A telling scene in the first movie is at the beginning, when a barefoot member of the gang kills a cop, then escapes in the cop’s car with his girlfriend. As two police cars are in pursuit, he crashes through a direction sign, with “anarchy” on one pointer and “bedlam” on the other. Then, when Max pursues him, he starts to cry, long before the two die in a fiery crash.
It shows a great combination of stress and frustration that everyone is sharing at the collapse of society. Max stands out as keeping his equanimity a lot longer than everyone else.
The background to this would be serious drama. Of a rapid decline in things that nobody wants and are powerless to stop. Every day, something expected or useful fails.
Initially it’s implied that the cause of this is energy shortage, but it only comes out in later movies that nuclear war was involved, and that cities were destroyed with some wiped out with air bursts that left little radiation and left buildings partially standing, and others with ground bursts that extensively distributed fallout.
Dysgenics, rather. The breeding seems neither good nor true.
But I get your point.