Justin McGuirk
Selected writing 2005 – 2015
  • About
  • Category
  • Title
  • Publication
  • Year
  • Reviews
  • Mad Max: Fury Road
  • Dezeen
  • 2015
Justin McGuirk
Selected writing 2005 – 2015
  • Mad Max: Fury Road

Whenever I see a design project that involves cobbling together one thing out of the discarded remains of another – stools out of plastic from the Pacific Garbage Patch, an espresso bar out of washing machines, lamp shades woven out of plastic bottles or anything made from old shipping containers – at the back of my mind I’m thinking of Mad Max. This is not to criticise such projects or to undermine the idea of recycling, upcycling, creative reuse or any other term du jour – ecological imperatives one and all. It’s just that Mad Max pushes them to their logical conclusion, to a world where there is no alternative.

The first three Mad Max films, released from 1979 to 1985, cornered the market in a particular vision of the post-apocalyptic future. And the central tenet of that vision is that the new world will be created out of the detritus of the old one. In Mad Max, the clock of technical progress has stopped in the 1970s – there are no new technologies, no new energy sources and certainly no Tesla home batteries. Forget computers and software – we’re talking hardware, of the greasy variety. In this world, the mechanic is king and the scrap yard is civilisation’s laboratory.

What is compelling about Mad Max is the extent to which it has become the default setting of the post-apocalypse. It may be viewed through a 1970s lens  – refracting the oil crisis, Cold War nuclear anxiety and the rise of the ecological movement – but it continues to play on contemporary fears. Despite the fact that in the year the first Mad Max was filmed President Carter was installing solar panels on the White House roof, somehow we still struggle to reach life beyond fossil fuels, we still equate climate change with deserts and we still configure the future through Malthusian scarcity models.

These are the clichés of Mad Max’s retro-future. They were present in the first iteration (although not so much desert in that one) but of course they’ve been turned up to eleven for Mad Max: Fury Road. The low budget, realist feel of the original has evolved into its own fantasy genre. The villain, once just a camp psychotic biker, has morphed into a cock-rock pharaoh presiding over a death cult of skinhead supplicants. The survivors, scavenging a life for themselves in the desert, guzzle bugs and two-headed lizards with more gusto than Bear Grylls. Things are bad, real bad.

In this three-way duel between man, machine and wilderness, it is the latter, the desert, that most plays up to our morbid fantasies about the future. Global warming equals sand. Except that Fury Road is proof that the opposite is also true. Originally slated to be filmed in the Australian desert, freak rains associated with changing weather patterns made the dust of New South Wales bloom with wildflowers – not quite the dystopian look director George Miller was looking for. The production was subsequently moved to Namibia, which was suitably barren.

The desert is the perfect tabula rasa on which to reinvent civilisation. One thinks of Reyner Banham’s argument that American design was forged in the heat of the western frontier, where the Sears Roebuck catalogue and the gizmos of an emerging consumer culture created the good life ex nihilo. (As readers of Scenes in America Deserta will know, Banham was later captivated by the Californian and Nevadan deserts, finding there a kind of blacktop sublime that Mad Max cranks up to a high-octane fever pitch.) And the Namibian location is truly stripped back – as far as I can remember there are not even any roads in Fury Road, let alone any architecture. Infrastructure is limited to a distant glimpse of Gas Town, built around an oil refinery. This emptiness is fertile ground, if you will, in which to lay the challenge of design in the Anthropocene.

Except that Fury Road has no such intentions. What purports to be a cautionary tale about the perils of fossil fuel consumption is in fact the exact opposite. Here in the Australian/Namibian wastes, the motif of recycling is used not to critique auto culture but to celebrate it. How else can one describe the parade of Frankenstein’s machines in pursuit across the desert than a motorised carnival. This is a ceremonial procession of classic Americana, but remixed and souped up – carmaggedon on life support. Here are Depression-era Dodge pick ups turned into monster trucks with Bigfoot wheels, and 1970s muscle cars fitted with tank tracks, as if their inherent machismo needed a steroid booster. In a fitting gesture, the villain’s ride is a 1959 Cadillac Coup DeVille (on a truck chassis, naturally) with two trunks welded on top of each other so that Harley Earl’s infamous tailfins are repeated in a double dose of Detroit gothic. This freakish convoy is a hymn to high-period General Motors.

The war boys who drive these relics love chrome so much they spray their teeth with it before their kamikaze attacks. These petrolheads are the foot soldiers of what McKenzie Wark calls, amusingly, the Carbon Liberation Front, or the capitalists whose profits rely on releasing fossil fuels into the atmosphere. Fury Road is not really about scarcity of resources. The occasional snatches of dialogue might suggest that petrol is an ever-so-precious resource, but the cast pisses it away like there’s no tomorrow, spraying it out of their exhausts, out of their mouths and even out of their guitars. One assumes there was a Texaco behind one of those sand dunes.

In the end, the moral seems to be not “there but for the grace of God” but carpe diem, let’s enjoy this party while it lasts. The metaphor of a civilisation trapped in the late industrial revolution, where the internal combustion engine is still the height of technology and the rest is all steampunk cogs and gears, is more hellish now than when the series started – in the late 70s we didn’t have to contemplate life without… the internet. Good thing this is only a movie. And, true to form, the good guys prevail. When Charlize Theron – in her rather fetching engine-grease makeup – and Tom Hardy take back the Citadel for the people, they discover an oasis full of hydroponic planters. It really is a parallel Detroit, not as Motor City but in its second incarnation as the capital of urban farming. Maybe George Miller can see which way the wind is blowing after all.

 

 

Justin McGuirk
Selected writing 2005 – 2015
  • Category
  • Title
  • Publication
  • Year
  • Architecture Activist architects Al Jazeera 2014
  • Architecture Djenné’s mud mosque Icon 2010
  • Architecture Honeywell, I’m home! e-flux journal 2015
  • Architecture Maison Dom-ino Dezeen 2014
  • Architecture PREVI, Lima Domus 2011
  • Architecture Revolutionary housing in Argentina Domus 2011
  • Architecture Robin Hood Gardens SQM 2014
  • Architecture The Base, Chocó Nuevotopias 2013
  • Architecture The High Line Icon 2009
  • Architecture Walter Benjamin puts activists to shame? Here 2013
  • Cities Beirut Icon 2006
  • Cities DIY cities (the limitations) Uncube 2014
  • Cities Edge City (São Paulo) Strelka Press 2012
  • Cities How radical is Radical Urbanism? Catalogue 2015
  • Cities Istanbul Icon 2010
  • Cities Jenin Icon 2005
  • Cities Life on the edge Moscow Urban Forum 2013
  • Cities Seoul Condé Nast Traveller 2012
  • Cities Shenzhen Icon 2008
  • Cities Unreal estate (London) Domus 2012
  • Cities Urban commons The Guardian 2015
  • Design Adventure gear The Guardian 2010
  • Design Beneath the street, the wilderness: Occupy and Bear Grylls Here 2012
  • Design Craft fetishism The Guardian 2011
  • Design Craft fetishism: From objects to things Disegno 2012
  • Design Design and the Right Domus 2013
  • Design Design and violence Dezeen 2013
  • Design Dreaming of year zero Bio 50 2014
  • Design Fabbers, dabblers and microstars Icon 2009
  • Design London riots The Guardian 2011
  • Design Luxury watch culture The Guardian 2010
  • Design Milan’s PR economy The Guardian 2011
  • Design On William Gibson on design Dezeen 2014
  • Design Open design Dezeen 2014
  • Design Samsung vs Apple Domus 2013
  • Design The internet of broken things Dezeen 2014
  • Design The post-spectacular economy Van Abbemuseum 2011
  • Design Ultramundane Domus 2013
  • People Alejandro Aravena Icon 2009
  • People Do Ho Suh Icon 2008
  • People Enzo Mari Icon 2009
  • People Ettore Sottsass Icon 2007
  • People Francis Kere Icon 2010
  • People Richard Sapper Domus 2013
  • Reviews Cool Tools by Kevin Kelly Dezeen 2014
  • Reviews Hearts of the City by Herbert Muschamp Icon 2010
  • Reviews Latin America in Construction at MoMA Architectural Record 2015
  • Reviews Mad Max: Fury Road Dezeen 2015
  • Reviews Max Bill Icon 2010
  • Reviews Philips shaver Icon 2008
  • Reviews Postmodernism at the V&A The Guardian 2010
  • Reviews Rebel Cities by David Harvey Art Review 2012
  • Reviews The Craftsman by Richard Sennett Icon 2008
  • Reviews The Historical Museum, Sarajevo The Guardian 2011
  • Reviews Together by Richard Sennett Art Review 2012
Justin McGuirk
Selected writing 2005 – 2015
  • Reviews
  • Mad Max: Fury Road
  • Dezeen
  • 2015
Back to Index

Whenever I see a design project that involves cobbling together one thing out of the discarded remains of another – stools out of plastic from the Pacific Garbage Patch, an espresso bar out of washing machines, lamp shades woven out of plastic bottles or anything made from old shipping containers – at the back of my mind I’m thinking of Mad Max. This is not to criticise such projects or to undermine the idea of recycling, upcycling, creative reuse or any other term du jour – ecological imperatives one and all. It’s just that Mad Max pushes them to their logical conclusion, to a world where there is no alternative.

The first three Mad Max films, released from 1979 to 1985, cornered the market in a particular vision of the post-apocalyptic future. And the central tenet of that vision is that the new world will be created out of the detritus of the old one. In Mad Max, the clock of technical progress has stopped in the 1970s – there are no new technologies, no new energy sources and certainly no Tesla home batteries. Forget computers and software – we’re talking hardware, of the greasy variety. In this world, the mechanic is king and the scrap yard is civilisation’s laboratory.

What is compelling about Mad Max is the extent to which it has become the default setting of the post-apocalypse. It may be viewed through a 1970s lens  – refracting the oil crisis, Cold War nuclear anxiety and the rise of the ecological movement – but it continues to play on contemporary fears. Despite the fact that in the year the first Mad Max was filmed President Carter was installing solar panels on the White House roof, somehow we still struggle to reach life beyond fossil fuels, we still equate climate change with deserts and we still configure the future through Malthusian scarcity models.

These are the clichés of Mad Max’s retro-future. They were present in the first iteration (although not so much desert in that one) but of course they’ve been turned up to eleven for Mad Max: Fury Road. The low budget, realist feel of the original has evolved into its own fantasy genre. The villain, once just a camp psychotic biker, has morphed into a cock-rock pharaoh presiding over a death cult of skinhead supplicants. The survivors, scavenging a life for themselves in the desert, guzzle bugs and two-headed lizards with more gusto than Bear Grylls. Things are bad, real bad.

In this three-way duel between man, machine and wilderness, it is the latter, the desert, that most plays up to our morbid fantasies about the future. Global warming equals sand. Except that Fury Road is proof that the opposite is also true. Originally slated to be filmed in the Australian desert, freak rains associated with changing weather patterns made the dust of New South Wales bloom with wildflowers – not quite the dystopian look director George Miller was looking for. The production was subsequently moved to Namibia, which was suitably barren.

The desert is the perfect tabula rasa on which to reinvent civilisation. One thinks of Reyner Banham’s argument that American design was forged in the heat of the western frontier, where the Sears Roebuck catalogue and the gizmos of an emerging consumer culture created the good life ex nihilo. (As readers of Scenes in America Deserta will know, Banham was later captivated by the Californian and Nevadan deserts, finding there a kind of blacktop sublime that Mad Max cranks up to a high-octane fever pitch.) And the Namibian location is truly stripped back – as far as I can remember there are not even any roads in Fury Road, let alone any architecture. Infrastructure is limited to a distant glimpse of Gas Town, built around an oil refinery. This emptiness is fertile ground, if you will, in which to lay the challenge of design in the Anthropocene.

Except that Fury Road has no such intentions. What purports to be a cautionary tale about the perils of fossil fuel consumption is in fact the exact opposite. Here in the Australian/Namibian wastes, the motif of recycling is used not to critique auto culture but to celebrate it. How else can one describe the parade of Frankenstein’s machines in pursuit across the desert than a motorised carnival. This is a ceremonial procession of classic Americana, but remixed and souped up – carmaggedon on life support. Here are Depression-era Dodge pick ups turned into monster trucks with Bigfoot wheels, and 1970s muscle cars fitted with tank tracks, as if their inherent machismo needed a steroid booster. In a fitting gesture, the villain’s ride is a 1959 Cadillac Coup DeVille (on a truck chassis, naturally) with two trunks welded on top of each other so that Harley Earl’s infamous tailfins are repeated in a double dose of Detroit gothic. This freakish convoy is a hymn to high-period General Motors.

The war boys who drive these relics love chrome so much they spray their teeth with it before their kamikaze attacks. These petrolheads are the foot soldiers of what McKenzie Wark calls, amusingly, the Carbon Liberation Front, or the capitalists whose profits rely on releasing fossil fuels into the atmosphere. Fury Road is not really about scarcity of resources. The occasional snatches of dialogue might suggest that petrol is an ever-so-precious resource, but the cast pisses it away like there’s no tomorrow, spraying it out of their exhausts, out of their mouths and even out of their guitars. One assumes there was a Texaco behind one of those sand dunes.

In the end, the moral seems to be not “there but for the grace of God” but carpe diem, let’s enjoy this party while it lasts. The metaphor of a civilisation trapped in the late industrial revolution, where the internal combustion engine is still the height of technology and the rest is all steampunk cogs and gears, is more hellish now than when the series started – in the late 70s we didn’t have to contemplate life without… the internet. Good thing this is only a movie. And, true to form, the good guys prevail. When Charlize Theron – in her rather fetching engine-grease makeup – and Tom Hardy take back the Citadel for the people, they discover an oasis full of hydroponic planters. It really is a parallel Detroit, not as Motor City but in its second incarnation as the capital of urban farming. Maybe George Miller can see which way the wind is blowing after all.

 

 

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