Devil may, devil may, devil may care
How many devils does Daredevil dare?
I’ve finally started watching the Netflix Daredevil series. For general storytelling fun, and especially for its action, it lives up to the hype.
(Or should that be “up to the hyper-senses?” I would have loved to compare Matt’s senses to Paul’s gift in my own Shadowed, but the show minimizes the fact that its hero has one actual superpower in the mix. But of course that Frank Miller-type grit means fists and courage are more than enough.)
Binge-sized Chapters
As a general storytelling lesson, Daredevil is a handy reminder of how many different lengths of tale and chapter a writer can build with.
A single comic book might take ten or fifteen minutes to read, though its storyline might take twice that if it were unpacked into a conventional short story. (All those thousand-word pictures do condense the experience.) Or a network TV adventure is forty-some minutes with your DVR, though it might actually be less than that to read. They’re all valid blocks at holding a fan’s interest and moving a story forward.
And they are about hooking us on the total story. Unlike a movie that sells itself as one complete arc, all those episodic forms are about settling the story enough now to satisfy us but bring us back in just a week or a month for the next installment. Which makes them subtly different from novel chapters, where the next step is always waiting on the next page, but the story’s so big it can explore more on the way and we probably don’t expect to finish it in one rush.
Like Daredevil. As a Netflix show, knowing the whole season is right there (and paid for) seems to give the creators a certain extra freedom to take their time. Every episode has its share of action, but otherwise the first takes the rest of its time making us comfortable with Matt and his law partner (and if you think a best friend named “Foggy” has to be stuck as comic relief, you’re only a little right) and what their first case opens up. More than network shows, more than cable, there’s a certain novel-like depth to each step along the way.
Fighting To Scale
When I was gearing up to start the show, my friend Ace Antonio Hall said it had some of the best fight scenes around. Since then, I’ve been thinking:
He didn’t say “action scenes,” let alone “effects,” he said fight scenes. And how many superhero or science-fiction stories are there where we still use that word? Where we don’t just enjoy the spectacle and (hopefully) the storytelling, we appreciate that those might be people squaring off?
I don’t mean that CGI kills visual action (hello, Lord of the Rings!), or that non-super battles are just better. True, it’s the low-powered fight choreography that’s been more likely to be completely right. But any kind of story just needs to get a handle on itself.
Scale matters. A great adventure defines just how tough its hero is at whatever he does, and brings that size of conflict to life to the point that we understand what’s daily suspense and what’s a step up for him. A hacker stealing a few files is not the same as trying to shut down a doomsday device that the whole world is watching. A human hero can’t wade through bullets with his only explanation that “I’m the hero.”
So I realize I’ve been waiting a long time to see a hero like Daredevil onscreen—especially in the thorough treatment a TV show allows. The first comics I really appreciated were Spider-Man and Daredevil, and I think it shows in my (super)world-view. From them I’ve built the sense that:
- for Superman or the Avengers, walls are only there to punch through
- for Spider-Man, walls are there to swing from to reach the door (then he rips that off its hinges)
- for Daredevil, walls still have to lead to a regular door
In fact, I’m still in Season 1 of the show, where Matt doesn’t have any kind of grappling line yet, so he’s got nothing but plain parkour climbing and dropping to set up his battles. (Even Batman, the more famous “non-super super,” has enough gadgets to let him act like a true superhero whenever it’s cooler. For DD, no such luck.)
And it’s been a pleasure to see this kind of action. Matt Murdock in a fight is skilled and believable, but you can see he’s struggling with just one assassin; against two it really is all about knocking one away to deal with other fast. And unlike with Bats, taking on four or five crooks at a time doesn’t come off as something he’s eager for… though I wish those bigger showcase fights did work harder to spell out what a challenge it is for him to juggle that many threats. (Well, call it a nod to his comics history where he does it all the time; at least the show makes it look good.)
On the other hand, watch for the when moment the camera takes a slow pan around an alley from the inside of a car; who’s going to be lurking somewhere? is a body going to drop, and where? When something does trigger, it shows us this is a show where they know their options.
So… Know Your Foe
Call it a basic rule for writing action, or any other kind of opposition scene. We writers have to understand just how much the hero can do, and what the challenge can, and how many other complications still matter on that scale… and then use that.
If I take a hero’s enemy up to a new level, and the reader doesn’t know the difference, I’ve failed.
In a way it’s a counterpart to what I wrote about as the Tarzan Test. That idea is qualitative, and says the total story lives in the variety of its challenges, while this principle is about quantifying it. So it’s rarely good writing to fight a lion and then another lion, or to fight a lion with an elephant gun.
Or, we could think of it as simply matching the action and the size of the visual focus, whether it’s a film angle or a style of description. Campy swordfights use “Flynning” (Errol Flynn was a charismatic actor but no fencer), big sweeping movements just to fill the frame, but better action would know what small moves actually are faster and zoom in enough to let us appreciate them. –Or if the story were about Spidey swinging across the block or Superman zooming past a whole continent, pull the “camera” back and show us what that scale means.
Pick a size. Learn it, own it.
I’m glad Daredevil isn’t afraid to do just that.
(Extra: for a look at one aspect of action, some of the ways I learned to use the flying powers in The High Road, here’s a guest post I did this week on Janice Hardy’s Fiction University.)