Single combat, like sex, is ruthlessly revealing on film. A duel lays bare its participants’ innermost desires, the limits of their morality, the strength of their convictions, and the pervasiveness of their ambivalence. A duel provides a precise intersection for two characters driven towards one another. How a duel is conducted, and then how it ends is nothing less than the distillation of that attraction, however malicious or one-sided, to its absolute essence.
"Single combat, like sex, is ruthlessly revealing on film."
That sex and violence mirror each other is less a cinematic invention than a basic tenet of human psychology. We consider both governed by the subconscious and biological instinct. Both, we contend, are drives. Whatever motives we project onto our engagement with the acts of sex and violence, we still partake in the actions themselves with the rest of the animal kingdom. In intercourse of either kind, there is room exclusively for two. All swords are inherently phallic. Guns less so, but only somewhat, as the end goal of the ejected bullet is penetration of the flesh.
Perhaps no period drama unites the two as fluidly as Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons. The majority of the movie is a duel in the figurative sense between the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, who engage in an erotic wager of rapidly escalating stakes. The fallout from this wager destroys them both, with the Marquise shunned by Paris society and Valmont dead in a literal duel. By the time Valmont is challenged to the movie-ending duel, his libertine scheming has left him spiritually debased. He has fallen in love with Madame de Tourvel—a woman he only intended to seduce—and forced himself to abandon her.
Dangerous Liaisons ends with a duel scene fought between Valmont and Danceny. Danceny is intent on avenging the honour of Cécile, the young woman Valmont has coerced into sexual “lessons” and impregnated. The duel is interspersed with shots of Valmont and Tourvel together in bed, and each time Frears cuts back to the duel, Valmont’s will to win against his inferior opponent has eroded further. Indeed Valmont welcomes the final blow, and in that sense, it is Valmont, not his challenger, who actually achieves release. Bleeding out in the snow and no longer facing a life of misery, Valmont gives Daceny the letters revealing the Marquise’s malicious handling of the romantic lives of everyone around her. The true duel of Dangerous Liaisons is the protracted one between Valmont and the Marquise, and in condemning her to social ostracisation Valmont delivers the final blow, even as he himself lays dying.
Ridley Scott’s The Duellists takes a slightly subtler approach, but it too understands the latent eroticism of the duel. Set over the course of the Napoleonic Wars, it strings together a series of confrontations between two French Hussars, the duel-obsessed Gabriel Feraud and the otherwise level-headed Armand d’Hubert, kicked off over a minor perceived slight at a salon.
Outwardly, d’Hubert acts frustrated with Feraud’s unshakable insistence on duelling. Still, he privately intervenes to prevent Feraud’s execution for treason, intent on preserving the single relationship in his life suffused with intensity and drama as opposed to aristocratic gentility. Feraud, for his part, is not pursuing satisfaction but consummation—the instigating insult being a half-invented pretense rather than an actual matter of honour—which d’Hubert refuses him. Holding the disarmed Feraud at gunpoint, d’Hubert forbids him from making further challenges. Keith Carradine never lets the side down on d’Hubert’s unfailing respectability, but here he seethes with razor-sharp smugness: “I have submitted to your notions of honour long enough. Now you will submit to mine.” If killing Feraud is consummation, then d’Hubert’s order is tantamount to castration. It’s a fate worse than death.
The Duellists aside, most filmmakers stick to one duel and save it for the end. A duel is an opportunity for a movie’s animating conflict to be wrapped into a single loaded confrontation. It’s a built-in dramatic climax. In the final scene of Akira Kurosawa’s Sanjuro, the titular character finally and reluctantly demonstrates the true extent of his swordsmanship with a single blow that ends the fight in an instant. It happens so quickly that it feels momentarily anticlimactic, at least until the now-iconic fountain of blood starts spurting out of his challenger. Early in the film, an old woman describes Sanjuro as a “sword without a sheath,” prepared and willing to kill almost indiscriminately. What’s remarkable about this duel is that it reveals two seemingly contradictory things: the first being that Sanjuro has become, by virtue of initially refusing the challenge, a sword with a sheath, and the second is the true and near-godlike extent of his swordsmanship. The onlookers fall to their knees in reverence, and the movie ends two minutes later.
A film duel is always a demand for satisfaction, usually and ostensibly between the characters crossing swords, but always and ultimately from the audience. A duel scene is a perfectly self-contained package of tension and release, and it’s predicated on the promise that something irreversible is bound to happen. It is a culmination of a dramatic impasse—absolutist and often annihilating yet regimented and even civilized in its undertaking—and ideal for fulfilling the audience’s demand for a narrative breakthrough. No other period drama convention can crystallize a relationship and provide a climax quite the same way.
Except for maybe—well, you know.
Single combat, like sex, is ruthlessly revealing on film. A duel lays bare its participants’ innermost desires, the limits of their morality, the strength of their convictions, and the pervasiveness of their ambivalence. A duel provides a precise intersection for two characters driven towards one another. How a duel is conducted, and then how it ends is nothing less than the distillation of that attraction, however malicious or one-sided, to its absolute essence.
"Single combat, like sex, is ruthlessly revealing on film."
That sex and violence mirror each other is less a cinematic invention than a basic tenet of human psychology. We consider both governed by the subconscious and biological instinct. Both, we contend, are drives. Whatever motives we project onto our engagement with the acts of sex and violence, we still partake in the actions themselves with the rest of the animal kingdom. In intercourse of either kind, there is room exclusively for two. All swords are inherently phallic. Guns less so, but only somewhat, as the end goal of the ejected bullet is penetration of the flesh.
Perhaps no period drama unites the two as fluidly as Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons. The majority of the movie is a duel in the figurative sense between the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, who engage in an erotic wager of rapidly escalating stakes. The fallout from this wager destroys them both, with the Marquise shunned by Paris society and Valmont dead in a literal duel. By the time Valmont is challenged to the movie-ending duel, his libertine scheming has left him spiritually debased. He has fallen in love with Madame de Tourvel—a woman he only intended to seduce—and forced himself to abandon her.
Dangerous Liaisons ends with a duel scene fought between Valmont and Danceny. Danceny is intent on avenging the honour of Cécile, the young woman Valmont has coerced into sexual “lessons” and impregnated. The duel is interspersed with shots of Valmont and Tourvel together in bed, and each time Frears cuts back to the duel, Valmont’s will to win against his inferior opponent has eroded further. Indeed Valmont welcomes the final blow, and in that sense, it is Valmont, not his challenger, who actually achieves release. Bleeding out in the snow and no longer facing a life of misery, Valmont gives Daceny the letters revealing the Marquise’s malicious handling of the romantic lives of everyone around her. The true duel of Dangerous Liaisons is the protracted one between Valmont and the Marquise, and in condemning her to social ostracisation Valmont delivers the final blow, even as he himself lays dying.
Ridley Scott’s The Duellists takes a slightly subtler approach, but it too understands the latent eroticism of the duel. Set over the course of the Napoleonic Wars, it strings together a series of confrontations between two French Hussars, the duel-obsessed Gabriel Feraud and the otherwise level-headed Armand d’Hubert, kicked off over a minor perceived slight at a salon.
Outwardly, d’Hubert acts frustrated with Feraud’s unshakable insistence on duelling. Still, he privately intervenes to prevent Feraud’s execution for treason, intent on preserving the single relationship in his life suffused with intensity and drama as opposed to aristocratic gentility. Feraud, for his part, is not pursuing satisfaction but consummation—the instigating insult being a half-invented pretense rather than an actual matter of honour—which d’Hubert refuses him. Holding the disarmed Feraud at gunpoint, d’Hubert forbids him from making further challenges. Keith Carradine never lets the side down on d’Hubert’s unfailing respectability, but here he seethes with razor-sharp smugness: “I have submitted to your notions of honour long enough. Now you will submit to mine.” If killing Feraud is consummation, then d’Hubert’s order is tantamount to castration. It’s a fate worse than death.
The Duellists aside, most filmmakers stick to one duel and save it for the end. A duel is an opportunity for a movie’s animating conflict to be wrapped into a single loaded confrontation. It’s a built-in dramatic climax. In the final scene of Akira Kurosawa’s Sanjuro, the titular character finally and reluctantly demonstrates the true extent of his swordsmanship with a single blow that ends the fight in an instant. It happens so quickly that it feels momentarily anticlimactic, at least until the now-iconic fountain of blood starts spurting out of his challenger. Early in the film, an old woman describes Sanjuro as a “sword without a sheath,” prepared and willing to kill almost indiscriminately. What’s remarkable about this duel is that it reveals two seemingly contradictory things: the first being that Sanjuro has become, by virtue of initially refusing the challenge, a sword with a sheath, and the second is the true and near-godlike extent of his swordsmanship. The onlookers fall to their knees in reverence, and the movie ends two minutes later.
A film duel is always a demand for satisfaction, usually and ostensibly between the characters crossing swords, but always and ultimately from the audience. A duel scene is a perfectly self-contained package of tension and release, and it’s predicated on the promise that something irreversible is bound to happen. It is a culmination of a dramatic impasse—absolutist and often annihilating yet regimented and even civilized in its undertaking—and ideal for fulfilling the audience’s demand for a narrative breakthrough. No other period drama convention can crystallize a relationship and provide a climax quite the same way.
Except for maybe—well, you know.