This book explores the inter-relationship of disability and trauma in the Mad Max films (1979-2015).George Miller's long-running series is replete with narratives and imagery of trauma, both physical and emotional, along withmajor and minorcharacters who are prominently disabled. The Mad Max movies foreground representations of the body â in devastating injury and its lasting effects â and in the broader social and historical contexts of trauma, disability, gender and myth. Over the franchise's four-decade span significant social and cultural change has occurred globally. Many of the images of disability and trauma central to Max's post-apocalyptic wasteland can be seen to represent these societal shifts, incorporating both decline and rejuvenation. These shifts include concerns with social, economic and political disintegration under late capitalism, projections of survival after nuclear war, and the impact of anthropogenic climate change. Drawing on screen production processes, textual analysis and reception studies this book interrogates the role of these representations of disability, trauma, gender and myth to offer an in-depth cultural analysis of the social critiques evident within the fantasies of Mad Max.
To open the book, we introduce critical trauma studies and critical disability studies to argue that it is time these two theoretical approaches entered into a productive conversation. The Mad Max series of films traversing a period of almost 40 years is the ideal text to prompt such a discussion. The character Max Rockatansky transitioned from able-bodied masculinity in the first film to a limping, maddened road warrior in The Road Warrior and, by Fury Road, to a man haunted by guilt and hallucinations, often presenting as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but rediscovering himself and his humanity. The origins and intentions of both critical trauma and critical disability studies are outlined to examine the sites of divergence and intersection. Focusing on a humanities approach to both trauma and disability, this chapter highlights productive areas of intersection related to aesthetics, metaphor, embodiment and social-cultural critique.
The dystopian Australian action film franchise Mad Max traverses the period from the late-1970s to mid-2010s, beginning with MadMax (1979) and producing three sequelsâMadMax 2, aka The Road Warrior (1981), Mad Max: BeyondThunderdome (1985) and, most recently, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). The entire series is well known for deploying narratives and imagery of trauma, both physical and emotional. The series creator, writer-director-producer Dr George Miller has often described his initial impetus for crafting a work set in a dystopian future as one based on his clinical experiences as an Emergency Room physician dealing with the horrendous road carnage he would regularly confront during his hospital shifts (Mathews, 1984; Peary, 1984). Indeed, major, minor and background characters are prominently disabled throughout the series, seemingly for a variety of narrative and atmospheric purposes.
However, it could also be argued that the Mad Max series offers an additional, broader social critique on disability. Significant social and cultural changes over the three and a half decades of the franchise have had great influence in this field, and many of the images of disability and trauma central to Maxâs post-apocalyptic desert wasteland could also be seen to represent these societal shifts in both social decline and rejuvenation. For example, the character Max Rockatansky transitioned from able-bodied masculinity in the first film to a limping, maddened road warrior in The Road Warrior and, by FuryRoad, to a man haunted by guilt and hallucinations, often presenting as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but rediscovering himself and his humanity. By interrogating the role of these metaphors and representations of disability and trauma, this book offers an in-depth cultural analysis of the social critiques within Mad Max, drawing on production processes, textual analysis and reception studies (Fig. 1.1).
Fig. 1.1
Miller uses low-angle framing to emphasise impairment, especially lameness, afflicting Max and other characters in the series, often shown wearing braces or calipers to compensate for and minimise the disability
In this introductory chapter, we outline the origins and intentions of both critical trauma and critical disability studies, examining the sites of divergence and intersection. Disability studies, which arose from a civil rights platform, aims to position disability at the heart of discussions rather than at the margins. As an interdisciplinary field of scholarship, it seeks to explore models and theories that examine the social, political, cultural and economic factors that define disability and interrogate the way in which these are represented across time and place. Importantly, it challenges the view of disability as an individual deficit or defect that can be remedied solely through medical intervention, the so-called medical model of disability, and rather sets out to explore the social construction of disability in which disability is viewed as arising not from the body but rather from social and cultural barriers to society. This social model redefines disability as a problem with society, imposed on top of bodies, not as a problem existing within a damaged body and, as such, sometimes under-theorises the effects of impairment and trauma.
James Berger describes trauma studies and disability studies as âtwo of the most important new fields in the humanitiesâ (Berger, 2004, p. 563). They have much in common, including a shared interest in representations of the body, in devastating injury and its lasting effects, and in the broad social and historical contexts of trauma and disability, respectively. Significantly for the humanities, both âfocus intensively on problematics of representationâ (Berger, 2004, p. 563). However, despite these commonalities, critical trauma and critical disability studies do not often collaborate in the production of new scholarship. Indeed, whilst trauma studies rarely considers disability, disability studies seems to avoid even mentioning trauma (Berger, 2004). Within a disability studies framework, trauma is often considered as falling within the domain of the medical model and, as mentioned above, critical disability studies challenges the assumption that disability is an individual deficit or defect that can be remedied solely through medical intervention and rather sets out to explore the social construction of disability. In pursuit of this aim, disability studies has therefore worked hard to ârecast disability as something more than inherently traumatic or traumatizingâ (Casper & Morrison, 2012).
Like disability studies, trauma studiesâas an interdisciplinary field of enquiry seeking to explore social, historical and cultural influencesâhas undergone several stages. Just as disability studies recognises disability is culturally constructed, a humanities approach to trauma recognises and names trauma:
not only as a condition of broken bodies and shattered minds, but also and primarily as a cultural object. In these framings, âtraumaâ is a product of history and politics, subject to reinterpretation, contestation and intervention. (Casper & Wertheimer, 2016)
With regard to the aforementioned medical versus social model argument, trauma studies emerged from the clinical study and treatment of traumatic injuries and is therefore more closely tied to the medical model than critical disability studies which was established through political activism. Further, although trauma studies has moved beyond purely clinical approaches to trauma (Ball, 2000), humanities approaches continue to think about trauma using a psychoanalytical approach to interpret the traumatic symptoms of the event experienced (Berger, 2004, p. 567). As a result, trauma studies focuses on the interpretation of language and the linguistic tropes used to describe these symptoms. The interpretation of metaphor is therefore, according to Berger, an important part of trauma studies as language is used to give meaning to âradically non-linguistic eventsâ (p. 570).
