The joys of a well crafted fight scene: Dollhouse, Episode 11

Minor spoilers ahead (but not the Big One) . . .
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There. I would have subtitiled this "Ballard vs. Langton" if it wasn't for the spoiler issue. And now that I think of it, non-Dollhouse fans may want to skip the next two paragraphs. Mostly, I want to write about a really good fight scene, but I feel compelled to note how well it works in the context of the season. So if, for some reason, you're not interested in the series, by all means, skip ahead.

Anyone who has been watching Dollhouse this year knows that this has been coming. Joss Whedon and his subordinates have been building up Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) and Boyd Langton (Harry Lennix) as the supreme hard asses of the show, sans peur et sans reproche. Neither of them has even come close to losing a fair fight yet. Hell, they both won most of their unfair fights. So, sooner or later, they would have to meet.

But the fight was not just a contest between the two toughest kids on the block. Both Ballard and Langton have settled on Eliza Dushku's Echo/Caroline as the chief justification for the sorry life choices that they have made. Ballard torched his FBI career to save Caroline; since Patton Oswalt's character dissected Ballard's motivations far better than I could in "Man on the Street", I'll leave that aside. But Langton isn't much better. He's never been shy about his mixed feelings about his gig working (and then running) security for the Los Angeles Dollhouse. His way of compensation? Develop a myopic concentration on saving Echo. A more productive neurosis than Ballard's, of course, but still a neurosis. And a neurosis that puts him at cross purposes with Ballard.

So that's the backstory, characterwise. Now for the fight itself, which largely takes place in the penultimate segment. Whedon fans, of course, should be quite used to fight scenes by now, which have largely been very well done. Many stand out, too many to mention, really; my three personal favorites are Connor's fight with the Beast and the Angelus/Faith wire fight (both from Season Four of Angel) and (God help me) the scene from the Season Two Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "What's My Line, Part One" where Buffy malarchuks* a demon assassin. What makes the "BriarRose" fight stand out is how intricately it is choreographed.

Granted, any self-respecting drama will take care when staging a fight scenes, which almost always serve as the dramatic climax to a film or episode. Does anyone remember anything from the series Dynasty other than the Joan Collins-Linda Evans confrontations? It remains a mystery to me that neither the Oscars nor the Emmys (nor the Tonys, for that matter) do nothing to honor fight choreographers. Say what you will about the MTV Movie Awards, but they at least do something to recognize how important a fight is to a film's ultimate value.

One needs only look at the Ballard-Langton fight to see how much work goes into designing these fights. At one point, Langton has Ballard dead to rights, holding a gun on him while Langton lies crumpled on the Dollhouse steps, by now shattered by ealier stages of the combat. Ballard knows that he has a deadly opponent by this point; his only chance is to attack Langton in a way where reflex overwhelms control. So he throws a piece of the shattered bannister at Langton's gun arm. Langton involuntarily flinches, and in the second that action gives him, Ballard kicks Langton's gun out of his hand, then moves to press his advantage. The amount of storyboarding, rehersals and camera shots it took to develop this scene, or put more simply, the care put into this scene, simply beggars the imagination.

I could rattle off any number of films or television series with iconic fight scenes: Errol Flynn vs, Basil Rathbone in The Adventures of Robin Hood; Marlon Brando vs. Lee J. Cobb in On the Waterfront, James Caan vs. Gianni Russo in The Godfather (OK, better known as "Sonny wailing on his brother-in-law with a trash can lid"), the "He ain't pretty no more" fight in Raging Bull (along with Sugar Ray Robinson's final shot against Jake LaMotta), and the first Darth Vader-Luke Skywalker confrontation in The Empire Strikes Back. But what I think of most when I think of the Ballard-Langton confrontation is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. There is a fight early on in the film (very ably described here) between the two main characters and a man who tried to cheat them out of a very small payday. This is not a fight between immortals; rather, it is a sloppy fight where the combatants pay for their many mistakes, winnning through endurance and guile rather than any clear supremacy. In other words, it is like the fights, real or rhetorical, that we ourselves endure throughout our lives.

Kevin Murphy once described fight scenes in the old Repubic Serial Commando Cody this way: "Cody and his pal Ted get beat up by Clayton Moore and his sidekick, taking twice as many direct, bare-fisted punches to the jaw as George Foreman has in his entire career, with no apparent damage or injury."** This fight scene is essentially the opposite of that sort of fight. Two equally matched opponents go at each other, earning every advantage through blood and cunning, where ultimately the fight is determined, not by the clear superiority of one over the other, but by the intervention of outside forces.

* Don't click on this link unless you have a very strong stomach. I'm still not sure how I feel about trying to create a verb out of Clint Malarchuk's near-tragedy (oh, BTW, he did live, and even got back to the NHL)

** To be precise: The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, page 12.