The Feral Kid’s character arc goes from an animal state where he takes pleasure in using his boomerang (sloppy tie to savageness through reference to aborigines?) to kill the gay villain’s gay sex slave/lover, to being passed on the qualities of the drifter-hero Max, to eventually becoming the English-speaking founder of a new civilization with his only remaining male role models being two characters presented in the film as possessing extremely virile heterosexuality. In those first acts of violence, he’s more like the Marauders and so further from civilization. His civilization at the end of a film is an act of Freudian sublimation in that that violence is directed towards being useful for society as he comes to help Max. Wouldn’t reproductive (ie heterosexual) sex be essential to founding a new civilization? In any case, the villains are homosexual and embody the opposite of civilization (ie savage), and the Feral-Kid-as-hero’s character-arc-goal is ‘becoming civilized’ and thus heterosexual in order to found a new society.

If the director is making Mad Max 2, as a post-apocalyptic film critique of contemporary society, it seems like a pretty homophobic critique of society.

Wez, the main villain in the film trying to kill Max and the Feral Kid, as he first appears with his companion the Golden youth. It’s a big topic of debate as to their relationship on the Mad Max Fandom Wikia and on the Mad Max subreddit, since the actor who played Wez, Vernon Wells, has said very strongly at fan conventions that they’re not gay. I stand with the majority of those engaged in those conversations in calling BS gay panic on Vernon Wells. There are tons of cues to their relationship all really coming down to the understanding of homosexual relations as being defined by an active dominant partner and a passive receptive partner. This relationship is all over the movie, in how they ride the motorbike, in their characters (Golden Youth is a vacant-eyed, totally passive twink-type). The director ties it to BDSM sub-dom play in their costumes, with Wez wearing assless chaps and the Golden Youth wearing a collar with a padlock and chain. I think it’s pretty obvious that the Golden Youth is supposed to be Wez’s sex slave/lover, especially in the scene where the Feral Kid kills the Golden Youth. SO, the Feral Kid as hero kills the gay villain’s gay lover?!

So then if by the end of the movie, Max leaves and the leader Papagallo is dead, who’s left to civilize the Kid, to be a male role model? It’s just the Curmudgeon and the Gyro Captain (who the Kid says became their leader before him). If you watch the film closely, you’ll notice that there’s one big important difference between those two and Max, and that’s what makes it possible for them to become civilize-rs, to become the founders of a new civilization and not for Max to be. At the end of the original Mad Max, his wife and child are murdered, so that’s why he’s so cold and harsh in Mad Max 2, why he won’t go with the settlers. He can’t form a family anymore.

Freud says, in his next big definition, that this is essential to the formation of civilization: “The evolution of civilization…must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization may therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species.”

 In contrast, with Max the director keeps dropping these hints that the Gyro Captain and the Curmdugeon have a highly virile heterosexuality, such as when the Curmudgeon is trying to convince Max to join their new civilization and tells him, “You have to come sonny. This is where we’re going, paradise! 2000 miles from here. Fresh water, plenty of sunshine, nothing to do but breed!” The Gyro Captain has a naked woman painted on the tailfin of his gyrocopter and when he gets into the compound he immediately tries to convince the pretty young woman to fly away with him.

Still thinking about that Epilogue today–reading Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and thinking about the movie I think I’m starting to get some answers, a story is coming out. He writes about some definitions of how civilization is formed that I think have a lot to do with those ideas about feral children and the ideas about how civilization is formed that the director George Miller puts into The Road Warrior. The first big definition he gives that jumped out at me is this: “Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as ‘right’ in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as ‘brute force’” Which if you think of the two groups in the Road Warrior, the Humungus’ Marauders and the settlers in the oil refinery compound, you see how they each are one side of Freud’s definition. The Marauders are savage, uncivilized, they just have this brute-force despotic ruler. When the Feral Kid kills Humungus’ head henchman Wez’s lover the Golden Youth, Humungus only stops Wez from going crazy and attacking the compound by himself by head-locking him choking him out until he’s unconscious. And then the settlers are civilization, they have scenes where they have public debates and meet as a council to make decisions. And then Max and the Kid are a third group somewhere in between or apart.

A lot of those ideas about feral children from the Mowgli-era, and earlier, 18th and 19th centuries, are really problematic but especially in terms of how they connect sexuality with civilization. There’s a famous historical movie called The Wild Child about a doctor in France in the 1700s who worked with a feral child who was found in the forest of Aveyron, and I was reading an article feral children that pointed out how that movie left out this really important part of the story that the doctor basically stopped treating the feral child because he was worried he couldn’t make him be heterosexual. Here’s the article: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/35304 That article also talked about how Sigmund Freud connected homosexual urges with earlier developmental phases and feral children, and that as people naturally move beyond the savageness of the feral child into a civilized state as they mature, their sexual urges become exclusively heterosexual.

At the end of the movie the Feral Kid narrates this epilogue where he says that thanks to Max saving them they founded a new civilization called “the Great Norther Tribe” in the North of Australia away from the Wasteland and he (the Kid) eventually became the leader. But he’s speaking English and now he’s the founding father of this whole new civilization coming out of the crazy post-apocalypse of the movie with Marauders raping and murdering. So how did he become civilized?