The politics of the Wasteland rests on a simple, age-old triad: Gastown refines the petrol; the Bullet Farm smelts and casts armaments; and from the jealously guarded aquifers of the Citadel, a million cabbages grow. Trade ensues. And peace prevails, right?

Not exactly.

Warrior-trucker Imperator Furiosa—played by Charlize Theron in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road and Anya Taylor-Joy in this year’s prequel—enjoys job security, shuttling shipments of petrol between Gastown and the Citadel, because the balance of power among these three poles is precarious, at best. Stolen from the Green Place as a child, Furiosa escapes the clutches of nomadic warlord Dementus and, disguised as a boy, ends up in the Citadel’s mechanic corps and then behind the wheel of its most important tanker truck. 

It takes a steady hand and inextinguishable rage for her to ply those dusty roads. Whether she completes her run or not is the difference between anarchic stasis and total war.

It goes without saying that speculative fiction, no matter how outlandish, is meant to reflect the present at the same time that it anticipates the future, or at least a future. Director George Miller has imagined and reimagined ecological devastation and a resource-constrained hellscape ever since the original Mad Max, starring Mel Gibson, premiered in 1979. Forty-five years later, he returns to the same desert, dry and brutal as ever, with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.

It’s also more realistic than ever.

It’s true that, for all of our problems, humanity appears to be basking in plenty right now. Food, money, shelter, medicine, water: 8.5 billion of us are getting along pretty famously, all things considered. 

Take California, though. The difference between the Central Valley and an actual wasteland depends on a few feet of water table. (It already has Gastown—aka Taft.) The Coachella Valley is a step further ahead, sustained only by a river that seven states and two countries have attenuated into little more than a mirage. When the next drought hits the Sierra Nevada, the next heat wave hits the desert, or the next earthquake hits the Sacramento Delta or one of the cities, we may find out what anarchy is like.

And what’s a commute if not a death-defying journey for the sake of self-preservation?

Here’s the thing about the Wasteland: nobody likes it. Even the warlords who control it hate it. 

Immortan Joe is misshapen and infertile. Dementus can’t escape the memory of his slain child. The Bullet Farmer can’t even use his products to defend his own property. The lower on the hierarchy you are, the more likely you are to become roadkill. The higher up you are, the more likely you are to get betrayed. All the hotrods, hogs, shotguns, and flame-throwers in the world can’t undo their despair. You get the feeling that, beneath their tattered finery and caveman bravado, each of them would un-break the world if they could.

Rewind to 2024, and we have the opposite.

You could pick your global offender: Putin. Netanyahu. Shi. Al-Bashir. Al-Assad. Trump. Biden, if you must. None of them is pulling us away from the brink. But no one is pushing us toward it more gleefully than our greatest industrialist-adolescent and would-be warlord: Elon Musk.

Amid 2.5 hours of real-life special effects that will make you want to walk out of the theater next time you’re assaulted with CGI, Furiosa’s most affecting scene pits a hobbled Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) against an ascendent Furiosa, whom he kidnapped at age 11. Vainglorious, maudlin, and wisecracking—he drove a chariot powered not by a team of stallions but by a trio of choppers—Dementus reminds Furiosa, “to feel alive we seek sensation, any sensation, to wash away the cranky black sorrow. It leaves us for a moment, and then it comes back,” right before she exacts her revenge.

I relate to Dementus far more than I do to Musk. At least Dementus has an appreciation for the absurd, however brutal the absurdity may be. The world that Musk wants is the very world that Dementus laments. But whereas Dementus has the excuse of facing life-threatening violence and scarcity on a daily basis, our warlords have no conceivable earthly need or desire that they cannot readily obtain.

Musk pretends to be a barrel of laughs, smoking weed while he’s being interviewed (rebel!) and responding to questions with poop emojis (so suave!). He plays practical jokes on his children, choosing unpronounceable names before they’re even born, and worse. Just recently, he decided to pull his companies’ headquarters from California because it’s too friendly to trans people. 

These jokes aren’t funny.

Musk’s juvenilia could be disregarded were it not accompanied by his inconceivable wealth and an almost orgasmic fatalism. Musk talks big game about his electric cars, battery packs, and renewable rockets. But he shows his true self in chilling ways: his assault on the marketplace of ideas; his sociopathic hatred of cities and, particularly, public transit; and, most of all, his fantasies of Martian colonization. 

Musk wants to proactively, deliberately abandon the green place for someplace that is literally worse than the Wasteland. A place named, incidentally, after the god of war. (Only slightly less bonkers are proposals for “seasteading,” promoted most notably by Peter Thiel.)

Even if Musk pays for it himself, imagine the cost of setting up a single outpost on Mars. $100 billion? $250 billion? $1 trillion? Now imagine if a fraction of that amount was spent on green technology. Or humanitarian aid. Or habitat preservation. Or bribing the world’s dictators to abdicate and move to their own private islands. Imagine how much global good Musk could do with his own checkbook, if he wanted to.

Musk embodies the antisocial, survivalist attitude of many of the world’s oligarchs, tycoons, and sociopaths.

But he doesn’t want to. Musk embodies the antisocial, survivalist attitude of many of the world’s oligarchs, tycoons, and sociopaths. The ecological benefits of electric vehicles matter to him only insofar as they burnish his ego. He doesn’t actually care about sustainability. He hates the very world in which he has made his billions. 

He’s already selling a hideous, inhuman vehicle no less imposing than Immortan Joe’s cobbled-together mutant vehicles, except it’s under the guise of zero emissions rather than red-hot combustion and guttural exhaust. It might not burn petroleum, but it still wants to beat you in a drag race—or run you over. Remember the Hyperloop? That, too, was a charade. A distraction in the guise of civic largesse. 

Musk recently tweeted about overthrowing the government of Bolivia: “We will coup whoever we want!” he declared. What for? To plunder lithium deposits that can power his batteries. It doesn’t get much more warlord than that.

As social critic Douglas Rushkoff wrote in The Guardian, “contemporary billionaires appear to understand civics and civilians as impediments to their progress … sad artefacts of the civilisation they will leave behind in their inexorable colonisation of the next dimension.” This attitude is the opposite of the diverse, cooperative, compromised-based collective that is a city and, more broadly, a human society. And, Rushkoff notes, it rejects the nominal civic conscience of earlier tycoons, like Andrew Carnegie or, more recently, Eli Broad and Michael Bloomberg. 

The world is not just breaking, it is being broken. Broken by people who are so privileged, they have nothing more to gain.

Furiosa has no happy ending. It elides into Fury Road, and we all know what happens next. And yet there is a triumphalism here. It’s not in the fiction. It’s in the film itself. It’s in art. It’s in exuberance. It’s in an artistic alchemy that spins intensity out of the depths of despair. It’s in the fact that our world is still sufficiently intact that we can rationally consider different futures and decide which one we want. In short, we must get serious. 

The highest aggregate daily temperature on Earth was recorded on July 22. The record it broke was set July 21. Functional, pleasant, efficient cities are just part of the solution to the climate crisis and to the crisis of sociability, both of which Miller depicts in extremis. But they are a crucial part nonetheless. 

Oil, guns, megalomania, and trucks already have ruined much of our world (I don’t have an opinion about cabbages). But, they haven’t ruined everything yet. The more furious the rest of us become, the better chance we have of winning the war.  

Featured image vis Warner Brothers Pictures.