Sunday Song # 3 - "The Fight"

***

Adulterous embraces and murderous rage
are promised by a poster as she waits in line to pay
She's out alone tonight, patient and polite
here to escape her dreary day

It's taken from the life of a famous libertine
She read all about it in a glossy magazine
She sits and stares as light cuts the air
and faces so familiar appear on the screen

She sees the fight and hears the swelling violins
She's not too sure how this will end
But what a nice surprise
Force finally decides the best man wins

Underpaid employees impatiently wait
Everyone else is gone but still she hesitates
The story's reached its end, life begins again
but what's a few minutes more if she's already late

He's watching television and acting upset
She speaks to him softly, wraps her arms around his neck
She doesn't want to fight, she just turns out the light
and imagines a man she has never met

She sees the fight and hears the swelling violins
She's not too sure how this will end
But what a nice surprise
Force finally decides the best man wins

***

Key of B, although not a part of the small town north GA songs. No minor chords. An earlier version of this has been performed live by the full-band Titans many times, and an even earlier version appeared on the one EP (unreleased) that John Demartino and I recorded in early 2005 in Durham NC under the band name the Stops and Starts.

I spent the past week doing yet another substantial revision of the lyrics of the verses of this song, this time making them fit a much stricter rhyme pattern than before, and still I'm not 100% happy with it. This song is set primarily at a movie theater, and while it would be reasonable to assume it is inspired by my experiences working in a theater here in Athens, it actually goes back to when I was working at Burns Court Cinemas in Sarasota, Florida, in 2003 and 2004, although it has been altered continuously since then, always failing to reach whatever it is I want it to become.

I have always been happy with the structure and particularly the use of the chorus here, that it is not just being repeated, but that this repetition actually plays a part in the plot of the song's story, and is in fact the whole point of the song, that the main character is repeating the events of the film to herself in her mind later on, that the escapism of the film is something she can carry with her out of the theater.

Like I said, I like this, but I have never been quite able to get words, a melody, and chords that seem good enough. A lot of times I'll spend months laboring on the lyrics of a song but make up the music in about fifteen minutes, and I think that is the case here, although the chorus came later and is the one part of the song I am most satisfied with, musically, although I think the whole thing may fall apart if it is fact-checked and it turns out that there is for example only one violin used in a Hollywood string section.

***

I think I had the initial idea for this song some time after Brian Hughes and his father took me to see the film Training Day, which I remember as being exceptionally dark and brutal for a mainstream Hollywood film, but the scene in particular that I remember (possibly incorrectly) was that there was this very violent fight scene in slow motion with really dramatic classical-style music playing in the background, which got me thinking about music and how it could manipulate an audience's emotions to the point that they might accept actions on-screen as morally/ethically good that they otherwise would not. Or that a scene like this might program into audience members the idea that desirable heroic masculinity requires brutally beating or even mercilessly killing your opponent. Also the lines at the end of the chorus, "what a nice surprise -- force finally decides the best man wins," is my attack on the convention of films in which Good triumphs over Evil in some kind of climactic violent confrontation -- this to me seems to risk indoctrinating the audience with the idea that in the real world, the winners (big business, countries with strong militaries, big tough dudes who kick sand in the faces of scrawny bookworms and walk away with their girlfriends) are also necessarily morally superior/virtuous to the losers -- Like, how convienient is it that we do not have to feel any sympathy at all for the losers who got smashed to pieces? I think much moreso than Training Day, films like Star Wars and Lord Of The Rings are guilty of this. Someone (I think on Salon.com) wrote about how Star Wars is much more interesting if you are watching it as a propaganda film of a fascist state who is retelling their own history after winning a war.

But I don't know, this song is also very much about someone who watches a lot of movies and in a way prefers watching movies to existing outside in the real world. Which is very much like me, the author. But I do want it to also be about at least one of the dangers of this, which is being disappointed in your actual life because it does not measure up in whatever way to the fantasy. So that the fantasy of the Hollywood film, while we are loving it while it happens on-screen, serves actually to drain some measure of happiness from our life in the long run. But I think there are movies that have just the opposite effect, although good luck finding even a politically/ethically smart film with actors who are not unrealistically good-looking.