Hollywood and the Language of Violence
Punctuated by punches, meaning is hammered home and the most fluent fighter wins.
I was 10 years old the first time someone threw a fist at my face without the intention of striking me. (I’d faced my fair share of those who wanted to pummel me up until then.) Still, I flinched. It would take a while to separate these actions in the dojo from the real-world encounters where blood had been spilled and bones broken.
At 10 years old, I was years away from looking at violence as a language. Karate and kung fu were actions. Tools. A way to stop the bullies on San Juan Drive from making my school days hell. But after a hundred punches aimed at my head, after a thousand, after ten thousand, I had achieved a level of desensitization that allowed me to see each attack as a statement waiting for my response. The outstretched arm with the clenched fist at the end is a weapon, yes, but with experience you also begin to realize it’s a target. One can block or evade a punch, certainly. That’s a reasonable response, though it does allow for the attacker the freedom to attack again. But to control the arm in flight, to divert its force, to bend it back upon itself, to — yes — even break it, changes the tone of the conversation entirely.
To those who have been a victim of violence, it’s anything but honorable or logical. It’s brutality, pure and simple. But for those who have spent a goodly portion of their lives in the minutia of it, in its discipline, in its philosophy and path, we set our feet on the roads walked by samurai and Spartans alike. There are many ways to speak who we are to the world we live in. This is but one of them, and not a bad one at that.
Anything is language if it can be defined and replicated and used to communicate ideas and resolve conflict. The initial pleasantries we exchange in polite conversation — the “how are yous” and the “I’m fines” — are all tossed out thoughtlessly in those first breaths like the opening chess moves between competent players. Language is pattern. Communication. Violence, with its opening volley of snapped jabs and familiar stances is just setting the stage for the conversation that is to follow.
Violence on the global scale is a larger subject and best left to those who have the tools to address it. Superior firepower is not a way to convert your enemy to your way of thinking. It’s seeing who can yell the loudest and calling it a win.
But violence on screen is part and parcel of the movie experience. Watching people fight is fun, it’s exhilarating, it’s engaging. And each finely crafted scene is a different conversation, an argument which ends with a lone winner at the end.
Think back to the sword fight and the winding staircase between Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in The Adventures of Robin Hood. The tone of the conflict is defined by the weapons they’re using. They’re not bludgeoning each other with sledgehammers. They’re dueling with rapiers. It’s a battle of wit and wits, perfectly married.
In The Bourne Identity, director Doug Liman understood that in order for Bourne to come across as a deadly espionage agent, the action sequences needed to be seen and understood. Bourne needed to appear to be in control — not only of his opponent, but of himself. That’s a vital character note that could only be delivered through the presence and threat of violence. He’s not overcome by fear or adrenaline. He has seen and been a party to violence too many times for it to shake him.
Throwing the camera into a blender during the two sequels (directed by Paul Greengrass) says less about Bourne, whose skill had already been established, and more about the director who did he best to mimic a language he didn’t understand. “Of course I speak Spanish! Listen: ¡Hola, paso doble! ¡Que pablano pepper corn tortilla in your salsa frijoles! ¡Andile el gato!” Of course, to any native speaker, he’s just spouting gibberish and he sounds like an idiot.
Violence denotes character. The Hulk’s rag-dolling of Loki in The Avengers is brilliantly hysterical. Not an hour after I saw that film in theaters, there was a 16-minute clip on YouTube with just that moment on a loop. That’s how well it spoke to the audiences. Because you don’t need to be fluent in sixteen forms of martial arts over decades of study to understand the simple concept of “Hulk smash!”
“Hulk smash” is about as primal as the language of violence gets; it’s the first morpheme.
Contrast that with Neo in The Matrix. It’s all precision of movement, combined with grace and power. He’s a vessel that’s been filled to the brim with thousands of combat styles — each one a language unto itself — and he’s fluent in them all. The dojo scene following Neo’s astonished utterance of “I know kung fu” is maybe one of the most glorious on-screen fight scenes ever. Because the statement really should have been, “I speak kung fu.” And Morpheus’ reply should have been, “Then let’s talk.”
Neither character in that scene intends the other any harm. They are carrying out a conversation that allows Morpheus to meet Neo as he has become. Words alone could not do it, but when they meet in an arena using a language they both speak, they come to an understanding.
On a personal note, what really switches me on is when the fight choreographers geek out themselves on the language of combat. In Troy, Achilles’ fight to the death with Hector is performed by both men fighting with spear and shield. The remarkable part? No one knows what that’s supposed to look like. We know people used them both in combat. We see it on ancient urns and such, but we have no more idea what that kind of combat looks like any more than we know what Aramaic sounds like. Because it’s a dead language. And yet the stunt crew spent weeks or months prior to filming using what they knew about combat in related fields to create something that not only looked good on camera, but was thoroughly convincing as a way to do battle.
In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, we’re treated to such varied and character-based action that each character has their own language. Captain America’s fighting style is different from Batroc’s, and both of those are different from the Black Widow’s. It’s easy to write off the superhero genre as a bunch of spandex malarkey, but when it’s done right, as it is in Winter Soldier, it’s a joy to behold.
Of course, things sometimes go the other way and you get “Rowdy” Roddy Piper wrestling some guy on the street over a pair of sunglasses for a half an hour. And for those of us who have spent some measure of our lives in the study of a martial art, watching actors who have no previous combat experience pretend to be world-class spies (hello, entire cast of Chuck) is like a grammarian reading Facebook everyday and watching people mix up “your” and “you’re.”
But films like Captain America elevate the conversation. It shows a true understanding of the styles, tones and patterns that make up the language of violence.
And that’s good news in any language.
