digitaldiscipline ◾ ◾ Fluid Dynamics in Fury Road

While I have only seen Mad Max: Fury Road once, it's been inexcapably and exhaustively critiqued, meta'd, and otherwise held up to the light for praise and examination in pretty much every corner of the internet I regularly peruse, save for ESPN's NHL playoff coverage.

This will not be another review or exhortation to see it; I enjoyed it, and so might you. Well worth the $6-and-change-plus-Fandango-service-fee, in any case (and I did end up buying the soundtrack in both circular media and digital formats).

Rather, I'd like to focus on the various liquids' role in the narrative, so there will be spoilery talk beneath the cut, as well as some half-assed thematic wank, in all probability.

When you live in an apocalyptic desert, pretty much any liquid is going to be a point of contention. In MMFR, this was applied to everything from gasoline, nitrous (or nitromethane, or whatever Maguffin Juice featured in one of the later chase sequences), and oil as the lifeblood and nourishment for the vehicles that were every bit as central characters as the human actors, in addition to the more biological fluids of water, blood, and milk.

He who controls the spice, controls the universe, and Immortan Joe controlled most of the juice at the get-go; he had his posse of war rigs, his literal stable of women being milked to feed the war boys, and an iron fist on whatever pumping apparatus drew up the water for his citadel stronghold. His boys even had their own cadre of slaves fueling a brisk trade in good ol' hemoglobin juice to keep the decaying warboys topped off. IJ chides the literally unwashed masses for their nascent 'addiction' to water while fathering and shepherding a cadre of subservient, puling thugs who are literally blood addicts, but he's an entirely irredeemable shitcock, and calling him a hypocrite is like criticizing an earthquake for missing a downbeat.

Now, as to the question of where the fuck they got the blood typing kits, that's something I'm not equipped to answer.

I'd initially contemplated focusing exclusively on Max's pseudo-Jesus "this is my blood; eat me, fucko" depiction, what with being bound to a pole as the ugliest iteration of the Rolls Royce flying lady hood ornament as his blood provided ongoing, if not everlasting, life to Nux, to be revisited with Furiosa late in the game as a hail mary attempt for a resurrection (kinda), but that's both thin and facile and there's a lot more crossing of streams going on than just that.

The fact that Max washes other people's blood off, after doing a bit of the old ultra-violence to the Bullet Farmer and his boyz, with the milk from the tanker truck rather than water is something I'm still trying to unpack and unravel; on the one hand, that's going to smell fucking horrible in about eight hours and be sticky as fuck (refrigeration didn't seem to be something Furiosa's rig was equipped with, so, unless they're planning on surving on curds, whey, yogurt, and botulism... ghaaaaaa), so why not just use water? On another hand, it's an interesting blend of using what's at hand, honoring where it came from (a more pretentious interpretation than I'm giving here could probably gin up a case for baptism or other symbolic rebirth), and also not giving a shit, because he's still interested in survival first and niceties later.

Gasoline ("guzzoline") and water are obvious resources, though neither are in particularly tight supply for the principals, whether you want to draw parallels to contemporary society as commentary or let the movie's world exist in a soft vacuum. Maybe I'll delve into them when I'm not falling asleep at the keyboard.

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