Last Friday, I attended Rose’s screening of the post-apocalyptic film, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Although I didn’t particularly enjoy the movie, I could see why it was an important film for its time. It was released in 1985, one of the final years of the Cold War. Through this lens, we can view the movie as an encapsulation of the fears of the American people, who foresaw nuclear devastation and destruction by the USSR. These anxieties towards the Soviet Union are manifested in two important scenes. The first is Bartertown’s (the town to which protagonist Max travels to take back his stolen belongings) punishment of Max, as they send him to the “Gulag.” Gulags were, in reality, Stalinist labor camps, where high mortality rates and difficult working conditions befell people sent there. The second scene referencing the USSR is that in which a Bartertown resident is thrown into a pig pen to be eaten by the animals. I saw the use of pigs as a clear reference to Animal Farm, an allegory in which author George Orwell uses farm animals to portray the Russian Revolution and Stalinist era of the USSR. In the book, pigs represent historical Russian figures, including Stalin and Lenin. Therefore, in this scene,  the pigs could be construed as a symbol of the USSR, and their near consumption of a Bartertown citizen as a representation of the fears of the American people.

In addition to manifesting Cold War fears, Mad Max also makes interesting points about what it means to be a civilization. The movie portrays civilization and savagery, two normally dichotomous concepts, as synonymous. Bartertown is a symbol of both the civilized world and barbaric tendencies. With infrastructure, livestock (pigs), a source of electrical energy (porcine feces), merchants, blacksmiths, and a bar, the town can be viewed as a civilization in the post-apocalyptic world. On the other hand, the level of savagery is profound: residents challenge other residents to fight in Bartertown’s Thunderdome, where “two men enter and one man leaves.” When Max enters the Thunderdome for a fight to the death, the citizens of Bartertown are sadistically thrilled and energized that they will get to see someone killed. This movie thus makes the important point that savagery and civilization are not mutually exclusive. It reminds us that we must pay attention to our own civilization because even though we have infrastructure, a Constitution, roads, and settled homes, we are not immune to the possibility of savagery and barbarism.