Last week we looked at a scene from The Princess Bride. This week we’re going for something a bit more brutal, much less comedic, certainly more gory. This won’t include a review of the movie the scene is from- I found the scene on YouTube a while back, not as part of the movie, and am utterly unqualified to write a review of the film as a whole. No, today we’ll be looking at just this scene, focusing on certain micro-elements of it.

If you watch the scene, be warned for crude language, blood, and the sound of violent injuries.

Scene #2: Bus Fight (Nobody)

This scene I’d like to analyze not so much from a plot perspective- as I said, I don’t know enough to do that- but for its internal dynamics, what it alone says about the main character as a man and as a fighter. I’d also like to compliment the scene for its verisimilitude.¹ Lacking significant trainign with a knife, I can’t say it’s accurate-to-life, but I can say that the way blows land matters about the right amount, the way people act seems realistic, and the use of the environment is impressive without being frivolously exotic.

This fight scene is, to put it bluntly, brutal. Stabbing, bashing, strangling, punching, all have their part in it. The first point of interest to me, though, is how it starts. See, the main character, Hutch,² very obviously sees it coming. He says as much in his internal monologue; he is glad of the opportunity. Furthermore, the antagonists, a bunch of young men obviously having the time of their life being thugs, prove their aggression with their casual provocation of the other male passenger, as well as by surrounding and accosting the lone female passenger. Nevertheless, Hutch does not launch a preemptive attack. Instead, he shuffles a bystander out of the way, takes a stand, and informs his opponents that he intends to beat the stuffing out of them (his language is much more indelicate). Then he gets punched in the face.

This sequence of events tells us a lot about Hutch. First, we learn that he really, really wants a scrap. He doesn’t want to blitzkrieg them into the ground without opposition; he wants the struggle. Second, we learn that he is confident in his ability to come out of that struggle victorious, implying a high level of combat skill and experience (it could be over-confidence, but the absolute calm contradicts that idea. He’s got the complete opposite of jitters). Third, we learn, via his concern for the safety of the young woman being harassed, that he sees himself as a protector, albeit not a particularly glamorous one. He reinforces this idea by consciously or unconsciously, probably fatalistically, drawing his opponents into starting the fight, into throwing the first punch.

Second, everybody, including the protagonist, gets real busted up during the fight. Hutch, in fact, is the first to be stabbed- with a knife that he then proceeds to pull out, prompting one of his opponents to charge him, recognizing that the fight has escalated to potential lethality in the instant that the knife became a factor. This speaks to precisely what kind of fighter Hutch is: a scrapper, one with a lot of skill. He takes a beating, and he pushes through. This is a different combat archetype from the character who wins without taking a scratch, and it generates different expectations in the audience, sets up different pay offs. It establishes, too, a potential that accumulated damage will slow the hero down in a way that matters, and it means that if the protagonist gets beaten hard enough to stop fighting, the audience knows he simply lacks the capacity to keep going (or is playing turtle).

The brutality in both directions also sets a higher stake for the fight. If one side is going down like ninepins and the guy taking them out is unscathed, it sends a message that this fight is a forgone conclusion, at least until the fight passes the goon-v-hero stage. Now, foregone conclusions have their place in fight scenes. Sometimes, too, the fight scene’s point isn’t that the winner kills everybody else (or incapacitates them) but that he’s delayed, kept long enough for something else to go wrong, turning the victory into a loss. But in a fight where both sides are getting beaten and stabbed, where both sides are sometimes just sprawled where they fell, trying to get their breath back before the other guy, as in this fight, the stakes are set more directly inside the fight. Even if the hero may be safe from death, meta-textually, we start to wonder if he’s going to win, if he’ll be injured really badly (maybe that’s the plot set up?), if he’ll get a wound that matters later, if this will leave him unable to get out of social or other repercussions. Maybe, in a really well-executed example, we’ll have that flash-in-the-pan thought: ‘What if this is a tragedy? What if he actually does die?’ Stories don’t always have to have happy endings.

Third, consider the use of the pause in the action (a little over 5 minutes into the clip). The main character goes flying out the window, and people have time to evaluate what just happened. Who’s lost a bunch of teeth? How bad is it? Can they still stand up? The protagonist, in particular, has a choice. Is he going to go back in? The question is whether he’ll re-enter the fight after being stabbed, still outnumbered, heavily bruised, and fresh from literally going through a glass window.. The protagonist gives his answer by standing up, and his character as a self-defined ‘protector’ is reinforced when he tells the girl to run.

Further, this pause serves as a transition in the fight. In the first half of the fight, Hutch is fighting, yes, but he’s fighting to subdue and injure and dissuade. By the second half, though, he’s injured- he’s got a visible hitch in his walk, and when he kneels to get the knife, it’s very obviously a barely-controlled descent. So he changes his stance- particularly now that this is a fight without a bystander to worry about. His motive has shifted; he wants to finish this. So in the next ten seconds he wades in with the knife. He’s going for the kill now.

Fifth, this change to lethality is tempered at the end by his choice to save the life of the final combatant, who is choking on his own throat as a result of being bludgeoned with a metal pipe (a believable amount of damage from that sort of weapon, FYI). He rolls his eyes, but he saves the man’s life, and this establishes that he’s not just in this as a killer. It tells the audience that he might not have any problem killing but it also is not his true goal. That was to be a ‘protector’- in part a pretext but still sincerely held- and to work out his tension in a good fight, the underlying idea of his early narration.

Conclusion

This scene, in itself, is well executed. The action is clear; the character of Hutch is put to work with a workmanlike efficiency which matches the man himself; the shifts in the flow of the combat are punctuated by moments to let the poise of the fight become clear to the audience, keeping the stakes in view. Not every fight scene should be this scene, but if what you want from a fight scene is similar, it’s a good model, one to learn from.

God bless.

Footnotes

1. Verisimilitude is the trait of looking real. Note that it’s different from realism, the trait of being accurate to reality. As a result, verisimilitude can sometimes suffer from lack of realism (such as when a technical mistake which most people don’t notice harms the immersion of an expert in the field) or from over-realism of a sort (such as when over-description or over-explanation stunts the impact of the narrative and distances the reader from the story, pushing him back through the fourth wall). ↩︎
2. Name from video description. ↩︎