Complex Numbers

Bar Wars

Entry #4 for June's "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]...

Bad Guy Bar  

Bars are so obvious that using them in storytelling borders on cheating.

They're usually a semi-public place (hence the name of the British version), so you get all kinds there, and the opportunity for both planned and chance meetings. This is, perhaps, no better illustrated than by the famous cantina scene (a cantina is, from what I've gathered, a bar in a desert) in Mos Eisley in the original Star Wars.

Han shot first, by the way. I have spoken.

Setting your scene in a bar, especially early on, is a kind of Chekov's Phaser   for me: If the rest of the story progresses without a bar brawl breaking out, I'm usually sorely disappointed.

I can only imagine the level of fight choreography that goes into filming a bar brawl. To make them look realistic enough, everyone has to know exactly what they're doing, while making it seem like everything is unplanned. I guess that's why they get paid the big bucks, though. You'd have to time everything just right, and be sure you know the difference between a real bottle and the fake ones used for bopping people upside the head, or the difference between the real chairs and the breakaway ones used for bopping people in the kidneys.

Gotta say, I love a good bar brawl scene, whether it's in a Bad Guy Bar or wherever. I mean, you don't usually get those kinds of fights in a library, or at Wal-Mart, though I suppose someone's probably done it in a movie just for variety's sake.

But sometimes, those scenes just don't work.

An actual melee fight is, by nature, chaotic. If you're in one, you can't keep track of what's going on; you just have to try to avoid getting hit while trying to make sure the other guys don't. Never ask me how I know this. Filming an actual bar fight, for instance from the perspective of a hypothetical security camera, you'd see a lot of flailing around, but there's no focus, and you only get one angle. This doesn't work in a movie, so there needs to be attention paid to the important parts at just the right time, as otherwise you lose the audience.

I've seen bar fight scenes where they don't do that very well, perhaps in a bid to capture the feel of an actual bar fight. Lots of quick cuts, and sometimes you can tell by where things are or what the characters are wearing that it took about seventeen takes and the result is a mashed-up edit of different parts of the footage.

And, other times, I've seen ones where someone, say, throws a punch, but the angle's all wrong, so you can tell it's a stage punch. You know, missing by a mile while the "punchee" twists their neck like they've been socked. How that gets past the editors and director, I have no idea, unless they were spending the entire scene finding the bottles of real liquor and drinking them.

Unfortunately, though, bar brawl scenes give bars a bad name. Of all the purveyors of fine distilled and fermented beverages that I've been to in my life, from sawdust biker dives in Montana up to the Ritz and every level in between, I've never once witnessed an actual fight break out in one. I'm not saying it never happens, but I've been to a lot of bars and I've never seen one. Watch movies and shows, though, and one might get the idea that walking into a bar is like you might as well be carrying a lit match near kegs of gunpowder.

But one shouldn't expect realism from movies. I can't count the number of times I've seen a scene filmed at a rave or concert, and the main characters are just standing there talking without saying "WHAT?" after every sentence the other one speaks. Loud bars are loud. I can't hear myself in them, let alone anyone else. You want to talk to me in a noisy bar? Try using a pen and paper, because my knowledge of sign language is limited to "hello," "thank you," and "up yours." Better yet, just let me enjoy my beverage in peace. I'm not there to socialize or get into fights; I'm there to drink.

And don't get me started on when a character makes a phone call in the middle of a DJ's set. That shit just doesn't work. Texting might, though.

But none of that gives bars a bad name the way fight scenes do. And yet, like I said, I love a good one.