Why is the allure of a punchfest so bottomless, and why are they so prevalent these days?
Add up the billions of dollars that have been spent making and marketing action/adventure/fantasy/hero films and TV shows. Think about all those Super and Bat and Spider and Iron men flying around, those Captains and Hulks and Widows. Ponder the myriad villains, with their evil genius, their high-tech claptrap and diabolical schemes. Imagine nearly a century's worth of comic book writers and illustrators bent over their drawing boards, and nearly as long a history of screenwriters and directors on sound stages and in editing rooms. Then think about this. Every story – Every. Single. One – distills down to the same thing: two people, face to face, punching each other.
Why is the allure of a punchfest so bottomless, and why are they so prevalent these days? I've been mulling this over as I watched the new Netflix series Daredevil, whose 13 one-hour episodes dropped on April 10. It's the story of Matt Murdock, blinded in a childhood accident that also gave him extra-sensory mojo, who's now grown up and played by Charlie Cox (Nucky's IRA-sympathizing enforcer on the HBO series Boardwalk Empire). He rights wrongs in the corrupt streets of midtown Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen (not the current, gentrified one; the seedier one of memory and myth) – by day as a lawyer, by night as a masked vigilante. Because he's an ambivalent yet faithful Catholic, he doesn't kill the bad guys. Because his dad was a boxer, he does beat the living crap out of them. He even claims to enjoy it.
Every episode features not one, but several punch-out scenes. Sometimes there are weapons (knives, pipes, fire extinguishers). Sometimes there are moves lifted from parkour or martial arts. Sometimes the violence is downright disgusting: Heads are smashed in car doors. Brains plop out. Gaping wounds ooze through hasty, amateur stitches.
The opportunity to go darker with the violence and its attendant moral quandaries is part of the reason Marvel, the entertainment conglomerate behind Daredevil, partnered with Netflix. "Our feature film slate is more PG-13," Joe Quesada, Marvel's chief creative officer, who worked on the Daredevil comics and is a producer on some of his company's TV ventures, said in a phone interview. "We wanted to do justice to the grittier, street-level noir aspects of Daredevil, and that's better suited to specialty television. We like to say that Avengers are saving the universe, but Daredevil is saving the neighbourhood."
It also didn't hurt that Netflix was willing to give Marvel a commitment – without so much as a pilot episode – to make at least 13 hours of Daredevil, followed four more 13-hour series including A.K.A. Jessica Jones, starring tart-tongued Krysten Ritter (Aaron Paul's junkie girlfriend on Breaking Bad) as a private eye with uncanny abilities.
As well, there's a series about Luke Cage, a Harlem gang member who changes after a cell-regeneration experiment, who'll be played by Mike Colter (The Good Wife's Lemond Bishop); a show about the martial artist Iron Fist (not yet cast); and The Defenders, which will unite all those broody, misfit heroes into a team.
Do we need another hero? Or rather, another four, or 44? Couple Marvel's splash onto Netflix with its film Avengers: Age of Ultron (itself a compendium of sequels), which is lumbering so loudly toward its May 1 release that world domination is inescapable. (Even a Toronto press screening for another film was forced to give way this week, when Ultron claimed its slot.) Factor in that the Marvel films Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 hauled in over $2-billion (U.S.) worldwide at the box office last year. Then throw in the ABC TV series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Carter (we're now calling network shows "linear television," FYI), and the Marvel Universe – the term the company likes to use for its offerings – is starting to feel literal.
Quesada claims that Marvel's rule is benign – but then, overlords always do. "If we were just expanding in one direction, I'd say, 'Yeah, that could get boring,'" he says. "But we're giving people so many different flavourings and offerings, you can pick any one and just watch that. The goal for us is to continue to do product that unites into a larger picture. But there's no requirement that you have to watch it all to get the picture. Just buy or watch what you want, that's fine with us. As long as the quality of our output is good – that we're giving a little bit of escapism and fun, some laughs and thrills – then we're doing our jobs."
Quesada's lived in the Universe since the age of 8,when his dad bought him his first comic book, a Spider-Man. "I grew up in Queens, about 10 minutes away from where Peter Parker lived," he says. "I'd read Spider-Man and think, 'That could be me, I could get bitten by a radioactive spider and swing across Manhattan.' I'd look up at the sky and go, 'Boy, imagine if I could see Thor and Iron Man up there.' It resonated pretty deep."
Daredevil's Deborah Ann Woll – who plays Karen Page, Matt Murdock's trusty assistant, who's harbouring some mysteries of her own – entered the Universe more recently. (She's best known for playing the vampire Jessica on HBO's True Blood.) But she already has a theory about why the mythology remains so potent. "A lot of horrible things happen in the world nowadays," she told me on Tuesday, in a Toronto hotel suite. She was dressed like her character, in a ladylike high-necked cream-coloured blouse and cerise-coloured skirt, with her red hair in a sleek ponytail.
"I often feel very helpless about it, that there's nothing I can do," she went on. "That's scary. So I think that hearing stories about people who not only have the abilities to help the powerless, but are also brave enough to put themselves in harm's way to do it, is comforting. A thing I'm most proud of about Daredevil is that the characters don't stand by and ignore corruption. We often repeat the line, 'How do you stop someone who is that powerful?' Our answer is, 'I don't know, but I'm not going to stop.' I hope that it inspires people to do the same in their lives."
In character, Woll's big blue eyes fill readily with tears, and her voice catches with emotion. In person, she's much the same. "I'm a nervous person by nature," she says. "I'm a worrier." Among her concerns, she wants to make sure that Daredevil "represents people who have visual impairments well and respectfully," she says. Her boyfriend of seven years, E.J. Scott, suffers from a degenerative eye disease that causes blindness, so Woll feels "an incredible responsibility for the series to get it right for him."
Still, there is a lot of punching in her show. I mean, a tremendous amount. Quesada makes a case for it: "Our fistfights are street level, and in a painful and bloody fashion," he says. "There's no punch that isn't felt or heard. And there's little CGI; it's mainly done by our stunt team. So it has a real and raw feel to it."
He also points out that from Beowulf to Die Hard, humans have always sought out heroes. "From the days we sat around a campfire hearing stories of the great hunters, to the Roman and Greek pantheons, to great fiction, to comic books, the stories are no different," Quesada says. "They're morality plays. Our heroes are particularly appealing because they aren't black or white; they walk in worlds of grey. You can see our villains' points of view. You can watch our heroes step over the line sometimes, but still root for them."
Woll adds that a fist fight is usually a fair fight, which increases its appeal. "Obviously in this day and age there are a lot of unfair fights," she says. "To see a hero, with all his powers, who doesn't take advantage of his opponent – the fairness is heartening."
All that said, it's still punching. Are we in Western culture so desk-bound, so pampered, so chained to pushing buttons rather than roving nature hunting game that we hunger for the visceral thrill of bone on flesh, no matter how reductive or repetitive? Are that many denizens of Marvel Universe huddling in their parents' basements, smarting from wrongs and the general unfairness of life, fantasizing about socking their tormentors in the kisser?
"We need stories in our lives about people who get knocked down, but who get themselves off the canvas, dust themselves off, and fight again," Queseda sums up. "We want to feel we're the heroes in our own stories, who get ourselves up day in and day out." Especially if all we punch is a clock.
Johanna Schneller