Mad Max: Fury Road and the toxic storm: the transcalar possibilities of digital images

The toxic storm is one of the main visual effects of Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015), its impressive scale introduced by a shot showing a long vehicle and its accompanying escort way off in the distance. As these race left to right, they move towards billowing clouds of dust encroaching on the desert floor. A chasing pack of vehicles looks increasingly small as the framing reconfigures to take in the massive wall of swirling debris, ominously filling two thirds of the screen. When looking at the toxic storm, what do we see? Which frames of reference might we use to give it meaning? At face value it is a portentous depiction of an immense storm signalling a character has crossed the line, provoking more turbulence to come. Taking our interpretation deeper, we can pay attention to its range of visual references and address the digital technologies used by the creative team crafting the storm. Kristen Whissel, for instance, discusses the visual motif of the emblem in relation to a range of digital technologies, including MASSIVE and Morphplus.1 As she demonstrates, these are not mutually exclusive forms of analysis. Appraisals of the efficacy of digital technologies are frequently tied into visual frames such as photorealism, and whether digital processes can recreate our shared cinematic expectations of physical reality or add innovative aesthetics. Steven Prince has written extensively about digital imagery and realism.2 Lisa Purse argues for the importance of paying attention to digital elements and what they add to our range of interpretive possibilities when thinking about film.3 In this essay I propose another way of thinking about digital images, by looking at them for what they tell us about digital objects. By digital objects I mean software and its algorithms, the technologies behind the production of digital images. Through this shift from digital images to objects, on-screen digital entities are reconfigured in ways that help us reflect on and interrogate our experiences of a digitally mediated world.