This was the title track to Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. A YouTube fan made this video from clips from the movie.
The movie takes place in the Australian outback, years after a global nuclear war. Max has been surviving in the desert by himself for years, ever since his wife and daughter were killed. He finds Bartertown, a settlement that’s been built by survivors since the war, ruled by Auntie Entity, played by Tina Turner.
The people of Bartertown think they’ve found a way to abolish war. Whenever two people get in a fight, they’re thrown into the Thunderdome, an arena, to fight each other to the death before their fight can escalate and drag more people into it.
Later Max ends up wandering in the desert again, where he finds a village of children living by themselves in an oaisis. To the older ones the war is a vague memory of something they never really understood. To the younger ones it’s a legend.
Left on their own, these kids have found their own way to keep from getting into wars. Don’t get into fights in the first place. Talk to each other and work out their problems.
How realistic is it that children left to fend for themselves in the wild would develop a more sophisticated conflict resolution strategy than adults had? That’s not really the point. This is what the nuclear arms race looked like to many young people when the movie came out in 1985. The arms race began in 1949, when the Soviet Union built their first atomic bomb. By 1985 the arms race had been going on for 36 years. To many people who had been adults in 1949, nuclear weapons seemed like more powerful weapons for fighting wars, and they just needed to figure out the best strategies for using them. To people who grew up after 1949, the nuclear arms race made less and less sense the more powerful the weapons got. They understood that life on Earth was in danger from a man-made threat that they never got to vote on. The best solution wasn’t to find the best way to win a nuclear war. The best solution was to talk to people on the other side and agree that they didn’t want to get into one in the first place.
Some of the children leave the oasis with Max and reach a city. They start rebuilding the city with their values of bringing people together on their mutual interests of living, instead of by inventing better ways of fighting each other.
These kids grew up in a world where civilization had been blasted into dust, and they were going to have to spend their whole lives trying to rebuild it just so they could leave something better for their own children. Why do you think Tina Turner, a Black American woman, would be able to write and sing such a powerful song about people doing that?
