Mad Max 2 The Road Warrior Essay

In Miller’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, we find a post-apocalyptic world that is plagued with miserable living conditions and riddled with an unquenchable thirst for gasoline. This strange world’s currency is not based on a monetary system, but instead, it is based on deals and contracts. This kind of contract based world leads to discrepancies between characters and most of all these deals give us a look into how trustworthy each character is. Usually, if a character makes a deal that he knows he is not willing to keep, then that character is one of the least trustworthy characters in the story, and if a character follows through with his deal, then that character is usually a trustworthy person who will be noble throughout the story. As we delve into the bowels of this

As Max drives through the desert, he finds a man who is a lone survivor out of a group of defenders who were from the compound that has an excess of gasoline. As Max decides to save this dying man, he decides to grant his dying wish of returning him home to the compound. Max gladly complies with this wish; however, he decides to make a deal with this dying man. This deal is: in trade for Max “Just [taking him] back there” max would get gasoline, “As much as [he] would like”(Miller). As max soon finds out from Pappagallo after returning the dying man, “If you [Max] had a contract, it was with him. And it died with him”(Miller). This kind of volatile nature that comes with these contracts appears throughout the story. Max fulfilled his end of the contract, but since the other party was dead: the contract was null and void. This shows the cut-throat and contract-based nature of this world. The kind of world in which no one is to be trusted and everyone has to earn his or her place through a display of either nobility or