I saw In Bruges last night. I really liked the first 90 minutes. A lot. Then the last 17 were pretty bad. The acting was great, but the plot. No no no.
Anyway. This isn’t a movie review. This is personal.
I started thinking about the few times in my life that I’ve used physical force as a means to an end. I’m more the kind of guy to run from a fight than to start one, but there have been exceptions.
1. First grade:
The Means: Punched a kid in the face.
The End: Believe it or not, I was actually defending another kid from getting punched.
The Result: He stared at me and then we more or less walked away.
The Verdict: Hero.
2. Fourth grade:
The Means: General fight.
The End: Self-defense. Even at the time I didn’t bother trying to find a better reason. A bunch of kids came to my house after school, and I was supposed to go outside and have a fight with one of them.
The Result: For some reason, my mom allowed me to do this. Went outside, scrapped for a while, ended up on my back. When he came for me, I kicked him in the stomach and knocked the wind out of him. He didn’t want to fight any more, so I went home.
The Verdict: Hero?
3. 9th Grade:
The Means: Another sort of general fight.
The End: AGAIN with the self-defense. Again some kid wanted to fight me and I don’t know why, really. Maybe I seemed like easy pickings. Also, I was probably as much of a smart-ass then as I am now.
The Result: This was one of those things where he says, “you take a shot first,” and then I say, “no, YOU go first.” Then he punched me!
I was really surprised. I’d never been punched in the face before. It didn’t hurt in the slightest bit. I just looked at him (which I only now realize is just what happened to the other kid in the first grade).
Had him in a headlock when some adult broke it up and reminded us that we were in the Sanctuary at the Temple and were basically pissing God off. I don’t think either one of us wanted to keep going.
The Verdict: Hero?
24 Years Old:
The Means: Slapped a guy
The End: To act tough. To get some kind of attention, maybe.
The Result: I was in Israel, in my 4th or 5th month working on a Kibbutz. I’d just gotten off the phone, having heard the news that my grandmother was extremely sick.
Two other volunteers (Russians, as it happens) came up and asked to see my phone card for a second. Then they started playing a game about not giving it back.
It was a game, as I said. I knew them, they knew me, and they would have eventually given it back. They were messing around. But I wasn’t in the mood.
I told them that I’d just gotten bad news, etc., and just give me the card. They yukked it up.
I said, “which one of you has the phone card.” Leonid said that he did. I slapped him. “Give it back.”
Leonid jumped back, and sort of brought his arms into a kinda-sorta-don’t-know-what-to-do fighting position. His friend said, ok ok ok, here’s the card, and handed it over. Leonid hadn’t had the thing after all.
The Verdict: Bully.
I wasn’t wracked with grief. I was in control, but pretending that I wasn’t. (I know that I wouldn’t have hit a bigger guy who I didn’t know.)
Leonid and I never apologized to each other. We were sheepish around each other until I left the Kibbutz. I was able to make people believe that I was right, because he should have stopped horsing around when I told him that I was upset. But whatever. I don’t know why I did it. It was the wrong thing to do, without question.
28 years old:
The Means: AGAIN slapped a guy!
The End: Moral Defense of a girlfriend. Sort of.
The Result: My girlfriend (now my wife) and I were on a bus in Indonesia. Westerners have a reputation for having sex with anything that moves, so occasionally we’d have to deal with people who thought they could say or do things that they otherwise couldn’t.
Some youngsters (15 year-olds, maybe) were behind us on the bus, saying, in English, “I sleep with you.” “We have sex?” “Let’s make love, baby,” etc.
I turned around in my seat and said something along the lines of:
“Please stop talking like that. Maybe you don’t know it, but what you’re saying is bad.” My Indonesian was limited, of course, but it was good enough to get the point across.
The main kid I was talking to was kind of laughing as I spoke. Maybe because of my accent, or the bad grammar. But also of course, because of the situation and his friends.
It wasn’t really a slap. It was really a light tap with my fingers on his cheek. I just didn’t want to ride the next three hours with them continuing in the same vein.
It worked beautifully. He was very serious and said ok whenever I said anything. His friends were serious, too, and then I thanked them and turned around. That was it for them speaking English.
The Verdict: I know that some people will argue with me here, but I don’t think I was unequivocally wrong. I tend to think that people shouldn’t threaten physical violence to solve a non-physical problem. And yet…
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
I am incredibly impressed you can remember these moments with such clarity. I have fuzzy memories of slapping a sleazy guy at a club during college because he kept touching my boob. And I remember biting my best friend on the back when I was probably 5 or 6 because she didn’t want to play with my dolls. But those moments are so hazy to me. And I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting completely.
I’m afraid that my “violence autobiography” would be far longer and much less defensible. The best I can say is that I haven’t initiated violence with a stranger since becoming an adult, and have never pointed a firearm at anyone. I would have handled the last two incidents without physical contact—the one by encouraging great shame and the other by ignoring or mocking them (“do your mommies know you girls talk like that?”) after the straight talk failed.
Were you drunk when you were in the club?
There may be others I’ve forgotten, too. And of course, I’m leaving out the hundreds of times I hit my brother or sisters when I was growing up. And I suddenly remembered punching a GIRL in elementary school.
And once, a girl tried to kick me in a very special place, and I grabbed her leg and lifted it high and she fell and cried. That wasn’t nice, but I have a problem with girls trying to kick guys there.
I’m sure there was lots of rough and tumble stuff going on when I was a kid, but they mostly didn’t mean anything.
Bruce, I’m sure you recognize how much easier it is to think you know how to handle a situation when you’re not in it. It’s also easy to assume that it would have worked.
With the Russians, I should have just walked back to my room and waited for them to return the card. That’s easy.
With the Indonesians (with any teenagers), the plans of adults don’t always work. I don’t know how good your Indonesian is, but mine wasn’t good enough to do much verbal sparring. And I didn’t feel like continuing to pretend to ignore them for the duration of a long bus ride.
Anyway, kids usually laugh heartily when pushed by adult strangers. I know that I did.
I remember being loud and obnoxious at a multi-school event when a teacher from another school turned around and said, “do you have a problem?” To which I answered, “No, but thanks for asking.”
Of course, my pals hit the floor laughing. Their opinion was much more important than that of the teacher.
I really liked In Bruges, ending and all. The plot machinations are probably more “clever” than “believable”, but there’s such a dearth of “clever” at the moment generally.
Shane: It wasn’t just the final twist, which I saw coming from a mile away.
It was a lot of the final elements. Some of them I saw coming, and some I just thought were unrealistic enough to take me out of the story. And not clever either.
But the first 90 were well worth the last 17. I’d recommend it to anyone who doesn’t mind the language or bursts of violence.
If you write a review, I’ll comment on it!
I ranked In Bruges as one of the worst movies I’ve sat through in the theater. I was bored from the get go. But that’s just me.
Of course, we’re all better at afterisms than impromptu. Even with the Russians, I might have been reduced to shaking my head and walking away. Any sparring with the Indonesians would have had to be in English, so it may have been very limited. I avoid physical contact, especially the aggressive kind, with strangers, even when provoked. My way may not have fared better, it just avoids a risk of escalation or other undesirable consequences. Of course, as a Mic, I’m just fulfilling the stereotype of passiveness.
I know I missed the point of your post completely, but I felt I had to announce that I hated the movie. I myself punched a girl in the stomach in grade school and proceeded to tell the teachers that she had run towards my closed fist. My freshman year of High School, I apparently wronged this girl on my volleyball team, and to this day, I have no idea how or why. She told me she was going to beat me up after practice outside. I was dumbfounded. She never materialized, but don’t think I went outside to wait for her. And then in College, some girl I had never met thought I was going to beat her up because she was consistently hitting on my boyfriend. I’m not sure where she got the notion, but I did nothing to dissuade her. Seems the threat of violence was powerful in both of the latter situations. I don’t remember why I hit the girl in the former, but I’m sure she probably deserved it, in some 4th grade kind of way.