Abstract
Conventional film scholarship has largely eschewed the analysis of screen texts from psychiatric and cognitivist approaches to traumatic representation. This chapter considers the convergence of emerging research into post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that challenges notions of psychotic behaviour (auditory, verbal and/or visual hallucinations—AVH) as aberrant amongst general PTSD sufferers. It aligns these findings with the recent global release of George Miller’s rebooted Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). By undertaking a close textual reading of key film sequences, with reference to the broader narrative, film trauma scholarship and Fury Road’s antecedents, this chapter suggests that this latest version of the Mad Max series strongly conforms to the new paradigms of PTSD symptomology.
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Notes
- 1.
This is not the only act of cinematic self-cannibalisation by Miller within the series. The Mad Max quartet repeatedly represents characters and narrative actions intertextually.
- 2.
It could be argued that the Feral Kid’s narration as an old man in The Road Warrior can be interpreted as a retrospective trauma narrative, particularly since we see him being taken away as a child against his will (echoing Australia’s Indigenous Stolen Generation) and looking back in anguish at Max, who fails to intervene.
- 3.
Numerous works by psychologists as far back to Carl Jung in the 1950s have specifically addressed such traumas and anxieties. Other examples include works by Robert Lifton, John E. Mack and Sibylle Escalona.
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Broderick, M., Ellis, K. (2019). Trauma. In: Trauma and Disability in Mad Max. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19439-0_2
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