(Contains spoilers for mentioned works, from 18th-century adventure novels to 21st-century sitcoms)
Every story has a climax, whether that climax is plot-based, character-based, or sometimes, oddly enough, setting-based. This can range from an emotional catharsis of confessing true love or the moment when a character’s plan is finally paying off. It’s the release that every story needs after a whole book or season of waiting.
Stories help us release parts of ourselves that we can’t express in order to keep society functional. That’s why, no matter how anti-violence you are, everyone loves a story that ends with a good fistfight.
Before we get into the analytics of why humans love to see their metaphorical worst enemy and favorite hero get absolutely destroyed, let’s see some examples, shall we?
Parks and Rec is a classic TV show on par with The Office at this point. Normally, with this comedy, we think of a quirky cast of characters and the goal to make a small town in Indiana better for its residents. Like all shows, however, there has to be an antagonist. Some would argue that the antagonists are the citizens of Pawnee themselves, but there is one, larger roadblock in Leslie Knope’s road to triumph and that is councilor Jeremy Jam, who is constantly fulfilling the role of the rotten politician and throwing a selfish wrench into all of Leslie’s plans. So when Ron Swanson absolutely decks Jam at Leslie’s wedding, it felt incredible. Not just for Leslie and her friends, but for the viewers watching. We don’t expect comedies to have the primal element of brawling, but the fact that the writers felt the need to include it says something more about us as a society than it does about Ron Swanson.
Let’s magnify this to other genres and medias. I recently just read Pierce Brown’s Red Rising series. It is an incredibly cinematic sci-fi tale of the oppressed rising up to conquer their oppressors. With sci-fi, action-packed fights are much more common, as seen in Star Wars and even to a certain extent, Star Trek, but the grand scale of this series places readers in a world where people can carve other beings in griffins or dragons and planets are terraformed on a large scale. Surely, we’ve moved past just kicking the shit out of each other, right? Wrong. The entire basis of the series is that the ruling gold class is so confident in their power that they will willingly wage war on each other to remain powerful and cull the weak. No matter how grand the battles and how intense the political debate of morality, surely enough, at the climax of each main arc, our main hero, Darrow, is beating someone to death or vice versa.
Sometimes, the fistfight doesn’t even have to be a traditional fistfight. In most of the western 18th century, these primal fights were replaced by duels. For a brief period in human history, wasting each other with our fists was seen as less noble than using a gun. Nonetheless in most satisfying stories, someone has to be severely injured or die by someone else’s hand. Hamilton, the genre-defying Broadway musical, climaxes in a duel that kills Alexander. In The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantés not only participates in a duel, but also hires bandits to torture his enemy after years of waiting for his revenge. In that case, in place of violence at his own hand, Edmond uses that of others. In some cases, the need for a fistfight transcends societal norms and we see a regression to physically fighting in the 19th century when Edgar punches Heathcliff in the throat and again when Heathcliff and Hindley fight in Wuthering Heights.
In other genres, such as action and adventure, fistfights are much more expected, but what’s even more interesting than a fistfight between antagonists is a fistfight between people on the same side. One excellent example is in DC Comics’ New 52, when Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson are literally beating each other bloody while talking about their feelings after Dick’s supposed death. Though violence is expected in the superhero genre, the climax of that particular arc has nothing to do with Dick’s faked death, but with the emotional scene of Bruce’s final plan to send Dick away on a mission to infiltrate Spyral, a morally grey espionage organization that controls people through hypnosis.
Of course, this is by no means a rule, but I am a firm believer that this is the reason why the superhero genre is so popular. Not because of the action on its own—people beating each other up for no reason isn’t very satisfying—but because it lowers an intangible, emotional journey to something that can be solved by our most primal instincts.
Fiction is a way to make our lives greater than they are. It takes the mundane and infuses it with imagination. It acts as a conduit for our deepest desires, whether that be love or adventure or good winning over evil. Conflict resolution is often one of those desires, and fighting is one of the easiest ways to release that inner longing for a quick and easy resolution. It would be too easy to spin this literary trope to say that people have an inner desire for violence, but I think that building to a fistfight actually proves the opposite. We want to solve our problems in the simplest, most base way possible to move on to things that people are better at—thinking and creating.
The appearance of fistfights in many stories helps us relieve the inner conflicts we feel with ourselves and each other in a constructive way. Stories that end with fistfights are a great way to experience that relief without actually going feral. Are you going to go deck person who antagonizes you at work? Or physically fight your dad whenever you argue about politics? Hopefully not, but there is a small part of the primal human experience that desires a quick solution. That’s just one of many reasons you may keep hungering for the next book, season, or movie. It’s also why it feels so damn good when your favorite character is beaten black and blue while killing their enemy.
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