“What If We Were Savage?” Mad Max Transmedia as Speculative Anthropology

Abstract

Through a neoteric methodology (speculative ethnography), we analyze the transmedia worldbuilding of the Mad Max franchise as a form of “Ozploitation.” This post-apocalyptic rural sci-fi series exploits culturally specific fears generated from Australia’s colonial past. Mad Max is a popular imagining of the Australian eschaton and its aftermath, a collective national nightmare where near-future Australia—“Maxtralia”—plummets into the savagery invented by generations of colonialist discourse. “Maximum madness,” the retrogressive technological, religious, and socioeconomic wasteland culture for which the series is known, signifies a Western reproach to indigeneity and locative culture, perpetuating attitudes of voyeuristic excitement towards primitivism.