So I'm driving down the street, on my way back to the station after lunch. At the corner of Ventura and G Street, a place where migrant day laborers frequently hang around waiting for a truck to roll up looking for a couple guys for the day. I stop at a red light behind another car. Two guys on bicycles roll past up to the intersection. Out of nowhere, a random assailant rushes one of the cyclists and throws a haymaker right into his midsection knocking him from his bike. Then another swift blow to the head. The man cowered and tried to run. The attacker has fire in his eyes and looked ready to kill him. He was shouting in what I assume was Spanish and advancing on the two cyclists. They tried to talk him down but he had his fists clenched, his nostrils flared, and he was itchin to open up a can on those two guys. I was just hoping they got out of the road before the light turned green. They did, the bikes didn't. So I had to maneuver between the fight and the bikes to go on my merry way.
I didn't look back to see how it resolved. I just assume they solved whatever it was amicably, and all is now well. Probably a case of mistaken identity.
If the ruffian did go through with it and kill them I didn't want to be a witness to a murder, for two reasons
1) Eww, gross.
2) Such a hassle. I don't have time for that. Well, technically, I probably do have time, but still...inconvenience.
Anyhow, this little affair brought me back to the halcyon days of internet video, when people would look up, post, stage, and pay for footage of "bum fights". (That was one adolescent itch I managed to leave unscratched, though, my contemporaries more than compensated for my disinterest)
There's something strange, but almost instinctive in people to love to watch people fight. I think it's lazy to cast it as simply a love of violence or even desensitization. Recent events in Tuscon show that people don't love violence, at least not uncritically. No one turns on the local news or reads in the paper about stabbings and shootings in their neighborhoods and cities and is amused/entertained. So it's not simple bloodlust. But there is something. Whether indigent immigrants or professional pugilists, people the world over love a good fight.
Even when it's staged.
Which brings me, as most things do eventually, to the cinema, and particularly in this case, David O. Russell's The Fighter.
The fascinating thing to me about this movie is that the eponymous 'fighter' is the least aggressive character in the story. Everyone else is a tiger on the prowl, protecting turf and attacking with abandon; Mickey (as played by Mark Wahlberg) is, oh I don't know (note to self: no more animal metaphors) a wise old owl, or perhaps, a soaring eagle, surveying everything, picking his spots, but mostly hanging back. Much of the commentary around the film mentions him as a "passive" character, lacking the charisma of Dickie (played to great effect by Christian Bale). 2 things about this:
1) It's perfectly written in terms of family dynamics. The flashy older brother, full of promise and braggadocio contrasts with the mild mannered younger son, who developed this persona to cope with being in the wide shadow of his sibling, despite surpassing talent.
2) His passivity (if we agree to call it that) works as a serviceable means to an end. It's not as though he doesn't do/accomplish anything, he just does it so deftly you don't notice what he's doing til it's done. In the ring you can be more of a brusier (see Butterbean) or you can be a tactician (see Lennox Lewis). In a fight, Mickey is more of the former, but in life he is clearly the latter, able to outflank his entire family/entourage to create conditions for peacable reconciliation.
I thought the fight scenes in the movie were competent, if unremarkable, and as such, I thought the best place to end the picture would've been the shot of the whole clan walking toward the ring: Mickey (in the center) with Dickie, Mom, Charlene, George. There's nothing wrong with the last fight, and it certainly helps the commerciality of the thing, but in my view the 'fight' of the movie was resolved when he had everyone in tow.
Passive? Ha. A knockout, indeed.
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