Vivendo no mundo distópico: Mad Max e a pós-história no cinema pop

Abstract

This work aims to briefly explore the theme of dystopia in pop culture from the point of view of Cultural History, using the Australian movie franchise Mad Max, which is composed of four films, released from 1979 to 2015. We consider that dystopias are born from social anxieties, being a tool to elaborate representations of these fears in fictional spaces which are in turn incorporated to discourses about reality. The first chapter approaches the history of dystopia and its possibilities as historical sources, the second focuses the franchise’s position in the cinema market, and the last one discusses the relations between the movies, the historical moment in which they were produced and dystopian fiction. The research confirms that, in the last decades, dystopia went from a mainly militant and literary genre of fiction to become part of pop culture and mass entertainment.