The slow apocalypse behind Mad Max

Each Mad Max film gets further and further away from reality, becoming increasingly baroque and operatic. But one of the most fascinating things to come out of the entire saga is the quietly existential horror of the slow apocalypse unfolding in the background of the first movie. 

While it's absolutely a white line nightmare in the original Mad Max, there is also still a society behind the carnage, at least at first. There are still cafes, and ice creams and milkshakes. There are still lawmen out on patrol, and hospitals full of machines that go beep. 

But while we're not in the full post-apocalypse of the Road Warrior, things are falling apart, with the law enforcement system barely existing by the end of the film.

For all the glorious histrionics of the series, this might be the most chilling aspect of it, and the most real. For all the talk of WW3 being over in a matter of hours, as global superpowers annihilate each other with their megadeath weapons, the end of the world as we know is unlikely to come with the sudden impact, and more likely to creep up on you like a sucking gut wound.

Human history is full of  great civilisations collapsing with alarming regularity and while the end seems to come at great speed in the sprawling context of history, for the people living through them, it can be decades of things falling apart before the streets are abandoned.

By the time Mad Max is travelling to barter towns and bullet farms, it's all over, rover. But that slide towards an abyss without any kind of ice-creams begins in the first film, and is worryingly familiar for us mugs in the real world.