Trauma and Disability in Mad Max: Beyond the Road Warrior's Fury

ISBN-13: 9783030194383 / Angielski / Twarda / 2019 / 109 str.

Mick Broderick; Katie Ellis

Opis

This book analyzes how disability, deformity and trauma are central narrative prostheses in the Mad Max franchises' post-apocalyptic desert wasteland, representing both social decline and rejuvenation. The authors detail how disability, deformity and trauma offer key moments of character and audience identification. They argue that despite a shared interest in representations of the body and the individual and social effects of devastating injury, critical trauma and critical disability studies rarely collaborate in the production of new scholarship. This book undertakes a cultural analysis of the Mad Max series of films to argue Mad Max is a potent site in which this collaboration can take place.

Spis treści

Introduction 

1. Trauma

2. Disability

3.Gender

4. Mythology

5. Fandom

Conclusion

O autorze

Mick Broderick is Associate Professor of Media Analysis at Murdoch University, Australia. His major publications include The Kubrick Legacy (2019), Reconstructing Strangelove: inside Stanley Kubrick’s ‘nightmare comedy’(2017), editions of the reference work Nuclear Movies (1988, 1991) and as editor or co-editor, Hibakusha Cinema(1996, 1999, 2014), Interrogating Trauma (2010) and Trauma, Media, Art: New Perspectives (2011).

Katie Ellis is Associate Professor in Internet Studies and Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University, Australia. Her research is located at the intersection of media access and representation. She is the author or editor of 20 books on the topic of disability, the media and popular culture including most recentlyDisability and Digital Television Cultures (2019).

Blurb

“The Mad Max films have been understood from numerous perspectives, from auteurism to national cinema to action adventure to gender to science fiction to dystopia. Mick Broderick and Katie Ellis have surpassed that literature with this exciting and profound work. Trauma and Disability is more than a new optic through which to view a storied series; it is a challenge to film studies and cultural analysis more broadly to wake up, smell the burning guzzoline, and rethink normativity.”
— Professor Toby Miller, Loughborough University London, UK

“Mad Max is more relevant today than ever, with climate change destroying the Earth and many despot leaders worldwide. Broderick and Ellis critique the imagery of trauma within the films and focus attention on the many narratives involving disabled characters. Their explication of representations of bodies, disabled and nondisabled, makes a significant contribution to our understanding of multiple Mad Max films, specifically, and popular culture, generally.” 
— Professor Beth Haller, Towson University, USA 

This book explores the inter-relationship of disability and trauma in the Mad Max films (1979-2015). George Miller’s long-running series is replete with narratives and imagery of trauma, both physical and emotional, along with major and minor characters who are prominently disabled. The Mad Max movies foreground representations of the body – in devastating injury and its lasting effects – and in the broader social and historical contexts of trauma, disability, gender and myth.
Over the franchise’s four-decade span significant social and cultural change has occurred globally. Many of the images of disability and trauma central to Max’s post-apocalyptic wasteland can be seen to represent these societal shifts, incorporating both decline and rejuvenation. These shifts include concerns with social, economic and political disintegration under late capitalism, projections of survival after nuclear war, and the impact of anthropogenic climate change.
Drawing on screen production processes, textual analysis and reception studies this book interrogates the role of these representations of disability, trauma, gender and myth to offer an in-depth cultural analysis of the social critiques evident within the fantasies of Mad Max.

Mick Broderick is Associate Professor of Media Analysis at Murdoch University, Australia. 

Katie Ellis is Associate Professor in Internet Studies and Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University, Australia.