Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 56

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The Popular Culture Review

In other words, the children of Beyond Thunderdome belong to
the romantic vision of William Blake of the child-as-innocent, or
Rousseau's noble savage. The child is protected from the cruelty and
real barbarism of the corrupt adult world only through isolation from
that degenerate world. In Beyond Thunderdome. the children are
literally isolated, cut off both geographically and culturally from
the old world. The bombs and subsequent radiation have purified it,
and at the end of the film, the children can move back into its ruins
and begin to construct a future that we know will be better for them
ant their heirs. Lord of the Flies gave us the despairing message that
humankind is brutal and corrupt by nature and will continue to
construct brutal and corrupt societies in which a person can survive
only by either taking the reins of p>ower, or by bowing to the power of
the stronger, a cynical and hopeless mixture of Social Darwinism and
Calvinist views about original sin. The comparison between Lord of
the Flies and Beyond Thunderdome. as one of two distinct and
opposing philosophies about human nature is all the more compelling
when we rememter that the group of schoolchildren on the island in
Lord of the Flies was all male, and that the children of Beyond
Thunderdome are composed of both males and females. The latter
becomes an idyllic, functioning social democracy, whereas in the
former, Golding's schoolboys fashion a truly evil and cruel
totalitarian society.
An interesting parallel exists also between the three Mad
Max films and the 1976 Clint Eastwood film. The Outlaw losey
Wales, in which the American Civil War protagonist sees his wife
and child killed before his eyes at the beginning of the film, sets out
to avenge their deaths, and in the course of his pursuit of the killers,
gathers to him, very reluctantly, an odd assortment of homeless
wanderers, including even a dog. Josey Wales, however, at fi