Also, I wouldn't be so quick to disregard the idea that literary and mythological symbolism exist in the Mad Max movies, especially Thunderdome and Fury Road. I was watching the movie with my nephew yesterday and i was seeing a lot of it in there. In fact, I saw so much symbolism in the movie that i stopped keeping count but some of the major ones i'll bring up are Max as a messiah figure (not just unique to this movie), his convenient blood ('this is my blood...'), the milk mothers turning on the water at the end to 'feed the masses' being an allegory for motherhood and many, many other instances. Like I said, I stopped keeping track of it but it's there. It's not just sophistry to observe such things. And I think it's fair to say that Immortan Joe, People Eater and the Bullet guy are all allegorical to something, but I really don't feel like putting much thought into it. It's pretty transparent, actually. But I think the more you build up something like Mad Max as apocrypha or mythology, the more you start to lose the potency of the films themselves. You stop seeing the world building and the action as you look for things that, whether they're there or not, dilute the purity.