The Duel! The Duel!

 

It might be unbelievable but in fact I had no idea the book I borrowed last week from the library, The Complete Short Novels by Chekhov, contained a short novel titled "The Duel". Well, I mean, there are more than one duel in Chekhov's plays, so it's not surprising that one pops up in a novel, right? 

At one point while reading this short novel, I burst out laughing so loud that one could hear me from another room. First and foremost, Chekhov is a comedy writer. I'm not talking about the kind of gentle and sad smiles with lamentation often associated with him, although those are present too, occasionally. No, I'm talking about gags and jokes and mockery of human frailties. 

I gotta admit it, I love this kind of mockery, which exposes how pathetic our lives are and how little our struggles mean. The existential laugh. It seems to be a fairly common theme in Russian literature at the time --- the futility of the intellectual angst over how to save the Motherland and her peoples from poverty and backwardness and the crushing bureaucracy and corruption blah blah blah. Throughout the novel, Chekhov made references to Tolstoy and Turgenev, which also made me laugh. And yet, as much as the novel is steeped in the time and place and those specific problems, I find it much more relatable and relevant to me and our times than anything else. The pathetic lives and anguish of these characters are instantly recognizable in people around me, including in myself. I would even venture to say that there are numerically more people today around the world that are Chekhovian than in 1890s Russia. They, no, we, are all wailing into the void --- "What should I do with my life?!" 

Not that he provides a definitive answer, mind you, or a definitive non-answer, as he was too early for Modernism or Existentialism. The answer he gave is in the example of himself. On top of the piercing insight and the hilarious mockery, he remained kind and warm and able to empathize with pathetic losers that are us. Right now is a pretty bad time to maintain warm feelings about humanity (although when was it ever a good time?). I often wonder if our need for "society" is more of a hardwired instinct than a justified choice. Chekhov seems to be showing us one way of living: One can see the crap that is humanity and still choose to live without illusions and perhaps even love while carrying all the baggage. Why not? (No, the lesson is not to literally work like a dog to pay off your debts, unless that's what you want to do.)

Ever since I smelled a whiff of The Origin of Species in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, I now see it everywhere (LOL). There is a German character in The Duel who is constantly spewing social Darwinism. It's quite chilling to consider how prescient this character is (and he is German too!), but I can imagine that view might have been popular at that time, before we had the hindsight of the real horror it is capable of inflicting. Nevertheless, a man like Chekhov can instinctively see through this bullshit, no matter how smart or rational it appears to be.

Yes, that's why I love him, because Chekhov inoculates us against bullshit and despair.

Duels on Screen

After denigrating the actual practice of dueling, I have to admit, to my chagrin, that I love watching one-on-one duels in movies. 

Most martial arts movies would include both brawls and duels. Both types of fighting can be well choreographed and well shot, edited, and presented. Nevertheless, a duel usually takes center stage as the climax of a movie. 

From of a purely instinctual perspective, a martial arts movie is composed of a series of ever escalating fights, because that's what human audience consistently wants from a story. Escalation. The hero of the story, with whom we identify, encounters fights of increasing danger and difficulty. If the sequence is reversed into decreasing difficulty, we would invariably lose interest before the triumph arrives. 

There are of course movies that climax on the biggest brawl. The one that comes to mind is the 1925 Japanese silent movie Orochi, possibly the earliest chanbara film. Chang Cheh also liked to end his movies with brawls, followed by the hero's death. Nevertheless, in the genre of martial arts movies, duels clearly outnumber brawls. The reason is quite natural---brawls are impersonal and anonymous, in which our emotional attention is on only one person, while duels concentrate and heighten the drama between two key characters and are therefore personal. One can fit a lot more emotional content into a duel.  

Orochi (1925)

I was thinking about climactic duel scenes in general when I recently re-watched the kitchen fight scene in The Raid 2 (2014) between Iko Uwais and Cecep Arif Rahman. Having only two actors, both top Silat practitioners, do a one-on-one combat, provides a kind of clarity that was less than fully realized in The Raid 1 (2011). Note how this scene is brightly lit with long takes and mid-range full-body shots. Everything in the scene is devised to illustrate the art of Silat as well as the characters' emotional states in high-fidelity details. 

Two other classic duel scenes that I re-watch from time to time are Kill Zone (SPL, 2005), between Donnie Yen and Wu Jing, and Once Upon a Time in China 2 (1992), between Jet Li and Donnie Yen. (Oddly enough, both involve Yen.) 

One of the most classic dueling fights, however, is neither so vicious as those above nor even used in climax. It's right in the middle of Pedicab Driver, between Sammo Hung and Lau Kar-Leung (1989). It's brimming with humor and personality, truly one of my all-time favorite fight scenes. 

As we can see from these clips, the dueling format forces the action choreographer, actors, and cinematographer to do good work, as there is little room to hide incompetence, unlike shaky camera, quick editing, blurry brawls, and all the tricks to allow the stunt team to do most of the heavy lifting. Thus, these scenes build an intimacy between the audience and the dueling characters, in which the audience feels the bruises, cuts, and bleeding far more acutely than a brawl scene.