{"id":92104,"date":"2015-11-18T16:26:21","date_gmt":"2015-11-18T21:26:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=92104"},"modified":"2015-11-19T11:39:49","modified_gmt":"2015-11-19T16:39:49","slug":"glutton-for-punishment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/11\/18\/glutton-for-punishment\/","title":{"rendered":"Glutton for Punishment"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fat City and<\/em>\u00a0the dark night of boxing\u2019s soul.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"

From an Italian poster for Fat City<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Boxing and cinema are so perfectly mated that if the sport didn\u2019t exist Hollywood may well have invented it. Its tropes\u2014man\u2019s internal struggle with his demons, his past, and his station, all externalized in a desperate fight against an opponent who could be a drinking buddy but who stands, right now, in the way of dreams, success, and validation\u2014dates back to Homer, and they\u2019re ready-made for the movies.<\/p>\n

The reality of boxing is, of course, not so clean. It\u2019s brutal, unforgiving, and easily corruptible; the runway to the ring littered with broken bodies, shattered lives, and buckets of blood. Redemption? That\u2019s only in the pictures. Which is not to say boxing films avoid hard truths about the sport. Gangsters, hucksters, bums, schemes, and death abound, especially in the titles released in the forties and fifties. But Hollywood approaches the inherent danger and venality of the fight game cautiously, never staring too long into the abyss. To do so would be to stray too far from the formula: audiences should go home cheering, if not for a champion then for a guy who failed stoically and with class. No one wants to spend time\u2014or, more importantly, money\u2014on a downer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That makes Fat City<\/a><\/em>, John Huston\u2019s punishing 1972 adaptation of Leonard Gardner\u2019s 1969 brass-knuckled sucker punch of a novel, something of a miracle. It\u2019s so contrary to expectation that it\u2019s better to call it the antiboxing film. There are no champions, only losers on the margins of a castoff society. Characters imagine boxing glory but can\u2019t overcome their own base urges or interior conflicts long enough to earn it. When they do climb into the ring, it\u2019s only because they\u2019re tired of topping onions in sweltering heat for pennies. Fighting is the best worst option, but even that pays a pittance.<\/p>\n

Only in the upside-down world of New Hollywood could a film as jaundiced and cynical about pugilism find big-studio support (in this case from Columbia). And naturally, it flopped with audiences. But critics loved it, and over the years its supporters have helped turn Fat City<\/em> into a cult classic. The evangelization continues this week: tomorrow, November 20, a new 4K restoration of the film opens at New York\u2019s Film Forum<\/a>. (The book, meanwhile, has been reissued by NYRB Classics<\/a>, and Twilight Time recently released the film on Blu-ray.)<\/p>\n

Set in blighted Stockton, California, Fat City<\/em> is an unrelenting depiction of people, as Gardner writes, \u201coverwhelmed by the monumental misery of the present.\u201d The headliners are fighters in parallel downward spirals: twenty-nine-year-old Billy Tully (Stacy Keach), a washed-out pug bouncing between bars, seedy hotels, and dehumanizing day labor; and eighteen-year-old Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges), a mediocre wannabe trapped in a failing town with limited prospects, mounting responsibilities, and fading aspirations. The men are funhouse-mirror reflections of each other: Tully sees who he was, Ernie who he will become.<\/p>\n

The bleak tone is set immediately with an opening sequence, shot on Stockton\u2019s Skid Row, of impoverished, transient hobos and laborers shuffling in and out of bars, lingering in doorways, and otherwise wasting away in a sun-bleached town crumbling around them. (None of these people are actors. Huston employed as many nonprofessionals as possible to ensure the film\u2019s authenticity.) When we finally meet Tully, he\u2019s in underwear and a sport shirt, lying on a bare bed in a crummy room, the only motivation for movement is to locate a match among empty bottles and crumpled cigarette packs. When he can\u2019t find one, he decides to grab his gear, head to the YMCA, and work a punching bag, you know, since he\u2019s up. Huston scores it all with Kris Kristofferson\u2019s achingly morose \u201cHelp Me Make It Through the Night,\u201d whose lyrics include, \u201cYesterday is dead and gone \/ And tomorrow\u2019s out of sight \/ And it\u2019s sad to be alone \/ Help me make it through the night.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From an Italian poster for Fat City<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Compare that to Rocky <\/em>(1976), the next major studio\u2013backed boxing film. It begins with Bill Conti\u2019s inspiring fanfare, the title scrolling heroically across the screen, demonstrating immediately a cloying earnesty 180 degrees away from Fat City<\/em>\u2019s caustic irony. The next image is the face of Jesus Christ, followed by a pan down to a cheap ring in a smoky church auditorium where Rocky inelegantly fights some schlub. It\u2019s not a rosy picture of Rocky\u2019s place in the world, and it gets more depressing before it gets better. But he\u2019s fighting\u2014and winning. Never mind he\u2019s so bad that, after his victory, an elderly woman flags him down on his way to the locker room to harangue him for being a bum; the looming religious iconography promises a salvation Tully could never fathom. Later, Conti\u2019s theme returns during the requisite training montage and we\u2019re roused to the film\u2019s optimism: \u201cTrying hard now \/ Getting strong now \/ won\u2019t be long now \/ Gonna fly now \/ flying high now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rocky<\/em> is schmaltz taken to its extreme, but it\u2019s the only way Hollywood could undo Gardner (who also wrote the screenplay) and Huston\u2019s complete rejection of it. In its opening five minutes, Fat City<\/em> does everything boxing movies are supposed to avoid. And from there, it sets about slaughtering convention, burning the remains, and flushing the ashes down the toilet: Tully shacks up in a dysfunctional relationship with a wino while her old man\u2019s in jail. Ernie knocks up his girlfriend, forcing him to marry someone he just wanted to screw. Both men scrounge up work in the predawn cattle calls for peach pickers and walnut harvesters.<\/p>\n

Oh, and they do end up in the ring\u2014if you can call what they do boxing. We see Ernie fight twice; he loses both times, first after his nose is broken and then when he\u2019s knocked out in under thirty seconds. (We do learn that he has racked up a few victories, but, naturally, we never see them.) Tully\u2019s lone bout comes seventy-six minutes into the ninety-six-minute film. It\u2019s inelegant and sloppy, an out-of-shape ham-and-egger colliding with a sick older boxer from Mexico City. Tully wins, but he can only stare vacantly beyond the crowd. This moment of victory, assigned so much importance by character and genre, neither assuages his emptiness nor provides us with catharsis.<\/p>\n

In the final scene, Tully, now destitute, drinks coffee with Ernie at a gambling hall and wonders if the ancient Chinese man serving them is their future. \u201cBefore you get out of your room, your life makes a beeline for the drain,\u201d he says before trailing off. The men stare ahead, resigned to a dead-end fate both sought to avoid but now realize is inescapable. Cue Kristofferson, roll credits, fade out.<\/p>\n

Hard to imagine no one wanted to see a film of such crushing existential defeat\u2014especially as Vietnam raged, stagflation began its inexhaustible burn through the economy, and Nixon\u2019s cronies broke into the Watergate. (Believe it or not, Gardner\u2019s book, itself a demolition of the romanticized sentimentality found in novels like W. C. Heinz\u2019s The Professional<\/em>, is even more hopeless, its world more nightmarish, by forcing us to rattle around inside Tully and Ernie\u2019s heads as they reckon with lives \u201claden with remorse\u201d and where \u201ccatastrophes seemed to whisper just beyond hearing.\u201d) But this isn\u2019t a case of Huston and Gardner misjudging their audience. They spent time as small-time boxers in California before turning to more creative pursuits, and they appreciated what it meant to be a fighter, especially one far removed from the bright lights of national attention. \u201cOf course, the cards are stacked against him,\u201d Huston told a French interviewer in 1972. \u201cHe can\u2019t come to a very good end. I naturally feel great compassion towards the fighter.\u201d That empathy compelled them to remedy Hollywood fantasy with bracing reality. It just so happened there was limited interest in their brand of verisimilitude.<\/p>\n

Fat City <\/em>is a barbed, bitter pill that hurts like hell going down\u2014especially if you aren\u2019t expecting the pain. Once you\u2019ve swallowed it, it\u2019s impossible to watch fight films with a sense of escapism. Tully and Ernie, penniless and bruised, eternally gazing out from that diner counter, linger in your memory and provide a constant reminder of what fighters\u2014and honest boxing pictures\u2014really look like. And as a new crop of films cycles into theaters, from Southpaw<\/em> (a by-the-numbers riches-to-rags-to-enlightenment fable released this spring) to Creed<\/em> (a Rocky<\/em> spin-off out later this month) to Hands of Stone <\/em>(a biopic due next year), Fat City <\/em>has more to say than ever, and it remains an essential, unsparing corrective in an increasingly maudlin genre.<\/p>\n

Dante A. Ciampaglia is a writer, editor, and photographer in New York. His work has been published by <\/em>Time, <\/em>Architectural Record, and <\/em>Forbes, among others.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fat City and\u00a0the dark night of boxing\u2019s soul. Boxing and cinema are so perfectly mated that if the sport didn\u2019t exist Hollywood may well have invented it. Its tropes\u2014man\u2019s internal struggle with his demons, his past, and his station, all externalized in a desperate fight against an opponent who could be a drinking buddy but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":898,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1186],"tags":[16445,775,80,5877,5879,12430,19408,81,20255,85,20256],"class_list":["post-92104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-film","tag-boxing","tag-california","tag-cinema","tag-fat-city","tag-john-huston","tag-kris-kristofferson","tag-leonard-gardner","tag-movies","tag-rocky","tag-sports","tag-w-c-heinz"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhy \u201cFat City\u201d Is the Best (And Bleakest) Boxing Movie of All<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"November 18, 2015 \u2013 Fat City and\u00a0the dark night of boxing\u2019s soul.Boxing and cinema are so perfectly mated that if the sport didn\u2019t exist Hollywood may well have invented it.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/11\/18\/glutton-for-punishment\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Glutton for Punishment by Dante A. 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