Anyone who’s ever been in a fight remembers it forever. Those of us who don’t like to fight, who never really learned how to, see the world of violence as a foreign place whose customs we hope we never have to get the hang of. I’d rather—much rather—live in a war-zone than ever get into a serious fight, one where the guy isn’t trying to merely beat me but take me apart with his hands. I spent my seventeenth summer traveling with the Ringling Bros. Circus, and practically all of the guys I worked with (we looked to the livestock) had run out on something—a bail-bond or a family, alimony payments or parole. They were stupid and listless creatures, uneducated, often drunk, and getting old fast. They fought over anything or over nothing at all, in horrific little set-tos that never lasted long before someone was hurt. There were no schoolyard shoves or who-sez-you-sez preliminaries leading up to the violence—it just naturally flowed from the realization that some disagreement hung in the air—and it always ended with someone being overwhelmed both physically and psychologically, which is a crushing thing to see. One fight, fought over a horse's location on the picket line, concluded with the big, naïve farmboy we called “G.I. Joe” splayed across the horseshit and hay, his nose spurting blood, his hands raised in surrender, and screeching for mercy as his opponent towered over him, spitting demeaning obscenities into his face while threatening to wallop him again.
I suppose that’s why movies never get fistfights right—they’re just too ugly, too painful—so we turn them into entertaining little agons where punches sound like a wet washcloth hitting the bathroom floor instead of human bone breaking against itself. And yet violence is all the rage in our movies—without it most films wouldn’t know how to end. It’s so pervasive that even an otherwise likeable movie such as Something Wild has to end with Ray Liotta taking a knife in the guts. And of course Liotta must die from his wound—without that assurance the audience would exit the theater with misfiring synapses, half-consciously alarmed he may somehow escape, recover, and return to finish his bloody mission. All of this formula comes in a Jonathan Demme film about a man losing his conformist ways, a theme that served a dozen Cary Grant comedies without once boiling over into bloodshed. One of the reasons I’ve always admired the Robert De Niro-Charles Grodin buddy-picture Midnight Run is that it foils our expectations of violence after preparing us for the worst: once the heroes, cops, and villains have gathered for a showdown in the Las Vegas airport, the movie ends, not in a hailstorm of exploding squibs, but in a confrontation both comical and, for one moment, intensely suspenseful, providing the kind of perfect catharsis that Hollywood ought to be able to churn out in its sleep.
It’s remarkable to me that after so many years and so many movies that employ violence, I can think of so few American films that do justice to the subject. It only gets worse as time goes by, what with the villains still going up in a fireball that inspires a dryly intoned wisecrack, and the heroes still falling for tricks that were musty before vaudeville died. It makes one almost giddy with gratitude when movie people actually act like people. I felt like throwing a party the first time I saw Key Largo, where Edward G. Robinson, having spent the movie establishing himself as an arch-criminal of nearly Hitlerian malice and cunning, attempts to deke Humphrey Bogart in their endgame. “Okay, Soldier, I’m coming out. I ain't got no gun,” he yells as he slithers out of the fishing boat’s cabin, a pistol hidden by his body. When I saw Bogart peering down through the hatch, I was ready to throw my beer at the TV—I knew he’d ultimately win the showdown but I was positive he’d fall for the old ruse in the meantime—but no. As “Johnny Rocco” hove into view, Bogart simply lifted his gun and fired a shot into him without a moment’s hesitation. And when Robinson, staggered but not downed by the shot, continued to move, Bogart let him have it again, and then again.
Even rarer than the moments that violence is represented realistically are those when it’s rendered with an aesthetic point in mind. After Seven Samurai, Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch (still the Rosetta Stone of cinematic violence), and a handful of miscellaneous killings in lesser pictures, it’s hard to think of films or TV shows whose violence was done well enough to make it stick to our ribs—to really affect us. Terrence Malick’s Badlands is rife with brutal killings but nothing in the film touches the moment when Kit, the bored, half-bright sociopath played by Martin Sheen, locks a hapless young couple in a storm shelter, sticks his revolver between two of its boards and blindly lets go a couple of rounds, then asks his girlfriend, “Think I hit ‘em?” Francis Coppola’s instincts as a storyteller were never sharper than in The Godfather Part II when he thought to have the thickheaded thug Don Fanucci touch his chin in bewilderment at an apparent marvel—a darkened lightbulb in his hallway—just before Vito Corleone guns him down.
The Fanucci killing is a keeper because it comes at the end of a sustained sequence that follows Vito as he stalks Fanucci’s leisurely stroll down Mulberry Street through the Feast of San Gennaro. An incredibly suspenseful sequence, suspense isn’t its only point; it’s drawn out so long we feel a welter of emotions as it progresses, culminating in the moment when Vito applies the coup de grâce by shooting Fanucci in the mouth, a moment made horrific by being shown in close-up, but which is split by a feeling of relief because Vito has so much of our sympathy. Hitchcock, of course, was the master of sustained mayhem: in (at the very least) Sabotage, Strangers on a Train, Psycho, Torn Curtain, and Frenzy, he crafted long, incredibly detailed sequences that end in violent deaths whose aftershocks play on our nerves after the movies have ended.
And yet considering the absolutely incredible amount of violence in our movies, so little of it is memorable in the way that, say, William Holden shooting down the German officer to kick off the final bloodbath in The Wild Bunch is. Our filmmakers tend to care only about body counts, without ever following through on their punches or actually affecting us emotionally with their maimings and gorings, which is surely the only legitimate excuse for such bedlam to begin with. In Chinatown we never quite recover from seeing Jack Nicholson’s nostril bisected by Polanski’s switchblade before the movie is barely a quarter old, while in Die Hard and the Bruckheimer movies bodies are stacked up like cordwood, yet no one in the audience thinks of choking on their popcorn. It’s unreal.
So it was with something like gratitude that I took in Dan Dority’s fight with Captain Turner in the fifth episode of this season’s Deadwood. I’ve been meaning to write something about the show here for months, but it seemed there was little to say that hadn’t already been said. (And besides, as you’ve noticed, I haven’t been posting about anything here.) But the Dority scene is the real deal—the realest deal I’ve seen in years. As a piece of cinematic storytelling, for intertwining character with action, for capturing physical exertion and the terror of combat, and then the exhaustion of death, it has few peers. Even for a show so accomplished as Deadwood it’s a tour de force.
That isn’t to say that watching the scene is a pleasure; it’s far from that. It had come to me only earlier in the week how much I’d cottoned to Dority and W. Earl Brown’s work in the role, a realization born of the fact that David Milch and his writers had set Dority on an unavoidable collision course with Turner, an Old West version of Oddjob whose indomitable mien made him seem the inevitable victor in any encounter he might face. Dority, with his paunch and shoulder-length hair, is like your older hippie brother who’s gone bad, but his relative innocence (at least when compared to Al Swearengen or Cy Tolliver) and his sunny drawl take much of the moral stink off of him. Also, as Swearengen has had to evolve, so have his men, even if they didn’t know why or that they’re doing it at all.
But George Hearst’s appearance, and his insane plans, seemingly ripped from the Book of Revelations, to destroy the camp if it won’t succumb to his will, forces Swearengen and his confederates—including that yang to his yin, Seth Bullock—to backslide a little, and maybe a lot. For a villain in a western Hearst’s motives run deep, so deep as to be unfathomable even to Swearengen, who’s carved out his place in the world by correctly divining his opponents’ next move. Hearst understands that what will hurt Swearengen far more than merely killing his right-hand man is to make the killing a protracted and very public one, indelibly stamped by his own hand, and in that sense Dority and Turner each are shadowed by a tragic cloud—both men, defined by their loyalty to their bosses, must go through with the fight just to sustain their identities.
Brown has stated that Milch said he wanted the fight to have three qualities: 1) an absence of fistfight clichés (no roundhouse punches or people thrown through store windows); 2) a rolling rhythm, gaining in intensity just when it seemed to be slowing down; and 3) something he’d never seen before. It’s that second quality which really defines the fight, which in memory seems to occur in a mere handful of set-ups even though it’s nearly five minutes long. The sequence in fact does have several cuts, but none of them are for the sake of flashiness—they simply propel us to a better vantage point of the convulsive action, whether we want to go or not. The fight itself plays just as a fight between practiced, burly, and motivated fighters would, with the deadlier, larger Turner having the advantage from the first second of contact. The men fight in such close quarters that it’s hard for either to land a solid blow, and the first big turning point comes when Turner headbutts Dority, then grabs Dan’s cheek between his teeth. The bite hurts but the headbutt is a true howler; you see how it instantly dazes, and frightens, Dority, and throws all the advantage to Turner’s side. Dority spends most of the rest of the fight just trying to escape with his life, two or three times crawling away, pathetically, like a wounded animal, and each time Turner comes after him, making his life a little worse with each return. At one point Turner hauls Dan to his feet and strangles him from behind, and through the snot and blood Dan spits into the wheeling sky we see Swearengen staring impassively down from his balcony.
The sequence wouldn’t be what it is if not for what comes next. Turner drags Dority to a mud puddle and forces his face down into the water, and holding it there, glances up to where Hearst stands on his “veranda,” and in that moment Swearengen quietly lowers his head, in anguish and in concession, now that it looks that his man has lost, and that his best friend will be killed. When the creative team of The Sopranos killed off Adrianna La Cerva two years ago, out of a delicacy of feeling for us (and perhaps for her), they let her crawl entirely offscreen before Silvio Dante pumped a shot into her head. But Swearengen’s redirection of his gaze seems to confirm that both the worst and the unthinkable are about to happen: the worst being that his power is about to be stripped away in a single stroke, the unthinkable being that a man we care about is about to be dispatched, in conditions so squalid and humiliating as to be grotesque, before our eyes.
It’s that motion of Swearengen’s, that downward tilt of his head without any change in his expression, that got to me. I don’t know fully why, though I’m sure it has to do with how the show’s relationships are made so concrete and believable that we can sense with unusual particularity how all of these people feel about each other. Swearengen’s history with Dority has been doled out to us in dribs and drabs—we know, for instance, that they cut the lumber for The Gem together. When Dority’s face is in that water, Swearengen is at risk of passing with him. From his point of view he’d have no leg to stand on if Dan were killed; Dority’s drowning would only finish what Hearst had begun by cutting off Swearengen’s finger. And Ian McShane has never been finer in the role than in his scenes leading up to the fight, when Swearengen desperately tries, without success, to suss out Hearst’s intentions—“What's in his head, I cannot fucking find in mine”—while pretending to his allies that he’s only working by his own timetable. Al Swearengen may be nothing but a sacred monster, and but for sheer naked circumstance he and Dority would be child-killers, but in this one moment none of that matters. Two men’s lives, and all of their labor, can be seen vanishing into that oily mudhole.
Leaving the kicker—presumably, the thing Milch has never seen before. Eye-gouging was a fairly frequent turn in frontier fights so it couldn’t have taken much labor to realize that popping out the Captain’s left eye was the right way to decide the fight’s direction once and for all. But before it comes there’s one last crisis: Turner smacking Dority’s skull against a rock, once with a thud, once with a sickening cracking sound, facing us again with witnessing what at that moment is the last thing we’d witness. But if Dan’s body is beaten, the look in his eye as his fingers spider across, and then dig into, Turner’s face is focused and deliberate, and when the Captain rolls off of him, one eye now dancing at the end of its nerves and his arms convulsing so rapidly that it seems for a second they’ve increased the film speed, Dan, like Bogart looking down on Edward G. Robinson, knows it’s neither the time nor the place for self-destructive pity.
Technically the scene’s a bloody marvel. For one thing, whatever Brown’s makeup artist makes on the show, it can’t be nearly enough: by the end of the fight, his mouth dripping ropes of saliva, his face split and bruised, his hair and clothing slathered in blood and grease and mud, Dan looks like a caveman who’s been blindsided by lightning. The sound design, too, is a thing of beauty. Except for a wagon rolling past at the beginning and the heavy thuds of the men’s blows, there’s barely a sound in the entire five minutes—only a grunt here, a murmur there from the townspeople watching or strolling past. The glaring absence of mood music gives the fight a fluid but fully shaped form—we can clearly retrace the action in all its vigor the second it ends. And in the end we're left with the sound of Allan Graf’s indescribably ghastly howls after the gouging, at least until Dority takes his cudgel-like fire log to the back of Turner’s skull. We don’t see that last bit of violence, and barely even hear it, coming to us as it does from Al’s distanced perspective on the balcony, just before he flips his toothpick over the railing and goes back inside. After everything that's come before, it’s a blessing to have things end with a whimper.