5. Mythology

When Tina Turner sang We Don’t Need Another Hero over the end credits of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), it seemed that the trilogy had exhausted its heroic narrative trajectory. However, based on myth scholar Joseph Campbell’s works, writer-director-producer George Miller understood that Max’s journey remained incomplete and lacked resolution. This chapter therefore considers the cultural and cinematic myths of heroism, trauma and disability alongside Max’s character transformation and questions of pre-determinism and fate. It examines the influence of Campbell’s “monomyth” across the four films spanning three decades in order to reflect shifting international geopolitics—including petrochemical dependence and globalisation—sociocultural contexts and, significantly, the spectres of Indigenous genocide, all resonating within our emergent epoch now widely understood as the Anthropocene.