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Here’s a drinking game: Sit down with some friends and talk about modern life and fossil fuels—supply, demand, embargoes, carbon, cars, batteries, whatever—and see how long it takes for someone to mention Mad Max. Ever since 1979, when an Australian ER doctor named George Miller and his friend James McCausland released a bootstrapped film about a bunch of gnarly drifters driving around looking for gasoline after the apocalypse, Mad Max has become the cultural reference point for fossil fuel depletion and the dystopia that ensues when “people don’t believe in heroes anymore.” Indeed, the film’s rather didactic modern fable has been highlighted in all sorts of serious discussions about resource depletion, oil dependency, chaos, and environmental collapse.