Toecutter: The biker who turned the road into a game of death

At a country railway station in Mad Max (George Miller, 1979), Toecutter’s gang is waiting for a coffin. Inside it travels the Nightrider, the biker who died in the film’s opening sequence, smashed into a roadblock while the policeman Max Rockatansky was chasing him. Toecutter makes the station master repeat the dead man’s name and remember him whenever he looks at the night sky, orders him to take his hat off and, when the man replies that he will do anything Toecutter says, mocks his obedience. It is a scene without blood or chases that tells almost everything: Toecutter despises anyone who submits, turns every encounter into a performance and relishes other people’s humiliation. What follows is an escalating revenge. The gang burns Max’s partner, Jim Goose, alive, and runs down Max’s wife, Jessie, and their little son on the road; the boy dies instantly and Jessie is left in a coma. Max hunts the bikers down one by one and forces Toecutter into the path of a lorry. David Matza and Gresham Sykes’s theory of subterranean values helps make sense of a man who wants neither money nor power: he wants speed, thrills and the feeling of standing above every rule.

// The theoryThe values society hides

In their article “Juvenile Delinquency and Subterranean Values” (1961), David Matza and Gresham Sykes challenged the idea that juvenile delinquents belonged to a subculture with values opposed to society’s. For them, young offenders share conventional values but exaggerate others that society also holds, though it keeps them in the background: subterranean values. The search for excitement and adventure, contempt for routine, boring work, and an idea of masculinity associated with toughness and aggression. Society celebrates them in leisure, sport or film, but suppresses them in daily life.

// The subjectA preacher of the road

Toecutter is theatrical, unpredictable and charismatic. He talks like a preacher and behaves like a cruel child: he toys with his victims, laughs at them and enjoys the fear he causes. He exercises a leadership based on spectacle: his gang follows him because he embodies better than anyone the thrill they all seek. He has no plan or goal beyond revenge and fun. That lack of purpose is what makes him dangerous: there is nothing to negotiate with him.

Goose’s murder adds a nuance the theory welcomes. Days earlier, Max and Goose had arrested Johnny the Boy, the gang’s youngest member, and the court had let him go because no witnesses turned up and he was found mentally unfit to stand trial, over Goose’s furious objections. Johnny takes his revenge by sabotaging the policeman’s motorbike, which throws Goose off the road. When the gang later ambushes him and his ute ends up overturned, Toecutter forces Johnny to throw the match onto the wreck. Johnny does not want to. Toecutter abuses him until he does. The thrill-seeking Matza and Sykes described does not spring up equally in every member of the group: someone administers it, demands it and humiliates whoever hesitates. Toecutter also dresses it up as liturgy. He speaks of his dead with funereal solemnity, as at the station, and of the police as an enemy that robs them of their pride. Hugh Keays-Byrne, the actor who played him, would return to the saga thirty-six years later as Immortan Joe, another warlord who rules through theatre.

// The crackA theory designed for another kind of crime

Matza and Sykes had in mind the juvenile delinquency of the 1950s, mostly petty crime and fights, not the extreme violence of a gang that murders a family. Applying subterranean values to Toecutter stretches the theory: the search for thrills explains the races and the defiance, but not the deliberate cruelty.

The film, moreover, is set in a world falling apart in which the state barely functions. There, gang violence is explained not only by its values but also by the absence of any control. The saga’s next film takes that idea all the way: the world collapses and what remains is a pure struggle for survival.