Mad Max, Fury Road: Imagining Redemption in a Dystopian Representation of the Present

In contemporary popular culture, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic crises are often represented as allegories of our present. Contemporary dystopian movies belonging to the cyberpunk or dieselpunk genre such as the Mad Max franchiseare the most prominent examples of this; they often depict current crises of capitalism as persisting in a futuristic world. According to Mark Fisher, contemporary dystopian movies generally fail to imagine a future world in which capitalism no longer exists. In his book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009), Fisher named such reification of capitalist reality in our imagination and cultural productions as ‘capitalist realism’. This is expressed precisely in the representation of crises, law, and subjectivity in the world of Mad Max. However, in the latest installment of the franchise, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), spectral and dispossessed subjects also play pivotal roles in revealing and negating a spectral figure of law in a way that can also be read as attempts to circumvent the threshold of capitalist realism. In other words, these are attempts at imagining redemption in a world in which capitalist realism has become the norm in post-apocalyptic/dystopian representations.

Psycho-Pass: A Case Study on The Representation Algorithmic-Juridical Machine

‘The state of exception is the device that must ultimately articulate and hold together the two aspects of the juridico-political machine by instituting a threshold of undecidability between anomie and nomos, between life and law, between auctoritas and potestas.’

• Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception

It has become a norm in contemporary popular culture to represent law and government as mechanism or apparatus for ubiquitous control; most often in the books, movies or tv series belonging to the cyberpunk genre. Contemporary theorists and authors who explore the relationship between governmentality and technology have revealed the fact that cultural objects of the cyberpunk genre generally represents a world that resembles our present world, and they often reveals the mechanisms of control that are employed in the creation of a docile working class (Chun, Control 183). In the age of algorithmic forms of regulations in which we live, such representations often engenders social critique, and reveal forms of ontological relations between human being and technological being. The combination of high-tech and low-life, which is a common feature of the futuristic societies in many cyberpunk and dystopian cultural objects, is precisely the reality in which majority of the current world population lives. In this article, however, I would bring into light an extreme example, the Japanese anime Psycho-pass. In this cyberpunk anime, machine is not simply a metaphor for the revealed hidden structure of the law, but law itself is reduced to machine. In this paper, I would like to delineate the points of intersection between algorithmic technology and law that the show illuminates. At the same time, my goal is to articulate how the main protagonist Tsunemori learns to deactivate and reduce the power of Sybil without completely destroying it.