Characters don’t exist in a void; they live in and are products of a specific world. It could be sixteenth century Venice, a space station perched on the edge of a black hole, Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, 221B Baker Street, the Far East or the West Wing. Worldbuilding is paramount in establishing a setting your readers or viewers can believe in. It has to be more than a pastel backdrop. It needs to feel real, and in one way or another, it must be infused in everything that occurs. The world shapes what characters believe, what they eat, where they sleep, what color their sky is, how many suns are in that sky. And it shapes their language too: I’m not just talking about constructed languages like Klingon or Elvish, but their slang and references, and in cases like George Orwell’s blood-chilling novel 1984, how language shapes what thoughts are possible.
And few franchises do worldbuilding better than the Mad Max series.
The Mad Max series was primarily directed by George Miller, with the exception being the third installment, which he codirected with George Ogilvie. Created by Miller and Byron Kennedy, the franchise is set in a post-apocalyptic Australia. The series has five films, video games (including a surprisingly good one from a few years ago), and various supplemental media. The first three films starred Mel Gibson, the fourth one starred Tom Hardy, as Max Rockatansky, and its overall vision of Armageddon is so influential that it has thoroughly saturated popular media with its remarkable example of worldbuilding done right.
This includes how language is shown to have changed. Gasoline becomes Guzzoline… the all-important vehicles having long ago replaced horses and camels as the means of transportation and war, so of course they would be treated–even subconsciously–as something alive, something that needs to guzzle down fluids. In Fury Road, vehicles are quite literally worshipped, with a mountain of steering wheels acting as a shrine, and people spray-painting their faces silver or smearing oil on their foreheads to denote social caste. No one says “cool” anymore; rather, something is “shiny and chrome”. Books are gone; we can imagine most were burned in accidental fires, or burned to keep warm on cold nights given the absence of trees, and so instead of books we have “history men” who have tattooed their bodies with the knowledge of yesteryear, and who offer “word-burgers”. Water is called aqua cola.
This change in parlance started in the previous films. In Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the character Savanah Nix says: “I’m looking behind us now, across the count of time, down the long haul of history back. It’s the Pox Eclipse, and out of it were birthed cracklin’ dust and fearsome time. It were full on winter, and Mister Dead chasin them all.” Other references include things like “high scrapers” and something called “sonic”. which we learn is a reference to records.
Even the names of characters has a simplified yet catchy quality, almost like they’re designed to be memory devices in a world without anything to write things down anymore, and with memories eaten away by savagery and radiation. Aside from Dickens, who names characters better than George Miller and his writers? Auntie Entity. The Organic Mechanic. Toast the Knowing. Imperator Furiosa. Master Blaster. Rictus and Scrotus. Dementus (and when he’s angry, he becomes the Red Dementus). An all-female faction calls themselves the Vuvulini.
It all contributes to the worldbuilding, in a high-octane return to the Bronze Age with mechanical warhounds and Valhalla-obsessed death-cults. It’s a true exemplar in this regard, and is the subject of the latest episode of Space Station Squid. So if you like, click on over to the Podcast tab, settle into your war rig, rev that V8 Interceptor, and let’s do the Tell of tomorrow-morrow land.