Tension through restraint
The ductility of Rebel Ridge
Hello my friends,
I love it when a good movie makes it to number 1 on Netflix. That’s what happened this past week when Jeremy Saulnier’s (Blue Ruin, Green Room) new film released on the streaming platform on September 6th.
The hero is Terry Richmond and like many heroes, he’s jacked and riding a bicycle. He’s on his way to town to post bail for his cousin but he’s run off the road by corrupt cops who seize his assets. When he tries to get those assets back the legal way, he encounters one obstacle after another. He’s left with only one option: The illegal way.
I think the movie is pretty close to perfect. What it does best is everything it doesn’t do. It doesn’t descend into a killing rampage like John Wick. It doesn’t have a cartoonishly evil villain like the recent Road House remake. It doesn’t lean heavily on slow motion, explosions, or shootouts like John Woo’s latest The Killer. It builds tension through restraint.
For my engineer friends who took material science, do you remember tensile testing? We’d use large machines to pull materials apart until they broke. Ductile materials like rubber elongate while brittle materials like ceramics don’t.
Rebel Ridge is like a ductile material, stretching out our feelings of frustration over Terry’s situation. As the viewer, I wanted vengeance. I wanted justice and swift retribution. I wanted Terry to open multiple cans of Whoop Ass®. I’m waiting for him to snap knowing that I, brittle creature that I am, would have snapped several scenes ago.
But the movie keeps holding back and the tension keeps building. Even when it lets rip, it does so in a way that won’t be fully satisfying for some. I loved it.
I hope you get a chance to watch Rebel Ridge and if you do, let me know what you think.
Thanks for reading,
Kyle
To extend the metaphor a bit further, Terry is the material being “tested.” During tensile testing, the sample material is restrained on both ends and held securely in place. Once the test begins and the machine starts pulling, a strong material will look like nothing is happening. It appears to be resisting the forces. But as the machine steadily exerts an increasing amount of force, little by little, the material starts to yield.
Terry at one point says to the cops “You’ve got me in a tight spot.” His eyes/face/body language strain to remain passive, calm, nonviolent as he gets pulled apart. He’s strong, he resists, but eventually reaches a yield point.
Watching his journey is much more entertaining than a tensile test.
I love the engineering analogy! I taught a materials testing lab as a TA in my senior year of my Civil Engineering degree. Thanks for reminding me of the fun we had discovering principles of tension, compression, torsion, stress and strain as applied to various common building materials. I never thought of the application to human nature, but I like the idea of having a ductile personality if it means slow to anger.