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.

Comics vs. Stageplays vs. Film vs. TV

The stage shares a lot of characteristics with the comics format in that it permits simultaneous presentation of images in a way that novels and film do not. Unlike in comics, however, there is a limit to the number of simultaneous images the stage can present, which in turn is compensated for by the fact that it permits sound.

The implications of this might not be immediately obvious, but they are present and they are vast. First and most fundamentally, the inherent artificiality of the stage is a gift to magical realism of various levels of plausibility, since it has that extra layer of separation, that inability to make the audience truly believe that what it is showing them could be really there.This fact necessitates a great deal of suspension of disbelief right from the off, and therefore opens the door to far stranger and more radical techniques without necessarily damaging the realism of the setting since, as mentioned above, there is virtually none.

The Real Inspector Hound could only happen on the stage, since it relies on the interplay between the audience and the players on the stage. Indeed, two of the audience members are actors.

Also, think of the darkly subtle magical realism of Sondheim’s Assassins. All the historical assassins can appear together onstage to talk Lee Harvey Oswald into killing John F. Kennedy and the response of the audience is not “what? how did they get there? what’s going on?” but rather, “that’s incredible.” The inflated suspension of disbelief creates a layer of unreality through which such a technique can comfortably slip.

I would also like to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of television. I will be talking, for the most part, not about network television, which is and almost always has been an amateur theatrical set within the concept of despair, but about premium television like HBO or one of the major internet television providers such as Netflix, if only because that’s where the good stuff comes from.

The main point of comparison is to film, if only because in nearly all respects the two are practically identical, and so comparing it to anything else would simply involve me repeating myself.

Film is a very compact format, good for stories that mainly concern one character or one small group of characters. There can be subplots, but they must be fairly limited. At the same time, the discreteness of film can be an advantage. It is easier to perceive the shape of a story told on film, a film is easier to structure because there is less material to have to worry about, and in a film you know precisely where the end is. On the other hand, you don’t have as much time to play with the characters, you can’t follow the journeys of multiple characters, and you have to cut things down to a reasonably-paced narrative.

These last three are problems that do not afflict quality television, but it’s no fun to only look at the advantages, so let’s look at the disadvantages. Ongoing television series can have some of the same problems as ongoing comic book characters, in that if you don’t know where the end is going to be, you don’t know how to structure the damned thing. Thus ongoing stories tend to be very awkwardly structured. Some series, like The Wire, managed to avoid this by reserving each season for talking about how the drug trade affects different aspects of society, so each new season tackles a different front of the war on drugs. While characters may reoccur from previous series, they serve the new story. Each season is a complete story, well-structured and with a well-balanced ending.

This is why I like the mini-series better than the ongoing series as a format. Even if you have a fair amount of clout, you never have much more than an educated guess as to when an ongoing series is going to end. With the mini-series, you get all the advantages of a TV series (e.g. more time for character, more space for subplots and intertwining storylines) while eliminating the main disadvantage. It can also help combat another of the disadvantages of television, the difficulty of conveying metaphorical or multi-layered stories. Obviously, the longer you make a story the harder it becomes to maintain a central conceit, but a miniseries at least puts a limit on it that can help you make the conceit watertight. The more you stretch a metaphor, the bigger and more obvious the tiny holes in its surface become.