Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can't Look Away by Eric G. Wilson

Author:Eric G. Wilson [Wilson, Eric G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2012-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

35.

In a twilight schoolyard, a shrill throng surrounds two shirtless boys. They look to be sixteen. Awkwardly, they swing at each other, rarely landing a blow, until they lean together, exhausted. As if suddenly horrified by this closeness, one roughly pushes the other away. The boys now stand three feet apart, facing, breathing hard. The crowd calms.

The quiet quickly ends, though. The horde screams: Kick his ass! But the two don’t move. They glance guardedly from side to side. Then they fix on each other, almost sweetly. The boy on the right remembers why he’s there. He resigns himself, puts up his fists, shuffles toward the other, who hesitantly puts up his guard.

Before the one on the left can get ready, his attacker strikes him with a right hook. The boy staggers; the aggressor tackles him, straddles his chest, hammers fists into his face. Within seconds, eyelids flutter: a knockout.

The winner springs up, raises his arms. He looks around. It’s now dark. He stares into the mob. Somewhere in there is a girl he knows, his age. There are older people, adults, men and women (one holds a toddler). There are children, too, junior high age or younger, flushed with joy and terror.

This brawl wasn’t a spontaneous, ephemeral scuffle between two classmates. It was deliberately planned, and the opponents were strangers. And it was far from transient. It was filmed so that it could become part of an underground video called Agg Townz Fights 2. The boys fought their hearts out to participate in a growing phenomenon around America’s suburbs: teen fight clubs recording their bouts for profit. The clubs’ organizers sell the homemade DVDs on the Internet or in back alleyways. Videos that don’t make it to market are often posted on YouTube.

The legal authorities in Arlington, the city where the 2006 film was shot, were understandably troubled by these deliberate acts of assault and the illegal trafficking of the videos. The law acted, and those who profited from the DVDs are now in jail.

While this fight club ring was broken up, similar operations exist today, in 2011, in New York, New Jersey, California, Washington State, and Alaska. No doubt other states have the problem as well, even if the authorities have yet to address it. What puzzles many is that these instances of teen savagery generally don’t take place in America’s poorer neighborhoods, which historically have higher rates of violent crime. Fight clubs are mainly on the rise in middle-class and upper-middle-class environments.

Cultural critics have complained. Orin Starn, an anthropology professor at Duke, claimed that these clubs manifest a grimly nihilistic “part of the American psyche fascinated by the spectacle of blood and violence.” For Starn, the staged battles are products of “the Mortal Kombat, violent video game generation,” offering youths “the chance to bring those fantasies of violence and danger to life—and maybe have your 15 minutes of fame in an underground video.”

But the man whom some see as the dark source of these clubs offers another perspective.

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