A) Montage

“It’s barbaric but it’s basic, it’s pure”

Sylvester Stallone 

 

Sylvester Stallone reportedly drafted the entire Rocky (Avildsen 1976) script in just three days; the typed script is 124-pages long.   

 

This anecdote brings to mind a frenzy of pencil chalking lined paper; scenes anchored to the page in illegible runes; of thumbing cramp-riddled palms - sign language profanities. It’s entirely beside the point though, I understand this, how I imagine Sylvester Stallone conceiving of the script. In all honesty, I don’t care much for the film: even by 1970s standards, surely audiences were unimpressed by the heavy-handed performances - it smacks of vanity publishing on the big screen.

 

But the film and its subsequent franchise birthed a hallmark of cinema: the training montage. It’s become the plimsoll line of any good boxing film: skipping ropes simultaneously whirring and slapping in nanosecond frames, the drudgery of hill sprints, the trainer brought out of retirement… It’s the what and the why and the who and the how collapsed atop one another. The Rocky franchise is so synonymous with the training montage that the films spawned not one but two emblematic montage soundtracks: ‘Gonna Fly Now’ and ‘Eye of the Tiger’, the latter would itself become a hallmark - that of the British Butlin’s clubhouse disco.

 

And it’s not just Rocky: of post-millennium cinema, you have Million Dollar Baby (Eastwood 2005), The Fighter (Russell 2011), Warrior (O’Connor 2011) and Southpaw (Fuqua 2015). The training montage stubbornly lives on, usually in a working-class industrial area on the East Coast, usually in winter. In these films, the inclusion of a montage is in itself a semiotic sign - when a film presents a training montage sequence, really what it is communicating ahead of time is that a battle is won: ‘This person is training = this person will be victorious in the end’.

 

With a montage, you are assured that the protagonist has undergone sufficient suffering and humiliation ahead of the fight, has sacrificed themselves and evolved their craft sufficiently to assure the movie-goer they can continue to sit back in their chair: there will be a redemptive victory, whether in the ring or outside of it.  The suffering is on the surface, the sweat is visible. The endurance and sacrifice is laid out for us in all its glistening glory. Deserving perspiration. No montage and you can be sure they're underprepared, overly confident, and bound to be brought down, physically or morally KO’d.​

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However, the presence of the montage does not absolutely promise a clean fight within the ropes. There is still a wrestle, scrappy play; still nervous tension, silly mistakes brought on by frustration. But the training montage informs (or assures) the viewer that the fighter has refined their reflexes and their ability to see: in the instance of A do this, in the instance of B do this, and so on. She is unprepared for Instance X, but has learnt how the opponent fights according to their reaction to actions A and B, and is therefore infinitely better equipped to think up a solution on her feet.

 

On the subject of A to B, ‘montage’, in its most basic form, is a considered series of images that jump from one to the next, and from which the viewer extracts connections, filling in the blanks based on the underlying logic of the artist’s selection and ordering of the images. Introduced by Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in his 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin, Soviet montage theory posits that a sequence of disparate forms, even if insufficiently rendered, constitute the entirety of an ideology: in jumping from A to D, the viewer is entrusted to give life to B and C. It’s the editing (the processing) of the thing that imparts its value and meaning, rather than an inherent value in the thing itself.

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Within the sports film genre, the training montage is generally considered the linear ordering of training scenes without explicit reference to temporality, but by the very nature of its structure, is a supposition of time passing, or rather, of actions taking place in a prolonged (or ‘sufficient’) period of time. Eisenstein’s aim in juxtaposing unrelated shots was to rouse the audience from their ‘political somnambulism’; to ‘punch people into political consciousness’ (boxing-themed emphasis added). For the boxer-in-training, the montage symbolises the awakening from a static state (prolonged economic or class stasis, personal tragedy, or simply the drudgery of the everyday) into a state of acceleration, or ‘consciousness’.

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And so, the montage points to wider temporal and spatial elements before even arriving at the symbolic actions within the individual splices. Before we can discuss the symbolism within the boxer’s training montage, let’s first reacquaint ourselves with its typical waymarkers:

 

1.A cumbersome or inexperienced boxer

 

2.Shots of the gym and the trainer 

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3.Shots of the boxer training alone outside

 

4.Repeated inclusion of shots with rhythm (i.e., a speedball, punch bag, skipping rope, etc) to act as indicators of improvement

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5.Rhythmic shots increase in tempo towards a scene of the boxer mastering the skill

 

6.The boxer graduates the montage

 

Given that the majority of the boxers who embark on the training montage are already working-class, muscular bodies, the montage begins from a point of pre-existing audience assumptions of these bodies being strong, capable and victorious. And yet, the irony is that, in the progression of the sequence and the physical and technical advancements that are made, when rewatching the sequence, the montage actually begins by displaying the boxer’s inefficacy, establishing them as potential idols of physical and moral victory.  

 

B) Developmental stages

 

It’s from this point of as-of-yet-unfulfilled potential that I make comparisons to developmental learning stages. To fulfil said potential, the boxer-in-training must display an earnestness of learning, a vulnerability in accepting teaching and teaching oneself - and that willingness can only come from a foundational acceptance that they don’t know everything, that even as an adult there is work to be done - very hard work. The becoming of the thing that you idolise inherently requires a recognition of the ego and the honourable determination to conquer it; it’s the discovery of ‘the stuff you're made of’. 

 

We can push the comparison further to being analogous to the growth from child to independent adult. During the Million Dollar Baby training montage, Eddie Dupris, the voiceover of the film, narrates the role of the trainer. He reels off a list of lessons the trainer must impart on the trainee:

 

[You gotta] show ‘em how to keep their balance and take it away from the other guy, how to generate momentum off your right toe, and how to flex your knees when you fire a jab. How to fight back enough so that the other guy doesn’t wanna come after ya, then you gotta show 'em all over again, over and over and over, till they think they were born that way.

 

The film’s protagonist, Maggie, resembles a child who, quite literally, is relearning how to walk: her trainer (Clint Eastwood) teaches her to step in time with the speedball. It’s interesting to note how, despite the film’s climactic fight ending in her catastrophic injury, she is nevertheless symbolically victorious - she journeyed into professional boxing in order to escape her ‘white trash’ prospects, and succeeded in doing so. Her conviction to become a professional boxer outweighed her experience - her desire to evolve outgrew her habitat. In training, she’s awkward but earnest, and is rewarded for her stoic endeavours. As training montages show, the trainee must accept the humiliation of becoming a child again, of inviting a parent figure to ‘raise’ you into a boxer. 

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This is never more pointed than in Warrior, in which Tommy (boxer-in-training) returns from the marines to his estranged alcoholic father Paddy (his former high-school wrestling coach) and asks him to train him for an ultimate MMA tournament. In one scene, Tommy, who has moved back in with Paddy, is asleep in his undersized childhood bed. Paddy rouses him with a coffee and wake-up song:

 

INT. TOMMY'S ROOM - PRE-DAWN                    

Paddy climbs the stairs with a POSTER BOARD tucked under his arm and a cup of coffee in his hands. He enters Tommy's room, which is also a monument to the past. Old wrestling TROPHIES, Steelers' posters, and an EMPTY SECOND BED that obviously once belonged to Brendan [Tommy’s brother who is also competing in the tournament].

                         

PADDY

(SINGING)

Oh the duck says quack and the cow

says moo, and the old red rooster

says cock-a-doodle-doo. Cock-a-

doodle-doo.

 

Tommy’s embarrassed by the intrusion and resentful of his absent father adopting the role of caregiver given the violence and neglect he inflicted whilst growing up. This rift inhibits Tommy’s ability to invest in the trainer-as-parent figure, whilst his brother, Brendan, is well-adjusted to a trustworthy trainer he knows from his past. Ultimately, Brendan wins the tournament following a finale in which he has to (literally and figuratively) beat his brother. His willingness to assume the ‘child’ role with his trainer leads him to victory. 

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C) Jump to-

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D) New metaphor

 

According to Lakoff and Johnson, whilst everyday metaphors (such as ‘Kelly’s feeling down’, ‘He put his words into action’, or ‘you can’t support your argument’) call on existing tropes of metaphorical language, it’s necessary when introducing a ‘new metaphor’ to pay due diligence to its cross-metaphorical coherence - how easily does the language of the one element cross-pollinate with the language of a comparison element.

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Lakoff and Johnson illustrate a metaphor’s coherence by introducing a third comparison: for example, they pair the metaphors ‘an argument is a journey’ and ‘an argument is a container’ with the further comparison ‘an argument is a building’. In this way, they note the further ‘metaphorical overlap’ of the three analogies to determine the strengths of the initial comparison. In this vein, this section will draft a new metaphor for painter and boxer, using Consalvo et al’s ready-made boxer and video gamer analogy as its 'new metaphor' trio comparison. 

 

Below are some aspects of the boxer-in-training montage:

 

Goal-driven

Persistence 

Process

Routine

Physical & psychological 

Endurance

No shortcuts

An arena

 

And below are how these aspects are shared between its conjoined metaphors of 1) the painter and 2) the gamer:

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Painter:                                                                                       Gamer:

Goal-driven                                                                              Goal-driven

Persistence                                                                              Persistence

Process                                                                                      Process

Routine                                                                                      ?

Physical & Psychological                                                    Physical & Psychological

Endurance                                                                                Endurance

No shortcuts                                                                            ?

An arena (studio)                                                                    An arena (VR)

 

And these two metaphors (painter and gamer) volley a return of additional aspects for the boxer:

 

Solitary (when in the ring)

Problem-solving (when in the ring)

Motor skills

Reflexes (differentiation here between the gamer and boxer’s reflexes as literally defensive or offensive versus the painter’s reflexes of habit or reactionary painting [figuratively defensive/offensive]).

 

Now that we’ve established the structural coherences, we can put this into language. Below is a matrix - the vertical axis denotes the dominant subject whilst the horizontal axis denotes the language sphere from which the subject is borrowing descriptors. 

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Gamers, as boxers, embark on ‘long, tedious hours,’ considering the ‘grind’ as essential to the gameplay in pursuit of self-set goals, whereas, on the other end of the spectrum, there are cheaters, who avoid the struggle and test of endurance through the use of cheat codes.

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It’s not only the boxer who gets a montage: the montage also exists for the gamer in the multiplayer multiverse as a functional as well as aesthetic feature. Gaming montage differs from film montage in that the formation of in-game montages aren’t produced in the edits but are auto-generated in-game according to algorithms. As such, it calls for the differentiating term ‘interactive montage’.

 

In interactive montage, the scenes in sequence are initiated not by the post-filming editor but by the algorithm and player in the sense that the algorithm can only select scenes made available by the player’s actions and decision-making: instead of the editor guiding the audience through the camera, the camera is guided by the player. Just as the gamer subsumes the role of montage content-creator and editor, so too does the boxer-in-training adopt the duo role of trainer (training alone, independently) and trainee (in the gym with the coach), and the painter also does something similar: the painter is both the do-er and the editor, their own teacher and a student.

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Moreover, montage theory is a useful pedagogical tool: Using montage to teach poetry, Mark Reid devised a lesson plan that presented students with items, texts and scenes with common themes across media  (Reid explores the notion of ‘cool’), juxtaposing their structure and consumption. Reid branded this process ‘placing’ or ‘reframing’: ‘It’s the process of putting one text next to another, and then a third, then revisiting the original with the idea that the act of juxtaposition will create new meanings.’ New insights are formed when placing one example beside another, and, ‘when combined with a third, all three texts are transformed, and for each transformation, there are different readings for each student.’ 

 

X) Conclusions

 

Metaphors help us comprehend experience, they are ‘as much a part of our functioning as our sense of touch, and as precious.’

 

The painter is not like a boxer-in-training;

The painter is                a boxer-in-training.

 

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Bibliography

 

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