Daredevil Thoughts
So I finished watching Daredevil a couple of weeks ago and my non-spoilery thoughts are: I liked it! It is definitely grimmer and darker than the rest of the MCU, and I'm okay with that given that there's some warmth to offset that darkness, and that it didn't feel gratuitously dark. Also, the MCU as a whole has a decent variety of tones/styles going for it, so one part of it going the noir route feels fresh and interesting as opposed to overdone. The violence on the other hand...some of that I wasn't okay with. Anyway, in general, I was quite impressed with how well made the show is: nice production values, good acting, some truly great directing and cinematography. I was also happy with the pacing, which I think took tremendous advantage of the Netflix format to build a great, nuanced take on an origin story for Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Karen Page). Spoilery thoughts under the cut:
I know everyone has already talked about that hallway fight at the end of the second episode, but THAT HALLWAY FIGHT. I'm in love with how that was filmed, and how it's a technically impressive fight scene with great choreography, but even more important than that, it's a fight scene that deepens the character of Matt Murdock. The sense of effort and exhaustion was just so visceral. I am also very fond of the fight scene with the Russians while the blind Chinese drugrunner is in that cab in I forget what episode. That was just cleverly filmed with some great sound design.
And sound design! So well done, with a lot of subtle stuff that indicates Matt's POV, like in aforementioned fight scene around the cab, you can hear the sound of heartbeats as Matt determines the Russians' locations. The sounds are also frequently very...gruesome. I found myself diving for the mute button a few times. Good job foley artists, but damn.
As a whole, this first season of Daredevil was definitely all about the mirrored origin stories of Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk. This isn't, strictly speaking, particularly new territory when it comes to mirroring your hero and villain. But Daredevil was a great version of that trope for the most part. Fisk was a great, well-rounded character who had his own important and emotional relationships and nuanced motivations.
On the other hand, I feel like they skimped on the development of Matt's character in the first half of the season, expecting the audience's awareness of Matt Murdock = hero! to carry us along. The sixth episode was actually the first episode where I felt like I was fully with Matt, almost entirely because we see him struggling here, we see that he doesn't really know what he's doing and that he's in over his head. This is the episode where I was strongly reminded that Matt Murdock is young: he's a newly minted lawyer who has high ideals and an urge to fight for his vision of Hell's Kitchen, whereas Fisk is a wealthy man who knows what he wants and the price he's willing to pay to get it. Matt doesn't know yet, not really. Matt doesn't have a plan, and well, that's believable. He's a dude who decided to dress up in a mask and fuck some bad guys' shit up, and because bad guys aren't just random muggers and abusers, they're part of a system, it's landed him in a situation he wasn't prepared for.
It's frustrating, but I like it as a somewhat fresh take on an origin story. In a lot of these origin stories, this period of flailing around with random vigilantism is usually the stuff of montages or a couple of one-off scenes. With an entire season to play with, there's more opportunity to build a different, more detailed sort of origin. There's no easy shortcut where putting on the costume = now I'm a superhero! We see Matt fumble through it, and struggle with the balance between violence for violence's sake and violence for a purpose.
And speaking of violence! I'm a little fascinated with the show's take on it. It's more violent by far than any other MCU property, because while body counts are high in movies like Cap 2 and the Iron Mans, there's not a lot of gore. People can get killed left and right, but it's fine as long as there's not much blood. With Daredevil, things get a lot more gruesome. (Ahahaha the decapitation via car door scene oh god.) But, y'know, whatever, the movies are PG-13 by studio fiat probably. And even aside from that, they're not about violence, not really.
Daredevil is about violence. About being a victim and survivor of violence, about being a violent person. It is a show that pays special attention to the marks violence leaves on the body and to a lesser extent on the psyche. When Matt gets hurt, he is very visibly hurt, and he's in pain. The marks of violence last on his body, across multiple episodes, and the camera doesn't shy from them. The frequent shots of shirtless Matt aren't just there so we can leer at Charlie Cox's admittedly nice body; they're there so that we can see the bruises and stitches and scars, so we can see the physical toll of vigilantism and of violence. When Matt fights in that skintight man in the black mask outfit, the audience can practically feel every blow that lands on him. Matt alone out of all of the MCU superheroes so far feels genuinely breakable, and Matt alone out of all of the MCU superheroes visibly grapples with what the violence of his life means.
The body as a site of violence gets a fair amount of attention in the show, and I don't know if I just started fixating on it because I noticed a pattern, or if it was deliberate. But we have Matt's father, a boxer, who we see Matt stitching up. We see Matt being stitched up himself, we see his bloody knuckles. We see Fisk's explosive bursts of violence and some of the impact they leave on others' bodies. The violence on this show has consequence and weight, much of that consequence writ on the bodies of its characters. That's interesting. That feels different, compared to the rest of the MCU, where we may see characters getting hurt, but it's easy to...let it go, I guess, in the shorter time frame of a movie, without the cumulative effect of 10+ hours of watching Matt get beat on and beat other people. And besides, the MCU movies are focused on a different sort of theme re bodies, where it's not so much about the body as a site of physical violence as it is about changes in the body and body horror, a different sort of violence.
Anyway, I don't know where I'm going with that, but it's a thing I noticed and found interesting about Daredevil.
Ugh, that got really long and I still haven't talked about Claire or Karen or Foggy or Vanessa. More later, eventually.
This entry was originally posted at http://yasaman.dreamwidth.org/463506.html, with
comments there.
I know everyone has already talked about that hallway fight at the end of the second episode, but THAT HALLWAY FIGHT. I'm in love with how that was filmed, and how it's a technically impressive fight scene with great choreography, but even more important than that, it's a fight scene that deepens the character of Matt Murdock. The sense of effort and exhaustion was just so visceral. I am also very fond of the fight scene with the Russians while the blind Chinese drugrunner is in that cab in I forget what episode. That was just cleverly filmed with some great sound design.
And sound design! So well done, with a lot of subtle stuff that indicates Matt's POV, like in aforementioned fight scene around the cab, you can hear the sound of heartbeats as Matt determines the Russians' locations. The sounds are also frequently very...gruesome. I found myself diving for the mute button a few times. Good job foley artists, but damn.
As a whole, this first season of Daredevil was definitely all about the mirrored origin stories of Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk. This isn't, strictly speaking, particularly new territory when it comes to mirroring your hero and villain. But Daredevil was a great version of that trope for the most part. Fisk was a great, well-rounded character who had his own important and emotional relationships and nuanced motivations.
On the other hand, I feel like they skimped on the development of Matt's character in the first half of the season, expecting the audience's awareness of Matt Murdock = hero! to carry us along. The sixth episode was actually the first episode where I felt like I was fully with Matt, almost entirely because we see him struggling here, we see that he doesn't really know what he's doing and that he's in over his head. This is the episode where I was strongly reminded that Matt Murdock is young: he's a newly minted lawyer who has high ideals and an urge to fight for his vision of Hell's Kitchen, whereas Fisk is a wealthy man who knows what he wants and the price he's willing to pay to get it. Matt doesn't know yet, not really. Matt doesn't have a plan, and well, that's believable. He's a dude who decided to dress up in a mask and fuck some bad guys' shit up, and because bad guys aren't just random muggers and abusers, they're part of a system, it's landed him in a situation he wasn't prepared for.
It's frustrating, but I like it as a somewhat fresh take on an origin story. In a lot of these origin stories, this period of flailing around with random vigilantism is usually the stuff of montages or a couple of one-off scenes. With an entire season to play with, there's more opportunity to build a different, more detailed sort of origin. There's no easy shortcut where putting on the costume = now I'm a superhero! We see Matt fumble through it, and struggle with the balance between violence for violence's sake and violence for a purpose.
And speaking of violence! I'm a little fascinated with the show's take on it. It's more violent by far than any other MCU property, because while body counts are high in movies like Cap 2 and the Iron Mans, there's not a lot of gore. People can get killed left and right, but it's fine as long as there's not much blood. With Daredevil, things get a lot more gruesome. (Ahahaha the decapitation via car door scene oh god.) But, y'know, whatever, the movies are PG-13 by studio fiat probably. And even aside from that, they're not about violence, not really.
Daredevil is about violence. About being a victim and survivor of violence, about being a violent person. It is a show that pays special attention to the marks violence leaves on the body and to a lesser extent on the psyche. When Matt gets hurt, he is very visibly hurt, and he's in pain. The marks of violence last on his body, across multiple episodes, and the camera doesn't shy from them. The frequent shots of shirtless Matt aren't just there so we can leer at Charlie Cox's admittedly nice body; they're there so that we can see the bruises and stitches and scars, so we can see the physical toll of vigilantism and of violence. When Matt fights in that skintight man in the black mask outfit, the audience can practically feel every blow that lands on him. Matt alone out of all of the MCU superheroes so far feels genuinely breakable, and Matt alone out of all of the MCU superheroes visibly grapples with what the violence of his life means.
The body as a site of violence gets a fair amount of attention in the show, and I don't know if I just started fixating on it because I noticed a pattern, or if it was deliberate. But we have Matt's father, a boxer, who we see Matt stitching up. We see Matt being stitched up himself, we see his bloody knuckles. We see Fisk's explosive bursts of violence and some of the impact they leave on others' bodies. The violence on this show has consequence and weight, much of that consequence writ on the bodies of its characters. That's interesting. That feels different, compared to the rest of the MCU, where we may see characters getting hurt, but it's easy to...let it go, I guess, in the shorter time frame of a movie, without the cumulative effect of 10+ hours of watching Matt get beat on and beat other people. And besides, the MCU movies are focused on a different sort of theme re bodies, where it's not so much about the body as a site of physical violence as it is about changes in the body and body horror, a different sort of violence.
Anyway, I don't know where I'm going with that, but it's a thing I noticed and found interesting about Daredevil.
Ugh, that got really long and I still haven't talked about Claire or Karen or Foggy or Vanessa. More later, eventually.
This entry was originally posted at http://yasaman.dreamwidth.org/463506.html, with
comments there.