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Favorite world-building elements: Realistic depiction of trauma

One of the things that makes Fury Road so immersive is the way it presents the result of violence. Unlike movies in which characters shrug off what in the real world would be horrific injuries*, the inhabitants of the Wasteland experience the full effect of the bad things that happen to them.

Some examples:

• Angharad’s graze wound. When Max shoots The Splendid Angharad in the leg, we see a close-up of the injury. When Furiosa asks her how it feels, she says, “It hurts,” and it apparently is a factor in her subsequently slipping from the war rig and being crushed. In the world of Fury Road, even a relatively minor injury can have severe consequences.
• Avoidance of gratuitous on-screen gore. At the same time, the film avoids depicting injuries just to be shocking. When Angharad is dying and Immortan Joe orders her cut open to try to save the fetus, we see the scene unfold – but we don’t see the actual procedure. The movie only shows enough for us to understand what’s happening. That restraint reflects a maturity in how the film approaches trauma that contrasts with the adolescent gross-out porn of other action movies.
• Realistic emotional responses. The inhabitants of the Wasteland carry both literal and figurative scars of past experiences. Angharad has a history of self-harm. Max exhibits a degree of PTSD that leaves him unable to speak. I ship Max/Furiosa, and there’s a side of me that wants to believe there were sexy fun times in the back of the war rig during that one chance Nux and Capable had, but I appreciate that the film respects its characters and what they’ve been through enough not to force them into emotionally false situations.
• Furiosa’s chest wound. When Furiosa is stabbed with the gear-shift dagger, we see the pain of it in her face. Especially given how stoic she’s been up to this point, the increasingly desperate look in her eyes during subsequent events shows the effect it is having on her. Unlike less-realistic movies, where such an injury might lead to a) a quick clichéd death scene with a few coughs of blood, an exhortation or two, and boom, dead, or conversely b) lots of ass-kicking followed by a wince and some light-hearted banter in the denouement, Furiosa’s injury follows a steady and clinically realistic progression through increasing distress and eventual loss of breath function due to tension pneumothorax. That the true emotional climax of the movie centers on an act of healing, as Max decompresses her chest and then treats her subsequent exsanguination with a transfusion of his own blood, is a beautiful inversion of action-movie tropes.

George Miller financed the original Mad Max with his earnings as an ER doctor, and made the movie in part to explore the effects of trauma on people who encounter lots of it. Although he hasn’t worked as a physician in many years, his experience and willingness to hold the movie to a high standard adds greatly to the believability of Fury Road.

*No disrespect to Holy Grail. That shit’s hilarious.