Anachronistic high technology in the Fury-verse

[flightsuit]

SPOILER CONTAINED HEREIN

I'm not sure if this has been brought up previously, so I apologize if I've missed the discussions, but I have some thoughts about two things in particular:

FURIOSA'S ARM

Whether it's the version seen in Fury Road or the earlier iteration in Furiosa, this mechanical marvel probably couldn't exist without microprocessor technology, not to mention somebody skilled enough at coding to write the software for that tech. The way the arm moves and responds to commands coming from Furiosa's brain through her stump would probably be impossible to replicate using a mere "clockwork" of low-tech steampunk (or I guess we might say oilpunk or atompunk?) mechanisms.

Additionally, Furiosa appears to know where her arm and hand are in space, and what they're doing, even when she's not looking at them. This implies that, although the arm clearly lacks external sensors that would work like the nerve endings of your epidermis, it must have some rudimentary way of communicating its position and actions back up through the stump.

So what is going on here, and how is this all possible?

My fan theory:

1. The Vuvalini and the people of The Green Place, i.e., The Pole of Inaccessibility, succeeded in preserving much of the scientific and engineering knowledge from The Before Times. Their use of horses was pragmatic, and did not reflect a lack of knowledge regarding how things in the previous civilization worked. As such, when Furiosa was a small child, she received schooling, and was educated about the kinds of tech that would have enabled a person to build a robot arm.

2. Robot arms for amputees existed prior to the collapse of civilization, and because the new Fury Road/Furiosa timeline places the Apocalypse many years on the future relative to us living here in present-day 2024, the robotic limbs that were in commonplace use for disabled people were much better and cheaper than a robot limb a rare, lucky amputee might be using in the real world of today. So therefore, Furiosa did not build her robot arm from scratch; there was one already being stored in the Citadel, probably with the intention of attaching it to a War Boy or Praetorian who'd lost an arm in combat. Furiosa, having some degree of power and privilege as a battle-hardened Praetorian at this point, was able to acquire the arm for herself and make extensive modifications.

And this brings us to...

The Organic Mechanic

Since this guy had province over all things medical in The Citadel, and a prosthetic limb is, of course, a medical device, it is possible he provided Furiosa with the original, purely medical arm, which she weaponized with her extensive modifications. Though The Organic Mechanic never demonstrates any knowledge of weapons technology, it is also possible or likely his understanding of the human body and biomechanics came into play as Furiosa was modifying and/or creating her arm.

And this brings us back around to the idea of scientific and engineering knowledge from the pre-apocalypse world being preserved and handed down through the generations. If we accept the premise that Furiosa begins roughly eighteen years after the apocalypse (and not the 45 years claimed in the trailer), then The Organic Mechanic appears to have possibly been a boy when the world fell.

So this demands the question: Where and how did The Organic Mechanic get his knowledge and capabilities? Because he is clearly more skilled than, say, some huckster from the Old West in the US of the 1800's selling nostrums and snake oil in a traveling medicine show. His ability to determine Max's blood type in Fury Road implies a sophisticated understanding of human biology and chemistry, and access to the tools and materials associated with those things.

The inevitable back story which flows from these facts virtually requires that The Organic Mechanic was a child of a doctor, or perhaps a husband and wife who were both esteemed doctors, prior to the fall. They would have taught him everything they could about medicine and medical science, probably in a settlement or community not unlike The Green Place or Bartertown, in that it would have had a working economy, laws, and a community robust enough that some members could devote some of their time to teaching and learning, because not all of their time and energy was taken up with survival needs like making war or growing or finding food.

The Organic Mechanic has to have come from such a community, and we can assume that community collapsed as the oceans receded and post-apocalypse conditions got worse.

So while Fury Road and Furiosa both portray The Organic Mechanic as mostly amoral, he is obviously as heartbroken as everybody else in that landscape; being attached to Dementus' gang was surely a downgrade from the family and community in which he had grown up and learned to practice medicine. And when Immortan Joe took ownership of Organic and moved him to The Citadel, which would have been a huge upgrade from Organic's point of view, providing him with far more safety, comfort, and stability than Dementus could ever have offered.

Organic still makes cruel and dehumanizing decisions, but his loyalty to Joe's regime certainly makes sense to him when viewed in this context.

[Mad Serge]

Those are interesting theories! Here's my interpretation concerning the prosthetic arm: I may be wrong but I was under the impression that the last scenes of the movie (Dementus all alone, powerless with no ammo and relentlessly hunted by Furiosa) almost stopped being grounded in reality, which is more than likely intentional. Even the environment has a dreamy feel to it, as if the "world" was revolving, all of a sudden, strictly around these two. As you noted, Furiosa's prosthetic arm seemed technologically too advanced, specifically compared to Fury Road which is set after the events of this movie. It seems hard if not impossible to reconcile the two. This is a memorable scene because she's using, at the end of the day, something too sophisticated in order to free a teddy bear. A chainsaw or, heck, a bolt cutter could have done the job. This scene is all about symbols: Furiosa using her prosthetic limb, she lose her arm because of Dementus. The teddy bear itself has some deeper significance to both Furiosa and Dementus. During his last speech I couldn't help but think that Dementus was way too eloquent for a Mad Max character, supposedly living his last moments. This reinforced the idea, to me, that the last scenes were purposefully sanitized, less visceral, and more aesthetically pleasing than what happened in "reality". Let's not forget the possible outcomes (Dementus suffering, not suffering or ending up as a "tree") described by the narrator; a narrative device previously unseen in a Mad Max film. It reminded me of The Life of Pi.