50 GREATEST FICTIONAL BADASSES

#3 – MAX ROCKATANSKY. The Road Warrior. The Man with No Name. Raggedy Man. The Man Who Keeps Mr. Dead in His Pocket. Mad Max.

There is no action film better than The Road Warrior. You can attempt to argue with me, but you’d be wrong. Apology accepted.

There are three key elements that make the Mad Max films so great. First is the stunt driving. For the first three, this was a time when filmmaking was corporeal: your brain subconsciously understood everything on screen was real. The process was simple enough — someone figured out how to do a stunt, they set it up, they rolled camera. The razor’s edge between faith and atheism then heavily depended on finding a hair in the gate.

I love the Fast and Furious movies (not Tokyo Drift, that’s a given), but I don’t believe them. Why? We live in a time where computer-generated imagery is as common as HGTV personalities standing in power poses. My brain refuses to believe anything up there is really real (both the stunt work and power poses). Manipulation abounds on today’s screens. Mad Max’s world is the opposite. It feels like EVERYTHING on-screen is real — and subconsciously, it leaves me in absolute awe.

Next is the mystique of the world itself. All four films offer a terrifying landscape that has struck a chord in our culture. Weird-ass souped-up cars, trucks, planes and trains. Mohawk’d tribes wrapped in football pads and bondage gear. The cultish chant “TWO MEN ENTER, ONE MAN LEAVE!” This is the post-apocalypse, where everyone you see on screen was once a regular Joe before the bombs started flying. Director George Miller reminds you periodically that’s you and your neighbors up on the screen, ready to rape and pillage for a can of juice and a spoonful of Alpo. This isn’t a story of heroes and villains: it’s mankind’s moral compass, and it’s gotten too close to the magnet.

My personal favorite mystery is Lord Humongous (who must have thought: “I need to intimidate people, to scare them. Fuck dressing up as a bat, I’m dressing like Jason from Friday the 13th”). In The Road Warrior, there’s a moment when he opens a case to retrieve a .44 Magnum. Amongst the few bullets left is a black and white photo of a man and woman. You imagine it could be him and his wife before all of this happened. Or it could be his parents. Or a symbolic photo of what he yearns for. We just don’t know. It just adds layers to who he really is, before the world went to pot and how one bad day changed everything.

The final element is the defining one for me. It’s the element of fallibility. Injury in film bothers the shit out of me. I can’t trust a movie where heroes walk away unscathed from conflict. In Empire Strikes Back, Luke is sweating, fatigued and loses a hand to the villain before he’s psychologically trampled on. Tell me, how the hell I’m supposed to relate to any of the prequel Jedis when they’re bouncing cartoon-like around a room, telekinetically throwing houses at one another? In Sucker Punch, a 90-pound blonde gets hurled against a wall by some kind of Nazi steam-punk robot. She falls to the ground, landing into a traditional Iron Man pose, then leaps unscathed at her adversary, all pouty-lipped. That robot may have cracked a nail. Yawn. It may be nice dreamlike imagery, but I don’t find it particularly engaging.

In Max’s world, injury is permanent. His shattered knee forces him to walk with a limp forever after. The wounds received in the Road Warrior’s climactic chase carry over into Thunderdome. He is a beat-up wreck of a man; 40 miles of bad road. The badass heroes I worship look like a side of beef worked over by Rocky by the end of the movie, not a polished Derek Zoolander ready for a close-up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbKrKrsFWzc

Aunty Entity: “And what did you do before all this?”

Max: “I was a cop, a driver.”

Aunty Entity: “But how the world turns. One day, cock of the walk. Next, a feather duster.”