I’d been meaning to do this one for a while, but the hands gif set reminded me. I’m not the first person to have noted a lot of this stuff, but…well, I have a lot of screenshots at this point and they’re not gonna blog themselves.
If you take practical touching during battle out of the equation, Max doesn’t really touch anyone during the first three-quarters of the movie. Even after he calms down and stops pointing guns at people, he keeps his distance when that’s an option. His personal space barriers can get temporarily overwhelmed in a fight, and in that context he gets in some pretty close, physically intimate situations–
–but when he has a choice and a chance to think about it, he tends to stay as far away from other people as he can. And in situations when he could get into someone’s personal space to intimidate them, he generally doesn’t.
Furiosa is not particularly touchy-feely either. They both spend a lot of time sitting against the doors of the Rig, in contrast to the puppy pile in the back seat.
And in the scene in which Furiosa is making herself the most vulnerable at any point before the third act, she’s wrapped herself up so she can’t touch or be touched.
The first time Max pro-actively reaches out for touch from anyone is here:
The touch gets returned:
And it’s like that breaks down some kind of barrier for Max, because during the final chase we get this:
And this:
And then when he finally gets to Furiosa after the final fight, he just cannot stop touching her.
No, wait, you need a gif set to fully appreciate what’s going on here.
And she’s reaching out for him, too–from the moment when he pulls her up onto the back of the car–
–to her hand on his jacket in the photo above this one.
The great thing about the “my name is Max” scene is that it doesn’t really matter what kind of relationship you think Max and Furiosa have or might have in the future, platonic or romantic. In the context of the scene, this is all platonic, comforting touch. It’s as much about Max comforting himself as anything else, and it’s very, very intimate, without having to signal anything romantic or sexual. This is the scene where a lot of movies would have gone for a kiss, but they don’t, so you just get to process the intimacy of the touch at face value, on its own terms.
