We find the haunting themes of technology and an unresolved past that bring about a much more jaded world that seems to be caught under the shadow of progression rather than brimming with hope and prosperity as seen in the “Hopeful Ottensian” setting. However, even so, Casshern and The Mutant Chronicles as well as Delicatessen provide their dieselpunk world with a hero who attempts to remedy the problems through their own means, even if it relies on their self-destruction — as is usually the case in all three films.
The emphasis on famine and poverty emanating from the social collapse of the Depression and on wartorn urban slums or cities built up entirely of factories and industry are key to the look and feel of the landscape capitalized in all three films and are another important facet
to the dieselpunk formula. In the “Piecraftian” world there is no hangover from the previous decade, such as the socio-political problems that have carried on into the consciousness of the new generation.
Mad Max (1979) and Six String Samurai (1998) do not present a particular mood to their world other than one of nihilism where the future is uncertain and the past is only manifested through the physical ruins left behind from the previous civilization. Nostalgia plays no importance upon the characters in the “Post-apocalyptic Piecraftian” dieselpunk setting. This is because they no longer retain any memory of the “Hopeful Ottensian” or “Dystopian Piecraftian” world prior to the “rapture,” only a visual reflection of what it was once like from the objects and landscape that survived. The antihero is reinforced from the “Dystopian Piecraftian,” only in this case we see again the lone stranger attitude revel in the characterization of the protagonist, and fast forwarded to a much more alienated and misunderstood stereotype.
An outcast. Mel Gibson as Mad Max
The “Post-apocalyptic Piecraftian” antihero has no sense of responsibility or duty; therefore is carefree and is truly a nihilist. He exists and survives for the present, the antihero is a survivor and can be seen as both heartless and cruel at times or good natured and loyal depending on the circumstances of a situation presented in the narrative. This is exemplified with Buddy’s uncaring and uninterested attitude at first to the abandoned Kid he encounters on his path in Six String Samurai.
And this is also true with Max’ personality by the manner in which he treats anyone he encounters in Mad Max. This can be explained because both Buddy and Max have experienced an event in their world which has caused them to distrust their fellow man — a clear differentiation from the always-at-hand and helpful Samaritan of the “Ottensian” hero. Since the “Post-apocalyptic Piecraftian” world is portrayed in anarchic disarray this inadvertently causes the negative-realism of an ultra-industrialized world to affect the characters that exist therein.
The ordered and bleak world that breaks the will of the human spirit, in the setting of the “Dystopian Piecraftian” is exchanged for one where the world is now completely destroyed and the people are an outward expression of a neoprimitivistic future, enhanced by the scrapped and wreckage leftovers from their diesel charged and mechanical machinery that survived the cataclysm.
The present “deprecated” technology and resource of fuel and mechanical sustenance is a drawback to the times before the great technological boom perpetuated by the megalomaniacal obsession and propulsion of the diesel empowered world of the mid twentieth century. This is their only link to the era of the 1930s, that and perhaps the scraps and shreds of clothing that remain, mostly connected to the automobile and motorcycle styles; Greasers, Rockers, mechanic, engineer and industrial work wear as well as army fatigues seem to be the typical clothing of the post-apocalyptic individual. Later we find these technologies reinvigored in a primitivistic and patchwork style (much like their own clothing and state of mind), fused with the rusted remains of a time when such machinery was literally the oil that greased the cogs for the momentum of a futuristic technocratic society —
one which would befall the events that take place in the Mad Max series
Originariamente Scritto da Kayato
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