Daredevil, Wilson Fisk, and the Language of Violence

SPOILERS FOR FIRST 5 EPISODES OF DAREDEVIL

I am, I gather, hardly alone in finding Vincent d'Onofrio's performance as Wilson Fisk, a.k.a. Kingpin, fascinating in the new Marvel Netflix series Daredevil. But there is an aspect of the writing and performance that I want to highlight and discuss in slightly more detail, and that aspect is the language of violence.

A big part of what makes d'Onofrio so compelling in the role is how much effort it seems to cost him to say every word. Each syllable is a deep whisper and feels deliberately labored. I say deliberately because this sort of fundamental difficulty is a theme that runs through the entire performance. Every movement and gesture is made to look difficult and even forced, from courting ambitious art curator Vanessa to simply drinking a glass of wine. Normal human behavior is something that it looks like the character of Wilson Fisk has had to learn by rote.

However, there is one aspect of behavior that is not performed with this same awkwardness, and that is violence. The scene in episode 4 in which Fisk brutally murders Russian gangster Anatoly is the only time up to that point in which we have seen him move, speak, or do anything with ease. He fights as if he has been doing that his whole life, and we learn more about his emotional state through that scene than through any of his conversations heretofore.

Essentially, the Language of Violence is the only one in which Fisk is fluent, and this point of characterization is driven home in his dinner scene with Vanessa in episode 5. This scene plays host to the longest sustained conversation we have seen him conduct in the series, but it is not until he takes Vanessa to the window to see the burning hideouts left by his extermination of the Russian Mafia elements in the city that we get the sense that Vanessa truly understands him. All of his rhetoric about rebuilding the city is lovely but vague - when Vanessa sees him express his goals in his native language, violence, she suddenly comes to understand him in a way she never did before.

This is a beautiful bit of characterization all around, and it is only possible through a coordination of writing and performance that I do not see nearly as often as I would like to. To all those involved, I would just like to say, well done.