Mad Max is Australian cinema’s defining dystopian mythology, a primordial fusion of man and machine. It takes place almost entirely on Australian highways and continually nods in the direction of American westerns but with some critical differences. In particular, Australian highways don’t have the same mythos as American highways – instead of conjuring up the heroism of westwards expansion, they remind us that there is no single route across the interior of the country. If you follow most Australian roads for long enough they end up leading nowhere, depositing you in the void of a desert that is large, barren and inhuman enough to swallow up the frontier aspirations of the United States. As a result there’s an inherent absurdity and grotesquerie to the Australian western, and to Australian highway narratives, and George Miller draws deep on that here, in the first film in his classic franchise.

In his fusion of man and car, Miller creates a kind of Australian cyberpunk – a deranged Bathurst 1000 aesthetic filled with “fuel-injected suicide machines.” As in J.G. Ballard’s Crash, written only a few years before, the only public sphere that exists in Miller’s dystopian future is that of car accidents, mangled collisions of machinery and flesh. All other semblance of civic society has vanished – in a bleak riff on Walkabout, the city centre immediately gives way onto chaotic outback highways, with nothing in between; no suburbia, no nature, no small town camaraderie. Even the city core has been decimated, reduced to a small police precinct framed by the futuristic arc of the new West Gate Bridge in the background. In this environment, cars are on the verge of superseding people, and certainly possess as much personality as people, while the highway has become a series of atrocity exhibitions, to use another Ballardian term. People speak and move with the artificiality, intensity and fragmented body language of silent film, as if Miller were reaching back to an earlier era where the medium itself emphasised our increasing symbiosis with the mechanical world. Bureaucrats and criminals are closest to becoming one with the machine, while cops are the remaining repository of the human, especially Mel Gibson’s eponymous Max Rockatansky.

Unlike any of the subsequent Mad Max films there is still a vestige of naturalism here too. You see the impact of the Australian New Wave in some of Miller’s more lyrical shots of the road and landscape but it’s perpetually thwarted and distorted with his own grotesque and futuristic irrealism. That awry naturalism is particularly clear in the Australian accent, which never quite stabilises over the course of the film, as if shifts between Gibson’s American inflections, Hugh Keays-Byrne’s English intonations and the raucous animal sounds of the various motorcycle gangs. This produces a deranged larrikinism, as if the spillover of excess energy after a cricket match or footy game had been captured and mediated by some nefarious technology, deforming Aussie colloquialisms in the process. One of Max’s most laconic and ocker colleagues at the police force has to hold a microphone across his voice box for the full broadness of his Australian accent to make itself felt. In an implicitly post-colonial vision, Miller thus deconstructs any sense of a natural or authentic Australian identity. It’s notable that the only sustained sequence of naturalism, in the third act, functions as prelude and pivot to Max completely identifying himself with the machinic dystopia of the highway.

These dual tendencies towards naturalism and cyberpunk come together in the sheer flatness of Miller’s landscapes, which start out lyrical but end up bizarre, stretching the widescreen aesthetic of the American western beyond any semblance of stately realism. The Australian desert here is apocalyptically flat, as if decimated by some catastrophic conflict, and that quality extends to the placid blankness of Port Philip Bay and its environs. While Miller never depicts anything resembling a conventional urban core, you feel the endless plain of Melbourne in every scene. After a while, there’s no distinction between highway, landscape and sky, as every modified motor vehicle feels on the very of taking off for supersonic flight, most notably Max’s own van, which is painted with a spaceship landing on a distant planet.

This surreal flatness culminates in the final scene of the film. When Max’s wife and child are killed on the highway by the motorcycle gang, and Max himself is almost killed, it takes a superhuman effort for him to rise from the flatness, and not give into it. In doing so, he achieves a new iconic stature but also absorbs part of the highway into himself. Hence the final sequence, which sees Max overcome by highway hypnosis, and yet also channelling highway hypnosis, communing with the glaring light on the road as he enters a prohibited area, before Miller ends by positioning the camera right down on the blacktop, reminding us that its gravitational pull remains, and that Max will need more films to properly negotiate it.