[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] This Side of Thunderdome

Tue May 5 07:14:27 MDT 2009

The Archdruid Report (April 30 2009)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society

If you want to make the gods laugh, an old proverb suggests, tell them
your plans. The three years since I first started posting these essays
online make a tolerably good case for that claim. When I launched The
Archdruid Report three years ago, I had no great expectations for the
project, and I certainly never expected to end up facing the business
end of a video camera on a Los Angeles sound stage, talking about Mad Max.

Still, that's exactly where I was yesterday, doing my peak oil talking
head routine while the camera rolled and the time I usually spend
writing my weekly post here went elsewhere (which is why this post is a
day later than usual). Warner Home Video is gearing up for a thirtieth
anniversary DVD rerelease of Mad Max {1}, with the usual assortment of
bonus tracks, and one of the bonuses will be a documentary feature
looking at the dystopian future portrayed in the Mad Max movies. When
the producers started looking for - what do you call experts on dismal
visions of the future? Doomologists? - my name came up; the result,
after a flurry of emails, was a quick flight down to Los Angeles.

It's popular these days to despise Los Angeles, and certainly there's a
lot about it to dislike; the gray smoky soup that passes for air comes
to mind, not to mention the relentless rush and clamor of seven million
people or so crammed into a modestly sized coastal valley between the
desert and the deep blue sea. Still, I have a grudging fondness for the
place. Though it often seems as though every single one of those seven
million people are there for one purpose - to make a fast buck or,
rather, as many fast bucks as possible - it's almost refreshing to see
that fact so nakedly on display, free of the bulky garments of hypocrisy
that so often bundle them up elsewhere.

It's also not too hard, while strolling along Promenade Park in Santa
Monica or peering through the smog at the harsh brown slopes of the
mountains all around, to glimpse what the area was like before it became
Exhibit A in any study of metastatic urban sprawl. Nor is it too hard to
imagine what the same region will be like a few centuries from now, when
the inevitable dieoff is a matter of fading memory and salvage from all
that sprawl will most likely be the economic mainstay of the small
population that remains. If you want to talk about apocalyptic futures,
in other words, greater Los Angeles is not a bad place to do it.

Nor is it an inappropriate place to talk about the way that our
collective imagination of the future is shaped by the most unlikely
influences. If you asked people to put together lists of believable
sources for visions of the future, low-budget action films would
probably not appear very often. Yet Mad Max and its two sequels have had
an extraordinary impact on the contemporary imagination. Suggest that
the near future will look like the settings of Zardoz {2} or Logan's Run
{3}, to name two other dystopian-future films of the same decade, and
you'll likely get blank looks from those who've forgotten the movies in
question, and horse laughs from those who do. By contrast, if you
suggest that we're likely headed toward a "Mad Max future", you can be
tolerably sure that everyone present will understand what you are
saying, and at least a few of them will agree with you.

Now of course this is partly because the story lines of Mad Max and its
sequels are old hat to anybody who hasn't been hiding under a rock for
the last four decades or so. Mad Max is simply another 1970s
good-cop-gone-rogue action film set in a vaguely defined future instead
of the present; the title character is a member of an elite highway
patrol whose running fight with a motorcycle gang ends up costing his
wife and son their lives, sending him on a quest for vengeance. The Road
Warrior maps the plot of a thousand and one Westerns - the lone
gunslinger seeking redemption by rescuing a community threatened by
bandits - onto a more detailed future of social collapse and brutal
violence. Even Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome, which strayed a little
further from this sort of formulaic plot, is pieced together from a
dozen or so reliable Hollywood themes.

As a framework for thinking about the future, a reliance on familiar
plot formulas has some severe and predictable problems. Think of the way
that the late and unlamented Bush administration based its foreign
policy on a storyline that was essentially borrowed from superhero
comics. We're the good guys, therefore anything we do to the bad guys is
justified; they're the bad guys, therefore their behavior is motivated
solely by their own badness, nothing need be done about the abuses they
claim to be avenging, and everyone can be expected to cheer when the
good guys clobber them. It's a familiar story line. Apply it to war and
politics in the real world, though, and it turns into an epic source of
failure.

The same risk faces attempts to use the formulaic framework of the Mad
Max movies in any simplistic way to make sense of the future. Still,
certain themes in the movies are at least worth some reflection. The
collapse of civilization over the course of the series, in particular,
is not a sudden thing. In the first movie, some semblance of government
and ordinary society still exists, though both are fraying
catastrophically; in the second, civil order has broken down temporarily
in a mad scramble for resources; in the third, new social structures
with their own laws have begun to emerge, and alternative energy
resources have come into their own - I can't think of another attempt to
portray a deindustrial future that has achieved the gritty realism of
Beyond Thunderdome's Bartertown, with its methane energy economy driven
by fermenting pig feces.

Nor, I am sorry to say, is the violence central to the film's storyline
entirely out of place. My inflight reading on the trips down to Los
Angeles and back again was an old favorite, John Morris' The Age of
Arthur (2001), the only really comprehensive attempt so far to use the
tools of history to make sense of the original context of the Arthurian
legend - the collapse, partial recovery, and final defeat of Roman
Britain in the fifth century. It's a hefty volume, but worth reading for
anyone who hopes to get a sense of what the collapse of a civilization
actually looks like. The collapse of social order was a lived reality at
that time; Lord Humongous, the hockey-masked leader of the raiders in
The Road Warrior, had a close equivalent in the canny Saxon pirate
Hengist, who took advantage of civil war among British magnates to
ravage Britain and lay the foundations for the later ascendancy of the
English; the fragmentary records of that time, with their references to
unchecked violence and the collapse of civilized life, find ample
confirmation from archeologists.

What makes so much current talk about a "Mad Max future" problematic, it
seems to me, is simply the assumption that this sort of catastrophic
unraveling will be a universal experience. This is a little like
suggesting that anyone who lived during the twentieth century must have
spent time huddling in an air raid shelter or been interned in a
concentration camp. In any future we are at all likely to face, the
collapse of social order will be a significant fact in some regions, and
the raids and mass migrations that swept away most of Roman Britain and
built the kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy on its ruins will likely
have equivalents in certain places; this is the sort of thing that
happens when civilizations break down. Other places, however, will
follow very different trajectories, because another thing that happens
when civilizations break down is that historical events downshift to a
more local scale. To borrow Thomas Friedman's metaphor, civilizations
flatten out the Earth, but this is a temporary effect; when
civilizations decline and fall, roundness returns, and communities once
bound into a sprawling whole find themselves cut loose to shape their
own histories.

It may be possible to anticipate at least some of the regional
differences that will take shape as the industrial age comes to an end,
and next week's post will suggest some of the issues involved. In the
meantime, it might be a useful exercise for those of my readers
interested in exploring the subject to sort through their own images of
the future, to get some sense of how many of those images come from
media of the Mad Max variety, and to compare them with the way some
tolerably well documented example of collapse actually occurred - the
fall of Roman Britain is only one of many possibilities, though
libraries in the English-speaking world tend to be tolerably well
stocked with books on that particular example. Though the Mad Max movies
went zooming off beyond Thunderdome, most of us will likely end up a
good deal this side of it as the industrial age creaks and clatters
toward its end.

Links

{1} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Max

{2} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zardoz

{3} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run
_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He
lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/04/this-side-of-thunderdome.html

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