whether the Gothic landscape of the Australian Outback in Mad Max codes the characters as disabled, or whether it is the able bodied characters that are outside the norm, as well as considering the positive (or negative) implications of representations of disability in the franchise.
Highlights
The Australian landscape has a long Gothic history, as Gerry Turcotte writes: “long before the fact of Australia was ever confirmed by explorers and cartographers it had already been imagined as a grotesque space, a land peopled by monsters” (10)
The Australian landscape has a long Gothic history: Gerry Turcotte writes that “long before the fact of Australia was ever confirmed by explorers and cartographers it had already been imagined as a grotesque space, a land peopled by monsters” (10)
This paper will focus on the preponderance of physical differences in the Mad Max franchise, predominantly the 2015 film Mad Max Fury Road, the videogame Mad Max, and the graphic novel of the same name, which are set in a landscape where physical difference is a banal reality, rather than a deviation from the norm, exploring the relationship between these characters and the landscape of the post-apocalyptic Australian landscape
Summary
Australian Gothic has been a constant presence in cinema and fiction, “an off-centre, almost intangible element of sinister peculiarity in Australian productions,” with a “small yet consistent flow of malevolence and disorder that is never far from the surface in certain Australian productions” (Gillard and Thomas). The novel Wake in Fright (Cook), telling the story of a school teacher stranded in a small outback town with no money, invokes the Gothic, through its description of the Australian Outback as “the silent centre of Australia, the Dead Heart” (Cook 6) This is an apt description of a landscape that is frequently portrayed as grotesque, nightmarish, and deadly, and one that lends itself perfectly to the post-apocalyptic, and increasingly Gothic, franchise of Mad Max. Image 1: Mad Max: Fury Road screen shot, showing the Buzzard Vehicle
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